So, without further ado, let’s celebrate the New Year with a whole load of magic from Lu Chen.

If you enjoyed this please let me know in the comments below.

Inspired by his twitter feed and being in a remembering Xena mood for some reason, I went on a hunt for a humorous video for this week’s Sunday Funnies post. I believe this video montage properly shows the smoothness of Autolycus with the humor of one Bruce Campbell.

I miss the silliness of the characters portrayed in the Xena/Hercules universe and I wouldn’t mind seeing them again in new stuff.

If you’ve been reading my blog lately you may have read about me using embedded fonts via Resource Bundles. One problem I’ve always had with embedded fonts in Flash Builder is that some builds they work and some they don’t. I’m guessing its part of the incremental compilation process because doing a Project–>Clean… seems to fix the problem. It works but then I have to move my hand all the way over to my mouse to make it happen. I needed to find a good keyboard shortcut, for some reason I wanted it to be a default key binding.

Enter CTRL+3

There are shortcuts for Flash Builder common features but Project–>Clean… isn’t one of them. Eclipse has an interesting Keyboard Shortcut in CTRL+3 – Quick Access. The Quick Access shortcut allows you to hit the shortcut then just start typing the name of the feature you want to use – and there is a big list available to you in Eclipse. A bonus to the Quick Access shortcut is that the last feature you used can be used by hitting return. So to set up a shortcut for Project–>Clean there are just a couple steps.

1. Hit Ctrl+3
2. type ‘Clean…’ then press enter

Now you can trigger a Project–>Clean… with just Ctrl+3 and Enter. The default for me is to clean all projects and I usually only have one project open at a time so I just enter through that as well.

Really, you can use this with just about any feature you’d like. Once you use it, the feature goes into your Quick Access list. Then its as easy as an arrow up or down (or a few keystrokes to type the action name) to get the feature back to the top of your list and use it.

For me this is one of the hidden gems of Flash Builder. You get this for free for using Eclipse. There’s plenty more where that came from too. Are there some hidden gems you use all the time? Please share them in the comments below. Flash Fridays are all about sharing knowledge with the community so that we become better developers.

To be fair, I don’t watch many different shows anymore, so this list might be a very small percentage. Even then it’s a start.

I’m fairly tired of watching gritty cop shows or gritty hospital dramas so that limits me quite a bit right there. However, one of the dads that seems decent on TV is from Criminal Minds (which I try not to watch but sometime you get stuck in the marathons). Aaron Hotchner, played by Thomas Gibson, has had many touching moments and many difficult moments in dealing with raising his son. All the serial killer who killed his ex-wife stuff aside his role as a father has been written and played well. Making a living and being a father can be a difficult thing to find balance it and that is important to show. He is a fairly cold seeming person, who has a warm relationship with his son.

Getting away from gritty cop shows that will keep you up at night worrying about the depravity of humanity, let’s go to a humorous cop show – Castle. This show is formulaic in every way shape and form. However Rick Castle, played by Malcom Reynolds Nathan Fillion, is a good father. In fact the show often has his parenting dilemma a background story to the main murder investigation. Sometimes his case helps him parent better, sometimes it is the other way around. Yes, Castle can often times be juvenile but he, like all of us, still has an inner child that likes to play. This is good to show. Being a dad doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun.

Moving on from a silly show to another silly show, with serious overtones. I bring you Glee. I swear, all that singing out of nowhere happened at my school, okay maybe not. But it could have. The right people were there. I’m sorry where was I? Oh yeah, great fathers. This show has one of the best. Burt Hummel, played by Mike O’Malley,is the dad every outcast wants (and hey we all feel like an outcast now and then). His son, Kurt (I know, Kurt and Burt – the names are interesting in this show), is gay and deals with many things a gay son would deal with. As a heterosexual father he deals with them all magnifiscently. I can think of many great scenes where I thought to myself, wow what a great dad.

Some that stick out: 
• Telling his girlfriend’s son, Finn, he can’t live there after Finn starts talking about all Kurt’s Faggy stuff. He had just invited them to live with him and this would probably ruin his new relationship
• Having a talk with his son about sex. How hard is this when both parties are heterosexual? He still does what he knows he needs to do for his son.

Basically, Dads are becoming important in pop culture again. Sure, some are still absent and some are still jokes but now some are stepping up to the plate. They aren’t just showing up to the game and sitting on the bench. This is a good sign that the collective unconscious knows good dads are great characters. Here’s to all the good dad’s out there who show their great character every day they take the time to parent.

Magic, really often uses illusion (which can be easier in a 2D format such as animated gifs

Actually, people will turn any video highlight into an animated gif.

Me getting a pie(actually a cake) to the face.

If you have any Magical GIF files you have seen, I’d love to check them out here. Thanks.

Turns out the video is quite funny. It seems to parody every personal beauty advertisement I can ever remember seeing. Everything from eyelashes to cheesey animations explaining how it smooths away wrinkles. And yes, Fotoshop by Adobé can seemingly do it all.

In all seriousness what’s most funny about this video is that it is true. Photoshop by Adobe does skew our idea of what natural, normal, sexy and beautiful is. Since it takes a computer program, it turns out these images are neither natural nor normal. However, breaking through that psychological barrier of created reality might turn out to be a real tough nut to crack.

And if you would like to see the behind the scenes video, I found that too.

BTS Fotoshop from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

As a bit of attribution, more information about this video can be found at Jesse Rosten’s website.