you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

I put this together over the course of several evenings in March as an animation test. I hadn’t done much Flash in a while and needed to relearn some ActionScript.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click the ball anywhere inside the park to move it. The doggie will chase.

I spent forever getting the right color combinaton for the beach ball and the right shine to it. It shimmers when it moves.  I’ll have to redraw the grass and add a park in the background when I have more time. There’s some nice parallax scrolling I want to do. By moving things in the foreground faster, animators can achieve the illusion of depth. The flower, for example, shifts left or right to follow the perspective.

I also put some randomized actions on the dog, like tongue movements and tail wag when he’s not moving.

About a month ago, NYC had a huge thunderstorm. I mean earth crackingly loud, light up the sky like it was daytime scary. It killed my cable modem, several phones in the house, and my new Netgear router.

Several days later, when I tried to burn a DVD, it took over 45 minutes! The drive was writing at 1.1x! I blamed my computer probs on the lightning — it must’ve screwed up my DVD drive as well.

But even before that, I noticed that my DVD’s were hiccuping in VLC, and getting really bad performance overall.

This week, by some random stroke of luck, I figured out what it was! It’s the notorious PIO mode problem! I unstinalled the Secondary IDE Channel from the Device Manager and let Windows scan my system again. It found the DVD-drive and now I just did a test burn. Back to normal! DVD drive is on Multi-word DMA Mode 2 (whatver that means) and take under 10 minutes to burn again.

I knew nothing about this! All I knew was that disc accesses (HD or DVD) would bog down my PC.

Learn more here and fix your problem if your DVD is super slow. PIO Mode just might be the culprit.