2 weeks ago, I had a very important meeting at my day job where a number of us gathered in a room, ate large quanities of pizza and watched the 1983 smash hit, WarGames.  By the end of the movie, I came away with 3 key pieces of knowledge:

1. Ally Sheedy looked pretty damn cute in 1983
2. The Seattle skyline in 1983 was just a touch different
3. I should… no I must build a website to pay homage to this movie, and to give me an opportunity to work on my ActionScript skills & boost my SEO (or so that’s how I justified it)

That night I purchased the domain, http://www.globalthermonuclearwar.net to which my wife asked, how many domains do we own now?  A lot… we own a lot.

Once I put together a baseline for what I wanted on the site, I found an outstanding tutorial on how to build a Tic-Tac-Toe game using ActionScript.  Perfect!

15-20ish hours later, I built it and here it is.  Simple, all Flash, as true to the movie as I could get it with the time I allotted myself, and to avoid potential cease & desist letters, ad-free.

A few points about the site:

1. All the code validates strict (which can be a pain in the arse for Flash sites)
2. All iDevice users (of which I am one) are auto-redirected here via this handy little JavaScript
3. The sitemap.xml is registered with Bing, Google, & Yahoo so you can easily find it again in the future if you happen to forget the URL, or your bookmarks get blown away, or someone changes your home pages to something else.
4. It’s not perfect, but it’s fun.

Lastly, if you lived under a rock in 1983 or go deaf anytime there is a conversation about 1980′s pop-culture, and are therefore unaware of this movie, or if you somehow forgot it’s awesomeness, check out the YouTube trailer below.

Gregg – http://richterwebdesign.com

Last Friday (May 7th) I took the day off from work and did what I am sure a lot of you do, went to a day long technology conference.  Yes, I know how to party.  But not just any tech conference, this was Flash Camp… put on by the good people over at Universal Mind.

When I signed up for Flash Camp, I had no idea what to expect.  Mostly for some reason, I pictured a day long session of going through various tutorials in a classroom type setting.  This was not the case.  Rather, the entire day was listening to a series of speakers on a dizzying variety of topics.  In fact, I and every other person in attendance (60-ish) could have made it through the entire day without our precious Mac’s (& I think I saw a few PC’s too, this is Seattle).

Nerds

The event was held at Adobe’s Seattle office complex and the parts of the complex I saw were awesome… outstanding venue!  And that’s saying a lot… my day job is in the Starbucks HQ building and it’s pretty freakin’ sweet too.

From there, the speakers came, one after the next.  Some were good, some were not so good and if you are interested in the specifics, here is a list of speakers and topics.  A strange thing happened though… the speakers and topics that were the most interesting and engaging had mostly nothing to do with Flash at all.  In fact, the guys who talked about User Experience & Design were probably the best of the day.  Two stood out, Carl Smith & Christian Saylor.  The most valuable pieces of information I got out of this day long session came from these two guys and their approach and advice to design, website usability, and how to properly engage both your customers (as a designer / developer) and your site visitors.

I’ll end the post with this.  I am not sure if Flash Camp was actually worth my $150-ish entry fee + day of vacation time (I only get 5 weeks per year).  However, they did offer a little piece of compensation in return.  Door prizes.  There were 5 or 6 door prizes to be had.  The catch… you had to stay until the very last minute to be eligible to get one of these door prizes, and well, I happened to be one of the lucky winners.  And just what were the door prizes you ask… well, there was some cool stuff…

#1 – Adobe CS5 Master Collection (value = $2600)
#2 – Adobe Flash Builder (value = $700)

and some not so cool stuff…

#3 – #6 A Universal Mind Hat (value = the pain and misery of having come so close to winning one of the 1st two prizes).  Below is the outcome.

My New Hat

Gregg – http://richterwebdesign.com