vincentclark dot com

^{inital draft}
Today was a bad day, a very bad day. I think that the doctors of my life have finally pushed me to the edge. I find myself with one of two choices.

The first, go over the edge. This show has to end sometime, ever act gets pulled. I have no doubt in my mind that I cannot live my life like this. This is not a pain that I want controlled by mind numbing pain killers.

After my last nerve injection my doctor extended my leave by a week, then told me that I should talk to the long term disability service and then doubled my pain medication. Nothing says, “I give up” quite like that.

I have put up with a lot of crap from doctors in my life. I wonder what I would have been like if the doctors did not mess up as they did. I first went to the medical clinic at Chico State with a lump in my testicle since mid August 1997. Despite not having sex for close to a year I was treated for Chlamydia for three and a half weeks. Two types of oral antibiotics and three injections of very powerful antibiotics, but this STD I knew I didn’t have didn’t go away. I think this is because it wasn’t an STD. Though the not having sex should have been the first sign, the second sign is the lump was near but not on the epididymis.

After weeks in pain, I was referred to a urologist. If the pain was not so severe there is no way I would have gone to one. Only a year prior during an examination by a urologist certain things occurred that prompted me to file a police report for sexual abuse against the doctor. The officer that took the report as well as several advocates wanted to see this guy fry. Unfortunately the detective didn’t even interview the doctor and told me that if you go to a urologist you have to expect things like that to happen. I know very clearly where the line is, and I know it was crossed.

After abandoning my speech scholarship, dropping out of school, and splitting up with my fiance I was finally getting my life back together. I knew that if it weren’t for the pain I would have rather died that go to see the urologist. It took me almost a month of scoping out a nurse practitioners and doctors to find one that I trusted enough to tell them about my testicular pain. I never really blamed the nurse practitioner for not uncovering the obvious tumor as much as I did the people that trained him and the complete lack of education about testicular cancer. Chico State had a full site on breast cancer. The in depth information on a cancer that would not affect the female population for another 20 - 40 years dwarfed the single page that dealt with the most common type of cancer among college males.

I thought about suing the school and was approached by a couple lawyers, but I knew where that money to pay me off would come from. Classes such as ballroom dance would be cut and the ability to have lectures such as She-mo Perez and Ice-Tea would be lost. I could not do that to my classmates, so I did the next best thing, I raised awareness. I openly talked about my experience. When I gave a presentation or speech I can tell that this was my way of correcting the injustice, not by taking money away from the school.

The doctor that discovered the cancer was a surgeon. I was 22 and things were happening very fast. I was 500 miles away from my family doctors and decisions had to be made quickly. The doctor advocated the second surgery and the option to have chemo was never entertained until the second tumor was found. I lost the ability to conceive a child naturally and eleven years later I am still feeling the after effects of an unskilled surgeon gutting my insides. I probably could have got a settlement from his malpractice insurance, but there was no way I was going to sue the man that save my life.

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^{from Vincent Clark’s newsletter archives}

^{originally published December 2nd, 2004}

It has been eight years since I finished my final round of chemotherapy. I was cured. Some days it seems like it was just yesterday, but most days it seems like a lifetime ago. It’s amazing how quickly life can change.

In September of ‘96, my life was heading in a different direction; it has been so long that I don’t quite remember what direction it was going in, but I sure as hell know this isn’t the path that I saw for myself. People would tell me that things happen for a reason. Two surgeries later, two rounds of chemotherapy, pneumonia, a degenerative disk from the chemo, nerve damage, the loss of being able to have children-I still wonder: what was the point of all that? Why did this need to happen? I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that I feel like an ass every time I ask myself that. I am thankful that it was me and not one of my friends or cousins.I don’t want that ever to happen to someone that I care about.

I know I should feel lucky, but most of the time I just feel guilty. I got a curable kind of cancer. Yes it sucked, still does suck, and I guess it always will always suck, but it isn’t going to kill me. We think of all the shitty things that we have to go through in our daily lives while most people my age will never know what it is like to tell their mother that they have cancer. Sometimes you will think about how shitty it must be to get out of bed and go to work. This sucks, because we should be glad that we have the ability to get out of bed. Yeah, things suck sometimes, and for some of us most of the time, but we can still get up. Tomorrow, we will be okay. My uncle once said, “You know, if you have a warm bed to sleep in, three square meals, and nobody is shooting at you, then things aren’t that bad.”

