I made the trip down to CodeMash in Sandusky OH this past week.  I ended up driving the 6 hrs there instead of flying because there's no flight into Sandusky, I would have had to fly to Cleveland then rent a car and drive the hour to Sandusky... just didn't make sense to me.

I have to say I was fairly impressed with the conference, for their first attempt the organizers did a great job of it.  They had a good showing of speakers, including keynotes from Neal Ford, Bruce Eckel and Scott Guthrie.  Topic's ran the gamut - Java, Ruby, Ajax, .NET, Smart Clients, you name it they had a little bit of everything.  Ok, not entirely true.. there was no Delphi there, but I can't fault them for that since they never claimed there would be.  Even as such there was plenty to keep me busy there, I got a lot out of Mary Poppendieck's session on Lean Software Development.

All in all it was well worth the trip, I'm looking forward to CodeMash 2008.

I've taken on another commitment for the year - but one that is for a very worthy cause.  I've joined the Team In Training (TNT) to help raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I'll be participating in America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride at Lake Tahoe, NV on June 3rd.  It'll be the first time I've ever entered a race of any sort.  I've run 20+ miles a couple of times before, but that was 2 decades ago (a whole lifetime!) when I was in the Marines, and it wasn't for any sort of competition.

Now comes the tough part.. well, tough besides hitting the gym several times a week and going on all the training rides with the rest of the TNT team, then riding a bike 100 miles around Lake Tahoe, Nevada. I need to raise $4200 in donations by May 23.  I've never been part of something like this before, so it's going to be interesting.  They give a number of ideas on how to do fund raisers, etc. but I think it's gonna take some effort to get there.  Sure seems like a lot of money to get people to just donate out of the kindness of their heart. 

Shesh, what's up with The History Channel tonight?  First it was an episode "Countdown to Armageddon" talking about super volcanoes, global warming and killer viruses - with a healthy dose of wrath of god, end of days talk tossed in for good measure.    Next they followed it up with "Decoding the Past: Mayan Doomsday Prophecy", talking about how the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world / beginning of a new age on December 21st, 2012.  Now they're running "Mega Disasters: Asteroid Apocalypse", talking about how major asteroids have decimated the earth in the past and it's certain that one will hit the earth again at some point in the future.

Hmm .. December 21st, 2012 .. only 6 years away - bummer.  Guess on the positive side I'll never have to worry about turning 50.   Actually they've been pretty interesting shows, probably to interesting - I'm watching TV more than working.

Spent the better part of last night working on the home office, I splurged and bought some new equipment so it was time to clean the room & put the new desk together.  Once that was done I opened the box for my brand new Dell XPS 410 and got that set up.  Which was when I noticed a slight problem.. the 19in. flat screen that came with it doesn't want to work.  Click the power button and it displays for 3-4 seconds, then goes black - cycle the power and it does it again.   Long story short, the monitor doesn't work and I need a replacement.

I call Dell tech support and end up getting a rookie in training (yes, someone who's training to be a rookie, he's not even good enough to be a rookie tech support person yet).  After a couple minutes of him annoying me, asking if I tested this or that, telling me he can't help me because I don't have the XPS system with me (I brought the monitor with me to work, system is at home), he busts loose with this gem.

"Have you tried running the diagnostic software when the monitor was plugged in?".    My response was "No, that would be pretty useless because the SCREEN IS BLACK.  Running diagnostic software usually works better when you can see what is going on and answer the questions".

20 minutes later he determines that there is a problem with the monitor and starts the process to ship me a new one.  Only 3-5 days before the new one arrives.. yipee.

When it comes to working on things, be it assembling a desk, doing a tuneup on an engine, or writing software - I tend to be a "Jump right in with both feet, start doing it and don't stop to pick up the manual until I get stuck" sorta guy.  I get that from my father - The-Big-Guy (dad) is one of those guys who's either built, fixed, worked on or learned just about anything you ever wanted to (and some things you didn't want to).  So of course I grew up learning how to work on everything too, the typical son wanting to be like his father.  I've worked on farms, in 4x4 repair shops, been a welder, resturant manager, 4 years in the Marine Corps, and of course 15 years developing software professionally (add another 10 or so as a hobbiest).   Among my friends and co-workers I'm a bit of a handy man, helping people out with home repairs, building rec rooms, rewiring basements, etc.  Well since my comfort zone for work is pretty broad, I normally don't bother learning what I'm doing before I start - as The Big Guy has often said "When all else fails, read directions".

