Yeah, my main interest in flash is interaction design, I don't think I'd design a website in it--flash websites annoy me, to be honest, and I really like javascript.  I didn't really get into php until last year, when I found out you can do object oriented stuff with it--I didn't realize it had that before, I swear none of the sites I've seen online talk about it!  I found out that it had objects by wandering through the computer section of a bookstore and seeing a book titled "Object Oriented PHP" (which of course had to come home with me), and now I like the language much better

The idea behind ubiquitous computing is that computers are everywhere (hence "ubiquitous" ).  It's an idea that came out of Xerox PARC in...the 80s?  Mark Weiser, I think.  It's kinda like people have their cell phones and their ipods all the time, and those are computers, but people don't think of them as computers, just as little things that do useful stuff.  The research in ubiquitous computing is how to embed computers into the environment (or have people carry with them) in a way that is useful and unintrusive.  For instance, there's the "Aware Home" project, which involves a lot of things but lately has been more fucused on the elderly, and what can be done so that they can safely continue to live in their own homes longer.  This involves things like monitoring which medicines have been taken when and motion detection tracking unusual behaviors (e.g. they came into the kitchen 3 hours ago and never left).
Edit: found a page with some of the original work on ubiquitous computing: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html