As many of you know, I returned to school part-time this semester and now regularly spend two nights a week deep within the bowels of MATC (Madison Area Technical College), attempting to learn Flash. So far — east-side location, sub-zero commute, and indigent social life aside — the class has been great and I’ve really enjoyed it. For starters, I’m convinced our instructor, alias Rick Horton, is really John Hodgman. I know this because I thought “Rick” was a dead ringer for PC guy, but then upon seeing this month’s Wired cover, I decided he was a cross between PC guy and Wired Guy, and, as it turns out, they are both John Hodgman, therefore so must be Rick.
In addition to renowned (albeit aliased) tutelage it has also been fun learning about subtractive editing, tweening, alpha channels and the like. Writing Actionscript, the scripting language used for runtime manipulation of data and content, has been remarkably less fun so far, but I remain optimistic. Lastly, upon completing our first homework assignment, “Rick” showed the whole class my very artistic and sophisticated solution which brought me great happiness in a regression-to-1st-grade kind of way. (Which I thought I knew how to publish to html, but apparently not. Stay tuned.)