Some days we feel like throwing in the towel, saying “that’s it, I give up,” but deep down inside we know that we would never do that. I remember my cousin telling me that people would ask him if it was hard to grow up without his mother, who died when he was fifteen. He told me that he would tell them that he didn’t have a choice-he did what he had to do. He said that it was much like what I was going through. I didn’t have a choice; I did what I had to do. Shit happens, and sometimes we are stuck with it, but giving up is never an option.

One thing always stood out in my mind when I was getting chemo. I would be there for eight to ten hours, and I would see people come and go. Most of them were sixty or seventy years old, and I thought, I want that to be me when I get that age. Not that I wanted cancer; I just want to be that age and still be fighting hard for my life, even if only to extend it by a month or two. I think of this one girl, the only one my age there. She had melanoma on her lung. She asked me if I was going to be okay. I told her yes and asked her if she would be okay. She told me they didn’t know, that they needed to see if this round of chemo would shrink the tumor. She is dead now, and so are most of the people that were in the office the days that I was there. I was one of the few that survived this long and I will continue to survive as the years go on. I am not sure what that means, but I do know that it means something.

Your Friend, Vincent

45 second promo for a mocumentry I am developing.

The mocumentry, “the Cylon Menace” is about a rash of encounters commercial airliners have had with an unidentified flying object dubbed, “the cylon.” It is called “the cylon” because of its resemblance to a space craft featured in the legendary Television series, Battlestar Galactica.

The multipart series deals with learning about what this menace is as well as its technice of hunting aircrafts in the twilight. 

The overall purpose of this project is to test and build out project work flows. Though I will be doing a bulk of the work myself a work-flow is key when more than one piece of software is at play. 

In this edit I took a simple clip from Flight Simulator and ported it over to Adobe Premier where I trimmed it down and made several cuts. The focus of this was not on editing principles but how to incorporate an After Effects component. After Effects was used for the filters as well as the animated titles. You will see that the titles are not exactly what they should be. I was stuck in making a mask out of text. 

Building custom music with Garage Band has been a constant struggle for me. I take every opportunity I can to incorporate some original music into the clip. 

This is the the first clip in the promo 2 series. The three clips are separated by the After Effects filter being used. 

Adobe Premiere

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe After Effects

Adobe Audition 3

Soundbooth 2

Flash CS3

Google Sites

Flex 3.01

Microsoft Flight Simulator X

FRAPS

FSX BSG Cylon Raider - Rev 1.5

Garage Band

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When Fox first started to taken on the three main television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC they were largely seen as the network that aired the shows the real networks didn’t want anything to do with. This allowed for edgyer shows to survive with what many in the industry considered, substandard ratings. Since the spotlight was rarely on FOX they could simply, get away with more. This ability to get away with more than the average network show is a main factor in the success of the crass sitcom “Married with Children.”

Fox then took the initiative of thinking outside of the box and brought us complex shows speaking at times on complicated and controversial subjects. The network became the go to place for the shows with a niche market. Somewhere along the way FOX merged into the mainstream. The most spectacular part of this merge to the mainstream was the fact that the shows on FOX were not diluted in order to comply with the standards of Prime Time, however it was the standards of Prime Time changed.

If you are looking for an example of the boldness of FOX once it had entered as a true competitor to the previous three champs of Prime Time you only need to see the opening episodes for FOX’s 24. After an industry delayed start to Prime Time after the events of 911 and after movies such as Collateral Damage were postpone as well as video games being edited due to the sensitivity of the terror attacks Fox was set to launch a new promising franchise about terrorism 24.

24 was not just another telivison show about an governemnt agency thwarting attacks on the United States. 24 introduced a new format to the story, real time. The show would be 24 one hour episodes that would cover a complete 24 hour day. The format alone made the show a risk. Another risk of the network was putting the lead charter Jack Bauer into the hands of a gifted yet volatile star Kiefer Sutherland. The network was unsure if this formula would work, however they understood the base of the show, and after two subtle but ground breaking decisions, an audience was hooked. With one more thought from outside of traditional thinking, 24 is not entering its seventh season with several books and a video game added to the franchise.

Decision 1, should we or shouldn’t week?

