I was very honored to be invited to be a part of a new podcast named the ‘Gangsta Cast’.

The show is the brain child of Jeremy Saenz (aka ‘the Flex Gang$ta’) and is intended to be a fun discussion about all things technical but primarily focusses on Flash and Flex.

Jeremy is an extremely talented developer who also raps about the Flex framework. (Video evidence provided below)

The cast is made up of Nate Beck and Aaron Boushley of ZaaLabs, Dan Florio of PolyGeek.com, Jeremy Saenz and myself.

It’s a pretty scrappy group. Dangerous sure, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to describe us as ‘gangsta’. I guess you can be the judge.

Here’s the show details:

We introduce the GangstaCast crew and cool our episode 1 nerves to bring you 2 full hours of talking. Multitouch Matt gives us a rundown on multitouch and gestures in society, Dan talks about Runpee and the Nexus One, Aaron shares his woes on Alchemy and Javascript/HTML5, Jeremy talks 360|Flex…. And Nate likes stalking celebrities.

Here’s the Flex Gangsta blog and you can download the mp3 here.

Thanks for letting me be a part of the show!

And just for good measure here is one of my favorite Flex Gangsta music videos. I couldn’t resist:

On a personal note, My wife and I just had our very first child.  Ethan Paul LeGrand. 

Sorry for any slow down in tutorials and blog posts but we are scrambling to learn this new parenting business.

Ethan hasn’t yet fully grasped the finer details of Object Oriented Programming but I have no doubt that he’ll be teaching me ‘best practices’ in multiple programming languages before he can walk.

He’ll likely be my multitouch alpha tester once he gains some control over his arms.

I’ll report back on how that’s going in a few months.

Just a quick note that most standalone multitouch monitors should work in a Windows 7 virtual machine on your Apple Mac.

I just pulled down VMWare Fusion 3 and noticed I was able to receive raw touch data from my HP Compaq L2105tm monitor.  I’m sure there was a way to do this with Fusion 2 but I didn’t find it.

In Fustion 3 I opened up the settings for the Windows VM and specified the connected monitor USB device.  In my case, it was named ‘Quantra Optical Touch Screen’.  A name that just rolls off the tongue.

You can go grab VMWare Fusion 3 here.

I prefer working in OSX and I’ve been using Bootcamp to bounce around between operating systems in order to test different multitouch applications.  You might have noticed the bumpy transitions in my screencasts.

I like to think I’ll be more productive with this setup but the truth is I’m even more likely to loose countless hours exploring some sort of multitouch mapping application.

This coming weekend I’m speaking at the 2010 Portland Code Camp.

I’m speaking on ‘The Benefits of using Zip Disks for Computer Storage’. My entire presentation fits on 5 Zip Disks!!!

OK, I’m actually speaking on Multitouch on the Flash Platform. I’ll be showing new code, new multitouch applications and showing how stupid simple developing for multitouch interfaces can be.

Admission to this event is free, all costs are covered by donations and sponsorships so if you are interested in hearing me speak (and I know you are) zip on over to register and be sure to stop me and say hello.