blairsblog

ch, ch, changes ...

I recently made a few changes (bit of an understatement in some ways)

About 3-4 weeks ago my family and I put our life in a container and sent it to San Francisco, the next day we caught a plane to San Francisco, and a few days later I started a new career in Product Management.

After nearly 10 years in the field working for software vendors (including Allaire, Macromedia, Wily Technology and Adobe) in technical sales roles I needed a new challenge ... I also was tired of being on the road 48 weeks of the year, my kids are getting to an age I need to be around more unless I want to miss out on things. The opportunity came up to work @ corporate in a great role working as a Product Manager in the Acrobat Connect product team.

So we've sold up in Australia, in four or so weeks we put our house on the market, sold it, got our visas, packed our bags, sold anything with an electric plug attached (reminder to self, internalize your frustrations with America not following the rest of the modern world with standards) and held a gigantic garage sale.

We landed a little over 3 weeks ago, but have now started to settle in, currently we are living in San Francisco but plan to move out to the east bay shortly to be in a better area for schools.

So for friends out there who happen to travel to the bay area remember to look me up ...

On the homepage of Builder.com.au

How cool is that, http://www.builderau.com.au/ thanks Brendan Chase!

Please help us make some more money! http://www.millioneyesofsight.com/

Come on!

We made the front page of the Australian IT section!

Fran Foo kindly covered our event on http://www.australianit.news.com.au/

Please donate and try to help us make some more money http://www.millioneyesofsight.com/

Let's prove the viral nature of the internet!

Please help save someone's sight!

I ‘m participating in a charity event to help raise funds for the Fred Hollow’s Foundation (http://www.hollows.org), the event is time based so I have to help raise as much money as possible before Friday 12noon Australian Time. Less than 20hrs from now!

With some friends we’ve put together a website http://www.millioneyesofsight.com/ where you can buy a pixel for a minimum of $2, but if you donate $25 or more you stand to win a copy of Adobe Photoshop. As people buy pixels the image on the website becomes clearer!

I’m hoping you can help me in 2 ways

1. Please could you go to the website http://www.millioneyesofsight.com/ and donate as much as you feel able to. Every $25 saves someone’s eyesight! (you can use your creditcard or a paypal account)

2. Second could you forward this request to your network friends, to use the viral nature of the internet we can hopefully raise a ton of money in the short space of time we have.

Sydney Morning Herald moves to Flash video

I recently noticed Fairfax have switched to Flash video. You can see it in action on the Sydney Morning Herald site and the The Age site. For a long time I avoided looking at the video clips on their sites due to the poor Mac support more than anything.

It's great to see them using the best of breed technology for video on the web!

Wear socks. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, socks would be it.

I've had an interesting few days, but an interesting side note is my new found passion for getting the population of the world to wear socks. Let me explain ...

It all starts back in late December when I flew back to Australia from San Francisco, it's a 14 hour flight. I'd had a huge week in SF and unusually I slept for a good 10 hours, departing the plane I felt very refreshed for such a long flight. A few days later I started to get quite bad neck and shoulder pain, it remained for a few days and I went to see a doctor, he assured me it was muscular and I had nothing to worry about.

Fast forward to last week and I'd been having some calf pain and a very slight cough. The calf pain got worse through the week, the cough was hardly noticeable. By this Wednesday I knew I needed to see a doctor about the calf, along I went on Thursday morning, he sent me straight for an ultrasound mentioning the words DVT. I'm like haven't people died from DVT? He said go get a scan now! 1 hour later I'm getting told I have a serious clot in my calf and I need to go straight to hospital, do not pass go or collect $200, go straight to hospital. 30 minutes later I'm in hospital going through CT scans, ultrasounds, blood tests and so on. About 3 hours later I'm about to leave the hospital to medicate myself with anti clotting medicine to stop further clotting when the specialist (The Clot Guru) looks at my scan, and tells me I have massive Pulmonary embolus or PE (clots on the lung) and I ain't going nowhere. That neck pain back in December was the PE and by rights I shouldn't of made it through it.

5 days, many tests and scares later I'm out of hospital. Touchwood I should recover pretty well, I'll be on drugs for 3/6 months maybe life, blood tests most days for the next few months and follow up tests over the coming months.

So here is the really interesting bit, DVT can happen to anyone at any age with any fitness. The biggest reduction of risk when you're going to be less mobile for a while (long haul flights for example) is wearing some travel socks that cost $30, and guess what they could reduce your risk by 90%!! so do yourself and your family a favor if you're going on a long flight ...

Wear socks. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, socks would be it.

Like surfing the web ? Stay away from Australia!

Our so called New Leadership dragged Australia further into the online dark ages today.

Stephen Conroy our enlightened Digital Communications Minister announced broad brush filtering of Internet content for all Australians.

As Gary Barber puts it, when it comes to Kiddy Porn, as a father of two young ones I'm absolutely supportive of everything we can do in this regard.

But the way this has been announced (with no online communications / dialog), the lack of detail and the inconvenient truth in the practicalities of filtering leave me very concerned with our New Leadership when it comes to dealing with the digital industry.

We've already seen a lack of urgency in dealing with the bigger issue of being able to access the internet in Australia, the lack of urgency in moving the digital media content industry forward with the digital television switch over being pushed by to 2013 (who's driving that agenda I wonder?) and the then these ACMA age restriction rules coming into force on January 20th but now the firewall

Stephen, I urge you to engage with people that actually deeply understand this industry, discuss and collaborate for a better digital Australia. Move things forward not backwards, right now it all looks backwards

CF Camp Sydney awesome turnout

We had a great turn out yesterday for CF CAMP Sydney, great to see the community IS alive and well!!

We're at CF CAMP Brisbane today which again has a great turn out and we are heading to CF CAMP Melbourne tomorrow. Don't forget we are giving away 2 free copies of ColdFusion 8 and a copy of FlexBuilder

Sydney folks, win a copy of ColdFusion 8!

Sydney folks, attend CF CAMP tomorrow and you have two chances to win a copy of ColdFusion 8!!

More details @ http://cfcamp.pbwiki.com/

cheers
Mark

Writing AS3.0 code that runs on ColdFusion, I think it would be a great idea

I saw this cool blog post today http://www.barneyb.com/barneyblog/2007/10/16/the-rhino-is-coming-to-fix-cfml/ it's prompted me to request something I have been thinking about for a while now.

Adobe, please bring AS3.0 to the next version of ColdFusion