On Wednesday night, after the final session ended (a good session on FlexBuilder 3, fwtw), I walked back to my hotel (which was a good 15+ minute walk through a seemingly desolate part of town where the best place to eat is Subway or a shithole named ‘Kate O’Briens’ where they don’t have air conditioning….thanks Adobe for the swell recommendation). I relaxed for a bit and then, sick of eating at shitholes near my hotel I take the walk back to the Marriott where most of my sessions were on that final day (the previous day’s sessions were at the Moscone center). On my way out of the FlexBuilder session and then the Marriott I noticed a sports bar right there, so I kept it in mind for later that night.

So, I go to the sports bar. A beer and a decent meal and I leave and decide it would be a nice night for a walk. What a fuckin mistake that turned out to be. So I start walking up this fairly busy street for a couple of blocks and then I see an Apple store up ahead a ways. There were *lots* of people in this area, unlike near my hotel (the Marriott Courtyard – which itself is nice but outside is basically homeless people, a liquor store, and general filth).

So I walk up to the Apple store and drool over the new Macbooks for a little while. Then, I leave there and decide to check out the area, since it seemed to be full of tourists and nightlife. After an hour or so of checking out the area, along with a quick stop at a very cool blues bar with an excellent band, I decide to head back to my hotel. Now, by this time I’m farther away from my hotel than I had been since arriving in San Francisco – much farther. Probably a 25+ minute walk or so. I wasn’t sure just how far I walked but I’m good with general direction so I knew where I was in terms of the direction back to my hotel.

During the previous 4 days while attending MAX I had basically just walked from 2nd street to either Mission or Howard street to get to the Moscone Center and the Marriott. While generally kind of ‘city cruddy’ these streets seemed relatively safe, and I should have just backtracked my way through the crowds downtown back to the Moscone Center area to Mission/Howard and then back to my hotel. Unfortunately for me on this night I decided I was going to take a shortcut.

I wound up going down a street to take a more direct, diagonal, shortcut back to the Marriott Courtyard. I couldn’t tell you the name as I have no idea, but there were lots of people on it. In a wierd way – just hanging out in small groups. Looking back, it was probably a drug-dealing area but at the time it just seemed like lots of younger folks (late teens?) hanging out. I’m a middle-aged, bald, fat white guy and I definitely stuck out on this street. Major mistake. Within 10 seconds of going down this block I knew something was up, things just didn’t seem right – my brain was telling me to turn back but my legs were telling me to try to shave 10 minutes off my walk back to the hotel. No one said anything to me or gave me any evil stares/looks, and I seemed to be proceeding unnoticed, so I decided to keep walking to the end of the block and then make a quick left and back-track back to the main street I had been on that looked safe(r).

Well….I wish I could tell you what happened next but I honestly don’t know myself. The last thing I remember I was a few yards from making that left-hand turn to get out of dodge and then …

… I ‘come to’, standing in the middle of the street, hunched over, and blood is dripping from my face/nose. I quickly come to the realization that I must have been attacked/jumped/sucker-punched or am in the middle of getting mugged. I had no idea. I was in shock. I look up and there are two guys standing there a few feet in front of me, one of them with fists clenched and yelling something and he’s looking like he’s going to start beating the shit out of me. At that point I knew I was in a *bad* spot and needed to get out of there, but I wasn’t gonna be able to outrun these guys. And at that point (and still), I had no idea why they hit me other than I’m thinking maybe they’re gonna rob me. I have no idea what the one guy was saying. I assume he is the one that hit me and I was hit only once (and if so, boy was it a hit…see below for the damage). I assume, from the way things happened, that I was blindsided as I turned the corner, but I don’t remember it at all. Which is pretty scary.

So, I quickly, in that instant, assess the situation and think of my options:

a. Run like hell.
or

b. Clench my fists and fight back.

I decided to do neither, and I guess, looking back at it now (and trust me – I have a million times since it happened), that seemed to have been the right move.

I stumbled backwards and kept holding my head and making like I was so seriously injured that I might die. Groaning, whole nine yards. I put on the best acting job ever I guess, because the one guy just said something to the other guy (I was a number of feet away by this time so I did’nt hear what) and they started walking away. I slowly walked backwards (no way was I turning my back) to the other side of the street where there was a chain-link fence. I decided to lean up against the fence and act like I was going to pass-out (or die) for a few seconds because I figured that if they wanted to rob me they wouldn’t have let me get away. My guess is this assault was pure fun or a ‘why are you on my turf?!? this’ll teach you!’ kind of thing for them. At the time I had no idea. I just wanted to get out of there in one piece without further damage.

