Simeon Says

I got up at the crack of dawn today and headed to the airport. I am on my way to the Adobe MAX conference. This is going to be quite an event and I am very pleased to be a presenter here. But that is not why I am posting.

After I started traveling a bunch for training and speaking engagements, I realized that the noise on the airplane would eventually lead me to some kind of disastrous and jail-time inducing event and I needed to act fast. Before making the investment in a good pair of head phones I did some research. I borrowed some brookstone noise canceling headphones but they made my head hurt. I figured that they were just not nice enough and made my way to a pair of bose. But the end result was the same. The slow onset, head splitting, mother of all headaches. I realized active noise canceling, although all the rage, where not my thing.

So after a little more research I settled on a pair of E3C sure in ear buds. I love these headphones. My only regret with these headphones was not buying the E4C’s But I think its really important that I note I really researched. I hit up everybody on my IM list and half the people I have only met at confs to see what they used. I read specs and reviews and then bit the bullet. I tell you this because its an important character of me. It happens only very rarely that when I purchase something the sales rep at the store has anything to add to my knowledge of a product. In fact most of the time I end up doing an informal training session and bring them up to speed on the technologies. I can produce character witnesses if anyone doubts this.

I use the foam ear plug style adapters on my headphones. After a couple dozen trips these are starting to get a little gross. They are dirty and they dont like to expand to fill my ear any more. I found the replacement pack online but didnt have time to order before this trip. So this morning I got here to the airport early and decided to look around. I remembered that the inmotion booth down in terminal E was selling Shure headsets last time I was through there so I decided to head down that way. I think its really important to note that this event went down at 6:30 AM on a SUNDAY at an AIRPORT KIOSK. I found that they did have some replacement adapters, but they only had the foam ones for the e2c headsets. I decided against all odds to ask the attendant if they had any. This is where things went all “alice in wonderland”, but in a good way. The guy came over confirmed they did not have what I wanted out on display. And I figured this is where it would end. But know, he went and dug around in the cupboard to confirm they didnt have any around. And after about 5 minutes of searching proclaimed that it was nuts they didnt have any but he had a solution. He then went over behind the counter and produced 2 of the cute little yellow adapters. They do demos of the E3C’s and have fresh ones for each demo. He gave me a pair. The 3 pack replacement is $10, and he just gave these to me because they didnt have them for me to buy. I was so shocked I asked if I could buy something else to make it worth his while. We started chatting about the headphones and that was when I realized what a diamond in the rough this guy is. He actually knows his shit. Starts talking about the differences between the diodes and wiring between the headsets and how they make a difference. This guy is at an AIRPORT KIOSK. This guy needs to be recognized for the gem that he is. I bought coffee this morning and that process was a mess. But this guy makes my day with his exceptionally knowledge and wonderful customer service.

So I had to share this long drawn out post because I am bored and sitting at an airport. But if you are ever at Portland International Airport I totally recommend you take your business to the inmotion audio video booth in terminal E. You wont regret it for a minute.

I had the pleasure of presenting to the Rails conf audience this morning about “Building RIA’s with Flex”. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, I was kinda worried it would just be me and 3 guys who were in there to sit and check email
However I received a full room and had lots of good questions. I spent a good amount of time in the hall working on continued discussions.

For those of you who came to the presentation I wanted to make sure you got links to the files I used. They are all available in my public svn repo. I have a redmine site that I will update with instructions and documentation when I get back from vacation. But for those who just have to have it now, please visit :

HTTPService Demo: http://svn.simb.net/public/as3ActiveResource/branches/demo/

This actually includes 2 secret gems. The first is a delegate file I wrote to simplify making http calls against your RESTful Rails application. The other gem is actually the code for a framework I will be releasing at the end of the month. The demo’s dont use the framework but I needed one of the classes in the framework so its here for the taking.

Flex WEBorb Example:
http://svn.simb.net/public/flexwo/trunk/

Flex RubyAMF Example:
http://svn.simb.net/public/flexramf/trunk/

In all three of these examples the flex code is in /app/flex and the binaries get published to /public/flex/. I think I set them all up using SQLite3 so you should just need to run `rake db:migrate` to get things set up.

If you have any questions please feel free to comment or email me at simeon at simb dot net. I love sharing these tools and am happy to answer questions. Look for lots of code and blog posts about these topics at the end of October (after vacation and another Conference).

My wife and I fly out tomorrow for our first trip to Europe. I am speaking at RailsConf Europe next week. I have the pleasure of sharing Flex with the Rails community of Europe.

Although we start off in Berlin, we will also be making stops in Paris and London before returning to Stateside. I am hooking up with Mark Drew in London on Sunday the 23rd. Drop me an email if you would like to join us for a beer.

After that we come back to the US and I am back home for a few days before I leave for the US Adobe Max conference. I am presenting there on “ColdFusion development with Eclipse” where I will give an abbreviated version of my usual CFEclipse talk, but also cover the ColdFusion extensions for Eclipse and Debugger in CF 8. I give this talk in the afternoon on both Tuesday and Wednesday of the conference so stop in for some CF/Eclipse good times.

After that I get to come home and I will not leave travel again before the year is over. After MAX I will have given some kind of presentation at 7 conferences (i said no to 2) , and 4 user group talks this year. And I think I still have one more promised to the COWPU group in Bend.

Although some may think my speaking schedule is not that heavy, I want to try to tone it back a bit. I do not have a service to sell, and I dont do much contract work. So I am not sure why I have been working so hard at getting out there. I enjoy sharing the technologies I am excited about with others, but I think I may have gone a little strong this year. Between the travel for conferences and training gigs, I really want to spend more of my daughters second year of life at home than I did the first.

Now thats not to say I wont be out and about in 2008. I am just going to be much more selective about where I go. The good news is this will allow me much more time for blogging and releasing some of the code I have written. I have a flex framework and a couple utility classes I need to get out into the wild.

So if you are gonna be at RailsConf or at Max drop me a line. I always love to get a beer and chat tech. But in the mean time I will likely be offline until after the first week of October.

I saw [Brandon](http://www.brandonellis.org/) do this and decided I had better give it a shot also.

Have some fun give it a shot!