I’m out on the East Coast, and I’m attending Flash Forward 2007 in Boston. It’s been a great trip so far, meeting new people and seeing new places (my first time in Boston, can you believe it?). The conference is good, but, as usual, the most rewarding parts of any conference are the in-between and afterwards where you get to geek-out face-to-face over lunch, dinner and drinks. Some personal highlights to date:
Finding a Starbucks before the opening keynote
Though I’m quite sick of Starbucks coffee lately, it sure was critical to information retention that I get that morning injection of coffee after a late night and jet-lag. Also, there was entirely too much applause going on at this keynote. Ok, some AIR apps are cool, but c’mon…
OOP for N00bs
Peter Elst is a pleasant chap from Belgium who finally straightened out some ActionScript 3 OOP concepts. Well, at least for me anyway, judging by some of the blank stares around me.
Grabbing some quick snaps of Boston during lunch
Boston is a beautiful–and pretty clean–city. I was impressed by how small it is, relatively. And the fact that most of the major traffic arteries seem to go underneath the city.
Reconnecting with mod7 Alumnus, Jeff Weir
Jeff came out to FF2007 because his amazing Viscosity project was a finalist in the Festival. We eat fresh lobsters afterward the awards show. Sweet.
“Receiving” an award
My friend, Loc Dao, couldn’t make it to the festival so he asked me to collect the award for him, should his project win. It won. I collected. I acceptance-speeched. The award and I celebrated on the town. I just hope it isn’t too sticky… congrats to all the other winners for Flashforward Film Festival 2007.
Craig Swann’s Session
Craig Swann dazzled the audience at FF2007 with creative experiments using webcams, onboard mics, time, and alternative interfaces like the Wii remote. Neat.
Mario Klingeman
Mario presented his project to quantify the essence of Art into n-dimensional space using genetic algorithms and Flash, thus allowing a program to generate “art”. Very cool. Very German. Very Berlin. Oh, and he gave out pins! Awesome touch.
It’s strange being in place where you can talk to a group of strangers about properties, event handlers, and document classes, and they know exactly what you are talking about.
More to come…