Years ago while working at Quad/Tech (1994 ish) I needed to write an application for a small division of Quad/Graphics.  I had no resources, no help, and no time to do it in (3-4 months).  While Q/G was a big Microsoft shop and the rest of the IS department was busy working in Access & VB 2.0, I got my hands on a copy of this really slick little development tool called Delphi.  I had no training, but I loved what I saw and just dug in, working my way thru the help files and what little information I could get out of the World Wide Web.  And I was hooked - I knew Delphi was the language of the future, it was revolutionary - a thing of simplistic beauty and genius created by Borland.  For 12 or so years I've been programming in Delphi and it's always been a "just do it" sort of attitude from me.  Never been one for utilizing design patterns or standardized methodologies, code it now, get it working, refine & refactor it later as needed has been my modus operandi.

So you can see where my natural inclination to just dive in, fire up Visual Studio and start rewriting code comes from.  There is a part of me whispering "Dude, this is bigger than a breadbox.. you need to get your shit organized before you really start", but then there's the another voice coming from the other shoulder saying "Don't listen to him, you can do this.. it's not that different from Delphi - just go for it and worry about the details later".  An interesting conundrum for me really, do I go with what has always worked for me or should I try something new and actually start at the beginning?  There's a ton of interesting & informative books out there on the subject matter.. but no matter what, reading what someone else says you should do is never as interesting as actually doing it yourself. 

Oh well - as Confucius said "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".  Don't have any .NET books handy, but I do have Visual Studio installed.  Maybe I'll play around for a little bit, and do some research on a good C# book tomorrow..

Another year, another revamping of the website.  Been way too long since I made an effort to keep up on it anyway.  I had been using Intraweb Studio by Atozed software, but ended up having some problems with it during one release where it corrupted my database and I would have had to recreate everything from scratch.  That pretty much made me give up on using it, and ... well.. doing anything with the website actually.

With a new year coming I figure it's time to get back to keeping things up to date.  As a programmer by profession, using Delphi by choice, I've come to the opinion that it's near the end of the road for Delphi.  With the recent announcement from Borland that instead of selling the developer tools to an investor(s), they are going to spin it off to a wholy owned subsidary, I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that Delphi is close to dead.  Hell, just try to find a company anywhere that has Delphi positions available.  I only knew of several in the Milwaukee / Waukesha area and those are dwindling (I hear that MSB has done away with Delphi).  Trying to recruit a quality developer for Delphi is going to become almost impossible.  Spin the table and change that to C#, and you'll have a flood of applications.. pretty easy to see where we have to go.

So, I'm committing myself to delving into C# and .NET - much more than the random playing I've been doing to date.  I've got a fairly large assortment of misc utilites and programs I've developed in Delphi over the last 13 or so years, I'm going to work on converting those over to C#.  That should give me a good basis of experience in C#, and lay the groundwork for the real learning I need to do.  About time for me to do this anyway - I've been on cruise for far too long.  Oh sure, I've played with various languages & tools thru the last decade or so (PL SQL, ASP.NET) but haven't really thrown myself headlong into learning - it's long overdue. 

So - I've ordered some new equipment for the home office (desk, chair, computer), I'm revamping the website to be a repository of "What I learned in .NET recently", picking up the books and dusting off the learning cap - it's time to get busy.  I'm pretty excited about this journey.. let's see where it takes me. 

Good lord how time flies .. either that or I've hit a new level of laziness when it comes to updating my website. Anyway, last November I spent several days camping at Butano State Park in California, near San Francisco. You can read about my trip here. I've also put some pictures of the trip into my albumn.

Added 2 new folders to my photo albumn - Buckhorn state park (our yearly guys camping trip), