Some of the life of Calvin Crane

It's hard to be a supporter when your team value business over winning.
As a fan you want to win naturally and we have seen this week a manager walking out of his job due to discrepancies between what he feels he needs to win and what the board see as winning.
Thankfully Arsene Wenger has committed to Arsenal for another 4 years, and it is never really clear where the reluctance to buy players comes from.
How can you instill the winning attitude alll round when there is a negativity no matter how insignificant. Yet AW insists the team spirit is there indeed it is something he feels they have more than others.
Just qualifying for champions league and getting all the revenue that brings and doing it on a shoestring seems to be what arsenal is about these days. Part of me does not want to support a bought overnight team either, but we nearly lost a key opening game to liverpool in the style in which we did so often last season. Domination then snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They even had 9 players on the field at one point. Arsenal need a goalkeeper and the defence for me is lacking, though Vermaelen and Koscielny have be bought for this purpose but thats 2 players over 2 seasons a tad late for last year.

Posted by calvin crane

At its most basic form I have got Life Style Reviews up and running can be seen as a bit rough around the edges but this is a real content machine. Very important and helpful posts on life and health. I have no formal training but feel that I have tips to share and even use this to improve myself.

You can come and Join and post items yourself and things that you do to help you when your feeling off balance with your life. Its hard to make changes but this is better than waiting for the change to come to you.

Posted by calvin crane

Was a bit of a bad ass today on the tube, coming home from a hard day, its been long days into evenings for two weeks to get a project on track. A vicious flex 4 bug which I will report on here later lost a couple of days but also the project was underestimated in its complexity.

But tonight I want to examine my own reactions on the tube. It was emptying out and a few seats remained I was already in place. a group got on of 4 parents and finace i am guessing after the event.. but at the time looked like a couple and a few others, I was asked by the guy if I would move so he could sit next to his girlfriend. I said something to the effect that I was already settled and sorry if thats weird for you and excuse me. Of course he was polite and sat opposite his girlfriend instead of next to her. Then 2 stops later the woman next to me invited him next to her as they all moved and were more or less together (someone's mother) !

Now I want to make a couple of points here

The guy was within his rights ? Of course he was in displaying manners however small contrary to this he put me in the potentially embarrassing position of having to say no if I was the kind of person that gets embarrassed.

Continue reading "bad ass calvin"

Posted by calvin crane

Mum has since made a good recovery and the mysterious pains she was getting in her arm, were related to the gaul bladder and the stones.
I am working a flex 4 project which I'm quite enjoying at the moment and the sun is shining in this country.

I have an iphone 4 ! and its awesome. I lost my mobile in the back of a cab after a recent scuba diving holiday in sharm el sheikh. Was good diving spoilt perhaps by having to be on the boat all day every day. A lack of info before hand would have seen me able to make a more informed decision. With all these data at our fingertips there is failure somewhere in this regard. A sea of rubbish trip advisor reviews is not what is required better is the destination tips provided by travel sites like landed travel.

Posted by calvin crane

Poor old mum back in hospital, she was rushed in the middle of the night and my sister alerted me in the morning. So am back home holding the forst visiting and keeping myself busy building a flash game for a client. Well I just finished that and my mum got operated on today for a gaul bladder with stones in. Apparently we dont use them and can loose them, so she will be glad of the weight loss. At her age she is worried about that so now I know where I get it. but its a big relief to know that it was nothing too serious after all she has been through with her brain tumor which she has learned to cope with over the years.
God bless you mum x

Posted by calvin crane

@namespace s "library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark";
@namespace mx "library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx";
@namespace view "com.style.view.*";
@namespace local "*";

@font-face {
src: url("creative/GillSansStd.otf");
fontFamily: "GillSansStd";
embedAsCFF: true;
}

s|RichEditableText {
fontFamily: GillSansStd;
fontLookup: embeddedCFF;
}


text="The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. 01234567890"
width="400"
fontSize="33"
horizontalCenter="0"
verticalCenter="0"
/>

This works in the main application scope but not outside in other views/components with identical useage.

Once again font problems are causing developers to loose time. Please Adobe listen to the developers out here - problems fonts have bugged me since flash 4 !!!

Posted by calvin crane

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/8685009.stm
11
Triesman : ok he left and the talk is about re focussing on the bid as if triesman was the problem gone. No !! he was just hinting at a problem of bribery ? It stinks it stinks it STILL stinks even if you sake a guy who couldn't keep his mouth shut idiots..