There must have been decisions at the highest levels as to continue with the production of a show that centers around terrorism in the days following the largest terrorist attack on US soil.

During the opening episode of 24 on of the terrorist operatives blows up a plane in order to escape with a photographers badge. A decision was made to air the episode uncut less than two months from the date of the terror attacks. Blowing up a plane on a flagship television show on a network that had just earned its right into the mainstream could not have been easy. The scene could have been cut, the plot device was not a crucial element of the show. This all could have been done and nobody would have noticed, however the show would be less than what it was originally intended to be.

I am certain that the motivation of leaving this scene in was not to impress the potential die hard fans, but it did just that. Many of us remember the boldness of the shows producers when the plane was destroyed. The scene was not without emotion, I am sure almost everyone watching that thought of the attacks that occurred in the weeks prior. I was speechless, a part of me was angry that money trumped national traumatizing. It was then that I saw a point trying to be made. You cannot talk about terrorism without talking about all the components, even the components that make us sick to our stomachs. It was in that boldness that made me want to hear what this show had to say. FOX was on track to deliver us what we had come to expect from the show. A good story that is tough to swallow, but sparked debate within ourselves and at the water cooler.

thirteen eppisodes

Dispite the name 24 and 24 expected hours, the show only originally ordered 13, this is not uncommon for new shows. The problem with this approuch is the fact that the story was a serial show. This meant that we will have to wait until the end of the show before we know the whole story. 24 was a part of an emerging class of shows that broke from traditional telivison shows and formated itself more like a mini series than a network telivison show.

When starting a miniseries you are guaranteed at least some resolution within the show. An additional installment of the mini series or a full blow series was icing on the cake. Needless to say the new format of serial shows had the potential to upset a lot of fans if the series is pulled before completing.

Unsure if the season would be proved for the final 11 shows the producers wrapped up the show giving a sense of closure to its fans as well as leaving an opening for more. I cannot stress how brilliantly this was executed. The show was extended for the full season and the plot had thicken and twists were made and the efforts amoung the producers to statisfy their fans went largely unnoticed.

This effort among the decision makers behind FOX, including the writers, actors, producers, and executives not to abandon their fans loyalty went overlooked due to the success of the show and the fact that it had been extended. In the telivison world of 2007 and 2008 this concern for fan loyalty at the network level has all but vanished from the landscape. Those this descision did not earn new fans, strengthen current fans, or earned respect for the network, it was the right decision and was made with profit margins aside.

Beyond Telivison

In 2002 before the start of season two FOX found a whole new fan base for 24 within the DVD market. Though 24 was not the first TV show to come out to DVD, it proved to increase the fan base for the show and opened a new revenue stream. Though a show’s success still in 2008 is not based upon anything beyond sampling from Nilson, in 2002 the series was given royal treatment despite not posting the strongest ratings on the Network. The executives saw beyond the ad revenue and discovered the potential of TV series on DVD. This discovery has been largely missed within the industry.

I have no doubt that the concept of a world beyond ratings and a prime time slot was not floating around among the decision makers, and I am no doubt that the true concept of new media was drowned out by people that did not understand it. This is a failure within the industry, but not within the people that have maintained control of cutting edge shows such has 24.

As all great ideas by visionaries, the idea that made 24 24 would be lost as narrow minded individuals used their connections to get their hands into the mix of greatness others created, thus introducing a bacteria that will consume the life and legacy of the show. Unfortunately this is not an unusual occurrence, in fact, it is rarely not like this.

In television executive’s decisions (part 2, Universal) we will see the effect of well connected losers taking over the unconnected great ideas and how this treachery is on the verge of permanently crippling the industry.

^{brain leak
needs to be trimmed down, focused, however, will preserve original edit.}
A while back I set a standard for myself, and I admit it isn’t always achieved, but it is something that I try really hard at. That is taking responsibility for what I know I did wrong. My father always told me that he would back me 100% to the police, to my teachers, to anyone I might have got in trouble with. He then told me, “you will wish I hadn’t.” I knew that my father was a far worse person to cross than anyone. I am not quite sure the magnitude of what the fear was. I want to be clear, my father knocked me around a few times, sometimes I don’t think i deserved it, other times I know I did. There are some sore spots I have around my father  about this, but in the end, my father was fair.

