The Back Button

We’re trying to gauge the number of people who shall be attending the first San Flashcisco meet this Thursday. If you’re thinking about attending we would appreciate it if you could comment here.

Thank you

After several small meetings with community leaders and discussions between myself and joint San Flashcisco manager, Patience Elfving, I am please to announce the go-ahead of the San Flashcisco user group.

We have set a regular monthly date for our meetings which will be the 3rd Thursday of the month. Our first meeting will be on January 17th starting at 6:30pm, hosted at 275 Battery Street, Suite 800, SF.

Read More: http://sanflashcisco.com/blog/7/first-meet-january-17th-2008-630

SanFlashcisco.com .. coming soon .. first meet-up, soon after … watch this space :).

ps. Logo submissions are welcome.

I’m planning on attending RIA Camp next week at Adobe. So, if anyone wants to talk San Francisco Flash Platform User Group with me, then you should come on down. These small camps are always fun

I think that this past week and a half has been the most stressful part of my year so far. Why? Well it all started with my landlord calling us to inform that he’s selling our place and that, at the very least, we have a month until we have to move. The first thing that comes to mind is panic! The second thing that comes to mind is more panic because the holidays are coming up and this is the worst time of year to be finding somewhere.

This past two years we’ve been living in Emeryville (around where the road caught on fire and where Ikea and Pixar is located). Emeryville isn’t the best area, but it was very close to where I used to work, thus it seemed like a good idea to move there. Now I work in SOMA (South of Market, San Francisco), it’s a little far away, so we were planning on moving anyway, just in our own time.

After attending around five open houses, I came to realize that the situation was worse than I’d thought. Not only did most of the places suck, but many of them had lots of people bidding on them. Sometimes, contracts would be signed within the first five minutes of an open house. This whole experience was absolutely depressing. And to top it off, I don’t even have a credit history in the states yet (fyi: I’m British) as I don’t own a credit card yet and pay for everything with ATM (yes, I’m stupid, but I thought it was a good thing not to have any debt). So being picked out of large group of people was hard. The only thing I really had going for me was working for Sony.

Insolently, one of my co-workers was also moving. He was moving out of the Marina to buy a place in North Beach. So I asked if he could refer us to his landlord as good people to take over his old place. This all seemed like it would pay off, until we were informed that the rent on the place had gone up from 1700 to 2100 bucks!!! Crazy huh!?!

Just when it seemed that we were going nowhere, the building manager from the building in the Marina called. He informed us that there was another unit that had become available and as we had been previously refereed, our application would be bumped to the top of the pile if we were to apply. The only road block now was the units owner appreciating my status and lack of credit history.

So finally today, I get a call informing me that we have been approved and that we can move in soon. WOOOOOOO!!!!

Disclaimer: If there is already a San Francisco Flash Platform user group in existence, please let me know and ignore this post.

From my observations, I’ve heard of many Flash user groups from all around the world. The first few that spring to mind are based in Boston, LA, London and Belgium. They all seem to attract a good following and these people seem to want to share what they know and love with other like minded individuals.

So, what’s the motivation behind this post. Well, for the past few years, I’ve been a bit of a Flash lone wolf, as I’ve always ended up working as the only ActionScripter in my workplaces. Even now at Sony, I’m working in an office full of C engineers and one IA person. I have no one to talk ActionScript with!

At lunch times, I’ll sometimes take the short walk down Townsend St to get a burger from the Holy Grill, passing the SF Adobe building on the way. And I feel that I can’t be alone in my ActionScript world with the Flash mother-ship right next to me. haha.

For these reasons, I feel compelled to start a San Francisco based Flash Platform user group (see Disclaimer). To start recruiting people, I’ve setup a group hosted on Facebook (yes, I know it’s not the best solution and it’s only temporary) so, if your based in the Bay Area, with a love for anything Flash / Flex / AIR / ActionScript / MXML related, I would encourage you to join in!

When and if the group gets a big enough following, I’ll make another posting, both on here and on Facebook, outlining plans for a first meet to discuss how the group shall be organized.

I feel that any kind of group should be as democratic as possible, so please, if you have any suggestions or feedback on what I can do to make this group a success, please don’t hesitate in leaving me a comment or email.

Let’s make it happen!