Month: December 2009

Fun Games For Your Next Party

I recently played some fun games that I wanted to pass on. I played them at Christmas parties, but they would work great for any holiday or party.

The first one is a taste testing game. Here’s how it works. You need a variety of sodas that are similar in color and taste. The game I played used 7 two liter bottles. What you do is pour each one into its own cup and write a number on it. Then you take and pour a little from each cup into each players cup one flavor at a time allowing them time to drink it and mark down on a piece of paper what flavor they think that it is. Here is the break down for the game I played:

1. Sierra Mist
2. Squirt
3. 7up
4. Generic Brand Squirt
5. Generic Brand 7Up
6. Fresca
7. Sprite

The next game is a point game that involves eating M&Ms. Here is how it works. First you count out a certain amount of each colored M&M and place them in a brown paper sack. There is a sack for each player. Then each player pulls an M&M out of the sack without looking and shows it to the person keeping score. You keep doing this until the first person reaches the desired amount of points. The game I played the winning number was 500 and here is the count of each color along with its corresponding points:

Blue – 5 pts (8 M&Ms)
Green – 10pts(7 M&Ms)
Orange – 25pts (6 M&Ms)
Red – 50pts (5 M&Ms)
Yellow – 75pts (4 M&Ms)
Brown – 100pts (3 M&Ms)

The last game is one that I made for a Christmas party that we had, It’s Christmas Bingo. You can check it out and print off some of your own cards for your next Christmas party by going here: http://www.joebillman.com/christmas-bingo.php. Enjoy these game ideas!

Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2032: Stream Error.

If you have ever received this error it can be quite frustrating and there are a lot of not so helpful answers out there on the web. Because of that I wanted to post this real simple solution. All you need to do is add an event listener to the item calling the URLRequest. Here is a simple example using a Sound object:

var audio:Sound = new Sound();
audio.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, handleIOError);
audio.load(new URLRequest("myfile"));

function handleIOError(evt:IOErrorEvent):void
{
//handle error if needed
}

It’s that simple. I hope this helped! If this helped please post a comment so that others can find this simple solution.

Adobe Creative Suite Tools Not Showing Up Right

This is one that I found a while back, and just recently was reminded of it again. The other day I saw a forum post stating that Flash won’t display the path I’m drawing with the pencil tool. I had something similar to this happen with the eraser tool in Fireworks. It too wouldn’t display right and was flickering. The system I was using was running was Windows Vista and I had the Appearance set to Aero and that was what was causing the issue. Just by setting it to the Basic mode (Without the transparency) that fixed it. This also is the case for Windows 7. This is kind of a random issue and appears to affect multiple Creative Suite programs. So far I have heard of it affecting Flash, Fireworks and Illustrator. I was getting the issue with CS3 and when I upgraded to CS4 it no longer happened in Fireworks at least. I also have Windows 7 and CS4 and have noticed that it still is an issue in Flash with the pencil tool. The line you draw with the tool doesn’t show up until you let up on the mouse button. If you happen to run across this weird issue and want to find a solution try changing the Appearance Settings.