I did not live in fear of what the police might do to me, but what my father would do to me. I had seen my father so rarely violent. I knew what he could do, but I never saw that could be unleashed on me, but on the person he was protecting me from. My father always made it clear to me that he would rain hell fire down on the person that hurt his boy. It wasn’t the fear of the harm my father could do to me that kept me in line and out of trouble, it was so much more than that.

(parable of the barrel)

When I was nine years old I was with my father hunting in Willows Ca. I was a crappy hunter, terrible shot, crapped my pants, and  the stories can go on and on about the worst hunter in the Clark family. My father was among the best. Aside from being notoriously bad shot I was also left handed. If you have ever used a shotgun that ejected the shells out of the side of the gun it was most likely coming from the right side. If you haven’t, imagine a place that is in a confined space lights gunpowder hot in off and quick enough to shoot scores of beebees out the barrell. Now you cannot just explode gunpowder in a tight sapce like that with just anything, you need something storng enough to hold the gunpower before it exploded. This is made from metal that doesn’t melt when it gets really hot really fast, it just absorbs it, making the metal really hot. Since the hot shells are ejecting from the right side of the gun, the burning hot metal shot away from the right handed shooter and the shells didn’t have to shoot over the other arm in order to stay clear from any part of a right handers body because the metal was really really hot.

This is an important part of the story. For the hunting story I am going to tell it from one of my grandfather’s hunting buddies, I think the one that used to hunt with Tito.

Now right handed guns are for right handed people, it is why so many right handers like hunting. However if you were like Tom’s boy who was a south paw, lefty, or as everyone else saw it, not right handed. Most the time Tom’s boy had a jacket on, so when the shells hit his arm he didn’t notice. Only a few times did the shells hit skin, the boy dropped the gun in the mud and Tommy spent the rest of the day cleaning it as the rest of his family went hunting.

Most the time it was just my Tom and his boy out there. The family would always split into groups of two, three or four. Almost all the time rest of the family came back with their limit, Tom would always have one bird, and the south paw would be the one carring it. Most of them saw Tom give the bird to his son right before they got to the trucks. That kid was always dirty, no kills, eyes swollen from the brush, he reminded me of a kid in movies, the scronny one with the inhaler. But this kid didn’t have an inhaler, instead he was holding a shot gun. Tom had it specially made for him. It only had one shot but the shell didn’t eject and burn his arm. The kid was already a bad shot, this gun didn’t help. He looked so proud holding it with the barrel up.

As he approuched the group he gently pointed the gun down, in the oppisite directon from everyone else. Pulled the trigger back to unlock it. Now this trigger was different than the others, and really, not as safe, but nobody seemed to give it as second thought. Tom’s boy never pointed the gun at anyone. He put the gun down, cocked back the trigger to unlock it, flipped the barrel open, held the gun steady with one hand, removed the lone shotgun shell, looked down the barrel of the gun to be sure that one didn’t sneak in when nobody was looking. I will never forget how he looked down the barrel, he knew exactly what steps to take to make a dagerous wepon in to a harmless paper weight. He didn’t exactly as he was tought, though some of it may seem silly to anyone outside of the group that was hunting. The family would boast over their kills but they were most proud that everyone made it back, as they always done before.

I think Tom’s boy shot two Pheseants in his life. One was a join kill with his cousin. Tom flushed the bird out, Tom’s nephew was around eleven years old. The bird flew up in front of Tom, inbetween Tom and two boys nine and eleven with loaded shotguns was the bird they were out to hunt.

This is a small foot note in Clark family stories. Most would think it would have been told more, that is if the story went something like,

“Tom’s boy and nephew, bird flies up and pow, both shot at the same time. What sane man would take to kids out with loaded wepons? Poor bastard.”

But that isn’t how the story is told. The bird flew up between the two boys and Tom. Tom could have swat the bird out of the air it was that close to him. The two boys were about 15 feet away, their barrels pointed at the ground. They were always told, you do not point at something you do not intend to shoot. Tom saw the bird, the boys didn’t, they saw Tom and were not about to point their guns at him. The two moved their guns along the path of the bird and the barrels pointed harmlessly to the ground. They followed that bird with thier barrels pointed to the ground until they turn almost 180 degrees and both of then fired their guns at the same time and the bird fell to the ground.

