joshbuhler.com

The commercial for it is a joke.

The resulting sound quality is terrible.

It comes from Microsoft.

All good reasons to brush it off as one big joke, right?

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Those of you that follow me on Twitter, may have seen the post where I mentioned the awesome New Years “party” that we did - flying over Salt Lake City at midnight to see the fireworks from the air.

My brother-in-law Chris, was our pilot for that night and was kind enough to take my wife and I with him and my sister. We took off from Airport #2 out in West Jordan, flew down over Utah County for a bit, and made it back up to SLC just in time for midnight to fly over downtown.

Chris got a new HD camera for Christmas, and so we were able to shoot some video while we were up there. If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to fly directly over a fireworks show, now you can see it. The fireworks were being launched from near the Gallivan Center.

Watching the show there was great, but it was also pretty amazing to be able to see all the various fireworks displays across the valley all at once. This is easily one of the most memorable New Years that I’ve had so far, and would do it again in a heartbeat.

Fireworks by Air - 5D MKII from Chris Palmer on Vimeo.

Lately I’ve been working on preparing myself to take the Adobe Flex 2 Certification exam. I’ve always thought of myself as a Flash, not Flex developer, so this one was a bit of a challenge for me. For as much as I use it, there’s still a lot of things that I still don’t quite get.

So for the last few weeks leading up to my exam appointment, I’ve been cramming like crazy, and writing a lot of Flex code trying to learn and get as much studying in as I can.

Apparently, it paid off. I didn’t get as high of a score on the test as I had wanted to, but the important thing is that I passed. Plus, I now know a lot more about Flex 2 than I think I had ever initially planned on knowing. Of course, doing this reminded me that I never renewed my Flash MX2004 certifications for Flash 8 or CS3, so I think I’m going start working on those now…

Update: Since I’ve been slacking lately on the blogging, I’ve neglected posting some of the study materials I used to get ready for the exam. I still haven’t done that. But a friend of mine who recently passed the exam just wrote an excellent summary of the stuff he used to prep for the exam, and it’s pretty much the same stuff I used. Rather than duplicate his list, I’ll just send you directly to it.

Adobe Flex Certification Study Materials

Yesterday wasn’t exactly the greatest day of my life. My family had to make one of the hardest decisions anyone with a pet will ever make, and we put Boomer, our St. Bernard to sleep yesterday morning. He had been having some pretty serious health issues, and ever since our other dog “Allie” passed away a few years ago, he’s always seemed a bit lonely without her.

Taking care of a task like this can never be easy, but at least we were able to make it a little bit nicer for Boomer. My cousin is an animal control officer, and so rather than take care of things in a cold, empty vet’s office, we did it in the backyard, in the shade where Boomer liked to hang out. Once Boomer had passed, we buried him below the Maple tree in the back where he used to spend a lot of time napping, and rolling around in the mud.

Since my sister said it better, I’ll simply point you to read what she had to say, since it pretty much sums up everything I wanted to, but better.

Boomer Norman Buhler

Try to keep all of your fingers attached this weekend.

Just got back from seeing Indiana Jones 4 this afternoon with the rest of the mediaRAIN crew.

Indy rocked.

(I wasn’t exactly a huge fan of the ending, but I was more than satisfied with it.)

So my plan to reveal 100 facts about myself in 100 days turned into about 17 facts before I went on a vacation, and forgot to resume the posts.

I’ll resume that undertaking in the future, but for now, I think I’ll just have to leave it at the 17 for now until I get inspired enough to come up with 83 more facts to share.

Fact 17

It’s a good thing the schools I attended only transfer credit, and not the actual grades.

When I was dating my wife, I was attending Salt Lake Community College. I was doing OK with my grades until it came time to start making the wedding plans, and them my grades went south big time. I managed to pass my classes, but it wasn’t pretty.

After we got married, I decided to join the Multimedia Communications program at Utah Valley State College, so I transferred my existing credits from SLCC down to UVSC. I managed to keep my grades up at UVSC until I graduated, finishing with a 3.7 GPA, instead of the 2.something I was rocking at SLCC.

Fact 16

I can’t give blood. Not that I have any weird diseases or anything, it’s just that I’m a big wuss.

I get really squeamish just thinking about it, and the few times I have given blood in the past, I’ve either passed out, or had to lie down for a few hours afterwards. I can’t even have my blood drawn at the doctor’s office without having to lie down.

Fact 15

The things you do for love…

All of my life, I’ve been allergic to cats. When I was dating my wife, it really wasn’t much of an issue that she had two cats, because they both lived outdoors, and I just didn’t touch them. After we got married, my wife wanted a cat, but our landlords wouldn’t allow it.

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