This month, the Children's Museum is doing a reciprocal membership with the Desert Botanical Garden and the Arizona Science Center. Maggie said that she wanted to go to the library for storytime today, but changed her mind when I mentioned the Science Center. They have a lot of buttons to push and things to handle, but it's not quite as engaging for the kids as the Children's Museum, so I think we'll hold off on a membership. Maybe we'll trade off when they grow out of the Children's Museum! It was fun for a free day, and I'm glad we saved the third floor for last. The exhibit is entitled Forces of Nature, and I set them up on stools to play in the sand and water table. One of the attendants announced that the "show" was about to start, so I grabbed them and headed to the circle platform in the middle of the exhibit. Turns out it's a multi-sensory experience of, well, the Forces of Nature. Maggie freaked out right at the start, and insisted that we not go anywhere near the third floor for the rest of the afternoon. Instead we went to the "cafe" and had some snacks. We hung around for a bit since it was a little too early to head to dance class and too late to go home. Unfortunately between some wet pants and a lost gift shop purchase, we left too late after all and missed dance class. Maggie was disappointed and didn't really understand why we weren't going, but they offer make-up classes, so we can go another time!

Working a few days in San Jose, CA this week at the Zend PHP conference. The venue for the show is the Doubletree hotel, but I'm staying a few miles away at the Fairmont, which is Adobe's preferred hotel when you're in the area. This conference is going like most others I've been to of late - a lot of developers with no idea about Flex, but that are totally floored by what it can offer them. I guess that's what you get for being a product that's only a couple years old. I had a guy stop by with a very specific project to port a Visual Basic courseware system to the web. He was targeting PHP, but when he saw Flex he stopped by repeatedly to make sure he understood the product. I had some down-time, so I spent about thirty minutes implementing a proof of concept for him based on a screen recording he had. Seventy lines of code later we were done with his project ... that's currently 5,000 lines of VB. He swiftly proclaimed "Looks like I've got a new business model!"