McWilliams’ World

I’m soooo glad vacation started at 4:30pm today. I couldn’t take one more minute of work – although I enjoy what I do. I’m just a bit burned out and need a nice long break to freshen up my creative juices. If you’re wondering, I’m off Dec 17th through Jan 2nd.

Time to get some quality Xbox time in.

Well, it’s back to work tomorrow (Wed) from my long 6 day vacation. I typically like to save a majority of my vaction time for the end of the year; wrap a bit around Thanksgiving and make the most of Christmas vacation time. This year I’m off from Dec 17th – Jan 3rd. Tracy won’t like it but I will.

Tomorrow I’ll be launching a new site at work; www.bannerpackaging.com. If you click the link, you may just get bounced to Bemis.com; so check back in a bit if it’s not later on Wed, Nov 30th yet.

Banner Packaging has never had a web site. It’s not very extensive but it’s about the size of www.milprint.com. I’ve had it done for a few weeks, just was waiting for final revisions, general site clean-up and the go-ahead to launch.

Next on my list will be www.perfecseal.com. This is actually the very first site I did for Bemis; about 5 years ago – so it’s due for an overhaul. Looking back, I hardly knew anything – compared what I know today. Amazing what you learn over time and trial and error. I just cringe when I look at this site. There are a few other smaller sites due for facelifts as well, but those will come when time allows for it.

Anyways, as my Dad would say, “Back to the salt mines!”

My latest project has just gone live today: www.bemis-europe.com.

Check it out.

Did you help me get my Xbox 360 yet?

Okay, I’m no Flash guru but you practically have to be one if you want to do data integration with Flash. You’d think by the 7th version of a product you’d have certain features (like dealing with data and passing data in and out of flash) down to a science but I guess not.

I’m once again doing a short invitation registration site for a Curwood event at the House of Blues – Chicago – in October. It’s a fairly simple project but in order for me to get all this accomplished within flash, is a bear.

Since I already accomplished a prior flash registration site for Clysar, I based my new project off the things I learned the first time through – only this time – I want it to be more efficient than the first.

I actually got the main mechanics down fairly quickly and was fairly comfortable with the scripting and only struggled for a portion of the afternoon when I was trying to figure out why the flash movie wasn’t switching to the next section (to the success frame or the failure frame) after the form was submitted. I even had my form processing script just outputing “success” or “failure” directly. So I had to do some script “tracing” (a way of determining where you are within a program’s logic by outputing a bit of text) to figure out where it was failing. It came down to setting the right flash “level” the action was to tell the movie where to go in the event that the form processing script was successful or had failed.

One day I’m going to sit down and document all my solutions so the next monkey that want’s to do what I’ve done can do what I did and not bang his head against a wall like I did for 2 days. Get it?

Now, it’s just a matter of finding the time to document it.

I just launched Milprint.com this morning.

Check it out.

[FIXED: 8.30.2005]

After leaving work last night, I was in my car when I had a brain-blast. I vowed to give my new idea a shot – promplty after playing some Xbox – later that night.

My idea worked. It’s not the most efficient way of doing what I need to do but it was a solution nonetheless. It felt sooo good to have that finished. I had everything completed before lunch.

I have another simlilar project coming up and will try to improve on my idea.

When I get some time I’ll have to start documenting my solutions in a separate section of the site – ’cause I’m sure there’s some other monkey like me out there, somewhere, having the same problem.

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I have a short deadline on an event registration site for Bemis Clysar. I’m doing it all in flash (it has a spy theme to it), and it’s pretty cool – however – I’ve been banging my head against the wall for the past 2 days trying to figure out how to get the data out of Flash and into my ASP script (so the registration data get’s dumped into a database).

It’s not like I don’t know “how” to do it, it’s the ability to get at the data and pull it out and send it that’s the problem. I’ve looked all over the web trying to find the solution to my problem but although I’ve looked at example after example, nothing really mirrors my situation. I’ve resorted to posting on a board or two in hopes that some kind soul would be helpful enough to set me straigh on this.

I do have one more idea to try and I hope it works cause if I don’t get it working by early tomorrow, I’m going to have to scrap 4 days of hard work and revert back to pure HTML (or create some hybrid aproach).

Here’s crossing my fingers!

I love it when I’m at work and in “the zone” and I’m not really paying attention to the music that’s blasting through my headset. It just blocks out all external noises and keeps me focused. I catch myself tapping my feet and fingers, and occationally doing a little air drums or guitar when I’m not even paying attention.

However…I hate it when I’m not in the zone and I can’t find a song I like. Most likely means I need more coffee or my bladder’s about to burst.

Just had to share…