It was my son’s 4th birthday this week so we had a small party and invited a few of his friends. Naturally, we had to endure the shockingly poor service at our local Toys’r’us. Wow, that store (possibly a reflection of the chain in general) has gone downhill. Rude staff, no idea on how to work cash registers, a list of broken toys requiring us to return them, no idea on the latest toys or where they were… like I said… wow.

We bought him an Optimus Prime (the big red transformer). This, using “Automotive morphing technology” turns into a truck. Its age range is 5+.
After we gave him his present. he came to me and said:

"Daddy, can you turn it into the truck?"
"Of course son, you sit there and wait while I quickly do it for you.."

TWO BASTARD HOURS LATER and I was close to throwing the red bugger against the wall. I was still sat there trying to get its arm up its arse and turn its eyes into a pair of headlights.

Managed it in the end… I even got a round of applause. I have since managed to get it down to 14 minutes, this time without bits falling off. Ain’t like it is in the movies…

He also got this hot wheels track where the cars are meant to crash into each other.. my wife and I set it up. We then tested it… thoroughly. We hadn’t realised that he had left the room, bored, 10 minutes earlier. That game is addictive, all you do is put the car on the track and then wait for them to crash into each other. One car did land on my foot and it did really really hurt… but I didn’t cry.

His cake was initially going to be a themed cake e.g. Transformers, TMNT. The ones we saw had, what looked like, a printout of a still from the movies on a 1 inch thick layer of icing. Imagine it, 8 x 2 – 8 year old kids laden with sugar, not on my watch. Ended up with a normal cake. Naturally, we took countless photos which I will post soon.

All in all, a very enjoyable day.

In an attempt to run my entire life from Netvibes, I created a Freelancers.net projects rss feed. This is a site scrape-parse-rss script so if the html changes within the page then it is likely that the feed will stop working, let me know if it does as I will probably have not noticed.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/freelancersnet

I hope this will reduce the number of daily bookmark mouse clicks by one. :D

Finally, Adobe have released Coldfusion 8. Before I begin, we need to take a look at the price tags.

US Price
Enterprise edition - $7,499

UK Price
Enterprise Edition - £5,500

Can someone explain how a product that retails for $7,499 in the US can be £5,500 here? Don’t exchange rates mean anything anymore? That is around a £300 rise in price since Coldfusion 7 hit the shelves.

It’s about time Adobe asked themselves why they seem to making a conscious effort to drive more and more people away from CF and towards competitors such as PHP, .Net etc. I was asked what CF has over other platforms to warrant the price tag. I couldn’t think of a single thing. True, it has support for RSS, image manipulation, zip file management to name a few (for a full feature list, visit www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/features/ ) but the likes of PHP have had such support for years. So where are the incentives? I have been coding in CF since CF4 came out, and even I cant see any.

CF developers often talk about the way you can knock a site together in no time. I find that developing in any language which makes use of a framework is just as quick, if not quicker. E.g. CodeIgniter/PHP.

The truth of it is, CF is simply not worth it. I would love to hear how Adobe justify the prices. I cannot remember the last time I was asked to develop a CF application from scratch AND purchase either CF hosting or a CF license. Most clients approach me with either an existing site written in CF or a server with CF installed which they want to make use of.

Oh, and if I had a penny for everytime someone mentioned Myspace as a shining example of a great CF site, I would have enough to purchase CF8 license myself. :)

Who remembers them? They came in paper sleeves for a few pence, lasted around 10 throws before breaking in two.

I played with them when I was a nipper, it was a jaw dropping moment to see my nipper now playing with them. He bought them from a museum souvenir shop for 30p each.

:O

Got me thinking about the other toys I played with, who remembers BMX Flyer?

I am excited to announce a new venture which I have now become part of.

FAFTv is an online comedy channel showcasing the best of established and upcoming talent. It will span everything from stand-up, sitcom, sketch and animation.

The site will allow you to watch production quality comedy material, submit a rating, enter competitions and a bucket load more.

If you have any material, ideas or scripts you’d like to submit for consideration then send it through to info@faftv.com.

Launch date is 5th November, 2007.