Tom told his brother in law what happend. Bill laughed patting Tom on the back and said, “if it were me, I would have hit ground.” One might think Tom merly froze in the face of two children with loaded wepons wanting nothing more than to shoot the very thing that is flying in front of him. I wondered if Tom’s life flashed before his eyes. But I know it didn’t, and if he though it was appropriate he would have been face down in the ground the moment the bird took off. Tom was confident that the boys knew what to do and if he wasn’t then he would have been there. With so much to be embarassed about Tom knew his boy knew what mattered and that is why he was so proud to bring him back to the group, even if they were empty handed.

I, Vince, did make a mistake once. I dropped my gun near the mud. One can never shoot a gun if there is mud in it and that was a day killer right there. I wasn’t sure if mud even got in there. I paniced and acted like a nine year old, the gun was not cocked, and the chances of it going off without devine intervention was none. The gun was still loaded and I put my face in front of it. I was not thinking. My father swiped the gun from me and I will never forget the stair. I cannot say what it said, anger, disappointment, failure, I could guess but it was a look I had never saw before and it terrified me. Then he said the most terrifing thing I have ever heard in my life. “What would your grandmother say if she saw you do that?” It was beyond comprhension. He gave me back my gun. I pointed it down, with one hand held the gun, with the other I removed the bullet. I put the bullet in my pocket and looked down the barrel, this time from the oppisite end. I did exactly what I was taught. There was a small piece of dirt. I knew not to put anything I do not intend to shoot in front of the barrel of the gun. I knew that I could not shoot the gun if there was dirt there. I could have easily removed it when my father wasn’t looking, but this was not allowed I had not intention of shooting my hand off so I was not going to put it in front of the unloaded gun.

So I did what any nine year old kid that wanted to walk around with guns, hunting with his father and cousin would do, I told my father what had happened. I knew the day was ruined, the gun was dirty, I had to stay back at the truck. My father took the gun, walked around the truck, came back and handed it back to me. I checked to see if it was loaded and the barrel was clear and it was. I pointed the gun down opened it, held it with one arm and put the bullent in. I closed the gun and kept the barrel down. That was a really fun day.

In the end, what does this have to do with how I feared my father. With so much unpredictibility he taught me that there were always constants. He taught me to do right and then taught me what right was. I did not fear a beating, I feared doing something wrong. Now that my father is dead and there is a complete absense of fear that he could ever harm me, but I still follow what he taught me, not for fear of him, but the fear of being wrong. I am not always right, and I mess up, I try to admit when I am to blame, but I do not accept it when it isn’t mind.

Things will always be tough, but I draw on the fact that I do do good, I am better than I think, and I can always do better. I have a far higher standerd to compare myself to than I can expect anyone to hold for me.

That is how I am Tom Clark’s son.

I have set up the VincentClark foundation as the main portal into my current medical crisis. I won’t lie to you, things are getting bad, really bad, and I am needing help and i fear the Calvary isn’t coming, The probably got lost because how can anyone anyone help something nobody understands. I am trying to make sense of all this, because right now I don’t see any going back.

This pain needs to be resolved, I cannot live like this. This is my last stand, this is my Alamo.

Wish me luck

Today was an abnormally bad day. Yesterday was stressful. The thing about Kaiser that bothers me more than anything is them telling me over and over how they are culturally responsive while I am twisting in agony pleading for someone to send a signed fax to my HR department. It wasn’t that they didn’t send the fax, they did, but apparently the doctor’s seal which is a lot harder to forge is better than a signature one of the janitors could have put on. In the end, it got done. I can call on Tuesday to verify though. It is hard to fully express how difficult it was to remain composed dealing with the horrifying mess because I am currently not at pain levl ten and I am able to be how here listening to the crickets and the freeway. But if you need to know what it was like, there is a good example.

I will your foot ran over and then try to chase the person that did it. Your foot is broken, so this is going to hurt, however, I cannot help you until you can tell me what the make and model of the car was, the license plate number, who was driving it, and then I will give you some forms so I can quickly input it into my forms that I am required to do before I jump out of the office right as the clock hit six.

The good thing besides spending all weekend combing through a year of pain logs for my appointment I will post pone thinking about how my weekly pay check much shorter than it should of and after staring at it for at least an hour, I know I figured it out. The bad part of it, it will have been the first of the month and some important automatic drafts will most likely get annoyed which set me back even further.

