360Flex We bumped into Jim Cheng at teh Halloween costume store

Down the street from Tom's house they opened one of those Halloween costume stores, the kind that show up in early September and are a vacant store building November 1st. We decided to drop in a take a look.

We walked down the aisle with the masks, and there was Jim Cheng, speaker at 360|Flex San Jose. He had what looked like a Tuxedo Mask mask on. Whipping the mask off, "Uh, hi guys."

We look at the mask, then at Jim, then the mask again, "Uh hey Kim, how's it going? Excited about San Jose?"

Picking up a Freddy Krueger mask Jim answers, "Yeah. Super excited!" He put Freddy down, and picked up A Gargamel mask.

"Nice." I say pointing to the mask. "So, who should come to your session?"

Jim keeps the mask, watching Tom pick up a Robocop mask, "Everyone.  Folk that want to see the future of web application analytics and usability tools.  Yeah, that sounds kinda boring and not very 360|Flex-ish.   So scratch that.  How about:  Everyone and anyone that wants to get a glimpse at some of the wicked cool research that we've been up to at EffectiveUI over the last year. "

I pick up a crazy looking captain kirk mask, "Why should they come?"

Jim takes the mask, and turns it inside out, handing it back to me, "There's going to be something for everyone at my session--from user interface designers to low-level compiler engineers.  They'll all be able to walk away with some new insights into how we can use Flex and the Flash platform to build and test verifiably better RIAs.  Or if I actually do end up with a baby-doll T-shirt from Tom and John because I answered so crazily late, you can at least come, take pictures, and laugh at me."

We walk towards the full costume section of the store, Tom picks up a hercules (the Kevin Sorbo one) costume, "like?"

Shuddering, I ask Jim, what the goal of his session is.

Picking up a Power Ranger (the red one, from the first US show, none of those Johnny-come-latelies after that) costume, "Show developers how to collect better analytics and usability data from RIAs.   RIAs are not websites, and as a result, we need to move beyond the world of click-throughs and page impressions.  I will be presenting a number of novel ways to monitor RIA usage and performance that you can take home and build into your own applications."

I pick up a Cousin It costume, I'm all about no fuss, and no effort when I have to wear a halloween costume, "What two sessions are you looking forward to?"

Jim puts down the Red Ranger, and moves over to a costume that's almost 11 ft tall, made up mostly of a huge cloak and these enormous arms coming out. There's a huge harness inside, Jim slides into it, "If I had to choose two right now, probably Matt Chotin's and Eric Ko's.  But I'm really looking forward to hitting as many as I can.  There's a lot of real interesting goings-on in the Flex development community these days, and I don't want to miss a thing."

Tom picks up a tron costume, "what would you tell people, watiing until the last minute to decide to attend? There's a week left, and not many spots left."

Jim walks over and politely takes the tron guy costume from Tom, shaking his head. "360|Flex is focused specifically on Flex development and gives you some serious bang-for-the buck between the included pre-conference training, the depth of the technical sessions, and the all the Flex-developing cool kids that you'll get to meet and drink beer with."

I notice that Jim didn't put the costume down, and am about say something when Tom screams and runs toward the front of the store. Jim and I look and there's a little kid with a clown costume on. Jim looks at me, I shrug and tell him we'll see him in a week and head towards the front of the store.

Wanna see Jim in 'The Tron Guy' suit? better register now. Space is incredibly limited! We're down to the final 20 seats!