Brian Behrens

Azure Ray is releasing a new album after a 6 year hiatus. Both Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink have been off pursing music in their own ways, but are releasing a new full-length album as Azure Ray again on September 14th. Check out a sample of the upcoming album below:

Don’t Leave My Mind (MP3)

And, best of all, they’ll be playing the Tractor Tavern in Ballard on October 27th!

Tracklist:

1. Wake Up, Sleepyhead
2. Don’t Leave My Mind
3. In the Fog
4. Larraine
5. On and On Again
6. Make Your Heart
7. Silver Sorrow
8. Signs in the Leaves
9. Love and Permanence
10. Shouldn’t Have Loved
11. Dancing Ghosts
12. Walking in Circles

We had an epic trip to Shi Shi this past holiday weekend. We were blessed with great weather and bald eagles galore (even bald eagles carrying snakes). Enjoy some of the photos!

I went to the Showbox Market for the first time tonight. You would think living in Seattle for over 2 years and being someone who frequents on average about 1 show a week that I would have seen a show at the Showbox Market by now. This was my first time there. The venue and sound was great. The bartender serving me was kind of an ass and seemed to hate his job, but hey?

Either way, CocoRosie was great. Big surprise, right? This is my third time seeing CocoRosie. The first I saw them was at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee (with Tilly and the Wall & Bright Eyes), and the second show I attended was at the King Cat Theater in Seattle. I was most impressed with everyone’s energy levels and skill at this show. Things seemed to go great, and the beat-box session from Taz was nothing to laugh at. Amazing.

At the show I bought “La Maison De Mon Rêve” on vinyl (CocoRosie’s first album). I was very excited to get this beautiful, pink record home. I love the water colors used on the album cover.

I’m extremely happy I went and got a new record player this past weekend. It’s been great to dig out my record collection again after 2 years of being in boxes. This is the first time they’ve seen daylight since I moved to Seattle in 2008.

Apple released the iPad last week as many of you well know.  I had little interest in the device, but still see some great potential in the world of tablet computing.  After all I’ve seen and read, I feel the device, where it stands, is a great tool for someone like my parents but nothing more.  As it stands, it will be a great tool for the basics (email, calendars, and simple web-browsing).  I don’t think this hardware will be a great e-book reader.  The Kindle is good for a reason… it’s not a back-light LED display.

Either way, these are where I feel the iPad has fallen short:

• No Multitasking
• No Camera
• No Flash
• Over all UI Design of the OS (identical to the iPhone)
• Closed Platform (Apple controls which applications developers can deploy)

With that said, I still have hope for the iPad.  I also think it’s exciting that all my iPhone developer friends are now developers for the iPad as well.

There are 3 short articles that I found good reads on this same subject at Gizmodo, idsgn, and Mike Chambers.

Enjoying the cool mist off Lake Michigan

Originally uploaded by Brian Behrens

I had an amazing trip back home to Milwaukee. I got to spend a lot of time with my family and old friends I miss. Living in Seattle, I definitely find myself missing Milwaukee. I think it’s mainly friends and family. Milwaukee is still a beautiful place. Maybe it’s just nostalgia. I took some photos on my iPhone:

View Photo Set on Flickr.com

We’re starting to see mobile devices supporting flash content within webpages on our mobile devices. When is apple going to jump on this? Will Apple ever support flash on the iPhone? Check out the video below featuring flash on the new HTC Hero:

Broken Disco 2.0 @ Chop Suey

Originally uploaded by Brian Behrens

I picked up the new phone on Friday just before lunch at the AT&T store in downtown Seattle. There was no line when I arrived, but one formed shortly after. With there being no line and AT&T stating the only phone left in stock was exactly the one I wanted, I figured it’d be best I purchase it.

Either way, the big reason I was stoked on getting a 3G S was for the new touch to focus camera features. With that said, the camera definitely lives up to what I was hoping for. Still no zoom, but other than that it’s amazing! The touch to focus works great. The macro focus is amazing. The clarity and color are better and I believe it’s an extra mega pixel.

Most of all I’m surprised by the speed of the new phone. The 3G S is much faster than the 3G. Kudos Apple.

I love this picture (taken with 3G S).

oh yeah, the video rocks too.

Ride back from maple leaf.

Originally uploaded by Brian Behrens

Buying a bike about 3 weeks ago now was the best thing I could have ever done. I’ve gone the past year in Seattle without a car. Now owning a bike, I have the freedom, adventure, and transportation.

I suggest everyone rides a bike more!

So today I ran into the issue of getting superscripted ® and TM characters within dynamic text fields.  The  doesn’t work for this within flash, neither will any CSS trickery.  So I turned to font embeds after reading through some other blog posts.

I found 2 fonts in a blog post at blog.ggshow.com: GG Superscript and GG Subscript.

After embedding the superscript font in another dynamic text field you’re able to reference the font face and assign it to the characters that need the superscripting.

Like so:

var myString:String = “This is superscript® in a dynamic text field!”;
myString = myString.replace(“®”, ‘<font face=”GG Superscript”>®</font>’);
myText.htmlText = myString;

So today a co-worker of mine and I were trying to figure out why he couldn’t clear the display of an image in the video object on his stage.  The Adobe documentation states that if you use the clear method of the Video class that it should do the following:

“Clears the image currently displayed in the Video object. This is useful when you want to display standby information without having to hide the Video object.”

Well… when having smoothing enabled, this does not work.  It’s a known bug, and I believe it has to do with smoothing caching the video as a bitmap.  I’m not fully sure how smoothing works, but it makes sense that this would likely be the problem.

So to clear the video object that has smoothing enabled, you need to disable smoothing then clear the object.  After it’s been cleared you can turn smoothing back on.