Seb Lee-Delisle

I’ve just published a blog post on the FITC blog where I explain what inspires me and how to learn to love the constant demand of changing technology.

http://blog.fitc.ca/post.cfm/stagnating-in-your-cubicle-learn-to-love-to-learn

Yes, I know; I’m late with my review of last year. Everyone else did theirs in December, or at least January. But you know, I’ve done one every year and the OCD element in my personality just won’t let me get away with it. So allow me this minor self-indulgence just once a year (especially today of all days )

And actually 2009 was a very extreme year, some moments of difficulty and some moments of joy! So let’s start at the beginning…
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This has been a massive problem to me lately, particularly with distributing files on my training courses. For some reason, the swf files that I give my attendees don’t open with the stand alone FlashPlayer, instead they often default to Flash CS4 etc.

I know the usual way to do this is by right clicking and selecting “Info” (or cmd-i) and then setting the app to open this file and then “Change All”. But for some reason, with swfs this doesn’t seem to work and it just reverts back to CS4 or whatever it was before.

This was driving me mental.

But I’ve found a fix – RCDefaultApp

This is a preferences pain that allows you to choose the app for a given file extension.

This seemed to fix it for me but I’d love to know why this happens and how you’ve solved it on your machine, particularly for Windows. And you’ll save me a lot of trouble in my upcoming training courses!

Go to the terminal, navigate to the folder you want to delete files from and type :


find . -name "*.svn" -exec rm -rf {} \;


This should delete all .svn folders in the current directory and recurse down into sub-folders too. Please be careful with this!

I also found this handy AppleScript which will toggle hidden files on the mac:
ToggleHiddenFiles

Thanks to Niqui Merret and Raymond De Vries for helping with this.

I often get complaints about my domain name. Is it that hard to spell my surname? I guess it’s a bit of a strange one.

People seem to think that my first name is Seb-Lee but it’s not; Seb is my first name and Lee-Delisle is my surname.

But seeing as people seem to call me Seb-Lee (and close friends even sometimes call me Sebly), I’ve now registered the domain seb.ly and it’s set up to point here! It’s a full redirection service, so think of it as a short URL.

And hopefully that’ll help with the typing…

If you want to protest again Sony BMG’s hype machine that is the X-Factor, then whatever you do, do not buy Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name Of this week!

(If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read all about the Rage Factor campaign here)

Here’s why : Rage Against the Machine are signed to Epic, a subsidiary of Sony BMG. And the X-Factor winner will be signed to Simon Cowell’s label SyCo, also a subsidiary of Sony BMG (and by themselves generate a huge proportion of Sony BMG’s income). So while you’re sticking it to the man, you’re also giving the man loads more money!

So here’s what’ll happen. All you X-Factor haters will buy RATM, but let’s face it you weren’t gonna buy the X-Factor single anyway, right? And if X-Factor fans hear about this campaign they will want to support their artist and buy more X-Factor singles. End result : more X-Factor singles sold and more RATM singles sold. So who are you trying to hurt here?

Some people have accused Sony BMG of setting this up themselves, but I don’t think that’s true. But if they had it would be bloody clever of them!

Sure, it’ll be fun to have a Christmas number 1 with the word fuck in it. But no radio station will be playing it on Christmas morning that’s for sure. And do you really want to give a major label loads more money in order to achieve this minor delight?

Instead, why not just give some money to charity (and you could do worse than by using this justgiving page) or instead maybe really stick it to the major labels by supporting independent artists such as Pomplamoose who prove that you no longer need a record label to be a successful artist. And that’s how to really worry the majors.

Just saying.

I’m still reeling from the shock of it to be honest. We’ve never won any industry awards so far, so for our first to be a BAFTA is pretty incredible. (For the non-Brits among you, I guess it’s our version of the Emmys) The ceremony was at the Hilton in Park Lane, and it was even filmed for posterity (and perhaps broadcast?). Our category was for Children’s interactive and we won it for Big and Small up against 3 other incredibly deserving projects. It was a great project to work on but bloody hard work so it’s just fantastic to get some recognition. There’s a full list of team members on this post from earlier in the year.

Here’s the video, our award is at 9 minutes in. And I’d like to thank my mum, my manager…

Pretty embarrassing but what can you do?

Filmed at the official MAX hotel in downtown LA: The Westin Bonaventure, which is such a weird hotel but I really like it in a kitsch sort of way. I heard that the architect was a fan of the early 80s TV show Buck Rogers, which would explain all the concrete, chrome and glass elevators. Although I heard that it wasn’t great to stay there, mainly due to the fact that all the towers are circular, making vaguely triangular (and claustrophobic) rooms.

