My "frist" week at Knoware...an homage

On Friday I completed my "frist" week at Knoware. I say "frist" out of respect for my buddy Joe who helped get me this great new gig. He's a fantastic developer but he can't spell for shit :) After his first week he wrote a blog post entitled "My frist week at Knoware" so I thought I'd keep the tradition alive.

All in all I think it was a very good week. I'm learning quite a bit already. The most obvious change aside from the new office and people is the new laptop. I've made the switch from PC to Mac and so far I'm loving it. More about that in another post perhaps...

Another thing I've been learning is Cairngorm. We didn't use it at Crowe so I'm not too familiar. I started doing a little reading and watching some videos (davidtucker.net has started a fantastic series on Cairngorm that has been very helpful). So far I like what I see. I still haven't seen a full Cairngorm implementation but some of the design patterns I've looked at so far seem to make a lot of sense.

Anyway, I'm back at it tomorrow. God willing, things will continue to go well and I'll continue to learn a lot, and hopefully, get better at foosball...

I need a new phone

A few months ago the company I work for bought a Treo 700wx for me to use. Unfortunately when I did that I signed a 2 year service contract w/Verizon so they would get a good rate on the phone. Now I'm leaving my job and they want their phone back which leaves me stuck with a 2 year contract and no phone :(

Anybody know where to get decent phones on the cheap? I'd like to get another "business class" phone (Blackberry, Treo...) if possible but I don't have much money to blow on this.

A New Path

After a little over three great years with Crowe I've decided to head down a new path. In about two weeks I will be starting a new job at a local software studio called Knoware Those of you at MAX may recognize that name as my buddy Joe presented his AIR iPhone application at the Ribbit Inspire session on Monday. Unfortunately my timing is crap and I'm not able to attend MAX this year because I'm "in between" jobs. Oh well, there's always next year in San Francisco!

Dave Ramsey My TMMO Site Follow-up

After my post about the Dave Ramsey site using Flash/Flex I received a few comments from some of the developers on Dave's team. They pointed out that they are indeed using Flash/Flex and Coldfusion but what I thought was even cooler was the new fpuonline.daveramsey.com site. This is the complete Financial Peace University course offered online. The video player is built with Flex and it's pretty slick. Check it out, you can view the first lesson for free on the site.

Great work guys! If you're still watching, I responded to a couple of the other comments over at my TMMO blog.

Dave Ramsey Uses Flash/Flex

The wife and I are starting the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover program today to try to get ourselves out of debt and on the right track financially. I joined his website today and found something kind of cool, he uses Flash video for his video tutorials and intros which isn't too out of the ordinary but it looks like the online budgeting tool is built using Flex. I thought that was kind of cool, but then again, I'm easily amused.

If you're interested, I'm blogging our Total Money Makeover experience here.

Flash Lite For Windows Mobile

Okay, I have a Flash Lite question that's been stumping me for a while now so I thought I'd throw it out there and hope someone in the Flash Lite community has an answer. Does anybody know of a way to package Flash Lite applications for distribution on Windows Mobile devices? Are there any tools, applications, best practices etc... out there that someone could point me to? I've found several references to SIS files for Symbian devices but nothing for Windows.

Blogger Update

I updated to the new version of Blogger yesterday and so far I'm pretty happy with it. The beta has been available for a long time so this is probably old news to many of you but they have come out with some handy new features. Just of couple of the highlights I've discovered so far include the "Save" feature (you no longer have to publish for your changes to take affect), and the template editor. The template editor is an AJAX editor that makes it easy to add and edit page elements without having to work directly in HTML mode. All in all it seems like a very nice update.