For the first time in a decade, I’m proud to be an American.

For a long time it seemed that Americans were fundamentally broken at some level. Inexplicably, we gave our full support to an infantile, aggressive, simpleton. Finally we’ve backed someone who talks about striving for peace or the absence of violence over “fighting for freedom”. Rather than an angry, little man, our president comes across as a kind, gentle man. He may be overly idealistic to accomplish everything he’s set out to do, but the main thing I’m looking for in my president is someone that is fundamentally good at heart. Given that, others things fall into place.

Jen and Roz just after Roz paddled her rowboat from California to Oahu.

Rowing solo across oceans might not be everybody’s idea of a dream job, but Roz Savage decided she’d had enough of her conventional London existence and wanted to do something special with her life. So in her mid-thirties she quit her job and bought a rowboat.

She now uses her adventures to raise awareness of environmental issues and inspire others to rise to their own challenges - no matter how big or daunting those challenges may seem.

website: http://www.rozsavage.com/

Here’s the iTunes podcast link.

Free Spore Creature Creator trial releasing June 17th.

Direct download: Spore_Creature_Creator_Trial.zip

Play ForgeFX’s Stunt Bike Arctic public alpha.

The venerable Adobe Director continues it’s inexplicable reign as the uncontested practical solution for the delivery of realtime 3d content on the web. There are other solutions (Unity, Virtools, etc), but I’m excluding them from the “practical” category given the single digit plugin penetration rates.Included in Director 11:

• DirectX 9 compatibility: previously rendering was using DirectX 7. Note that the rendering feature set is unchanged, so this is really just laying the groundwork future versions.
• Ageia Phsyics: this replaces the earlier Havok physics engine.
• Unicode support: makes global localization easier/possible.

Doing research for the next ForgeFX simulation. And yes, being in the midst of a few hundred ~200lb pigs, I am as uncomfortable as I look in the photo.

Greg, Dave and Adam at this years ForgeFX “board” meeting.