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Iron Maiden – Phantom of the Opera just came on Rhythmbox (on random), and I immediately thought of this 1985 Lucozade advert, which was the first time I think I ever heard the Maiden… Showing my age!

Also, good ‘ol Daley Thompson – look at him go in the 1980 Moscow olympics! Did Britain proud! Superstar! =D

But then I took an arrow to the knee…

Really, I got tasked with handling all traineeships for work (on top of all my regular teaching duties) and it’s eating all my time while I get training plans together and get everyone organised with what they’re doing and when they need to get it done by. Also the (8,000 word) confirmation of candidature document for my research is due shortly so I’m beavering away on that whenever I have or can make a spare moment. Once these things are out of the way in the next few weeks normal service will be resumed!

Additional

T-Shirt available here: http://www.bustedtees.com/arrowintheknee.
Don’t get it? Try this: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee.

The upcoming (mid-2012) Alien prequel Prometheus looks fun!

I’m thinking Gold-Class for that bad-boy! =D

Jan 2012 Prometheus trailer:

My second attempt at recreating the PS3 XMB “wave” thingy in Flash – I’m thinking it’s not too shabby for purely using blurred 2D lines for the waves. I’m sure it could be fine-tuned to match up with the real XMB better, but for what I wanted this is fine.

And all using zero 3D, and zero splines/beziers.

Not bad for 7KB of Flash!

I had to cover a class on Flash today, and I haven’t touched it in over a year, so I got up bright and early to make sure I wasn’t too rusty…. and yeah… I was. Really rusty.

I was thinking in C++ and Python and Java, not thinking in AS3 and everything was wrong – so I decided to write a PS3 XMB (Cross Media Bar) “Wave-Thing” as practice. In fact, it doesn’t even do the waves – just the sparkles. Still, was a good exercise to get my head back in the game.

There’s nothing to stop me implementing the waves as fixed DisplayObjects moving in parallax (easy, weak), or via blurred splines (preferred, harder) – but at least I got the sparkles, um, sparkling…

I think I will do the waves, I need some spline practice…

Update: Modified so spark is allocated to MC with one of four levels of blur, increased spark density, spark has 50% chance of pulsing again without being re-initialised, spark has 1% chance of being big on initialisation.

Credits: PS3 wave background from: http://blog.guifx.com/2009/04/24/playstation-3-wallpapers/