We’ve been writing a ton of great stuff at that blog. You should check it out when you have a moment.

I promise to get back to posting here, and have a couple drafts nearly ready, but for now, I’m going to be mostly active on Twitter and may have some delicious links to post coming soon.

That said, I do have a couple milestones to share… It’s been 1 year since my URL shorteners went live at fnaweso.me and fnla.me… go use em and say hi, if you haven’t recently.

Also, this is my 500th blog post. Sweet.

Read about it on John Wilker’s blog.

Oh, and if you want to learn about the origin of the world’s most hated typeface, read up on it here.

Beyond that, I am scheduled to participate in an upcoming exhibit featuring work by the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein. That should be a great time and allow for some real creativity!

I hope you are all enjoying a brief respite in your work right now for the dog days of summer and relaxing with a nice beer or iced coffee. I know I am. I just brewed an Imperial IPA, currently carbonating in the dark of my cool basement… first tasting, this week! Don’t know Imperial IPA as a style of beer… take a look at these beauties. My garden is coming in nicely, too, despite the Japanese beetles best attempts to eat it all!

How are you staying busy? What are you doing to blow off some steam this summer?

Beyond that, we are exiting a first round of usability testing on a great new elearning development application we are building at doctumlearning.com. We used Silverback for our testing. It’s a really really cool tool for Macs that records a screencast and a video feed from the iSight to create a record of the test. Hard to argue with video evidence, after all. The app is coming along strong, feature complete and ready to build some training. We’ve put together a great interface and the Flash based content it outputs is pretty dang nice.

Related to that, I will be attending DevLearn ’08 next week. You can catch up with my twittering and possibly blogging from there. Tim O’Reilly is giving the keynote. Dan Roam is going to be there speaking, as is Dr. John Medina. Should be really really cool. We’ll be demoing at demofest, showing of the work we did with the International Society of Arboriculture that uses the Doctum platform. Psyched!

There is a one day Adobe elearning summit going on there, too, I’m definitely hitting that one. Are you planning on attending? Let me know! I’m interested in meeting up with other developers out there, so track me down.

If you twitter, be sure to check out the dl08 hashtag on twitter search and the devlearn08 one as well. This blog post here has a list of fellow twitterers headed to devLearn. Check it out.

I spent the last few days in Colorado, it was beautiful! I was the best man in a wedding there (in Estes Park), you can see some photos from the trip here. CO is a nice place with fantastic scenery and super tasty microbrews. Highly recommended.

While I was there, I got to meet Juan Sanchez, designer at Effective UI, and one of the main contributors to DeGrafa. He mentioned that Scalenine’s skin contest had completed. What a great pile of entries! I can’t wait to see the library grow and serve as the premier resource for Flex Designers on the web. How cool. Even cooler, was the fact that my Coworker, Heather Ford, was one of the winners with her DiscoType Theme! Awesome.

Beyond that, my students are begnining to build some mashups and make some progress learning Flex… Some recent ones they’ve made… GeekVahalla (a tech focused RSS Reader), TweetTally (a Twitter Tag cloud search). Dropped Passes (a sports focused RSS Reader). I hope to continue to post more as they pile up.

Finally, at The Iona Group, we are hard at work on our eLearning development platform, Doctum. We’re gearing up to launch and start talking to people/demoing it at DevLearn08. If you’d like to be made aware when we launch, head on over to DoctumLearning.com to get on our list of contacts. We have a full site launching soon with features, videos etc explanining what makes it different, but for now it’s kind of in a hush hush mode. Needless to say lots of work is going on and the system is shaping up to be pretty amazing, if I do say so myself.

For more info on RSS Day, check it out…

I hope to have some more time to build a couple more mashups and AIR apps soon, though work has been time consuming and the school semester is in full swing. I also recently had to take a couple days off of work to attend a family funeral, so I have been out of the loop a bit… Here’s to hoping for a productive Spring!