7/6/08 - The Northern Territory. We've been camped for awhile outside the town of Katherine, as it was getting too cold nights in the south...nice up here, but you gotta watch out for the saltwater crocs...

5/10/08 - Adelaide. By coincidence. There's no theme going on here. I'm actually here because I couldn't miss the quite literally named Abyssinian Restaurant, likely the only Ethiopian food for 8,000 miles. They make their own injera from rice flour...white, not blue, but not bad considering... and the doro wat is the best (read: hottest) I've had outside of Georgetown. $20 bucks for a complete mosab that'll feed two with leftovers. No complaints here...

3/12/08 - We're as far from home now as we've ever been, and completely off the physical grid. Picked up a camper van and a mobile broadband card near Brisbane and headed for the interior of Australia. In Byron Bay, home of a thousand other campers filled with unwashed youths, we saw a guy plugging away on his MacBook in a black-velvet-lined VW bus, and stood in awe. Wondering. Are there more of us, working full-time from the road like this? How many, exactly? People walk by me outside motel rooms, or sitting on the bench by a roadside cafe, and say, "Nice office you got." I'm working sixty hour weeks from wherever I can smoke a cigarette and find coffee - or from the van, out in the woods, with a pot on the butane burner - but I'm spending the rest of my time doing something completely new every day. Hey...was I ever going to be able to afford a house in LA? What could I get, an apartment a little nicer up in Pasadena? And then what...? Slow death by DIRECTV? A bigger bigscreen every couple years? Kids? Jesus? Debt? All I wanna do is work anyway, if I didn't make myself get out and about, a couple hundred miles a week anyway, I'd just stay home and watch movies in my spare time.
I say fuck it. Four thousand miles an hour straight into a wall, yes. This is how to live. Do what you love until you kill it or it kills you. There's so much I want to do. The last website came out great. So much more than work, though. Start a band again. Paint some more. There just isn't enough time for everything...and every night I go to sleep too exhausted to move. One day we'll walk into a town, I know this, and we'll say, "this is it." Someplace where the adults all have their own opinions and stay out late talking, and there's no kmart and the kids read books instead of playing videogames and ...and...where there's nothing of postmodern life to be disgusted by, in short. And I wonder how much I'm contributing to the downfall of western civilization, building toys and contraptions, distractions and puzzles, and sometimes it worries me a lot. But I don't know how to fix it. On the whole I've tried to put meaning into everything I can, treat nothing lightly, be a son of a bitch, and my own harshest critic. I can say at least that it's been a hell of a ride. I don't know if it's any loftier than that, but there's always room for hope.

Strike Site v.3

21 October, 2007 - It's finally official! After months of halted development while handling lots of other projects, large and small, I've finally managed to get the new site up and running. This is the first complete rewrite since late 2000, when the Flash 5 site went up in all its AS1 glory.

It's been a long, weird ride since then. Special thanks go out to the Away3d development community, particularly Rob and Alexander, for their work on the amazing engine that underlies much of what's going on here graphically. Check it:

We're booked solid through January on several major new projects, including one that'll also include some away3d code. Meanwhile, never content to sit still, we're jumping off-continent again, heading now to the South Seas.

Anyway, it was great fun and sometimes all kinds of hell building this site with all its various UI experiments; it's the greatest kind of puzzle in the world to put these things together and try to see how they might be used. I spend a lot of time decorating other people's houses, so to speak, but it's always more fun working on your own, and since I might not get around to it again for another seven years, I threw the kitchen sink at it. So enjoy playing around, drop me a line and let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Josh.

I've never been afraid of airing my political views, and I'd like to think that having been hounded by unmarked cars, burgled and robbed for letters and laptops after putting "American Apocalypse" online in 2004, and generally being driven out of the US by the unholy and fascistic state of affairs in that country, I have at least a modicum of freethinking liberal credibility. Which I will now spend on a brief denunciation of the athletes participating in the Beijing games.

Wherever you fall in the political spectrum, Left, Right or "sycophantic," (like the IOC, the athletes and the Swiss); I say, wherever you fall on this spectrum, the brutal repression of free speech, along with the brainwashing and cruelty inflicted by the "People's Republic" upon its citizenry, should not be tolerable to you. That is doubly so if you're a fellow liberal who thinks America is a repressive state. Because the US government starts to look astonishingly transparent when compared with that of the PRC.

If you can accept totalitarianism simply because it's coming from a Leftist regime, you have sacrificed your soul for a dogma. And dogma will not help your conscience; it will eliminate your conscience in favor of the unquestioning obedience it requires to thrive, virally, and grow, poisonously; a propaganda toy of rich and powerful men, a disease upon the human condition, the root of all evil since time immemorial. And if you've taken that pill because it's Mao or Che or Chavez or Khomeini on the poster rather than Hitler or Franco or Mussolini or Idi Amin, you're a fucking idiot. As in, welcome to the crowd waving pitchforks, you're the honorary black member of the KKK, you fucking idiot. Because in spite of what's in the literature, in spite of a century of mutual antipathy, there's no practical difference between a communist totalitarian regime and a fascist one (or a theocratic Islamic or Christian one, for that matter). They'll all torture your ass if you step out of line. It's about power and control, and if you're willing to split hairs about what color the holy book should be, you're just another slave.

