Hey folks,  we’ve been quiet this week so I thought I’d drop you guys a note and let you know that we’re not gone.  It’s a hectic week from a personal and professional aspect and we just have our noses to the grindstone.

A little preview of stuff coming up:  Right-Brain has a bug to do a little tutorial on the iPhone and getting 3rd party native apps running there.  I’m still working on part 3 of the AS3 game programming tutorial, and I’ve also started pondering an article on rsync. . .love that nifty little tool.

Anyway, stay tuned, we’re still here and working on bringing you guys some (hopefully) useful info.

LB

P.S.  Oh, two quick things: 1) I’ve updated the vmware-server backup stuff again.  If you’ve been keeping track, take a look.  2) I’m PISSED. . .You can’t make calls to native applications (ie, exec) with Adobe’s AIR product.  That irritates the hell out of me!

Postroduction, and by that, I mean an introduction after the fact. Hey! I used it, so it’s a word now. Since Mr. Super-Right-Brain had to get all random and whatnot on us and get the ball rolling without proper introduction (proproduction, I suppose), I’m going to take a few minutes and elaborate on exactly what’s going on here.

Who are we? Right-Brain did address that a little in the About section. But, just to place it at the level of front-page news: We’re geeks - meaning we’re both software developers. Right-Brain has, historically, done a lot of Windows based stuff, ASP, Visual Basic, etc. He’s also a pretty good designer when you hold a gun to his head ; ) I’ve been much more Unix based, PERL, Java, C/C++, etc. We’re both currently into Ruby on Rails, and coming up to speed with Flex 2, and ActionScript 3.0. We are employed as part of a web team for a highly regarded business school at a private university.

The original impetus for this blog was that we both are always having to come up with some solution to a problem that we can’t find good answers for and have to create the answers, or we have to pull information from different sources to compile an answer. It is our hope, that aside from entertaining some folks from time to time, we are able to save other folks (or same folks, for that matter) some time looking for answers.

I have a few projects (Ruby on Rails, Java/J2EE, AS3) that I will be open sourcing and making available here for reference purposes, and one project that is nearly complete that I will be going over in detail. This later project is a game written pretty much exclusively in ActionScript 3.0. As ActionScript 3.0 is new, and almost never discussed separately from Flash (disclosure: I do use flash to save time on animations, but it’s minimal) or Flex, I’m going to offer this as a tutorial for budding AS3 game programmers. Personally, I’m VERY excited about this medium and I think it’s going to provide a lot of creative technical people a terrific outlet for projects that might not otherwise see the light. . .more on this in some other *rah! rah!* post.

As mentioned in the About area, we are both musicians. Right-Brain is an extremely talented guitarist (among several other instruments) and excels in writing, recording, and performing more rock/pop type stuff. I’m a trombonist and my passion is swing and jazz. We’ve both performed in public a great deal, though neither of us are performing regularly at the moment. I am, unfortunately, not playing at all at this point. I look forward to the day when I am again, but there are just other priorities at the moment.

What else? Oh yes! We are both fairly avid gamers, as avid as life allows anyway. We poke around with World of Warcraft a bit, we’re both currently playing Guitar Hero (myself the original, Right-Brain: GH2). Our goal is that when we grow up, we want to be creating some fun games for people to play on a regular basis. We’re looking at a few things, but we’re really focusing on fun game-play over eye candy and thumb calisthenics. Another purpose of this blog is to document this journey as well.

On the more personal side of things, we’re both closer to 40 than 30 (some of us MUCH closer), both married, and I have a 6 month old daughter (see www.andnoplacetogo.com for more on that last one).

It’s been discussed, and will likely be the case that we will also have guest contributers from time to time, perhaps even on a regular basis. Stay tuned for more on that.

I think that’s the hemispheres in a nut shell. Welcome, and I hope we are able to enlighten or entertain you from time to time. If not, at least you were able to spend a couple minutes reading this instead of dealing with an annoying co-worker.

Left-Brain