I’m sitting here on my couch waiting for my wife to come back from delivering a pitcher back to our neighbors. (They brought over a pitcher of yummy sangria last night for cinco de mayo – and just managed to stumble home, let alone take their pitcher with them!)

So anyways, I’m sitting here and as usual when I don’t have anything immediate to do I kind of well – fret. Like a lot of folks right now I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. There is just so much new stuff pouring out RIGHT NOW. Everything from ActionScript 3 and Flex 2, to Apollo, to Microsoft’s new Silverlight thingie. It’s enough to make you want to either lock yourself in a room with a pile of binders full of documentation or just run screaming from the whole industry.

Then, I just thought about it some more and calmed down. Sure, like most people I have a lot of work ahead of me to catch up with everything. But you know what thats going to take? Some playing and some thinking – that’s what!

What made me calm down was trying to remember how I felt when ActionScript first appeared. That very first day I got my hands on the Flash 5 alpha I was so wigged out – but in a good way! I couldn’t think of what to play with first! I was on a business trip at the time and while I was in the airport waiting for my flight home I think I coded up 3-4 different small games (pong, mastermind, minesweeper – those kinds of things). I picked a problem and just tried to solve it with ActionScript.

Now, I need to do the same thing – with ActionScript 3, Flex 2, Apollo, Silverlight, and all of the other random bits of technology I’ve been meaning to learn for a long time now. Yeah, I already know some AS3, but if I just stick with my real “work” for it, it will take me forever to really be 100% fluent. So I got started on an asteroids-style game. It’s not terribly difficult, but it’s making me really take a hard look at parts of AS3 I haven’t even touched yet.

Here’s the best part (for you at least!) when I’m done with these little fun examples I’ll be posting the source code and run down of how it works here on our blog. Maybe then we’ll have a few more readers than just the two of us and my wife!