Month: February 2011

Posted on

Digitized Decade 3: Flash Forward

February 19-21, 2001 was the occasion for one of the early FlashForward conferences in San Francisco, the fourth such event if my own decade-old article can be believed.

I took a number of photos at the event and published some of them at the time, but in the interests of the Digitized Decade project, here are a few people from the past.

Director People
People who made their big names in Director before Flash was around: independent developer Phillip Kerman, Macromedia stalwart John Dowdell, and Marvyn Hortman who ran an early Director file-sharing site.

Smashing People
Flash is smashing!: Flash’s creator Jon Gay is flanked by Glenn Thomas and Andreas Heim of Smashing Ideas.

Clement
Manuel Clement waits for a session to begin before moving on to big, big things.

Wan
Sam Wan give a talk back when he was still a college boy. Those monitors look so futuristic!

For those of you using Flash in the mobile dev world, here’s an entertaining snippet from my write-up of the event:

Flash is extending its tentacles into new platforms with the release of a player and development kit for the Pocket PC platform.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of our entry into consumer digital photography.

Posted on

Things That Go Hump In the Night

I suppose there’s a perfectly good reason for the difference in terminology:

From an operational standpoint, speed humps and bumps have critically different impacts on vehicles. Within typical residential operational speed ranges, vehicles slow to about 20 mph (32 km/h) on streets with properly spaced speed humps. A speed bump, on the other hand, causes significant driver discomfort at typical residential operational speed ranges and generally results in vehicles slowing to 5 mph or less at each bump.

But seriously, does this difference—unknown to the non-traffic-engineering layman—overcome the possibility of roadside carnage when said layman drives off of SW Cabot St. in Beaverton in a paroxysm of juvenile laughter? Or accidents caused when they go unnoticed because the signs have been kifed by guys unintentionally adding a little versimilitude to their bach pads?

Paul Boehlke said about two or three months ago, some of the speed hump signs started disappearing one by one.

And while he doesn’t exactly know what happened to them, he does have a theory.

“Kids, you know i guess if i were a teenager, a speed hump sign might look pretty good in my bedroom, I don’t know.” said Boehlke.

When Barbara and I were in Ireland we saw huge signs for “RAMPS” in places where we didn’t see any potential for boating. I suppose if you called something a “SPEED RAMP” here it would just be a challenge for some Evel Knievel-style daredevil.