But why complain things are great here. Granted I am having fun learning how to make hdr images at 9:30pm at night, which is made possible by a visit to the Urgent Care, which I avoid more than rabid bores when relativly ok. The nurse took pitty on me, first time I cried at the doctors office. Not mentioning that you do that, it is quite huliating. But I finally got pain medicine.

During the onset of the incident that started the 18th I called the pain management doctor, you know the whole, getting pain medication from too many doctors bothers for me. When he called me back, he told me that he was not seeing me for my back but my side. I had told him that my back, neck, and side all seemed to me to be related. Since the last never group he numbed was in my back right next to my spine, I thought he had agreed. I understand differentials better than anyone, but I am confused on why you would give an injection to someone to see if it works over the course of two day and give them a month between appointments.

While we are on the subject of the pain management, it turn out the nerve that hurts the most is the one in one that goes from my back, through my side, in my testicular, and down my leg. Even more strange, this is not the nerve suspected and is isn’t even on the list of nerves that were or will be blocked.

I know what I am suffering from. I know what needs to be done. I don’t have all the answers but I have somewhere to look. I personally think it is bull shit when I can desin a better course of treatment than these doctors, and I know that with one week in a hospital this can all be figured out and I would be back at work in 6 weeks.

The reality, buracracy must be serve and the world has Vincent Clark layed up on a couch.

I think that is the worst part. I can be fixed in a week, sedate me, give me a lap top, private room, internet access, capable doctors, and I will be as good as new.

That will never happen, because, it has never been like that before.

I am watching old reruns of my former favorite show, the West Wing. I know the Bill O’Reily’s out there like to say what a pie in the sky show that is and has no resembles to how things actually work.

Why not? Why can’t we have something like that, rather, I want that. I want an idealistic president with an ideal minded team pushing their agendas, the agenda of their bleeding hearts against people that have only a portion of interest in anything.

We all know that would be best, we all know that if it were like that things would be so much better. I can live with the fact that we lost Camelot on the streets of Dallas, but I cannot live with the fact that we have never tried to get it back. If I were to point out the biggest single failure of the people of the United States is that one thing. It is that one thing that makes us a mere power, nothing super.

This is why I have an Obama iBumperSticker supporting the man on my site.

What do you think?

Father Constantine of Marin once remarked that a soul is what gives life. He said the Greek Orthodox Church believe all living things to have souls.

Modern science teaches us that all life on Earth originated from on single cell organism.

When a flame is passed from one candle to another the flame that is passed is never diminished.

When we put these concepts together we see that life and fire are much the same. Life is passed from the parents to the child with diminishing the life of the giver, much like fire.

If we were to follow these teachings to the inevitable conclusion we will find that all life on this planet is of the same fire. Perhaps life is an evolutionary set. Perhaps the idea of communing with nature isn’t so far off. Could the Hindu ideal of respecting all life and finding relativity in it isn’t that far off either? Maybe our bodies are not vessels but rather fuel for the life that burns within us. Could this be why we feel so connected to fire on so many different levels? Fire is the core to more than just religious beliefs. One can only stand in awe when looking at the eternal flame at Kennedy’s grave.

In the Orthodox Church at Easter time we have a tradition in which all the lights are turned off. A single flame is then passed to a several candles. The candles are then walked down the aile and passed to the worshipers. The flames is then passed from one to another until everyone’s candle is a blazed. In a matter of minutes all the candles are burning all from one single flame that has existed within the church since the church was first construction. This same flame than was passed to one another, than illuminated the church had inspired the same glow year after year. The flame is as strong as the day it was ignited. The same flame that brought unity to to those of us inside the church, that brought unity to the past could consume the world if given the proper chance.

The fire that burns within the candles of the church at Easter time could be used to do so much good and could do so much harm. In all my days I could not find a better example for all the life that surrounds us.

^{part 1 of 3 in the beyond web 2.0 series
first draft}

Background

I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase Wen 2.0 however I remember when I first mustered the courage to ask somebody what Web 2.0 was. It was the fall of 2003, I was working for Disney Online and our executives just returned from a conference talking about Web 2.0. The response to my question was “Ajax”. I was puzzled so I then decided to seek harder for a definition. I found that it was indeed Ajax.

