I was watching Kitchen Nightmares where Chef Gordon Ramsay verbally attacks restaurant owners in order to point out the areas where they lack. I used to think he was just another character on TV but there was a turning point in that episode. The owner was berating everyone around him and causing so much stress that his customers noticed and his business was failing. People from the Chef to the Hostess noticed the problems but they didn’t try to fix the core issue. This owner was a good enough chef to start a successful restaurant and then use that to open a second one in a beautiful space. ...

Arpit led another session about how and when to use Flash in an Ajax world. One of the attendees was a Microsoft Silverlight manager and was a solid hour of dispelling myths about RIA in general. There is still a large population that thinks Flash/Silverlight are bad for SEO and not enough people know of Adobe’s recent collaborations with Google and Microsoft, including project Ichabod that makes Flash more indexable than Ajax (some details here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/adobe_ichabod_flash_ajax.php). We also talked about how the RIA vs traditional html choice is often made unconsciously before the IA/Design phase and what we need to do in order to help inform that choice. Arpit is going to have a conversation later with a manager from Microsoft concerning Rich Internet Application development in Philadelphia. ...

Sorting through Barcamp photos. Is this a session or mac ad? Macbooks and iphones everywhere. I’d love to know the percentages.[caption id=“attachment_66” align=“alignnone” width=“450” caption=“Mac ad or conference session”][/caption]

The BarCamp happened yesterday and Philly’s brightest and most enthusiastic ‘interative media’ professionals came out in force. Barcamp is a type of grass roots conference setup by the people bottom up rather then by a company top down. I talked a lot, learned a lot, drank a lot and made some friends in the process. Each session exceeded my expectations in different ways. My talk on the how we build and operate http://www.comcast.net was very well received and it was very telling to step up from the weeds and view this creation with my peers. As much as we need to move forward sometimes we at CIM forget how far we have come. Since this was an untelevised, ego and marketecture free event we openly discussed what we did right and wrong. Having this talk with people that live through this grind every day is very different then having it with people that learned the ‘right way to build websites’ from books or blogs. ...

The vote turnout is really impressive. Its more like a party or superbowl. Normally people are quiet while waiting online to vote, and if there is conversation is complaining about the need to wait. Even the tv spots this election were a higher production quality as compared to years past. Maybe we need to let Fox and CNN bid for exclusive coverage rights. Anyway after I voted I took the kiddies to vote at the Bucks county kid election: ...