I decided to pull an all-nighter last night by taking some Modafinil. That’s what the military gives it’s pilots so they can stay awake on long missions. Well it certainly worked last night because I was able to focus on preparing some demos for the Sorenson Media booth. I began to get tired around 6:00 and taking more Modafinil didn’t really help much. This proves that it’s not a drug that you can keep taking for long periods of sleep deprivation.

I slept through my entire flight from San Jose to Seattle. That was a good thing because I guess there was a lot of turbulence. I got a cool cab driver from Kenya from the airport and gave him a pretty large tip. I was trying to explain to him what I did for a living but it was hard to do. Sometimes I don’t even know myself to be honest.

My first day at Flash Forward is always a little depressing for some reason. Even after winning a Flash Forward award I still feel like I’ll never live up to my own expectations. Add to that the sleep deprivation, and I was pretty down in the dumps. I wonder why I have such a fascination with sleep deprivation. I always have for some reason.

I setup at the Sorenson booth to do the demos but there were sessions going on at the same time so there was nobody there. I did actually get to give one guy a lesson in Flash video so it wasn’t all for naught. The Sorenson guys were really cool and the 4.3 Compression Suite is really nice. Thanks Randon and get your son’s temper under control

As for sessions, I didn’t really pay much attention to anything in any of the sessions. But it was mostly stuff I already knew or had seen at a previous conference. Did a little minor networking though today. I think I handed out about 7 or 8 business cards. I still feel like a little kid in a man’s body when I do things like this. I wish they would have had a session on “How to Socialize and Network at Conferences.”

A couple of people recognized me and thanked me for gotoAndLearn() which was really nice. If one of you is reading this, I’m sorry that I wasn’t more energetic. I really appreciated the compliments.

I talked to the folks at Lynda.com about creating a free “Tip of the Week” feature that could possibly replace gotoAndLearn(). You should let them know how good of an idea it is too Stanford is starting to stress out about all the bandwidth that the site is using up. If anyone has access to high-bandwidth hosting and would like to help the site out, let me know. But It will live on in some form that I can guarantee you!

The folks at frog design have expressed interest in interviewing me for a possible position. This is very exciting since they are top of the food chain as far as design studios go and they’re in Palo Alto as well! But while I’m up in Seattle, if there are any companies looking for an interactive designer, email me at brimelow@stanford.edu.

Time to get in a cab and sleep my ass off. Tomorrow I will be full of energy and will be a networking machine. Well at least full of energy.

See you all tomorrow!
Lee

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I’ll be doing a casual demo of the new Sorenson Squeeze 4.3 compression Suite over at the Sorenson booth at 12:00 tomorrow. That’s assuming my flight doesn’t get delayed. It’s really bad weather here right now. But either way I will be doing it a couple of times during the conference. I will just be showing the basic workflow of how I work with Squeeze and why why I think its the best encoding tool out there. And no I don’t work for Sorenson whatsoever

This will be really casual so feel free to come by with any questions on Flash video and Sorenson Squeeze.

Lee

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Unfortunately I couldn’t come for the preconference sessions at this years Flash Forward. But I would love to have seen the Aral Balkan and Rob Reinhart sessions. Both are excellent speakers. Someone who was there let me know what it’s like. It’s only 12:30, you can’t be asleep already

I can’t sleep!
Lee

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This is what I will look like tomorrow if you want to say hi and chat. I made myself slighter thinner in Photoshop but at least I can admit it

Lee

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I often work on international projects here at Stanford and I’ve always had trouble with all of the accented characters. I would usually embed the specific character into the textfield but this was often tedious. So below is a string of all of the French accent characters that you can copy and paste into the embed box.

â? ? ùæçéèêëîïôœùûü«»ÜÛÙŒÔÏÎËÊÈÉÇÆÄÂÀ

Also You have to make sure that you save your XML file in UTF-8 format.

Just in case you need to do some French sometime
Lee

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They have have put up four more of my tutorials in the Adobe Motion Design Center. These are from my After Effects title that I did for Lynda.com. Check them out!

Lee

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My two years here at Stanford have been wonderful but my position is based on research funding. This funding is drying up soon and I’ll be looking for a new home to do interactive design. If anyone knows of any good jobs located in or around the San Francisco Bay Area, please shoot me an email.

You can see my portfolio at http://www.leebrimelow.com.
You can get a PDF of my resume here.

Thanks
Lee

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