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. learn more

Basically, Web 2.0 is data driven web based applications. What separates these applications from a simple web page is more than the user just staying on one page and bits of the page update instead of having to reload the whole thing. The main selling point of this technology is the ability to download and change only that what needs to change. The idea was to do a number of micro requests instead of one giant request that anticipates all possible choices that can be made. Needless to say a number of well placed micro requests require a lot less to be downloaded.

The first web based application to catch the eye of executives is Gmail. I remember when the Director of Application Technology at Disney Online asked me how the heck Gmail was able to do what it did. The funny thing about 2003, we did not know that we were using Web 2.0 for a couple of years. Learn More

What is Next

Web 3.0

A key fact to technology that is yet to be realized by the masses the the impact the World Wide Web Consortium (http://w3c.org) has had on application development. The W3C is a collection of key innovators in the industry that has given us one of the most revolutionary concepts known as Web Standards. Granted that Web Standards are not 100% fully accepted, they are at least 99% accepted, which is mind bogglingly huge. Web Standards are an agreed upon way browser rendering engines use HTML, CSS, Javascript, as well as other minor areas.

Almost by accident this concept has given a long needed unifying graphic user interface which allows for the same application to be used on Unix based systems such as Apples OSX, Internet Explorer on PC’s as well as FireFox on Linux, Windows, and OSX. The list goes on.

Web 2.0 gave us insight on how to arrange web based applications by the division between the logic of an application which would exist on a hosted service and the GUI (Graphic User Interface) that would exist on the client machine.

With this technology an applications could use a combination of a web browser such as FireFox or Internet Explorer and web services that would be hosted outside of the clients machine. I cannot stress enough how fundamentally big this is. Though it might not be transistors to microchips, but vacuum tubes to transistors. Though we no longer use transistors we would not be where we are today without them.

One of the most outstanding applications of this concept is Adobe’s Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Adobe made the decision to not reinvent the wheel and build a browser rendering engine from the ground up. They figured that since they want to court web based application developers already familiar with HTML, Ajax, CSS, and Shortwave Flash it would be silly to code something to web standards when there were already available rendering engines.  Adobe decided to use Web Kit, which is the same rendering engine used in the Safari Browser. AIR also gives an API to allow for the user to interact with the operating system. Since there is no standard for communicating with the clients file system or system resources AIR for the Mac is coded different than that for Windows. Since the API used to communicate with the front end the burden for cross platform falls upon that of Adobe developers and not on the application developer.

Another high point of this technology is a lead in to Web 4.0. This is the interchangeability between a web based application and an AIR based application. The best example is Adobe’s Acrobat.com platform. There is a web based version as well as an AIR based version. The AIR based version is more convenient to use and requires less resources however, the functionality of the application is almost exactly the same. With Adobe’s Flex Builder a developer can build within the rules of a web based application while having the ability to integrate specific functionality specific to AIR such as communicating with the operating system such as loading a file into the application.

It is important to note that AIR is not the first of the new generation of web applications. Google, Yahoo, Mozilla, Apple, Windows, and a couple others all have been developing this idea.  It is also important to note that it is not the first time we have seen an integrated platform either. Java has been doing this when Internet Explorer 3 was struggling against Netscape. AIR is the best example of the exploitation of these concept.

What makes this better than existing web based applications?

We all go to those web sites in which we need to jump through several hoops before we can do what we want to do. A good example would be updating your “Tea” blog on Blogger.com.

First you need to open your browser, if you are like me and use a portal site as your home page, you get distracted by stock prices, sport scores, your email, current news, weird news, and a quick sudoku game.

Next you got to http://blogger.com. Since my wife and I share computers I cannot take advantage of the “remember me” feature thus, I need to log back in. Since my passwords are protected I need to give FireFox permission to pull down my log-in and password information.

The great idea I wanted to blog about is fading.

If you are one of those people that don’t delete old blogs and have spent the past few years finding the right blog for you are then faced with a clutter issue.

If you are one of those people that work on several blogs you are too faced with a clutter issue.

By the time that you open the browser, navigate away from the distractions, log in, find your blog, start a new post, the topic you wanted to blog about is nothing more than a reminder that you had a great idea.

The alternative would be to have an AIR application that is set to log you on automatically, and select a specific blog. This then gives you instance access to your Tea blog and there is only one click that stands between you and blogging about the new Russian Tea at the Tea Rose Garden.

to be continued

Next: web 3.5