So I lean up against the fence, I bump my body against it a couple of times as if I’m stumbling/having a hard time staying up from the damage, all the while rubbing the blood from my face (it turned out to be a bloody nose and some blood from a scratch underneath my eye, but I had no idea at the time). I wanted to make it look to these guys (who I had no doubt were still watching as they backed off) that I was so seriously injured that perhaps they would say to themselves, “shit – we went too far” or “damn, we killed the guy, let’s run before the cops show up!!!!” Naive or wishful thinking I guess but that was what I thought would be my safest thing to do at that point. I’m way too slow to run and actually get away. There were no cops anywhere near there that I could see. And I looked (once I got back to where I felt relatively safe). No cops anywhere.

So after a few seconds I start walking quickly back to the end of the block where there were plenty of restaurants and stores with lights and such and people so I figured that was where I needed to be asap. But before I got there a few bystandanders asked me if I was okay. Maybe they saw what happened, I don’t know. I said to the one guy, “I don’t know. Can you call a cop?” To which he and his friends just said, “Oh no!” and walked away.

So I started walking *real fast*. I then walk down back towards the Marriott/Moscone Center where I knew the streets were relatively safe from the previous evenings, and took Mission back to 2nd and then to my hotel. Of course, along the way I was hassled twice by homeless people, but nothing out of the ordinary for downtown San Francisco.

And so…after all that, here is the result, 3 days later and safely back across the country:

Talk about a black eye, eh?

My guess is it’s gonna start looking worse over the next few days and then heal up. The worst part isn’t visible in the image – the whites of my eye are filled with blood. Deep red.

EDIT: What the heck, here is a pic of the gruesome eye. Maybe someday I’ll look back at this and get a chuckle (NOT):

I have a meeting at work Monday morning (where I’ll surely have to recount this story again for the fiftieth time) that I have to attend and if it is still bad then I’ll make an appointment with a doc to go on Tuesday to get it checked out. If I die before then at least there will be written record of what happened : )

So how was the conference? If I take the above memories (and lack thereof) out of my mind and look at it objectively…it was a decent conference. The one thing about the MAX conference was that it was real ‘cliquey’ – the designer types were almost always there with other people, and the developer types just kind of kept to themselves. Maybe I was just unlucky (an understatement!) but even at the lunch tables I sat down at no one was talking to each other. It was kind of wierd and uncomfortable. One table I sat at there was even a lady there reading a book while listening to her ipod! It was just awkward and wierd, and conferences are usually best when people network and discuss their projects, employers, sessions they have/want to attend at the conference, etc. But I saw none of that. It didn’t help that I didn’t hear/see/meet any real elearning people there. Only a handful of wacko school teachers there with the usual “I’ve been asked to put our curriculum on the web, so I have Dreamweaver but don’t know how to use it!”

Ahh well. I should have gone to DevLearn but I’d been wanting to go to MAX for years. The schwag was good – I got 4 nice t-shirts for free. And I assure you, I’ll *NEVER* forget MAX 2008. Ugh.

Started off with the Fireworks Business Website mockup session I blogged earlier about.

Best session of the day was, not surprisingly, Lee Brimelow’s session where he introduced the new features of Flash CS4. Let me just say this – if you haven’t looked at the new UI and features of CS4 then do so immediately. It is a *must* upgrade in my opinion, for guys like me who never really got into the timeline animation thing because it just seemed to take so long to create nice animations, with multiple keyframes, etc. The new Motion Editor, along with the 3D tools, are absolutely brilliant. There is a definite learning curve to the Motion Editor, but learning it will be well worth it. I’m actually excited to start working on and experimenting on doing motion/animation again in flash without using actionscript. I haven’t felt that way in years. The 3D tool and the easing settings are great, and there are a boatload of built-in effects of the common stuff that most people seem to use anyways. You can also create and share your own effects.

As Brimelow mentioned during the session, one negative to the CS4 release is that Adobe did nothing to improve the actionscript editor. I don’t really mind the editor as much as many folks do. It’s definitely limited, but I understand that Adobe wants people moving on to Flex Builder anyway.

The UI of CS4 is completely different too. Much cleaner and makes more sense. I always hated the timeline being on top, for example, versus underneath the stage. It just feels more organized working in it now. And little things, like simply dragging the end of the last frame to extend the number of frames on the timeline, instead of right-clicking on a later frame and ‘insert frames’, etc.

It’ll take some definite getting used to, and as I said the Motion Editor will take some time to learn, but it’s a definite quantum leap forward for designing motion in Flash.

I ended the day attending a session on Flash Lite. It was a horrible presentation and pretty much a waste of time. I won’t go into the details, but based on what I’ve seen and heard of Flash on mobile devices….it just isn’t there yet and not worth the trouble for those of us in the elearning space. I never really understood the allure of ‘learning on my phone’ anyways.

P.S. I’m bummed. I got a copy of the Thermo (now formally known as Adobe Flash Catalyst) prerelease yesterday but I can’t use it as they only gave out the Mac version (what’s up with that?!?). So, the first person to email me and pay the postage for it gets it. I have no use for it.