Welcome!

Adobe Flex Authors: Maureen O'Gara, Avi Rosenthal, Yakov Fain, Kevin Benedict, Aditya Banerjee

Related Topics: Adobe Flex, FlexSeminar.com

Adobe Flex: Article

i-Technology Blog: Forget Murder and Mayhem — At "Real-World Flex" It's Business As Usual

"Blogging by pen is a little like driving an Mercedes SL at night by candlelight"

At 3:30AM Eastern Time on Thursday, August 10, at 8:30PM, American Airlines Flight 131 took off to the west out of London’s Heathrow airport, bound for New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. Those of us on board what ended up being the only AA flight on that route all day looked gratefully at the setting sun, and reflected that in many ways the next seven hours and five minutes would be symbolic: one little collective triumph against terrorism.

The purpose of my flight, for anyone who has been living in a cave or not noticed the literally dozens of Adobe blogs on the subject, was to chair the inaugural “Real-World Flex” One-Day Seminar on Monday in the historic Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan. But that tiny scintilla of a detail was nowhere reported or noted even as a footnote in the hundreds, now thousands, of stories published about London’s Heathrow Airport yesterday. Because real-world terrorism, not real-world web development frameworks no matter how excellent and admired, was the exclusive focus of the day: as we now all know, August 10, 2006, was when the UK’s security services intercepted and thwarted the world’s most outrageously evil attempt at airborne slaughter since 9/11.

This blog, unusually, has not been keyed in live to Blog-City’s uniquely excellent blog engine and propagated Web-wide in minutes. It has not been keyed in at all in fact (until now); it has been handwritten because the UK civil aviation authorities, in immediate response to this apparently elaborate conspiracy to blow up nine or ten airborne aircraft simultaneously - and in a move equally immediately mirrored by the Federal Aviation Authority in the USA - banned all hand baggage of any kind from all flights departing the UK. This included all electrical items - laptops, phones - and even books.

Happily I never travel without the one wireless device that, even without Cingular's worlwide broadband, has given me global coverage for four decades: a ballpoint pen. So I am typing this up now to convert it from its current status as the first handwritten blog I have ever written.

It’s oddly oxymoronic, blogging by pen; a little like driving an Mercedes SL at night by candlelight or going to a firing range with a flintlock musket. But what is important, wherever terrorism or threat of terrorism is concerned, is to maintain Business As Usual, so as to minimize disruption and thereby deprive the terrorist of one of his key objectives: not just murder, but mayhem.

On Monday, when the world’s first-ever “Real-World Flex” One-Day Seminar opens and I have the honor of introducing Adobe’s David Mendels to the delegates who’ll be traveling this weekend to the Roosevelt in readiness for the early start to the event come Monday morning, I am not going to give liquid explosives, or demented purveyors of same, a single thought. The only explosion I am interested in is the benevolent one which Flex seems set to cause among the Web development and design community, as i-Technology professionals within enterprises catch on to its huge potential role in helping them seize what, for want of any better term, I call the “Web 2.0 moment.”


More Stories By Jeremy Geelan

Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the all-new International Cloud Computing Expo series, of the International Virtualization Expo series, of AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series, and of the long-running SOAWorld Conference & Expo series. He's founder of Cloud Computing Journal, Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other leading SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.

Comments (2) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Most Recent Comments
Good news from the UK 08/12/06 06:40:05 AM EDT

The aftermath of a number of arrests in the United Kingdom, and the revelation of a massive plot to destroy US-bound airliners with explosives, may be the point where New and Old Media begin to work in cooperation instead of competition - according to this story about "Bloggers on the UK Terror Story" (here's the link: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20060811BloggersOnTheUK...)

Hope Down Under 08/12/06 06:31:19 AM EDT

There's a new anti-terror technology which can detect minute traces of chemicals, explosives and biological agents being developed by a physicist in Brisbane, Australia. The link is here: http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Technology-hope-in-terrorism-fight/2...