Web Development

Recently, I took the dive into developing in Silverlight 3.  I sat down, having only watched one 15 minute crash course video on it, and went to work developing a little version of Boggle.  I still have a few things to work out, but the main point is that I could just sit and do it.  Why?  Because I did it in C#. 

Some background: As I was going through school and they taught us Flash, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and some other classes, I started thinking that there had to be an easier way.  To use Flash you have to know ActionScript 3, to use PHP you have to know PHP, and so on to the point that for each technology you have to know its own language.  So, I took a look at the .NET framework, especially after taking one class in Visual Basic.  After not too much digging and research, I REALLY started to wonder why they weren't teaching this stuff in school...in Washington right down the street from Redmond, nonetheless!  I came to find out that they used to have one ASP.NET C# class, but it was disbanded the year before.  Why?!

As much as I loved hacking out 1000's of lines of code over the course of my time in school, I have since learned that I could have done the same in half the time and writing less code by hand if done in .NET.  If only I'd known at the time.  I think the great icing on the cake to that part of the story came in my final quarter in a Project Management class.  This class was the capstone to the 2 year program that I was in,as well as part of a scripting certificate, and by now I was hip to .NET.  Anyway, it started with 9 students: 6 PHP developers from our classes together and 3 .NET developers (I was one now and two others were there getting scripting certificates).  I found it quite easy to do all of the assignments in .NET with even the little experience that I had in it.  When the quarter's project came due there were only three of us there to turn it in, demonstrate it, and take the written final.  Guess which three were there.

Anyway, to try and keep this short, with .NET you can learn one language, such as C# as I prefer (or VB), and use it on many things.  Such as Silverlight, ASP.NET, WPF, SharePoint, and on and on.  You don't have to learn a different programming language for each thing that you want to work with.  Is it that hard for some schools to figure that out?  Well, I guess when most of the committee members would lose their jobs because they don't know .NET, then that makes sense, but oh well.  They just need to learn to be smarter. :-)

Bon Anniversaire!

A happy birthday to my great wife, Stephanie, today!  Unfortunately, she's working all day, but I made her a great, big lunch (which doubles as dinner as well).  Little does she know until she reads this, or gets home, that the girls and I creatively made a nice, yummy cake for her.  You'll see it later.

$5 = A day's wages...or a fast-food chicken sandwich

January 5th, 1914 - Henry Ford introduces the $5/day minimum wage.  Ninety-six years later, it costs me at least that much, with tax, to buy a simple meal...anywhere.  A fast-food restaurant, the grocer's deli...  No matter what the time difference is, though, the value of a dollar is still important and you can't convince me to pay that much for basic food, unless I'm in a hurry, you gave me coupons, and/or you are Taco Bell.  Even though that time difference is local here to the U.S., it's not much different than many other countries that have people working for such an equivalency in wages, I.E. $5US/day. 

I'm not exactly an economist, nor do I work for the IMF, but I find it amazing how people still survive in their own local economies around the world under such conditions.  Yes, I'm even taking into consideration the Digital Divide and imported medical assistance, but still, I might go bonkers.  But then, I'm also comparing my life now with said conditions.  That would be a bit different.

Today is a palindrome...for anyone interested in that. 01/02/2010 -> 01022010

I remember back in 1990 wathing the clock (with seconds on it) on the kitchen microwave right as it hit 12:34:56 on 7/8/90.

I guess you just have to be a numbers geek like me to find the fascination in things like these.

Resolutions?

I've never made New Year Resolutions, per se, where I actually write down a list of things that I want to do, but I guess that I do come up with things that I'd like to achieve and a new year is a good way to help measure those things.

So, perhaps I'll actually blog this year a lot more. Since joining Facebook early in 2009, I just didn't find much to blog about as I would just jot my thoughts, videos and photos, and other things down right onto there. However, there are things that can be split between the two and I'll blog about more things as the result.