Rock Music is not Un-Godly... only Un-Godly Rock Music is!

Last night, I was so excited that my Jimi Hendrix Electric Ladyland Deluxe Collector's Edition arrived. I was so anxious to see how one of my fave albums was made. If anything, it was, and still is, a masterpiece and the opportunity to climb inside the minds behind it is rare, especially since Hendrix died almost 40 years ago. I was excited about this, that I wanted to share it with Joelle.

You can almost imagine the rain I felt on my parade as I proceeded to express my excitement about this, only to hear her say, "I no longer listen to rock music... it's Un-Godly."

SAY WHAT????

Has she been listening to Paster Fletcher Brothers or something? Since when is rock music un-Godly, especially since a lot of my favourite artists these days are rather big on a Christian music scene??? Artists like Third Day, Michael Tate, Delirious, and others, sound amazing to me and make me want to stand up and play it out in the name of God! I don't listen to any devil-worshipping metal crap. Heck, that stuff is Un-Godly by its own presentation of evidence!

Who is Joelle to judge? Here's a bit of judgement: her taste in music has turned to crap... and country music ain't any more Godly! Even worse is that she no longer plays any music. If anything, the music has left her life... and probably has done so long ago.

Then I get the, "don't feel insulted" shtick. Of course I feel insulted. I don't care if she doesn't want to listen to some good ol' classic rock style of music. But to call it Un-Godly is calling me Un-Godly, and I have been giving God my all when it comes to music. Sure, I did have dreams of being famous and stuff... they may be dashed in some ways, but in other ways, I am getting some degree of fame on the net and I am able to spread my passion for the gospel through music. And to call that Un-Godly is wrongfully judgmental.

I'm almost in a spot where I don't feel like I can ride in the same car with her just because I don't want to listen to her music. I'd rather drive by myself because I can listen to whatever tunes I want without any judgmental remarks from her. She can watch her CMT channel all she wants... I'll go downstairs and make some real music... and it's real because I can feel it. It moves me and makes me want to move. Even more so, I will not ask her musical opinions on any more CD's that I am working on and I don't expect her to sing on any of them.Sadly enough,  I think Mirrored Images is done. It's just God and me now. Time to mourn her taste in music and move on.

Web 2.0 vs. ActionScript 3.0

Web 2.0 is still half-baked when it comes to making things happen for the web. I was hoping to create a simply slide show player that could be used for our photography web site, so that I wouldn't have to rely on any outside plug-ins. I also wanted it to be able to play on various devices capable of internet surfing. So, I spent a week going over what it would take to simply go through an array of images supplied dynamically, load them up and fade them in, pause for a couple of seconds, load the next image, fade out the current image when the next one has completely loaded, and the fade the next image in and the cycle repeats itself. Sounds easy...

Not for web 2.0.

If I got it to do one thing, it would crap out in another. Either that, or it would work in Firefox, Safari, Opera and everything else, except Internet Explorer. Or, it would load the first image great and then the next image would load in all distorted. It was just one thing after another and no two platforms would play it identically as set out in my style sheets.

After about 4 hours of sleep yesterday, I woke up in the morning going, "Forget it! I know what I have to do in Flash and can get it done in ActionScript 3.0 before the bridal show ends!" That's right... I had a deadline to make this work. It took me only 15 minutes to make a PHP page that will talk to Flash and help set up the slideshow. From there, I designed and wrote all of the ActionScript to accomplish everything that I needed to do for the slideshow. I managed to get it all done in ActionScript 3.0 in a matter of hours where Web 2.0 still couldn't get it right after a week of messing with it. I can live with the fact that it won't show up on anyone's iPhone or iPod Touch for now. However, any browser that does have Flash 9, which would amount to over 95% of them, will play the slideshow alike. No deviations and no quirks.

So, in my battle between Web 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0, the winner was ActionScript 3.0! The proof is in the results.