Presumably getting affected from the verse, I like taking photos of flying seagulls. The contrast between blue and white stands out. I feel ecstatic when I capture this moment into my frame. When I was in Perth, I used to go to Fremantle, situated in front of the Indian Ocean, sit down a bench and look through the viewfinder for a while.

Actually, the situations were quite tough. I used 300mm lens, which worked 450mm! for D70, without tripod and moreover seagulls flew too quickly to be caught by auto focus. Therefore, I used pre-focusing technique. With prediction, I focused on a particular spot and when seagulls passed there, took it. If I did well, I could get a few good ones out of a hundred. In English, we can say “shoot” photos instead of “take” photos and I very agree with this idea. When I shot the seagulls, I felt as if I was a sniper.

If I have a chance, I’d love to shoot seagulls in Japan.

You can see other segull’s photos at Flickr.

When you are creating a timeline animation, you might want to swap symbols in a layer with keeping movement. Usually, what you do is select the item, press “swap” button and repeat these process. For me a few times are acceptable. However, around five times, I would get agitated, and around ten times I would feel as though it was a torture or something like that. Although it actually takes several minutes, I can’t stand this kind of tedious job psychologically.
Thus, with my motto “I’ll work hard to get efficiency”, I wrote an automation script.

How to use this,
Select a layer which contains target instance and select a symbol from the library.
Then, run the command. Unless an error occurs, it’ll be done.

You should consider these followings,
I intend to use this command for timeline animation. Therefore, if a keyframe has more than two object, an error occurs.
Obviously, you can swap only Movie Clip, Graphic, and Button.
This also doesn’t support bitmap and video.

Rights and agreements,
I won’t have any responsibilities for damages caused by this script, even if something should happen.
This script is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

In fact I use this script for my ongoing project and it works pretty well. We should let computers do things which can be done by computers and spend our recourses for creative works. It reduces my stress too and I feel easy to have trial and error. I believe this kind of small thing contributes qualities and productivities.

9/23 added
the name has changed
to “swap symbols in the same layer”
from “swap symbols in a layer”

Good or bad, my life is almost the same as the one before going to Australia. Basically, I sit down in front of PC all the day and sometimes go out for meetiigs, and after the meeting I call into a book store and a cafe. Tidying up my room is one of the biggest possibility when I have spare time.
Uh yeah, come to think about it, my self organising skill and management skill is getting better. It’s not associated with English, I suppose, studying abroad improved me a lot.

A few days ago I recieved the printed photos I’d ordered. The tangible material is completely different from the image on the screen. Although some of them were added colour adjustment against my intention, basically it’s well done. I’m going to get albums tomorrow.