It's a Winter Wonderland around here today. I think it's actually warmer outside, now that it's snowed. I don't know the official precipitation, but it looks like we might have gotten more than the forecasted 2-4 inches. I haven't been beyond the front landing since the snow started.

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VBScript isn't my favorite language by a long stretch. It's so syntactically different from ECMAScript, Pascal, and even BASIC, that it gets frustrating soemtimes. Still, I keep getting work setting up or maintaining ASP pages. The project I completed this afternoon involved iterating through a form to find certain elements, and doing validity checking on some data entry fields. Since the user might submit the form more than once before it validates, the script writes some previously-submitted data into hidden fields. Kind of interesting.

Part of the project involves cookies. I'm curious about the mechanism behind the cookie architecture. The script is executing at the server, but request.cookies and response.cookies seem to operate as if the cookies file is local. At first, I figured the cookies must get sent along with the post, but then I realized that some users have a lot of cookies. Now I figure the data actually gets fetched and written in separate background transactions with the browser.

Meanwhile, there's ASP.net - an entirely different animal. It's object-oriented, and involves a completely different breed of language. Once the dust settles on Flash, I'll take a closer look at ASP.net, but so far I haven't been able to get excited about it. I also wonder about how quickly it will get adopted, and who's likely to jump first.

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I got word today that the Flash project that I was pitching went to somebody else. Hey, I gave it a solid shot. Meanwhile, it's back to the books. I think I'll be in good shape for the developer and design exams by next week.

Granny's homegoing service was actually beautiful. She would have been happy and proud. My cousin, the Rev.Edward Joseph, III did an amazing sermon about what Granny's two canes meant to him. (Before arthritis put her in a wheelchair, she walked first with one cane, and later with two.) My cousins Cheryl Dixon and Lisa Ware both sang powerful solos, and I had the privilege of reading my poem. The talent, diversity, and connectedness of the family was in full evidence that night. It was clear that Granny had touched the lives of a lot of people, and that her legacy is a rich one.

Family members came in from around the country for the services, and I had the special treat of reconnecting with cousins that I hadn't seen in 15 years or more. It's also been a good while since I'd been in Granny's house. It was nice to be there. Denise said she thought I was more at ease in that house than any other "home" I've been in. Maybe that's because it's where I spent the first three years of my life. Maybe it's because of all the special things that happened there. I wasn't aware of a difference myself, but it's hard to see outside my own skin.

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Sessions.edu has profiled 5 students from the class of 2002. I'm very pleased with how my page turned out. They even included a link to my portfolio, which is a surprise. I've been planning to upgrade the portfolio for a while, and it's starting to make a lot of sense to do it sooner, rather than later... It's been a while since I looked at the logs, but I might be surprised to see how much traffic it's getting.

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Reading more on Flash, I'm starting to get very interested in what can be done with the drawing API. For one thing, I can use it to dynamically generate a mask. That suggests a wide range of possibilities. Very cool stuff. I haven't built many of the examples, but I'll probably finish reading through Flash MX Studio tonight. It's chock full of good stuff, and covers a nice broad range of Flash applications. It is a code-rich book, labeled as advanced/intermediate level, so it's not for the visual designer who's never played around with Actionscript. But, if you've dabbled in ActionScript and want to explore how to enhance your interactive and dynamic content chops, there's a lot in this book for you. The writer does a good job of breaking down complex chunks of code and explaining what it's doing. Better still, most of the projects even look nice.

I think the coolest piece in the book is an interactive game called SphereCage - an update on the old arcade game "Pong." It does some interesting 3D simulation stuff, and even demonstrates a practical application of matrix math! But, the coolest thing is that I got a demonstration of how you do inheritance in Flash:

Model = function( ) {
};

// The code above, when invoked via the constructor new generates an instance of the class Model.

BallModel = function ( ) {
};
BallModel.prototype = new Model( );

/* ... Above is an example of how you would write a BallModel class to inherit the properties and methods of the Model class.

When you want to invoke a method of BallModel's superclass (in this case it's Model), use super.

For example, to invoke model.applyTransform from within the BallModel object, you'd use:

*/