Which brings me to my point. If the Olympic athletes are anything other than slave gladiators, then they themselves have an overwhelming responsibility to boycott the 2008 games, given that the IOC and the US government are now in cahoots with the totalitarian regime in the PRC.

If they compete, they'll be selling their consciences and souls in exchange for fame and fortune. What's the use of being a great athlete if you're a lousy human being who stands for nothing? If these men and women can't prove their greatness as persons of character, then they're really not much more than horses.

Yes, these athletes have worked incredibly hard to get to the top. To get a chance to compete in the Olympics. And what could be more important in their lives than this one and only chance to compete for the gold? Well, how about using that chance to stand for something more important than their own fucking egos?

Media...

4/2/08 - The Franchise Times loves the Barker Lounge logo.

3/31/08 - SexyPollitics gets demo'd on CNN! ...then bought by Fox (5/10/08).

AS3 Packages

5/17/08 - Strike Remoting 1.4 (Download) - Now available. THIS IS NOT FOR EVERYBODY. Totally unsupported; I mean, seriously, I'm not taking any responsibility for this thing. It's a miracle I scraped it together into a zip file. Have you seen my workspace? I can't find my laptop for the beer bottles. Still, this works for me, and I though it was worth sharing. New features: Automatic disconnect timer that repeats the call (but only takes the first response)! Definitely not in any other remoting package out there. Totally leak-proof! Optional (and bypassable) error handling methods and expressions locked to an individual PHPAccess instance! Fixed handling of false boolean results. Great for multiplayer games with lots of repetitive verifications. If you haven't tried 1.3 yet, start with that! If you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, hire a programmer from Pakistan for $5.20 an hour. Or if you're the DIY type, download Rosa instead, or better yet, throw away your computer and do something useful like building a small nuclear reactor in your toolshed. Known Issues: See below; they still apply.

Strike Remoting 1.3 (Download) - *New upgrade. There are significant differences from previous versions and code will need to be rewritten if you want to switch. An AS3 package that handles NetConnection calls, specifically designed for AMFPHP. It parses mysql recordsets automatically, up to one level of depth in returned arrays, and also parses other returned types into a neat result object that's roughly analogous to what you got with the AS2 remoting components. It also features an in-movie (optional) debugging panel that lets you see the calls and results.
Known Issues:
- Use with AMF3 is not recommended if you're dealing with recordsets. It's faster, but AMFPHP as of v.1.9 has an undocumented bug in parsing RS results when the call included an array.
- Returning multiple raw recordsets in the same array can cause problems when the recordsets have identical column names. This again appears to be an AMFPHP issue.
- My example doesn't work out of the box. I get this a lot. I keep meaning to comment it up, but in any case you'd have to rewrite pieces of it to make it work even in a very basic way with whatever database you're using. Still, feel free to ask if you're having problems...or better yet, write a new example and I'll post it up!

Tween3D (Download) - A working Tween class for position and rotation with Away3D objects. This isn't the only tween class written for this site, but it's the simplest. Lets you create rotation-only or position-only tweens or combine them into one.
Known Issues: None, but keep in mind this is a limited, in-house class that wasn't really written for public consumption. Maybe you'll find it useful. It does what it does fairly well. It does everything with Euler angles, so if anyone comes up with a slicker Quaternion-based version I'd love to see it.

Well, here's the new SexyPolitics widget I just coded. Almost finished. This may run a little slow for you with all the flash processing going on above. To lower the processing strain and speed up the widget, load up the contact section above, that's the lightest-weight...
10 May 2008: THIS IS UNDERGOING SERVER CHANGES -- Project's been handed off now, was picked up by Slingshot Labs -- News Corp incubator -- I finally get a little rest... (As if...)
8 July 2008: The widget is still down so I've taken it off of here. Oh well.

Latest Projects...

- Singlehandedly wrote the Flash, PHP and mySQL that powers the new SexyPolitics.com, a political strip quiz with elements of social networking, through a madly accelerated development process. Credit where due: Jordan Queen did a great job with Drupal customization and additional PHP on the blog, store and other pages, along with some nice graphics and some very tricky integration work. And J.A. de la Luz Lucero is responsible for all the candidate and issue cartoons on the site.
Now for the geeky stuff: I wrote 58 custom actionscript classes and 20 php classes for the front end of the site alone, which remains under 300k to load. An additional 16 of each were written onto a custom StrikeNet back-end, allowing for tens of thousands of questions, quizzes, members, prizes and videos to be managed by a large team while being sync'd over numerous clonable servers dedicated to different purposes. The site represents a whole new way of thinking about streaming flash video. Each video quiz has millions of possible combinations which all need to flow seamlessly from dozens of individual clips. Clips are therefore cached based on the probability of their being needed, using a secure token system to prevent theft, and with intense active memory management throughout. A rewritten version of the open-source tool Xmoov was instrumental in making this possible without using a Flash Media Server.

Odds and ends...

- American Apocalypse is still readable online.

- StrikeNet is now the basis of the SexyPolitics back-end, with half a dozen new modules designed specifically for them. Meanwhile, v.1.1 of the franchising platform is on the way, including new project management modules, more user-friendly file naming, customizable desktops, and improved scalability in existing modules for companies with more than a few hundred franchises.