Something Interactive

At the end of December 2007, I read somewhere that the year of 2008 would be “the year of change”.

While I don’t necessarily subscribe to the thought that we are completely stagnant some years and others not, I do however think that the amount of change from year to year would tend to have its ebbs and flows overall.

That being said, a large portion of this year has been spent making pivotal decisions to change my career, from working at The Shopping Channel to going back to school so that I can pursue my dream of teaching the discipline of Design, and doing so with positive social change.

Today, after almost 7 years with the company, I sent in my official resignation to The Shopping Channel.

This was no easy decision, and I have spent a lot of energy towards furthering my career.
Through applying and collecting information, filling out forms and attending workshops, negotiating and putting my feelers out, I’ve set myself up to attend studies this fall at the acclaimed up-and-coming Ontario College of Art & Design in the downtown of Toronto, Canada.
I also had to think about my income and my future, and the lifestyle that I would leaving behind and what lifestyle I could carry onward.

One constant thing that has gotten me through it all is knowing: if I want it really bad, I will make it all work out. I will jump the hoops. I will make the sacrifices. And, in the end I will reap the benefits.

I wanted to thank everyone that I worked with at The Shopping Channel.

These people are dedicated and hard-working. I know this because we all worked in one of the hardest lines of business to work in: RAPID-RETAIL. It’s not easy trying to satisfy one of the world’s most unique market of customers without having real-time in-person physical interaction.

I know that I will miss working alongside many of my co-workers, however, I know I will see them again down the road sooner or later in our travels.

I wish everyone the best, and hope that they are finding too, that this year is the year of change.

I’ve come to use this nifty little keyboard shortcut combination for Reverse Layers within Adobe Photoshop CS or greater. And, it’s a safe key-combination to use from the default set.

1. Open up your Keyboard Shortcuts Panel.
2. Navigate to the Layer menu.
3. Further down to the Arrange submenu
4. Further-still down to the Reverse option
5. Bind the key-combination (MAC:) COMMAND+SHIFT+r (PC:) CTRL+SHIFT+r to this option

Now select a group of layers in your layers palette. Hit your new keyboard shortcut, and voila! Layers reversed.

Variable Variables may be a different concept for the need and result I came up with, but Variable Variables is what lead to my re-discovery of the powerfully dynamic set(); function in actionscript.

Discovery
I have been working on a small Flash CS3 project that imports and displays information stored in XML.
Like many, who wouldn’t want their actionscript to be:

• simple
• clean
• dynamic
• scalable

… all to the synchronous XML data and design requirements that might change down the road?

Everything was going fine until I hit a little roadblock in my XML parsing loop.
How do I get flash to create variably-named variables?

I found out my solution after some intensive research, here’s how …

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