Either way, I couldn’t resist the strange gym equipment in the atrium in concrete “pods”. And Paul Wyatt decided it’d be a good location for an interview

Working out with Plug in media’s Technical Director Seb Lee-Delisle from Paul Wyatt on Vimeo.

I talk about Big and Small, future projects from Plug-in, the MAX experience and the EuroMaxInvasion.

And for the star wars fans, here’s me with the actual award winners, Thaniya and Andy from MLB.com

You may have seen some of the comments on my previous post, the first report from MAX this year. At first I was surprised and upset by Mike Chambers’ and Lee Brimelow’s reactions, but I wanted to take the time to reflect on this and gain some perspective on their point of view. It can sometimes be too easy to submit an emotional response, and I really didn’t feel like that’d help anyone!

Now I think about it I really can see why my post caused such a reaction. I was curt in my brevity and it was negative. My opinion hasn’t really changed but I do feel like I did myself a disservice by the tone of my writing. More than that, I’m quite horrified at how negative my post sounds now I’ve re-read it. There were indeed many things about MAX that I did like and I hope to go into some of these in later posts.

But right now I’d like to explore my personal relationship with Adobe, and try to figure out if there’s a way I can work more closely to become a more useful collaborator in future.

I must admit, our relationship has a somewhat chequered past. Some of our tiffs have occurred in public and others I have chosen not to talk about, in an increasingly rare display of discretion

The truth is that I often find it very hard to tally my position as a “community leader” and open source contributor with the fact that Adobe is, after all, a multi-million dollar corporation. It’s a essentially a symbiotic relationship, but it’s when Adobe makes bad business decisions that adversely affect the community that I feel compelled to speak out.

But trust me, I really do not enjoy being the voice of dissent. In fact I find it incredibly stressful. Anyone who knows me will realise I’m generally a positive person, and I’m passionate about digital creativity. I evangelise the Flash Platform at conferences and events all around the world.

I also find it very difficult to distinguish between the anonymous corporation and the many talented passionate people behind the scenes. So sometimes its just too easy to be dismissive without realising that there are real genuinely caring people that are behind the work upon which you are passing judgement.

I felt heartened when Lee described us as “friends who sometimes disagree” and that made me realise that he cares enough about what I say to correct me when I’m wrong and argue the other point of view when I state an opinion.

It’s also become somewhat of a surprise to me that people seem to listen to what I say; I now realise that I have a responsibility to explain myself clearly and accurately, stating my position with respect to the many individuals who have invested their time and effort to build the products that make Adobe what it is.

So! It is with a renewed sense of enthusiasm that I reach out to Mike and Lee, both of whom I respect massively, and ask that we communicate more efficiently with one another. We are friends (at least I consider us so) with many shared qualities and passions. Sadly though, we’ve rarely had the chance to chat for more than 5 minutes here and there, or the odd twitter message. I’d love to get to know you both better and to share the things that drive me and hopefully you’ll see that I’m more than my random mildly sarcastic tweets.

Don’t get me wrong though. I will tell you honestly what I think. Sometimes it will be good, and sometimes not so good. But I promise to do it more constructively. And I’ll also take the time to talk about what I love.

So it’s with this in mind that I will add some further explanation to my previous MAX post.

Group hug?

Post FOTB is usually a very sad time of year for me. Such a great group of friends from all around the world flock to Brighton for an amazing couple of weeks of fun. And when they leave, I can’t help but feel somewhat deflated.

But not this year! Because on Friday (tomorrow!) I’m starting my mini USA tour! And I’ll be seeing pretty much all of them again!

Starting in LA for MAX courtesy of the awesome Influxis crew, where I’m speaking at the FITC unconference. And I’m in good company; in an endevour that has become know as the EuroMaxInvasion, I’ll be there with Joa Ebert, Ralph Hauwert, Mario Klingemann, and Andre Michelle! In other words, the best Flashers in the world! How did I get in with that crowd?

Thanks to Scott Janousek for the photo!

Followed by a few days in San Francisco to see my friends at Odopod and check out the NoiseBridge hacker space.

Then off to FlashPitt; I’m really excited about this one. I met Val the organiser at FlashBelt, and she seems so cool, I just know that this will be a great conference.

My final destination is New York City for my one day Papervision3D workshop (only 4 spaces left!) and hanging out with Josh and my friends at BigSpaceShip and FlashCodersNewYork.

All in all, I’ll be gone for three weeks. Perhaps I’ll see you there?