On Tuesday, May 26th, I was honored to accompany my sister, Mari, as her guest to Disney’s Partners In Excellence Award Dinner. Mari works as an electrician at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and is responsible for repairing many of the animatronics in use at the Muppet Show and the brand new Toy Story attraction. Through hard work and dedication to her role, she was nominated and ultimately given the Partners In Excellence Award, which is the highest award a cast memer at Disney can achieve. Disney hosted an awards banquet at the Contemporary hotel to honor all of the recipients of the award. I was completely blown away by the extent to which Disney went to show their appreciation to the winners. It was a semi-formal affair and everyone was in their Sunday best. We were first given the opportunity to have a professional picture taken with a faux copy of the award trophy. After that we attended a beautiful reception with an open bar and several kinds of scrumptuous appetizers. We were later led downstairs for the official dinner. Seating was pre-determined and at each recipient’s seat was their own incredible trophy. The award was a bronze image of Walt Disney holding the hand of Mickey the Mouse, on a marble platform attached to a wooden base. The whole thing was approximately 12 inches tall and weighed 10 pounds. The dinner featured several performances by cast members singing various Disney songs, accompanied by dancing costumed characters. There was an early buzz about a guest speaker, and it turned out to be John Quinones of abc news fame. John spoke about heroes in America, and like most of these speeches it was a publicity attempt to sell copies of his book, but nevertheless he came across with some encouraging words and uplifting stories that helped add an even more positive note to the evening. The dinner wrapped up with more song and dance followed by indoor fireworks that took me completely by suprise. I qik’ed a few videos during the evening which you can see here and here. What I really want to say is just how proud I am of my sister for receiving this award. She works very hard and is well deserving. Congratulations, Mari!
Monthly Archives: May 2009
FlashCamp Orlando
I had the great opportunity yesterday to attend FlashCamp Orlando and wanted to share my thoughts about the event. For those that know me, I have been strictly a ColdFusion developer for the last year and a half. I’ve heard a lot of talk recently about Flex and Air and I was very curious to see how and if these technologies could enhance or help my current development strategies. I heard about this event through a contact on Twitter, which is one of the main reasons I have a twitter account. I quickly got authorization from my boss to attend (thanks Lenny!) and registered. My expectations of the event were solely to get a basic understanding of the Flex framework to once again see how I might integrate it into my current development environment. The event featured guest speaker Greg Wilson of Adobe evangelism fame, whom presented on Tour de Flex, which features great examples on what is possible with Flex development. Among those examples was a heatmap demonstration. The heatmap plots points in real time of users around the world as they access the Tour de Flex app. In fact, right before our eyes we saw hits on the map for Orlando, Florida as Greg accessed the app. We were also informed of an upcoming contest scheduled to begin next Monday or Tuesday (June 1st or 2nd), where the data stream for the heatmap will be made available with the goal to execute the best use of the data via a Flex app. Next we heard from Jason Madsen with a session on making the jump to Flex. This was my favorite presentation as it was aimed at beginners to Flex. Jason gave a great introduction to the framework and how easy it can be to begin Flex development. We also heard from various members of the Universal Mind team, whom helped organize the event. Among these included David Tucker on "Working with Data in Air, Christian Saylor on "The Art of Storytelling", and Andy Powell on "Implementing BlazeDS". All of these gentleman are extremely talented, and in fact most of their material went straight over my head as I am but a beginner to this platform. Nonetheless, the information provided was exciting and inspiring. It’s developers like these that encourage me to continue working towards my goals at becoming the best devloper I can be. Probably the coolest part of the event was the end when the giveaways took place. We had approximately 80 attendees and their were four prizes to give away. I was fortunate enough to have my name called for the giveaway of an ILOG Elixir software package. I will definitely begin Flex devlopment now, as I am already thinking of the some of the incredile things I will be able to achieve.
To sum up, I had a fantastic time at this event and am very glad to have it come to Orlando. I will be looking forward to future events. And if you are a devloper of Adobe technologies, I encourage you to check out your local user group. Here in Orlando we are proud to have the Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando. Check ’em out today!
Happy Camping!
Cameron's space 