Posted by calvin crane

Adobe Catalyst seemed to have some cool export options to allow you to directly insert into your flashbuilder4 project, and yes it works. But I had to jump through hoops and spend too long to get it to work, ok well thats learnt and will not need to be relearnt. But my problem is that its buggy (button states not correctly shown - you have to ignore what appears on stage sometimes !) the timeline I still didnt figure out.

If it ain't broke don't try to fix it adbobe and instead of bringing out this piece of software couldn't you have given us that swc support we are all dying for. So that code isn't stripped out and we are sort of used to this workflow. The fact is they did a great job with flash, and designers could/can also use flash and how I wish I could have the export options that catalyst has within flash...I think adobe has lost some market share to the opensource movement and this catalyst is some attempt at getting in there with catalyst. However as flash ide was always so good we never lost our need to produce graphics in flash.

Continue reading "Adobe Catalyst : I like the idea but its not there yet"

Posted by calvin crane

This sounded quite interesting on first inspection xml type description of vector art ! That you can just insert into your flex mxml classes. But for anything complicated the exporter in Adobe Illustrator seems to create some links to rasterised bitmaps ! So then why dont I just use a rasterized image from the start ?

Also Catalyst, I think this is a simplified version of the old flash program and it can handle produce .fxg files from differing kinds of imported art.

I still think that I will be using .swc files produced from flash for my assets as the vector format is preserved. I welcome discussion on this in case I missed something, but for me I see no benefit what so ever so far.

Posted by calvin crane

Well tonight another good class of capoeira for me. Is it really ok to justify my existance to such a "thing" cult - no think not, exercise..much more than that...martial art - no dance partly...how do you describe capoeira ? One may struggle to define me too, so maybe we is like brovers of a misunderstood category but deffo something good for the soul

For me it offers structure and some things I didn't know that I loved, dance rhythm energy movement balance but also capoeira has given me the ability to do things with my body to appreciate my immediate space I'm not sure what else could have given me these things. Sure it could have gone the way of Tango..not salsa that is lacking of story and inventive. Maybe we all find our thing our way, some people do not and for those I do really shed a tear; it is a possible state. But Capoeira has given me something that pulls me from running to another place (TRAVEL) and that is truly something.

cal

Posted by calvin crane

Moved out of Netherhall Gardens on Saturday morning so the beginning of a new chapter. Also with finishing a body of work on http://caribbean-diving.com I will be turning my attention to the fashion style review website

Posted by calvin crane

Its been accepted into the facebook directory of applications. Great stuff.It was a bit more of a test bed to be honest but if there is enough interest I will add the functionality I was originally thinking about. It would be a reasonable idea, just that what I realise is the usual web trends of people is lurking coming viewing then leaving, not many people are up for sharing EVEN when they can post something about their own business for free ! That I will never understand. I think its old money and they have an already solid customer base, or do they , one day you wake up and have lost a market share..

http://apps.facebook.com/caribbeanislands

Posted by calvin crane

http://apps.facebook.com/caribbeanislands/

CMS: Joomla
RichMedia: Flex

Please help me test it out as its a bit in Beta, I wonder if they will allow it into the directory will go ahead and submit it now ! please come and take a look. And let me know what you think.
How would you improve it etc.

Posted by calvin crane

The first 45 minutes of todays capoeira class with cordao de ouro was intense for the first 45 minutes this evening. We get a solid 2 and a half hours plus which gives us time to get things really done and stretching as well. It is great that we don't waste valuable learning time stretching when we just have an hour but I'm too slack to force myself to do it and at 37 its a mistake I am realising that I need to schedule as a priority. Joseph took his usual lumps out of me with his low cartwheels never my fault but its good and fun to train with him.

Caribbean Scuba Diving has dropped off of google recently for some reason and it had done in the past too. I'm not exactly sure why. All I can do is work hard on the facebook integration right now that I hope to port across to the other sites as I see fit.

I am not sure that this connect and share stuff is really worth the effort that it takes. I am starting to think that I should just cut right to the chase and start to write the content which is what I would really like to do and chase up tours and leads and just get involved at that level.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. It just goes against the grain to imagine to pay someone to code something I could do myself and I very specific vision in that also. Still I do feel that the mountain peak is within sight and I can start to move around. I feel like taking on some contract work just to get out of the house. It's really a difficult thing working from home and takes discipline. I respect those that are able to do that at least for a while.

Posted by calvin crane

Ok So I have these people on my phone

Bruce Springsteen
Arnold Swarzenegger
Bob Dylan
Sheryl Crow
Pamela Anderson

I just need to get the numbers to go along with the names.

http://tours.landed.at

Posted by calvin crane