Thursday, 9 May 2002

That keynote speaker - reading through Marc Canter's bio has brought back so many memories. The heady days of multimedia, CD-ROM, videodisc... And then I caught this paragraph... During this time period Marc was the Chairman of the Board and lead designer for all MacroMind products. He designed the system software strategy, helped produce interactive CD-ROM and marketing videodiscs, and gave over 100 speeches and lectures around the world. Trips to Europe and Japan saw sales increase significantly ...and I remembered. Marc jilted me. During the time I was Marketing Manager at Firmware Design we ran many conferences, shows etc. The first big conference was called MediaTools, run at the University of Western Sydney in 1994. Marc Canter was to be the keynote speaker, stopping off in Sydney after his visit to Japan [mentioned above]. On the Thursday before the conference [which was starting on Saturday] we got a phone call from Peter Mitchell, a friend of Marc's, who rang to tell us that Marc would not be coming. That the authorities in Japan had not let him board the plane to Sydney becasue he didn't have a visa to enter our fair country. Can you believe it? Now-a-days Americans and Australians can visit each others countries without visas. But in those days you needed them. This one action formed a lasting impression on American Imperialism which persists to this day :-) Fortunately we were able to shuffle things around and made our "other" international speaker, suddenly the star of the show, and Marc never appologised - but that's Marc. 7:21:38 PM    Comments ()

Just plain silly - I have a lot of respect for Tad James. He is an NLP trainer and businessman. Yet it never ceases to amaze me that someone who is obviously so clever can be so silly. Tad runs a company called Advanced Neurodynamics, and their website recently under went a make over. It has a snazzy rollover menu affair down the laft hand page, developed in -- wait for this clanger -- Director Shockwave. Dumb, Dumb, Dumb. Now don't get me wrong. I love Director. We teach Director. In fact I was the first trainer in the country to train in Director, and I was taught by the guy the created the program, Marc Canter himself. But I would never do a navigation bar for a web site in Director. I would do it in straight images, or if I needed to be flashy, I would do it in Flash. But not Director. The really funny thing about this is that Tad asked me [and the rest of the classI was in] in June whether he should do it...and I said no. Oh well. Perhaps someone will tell him. 7:01:35 PM    Comments ()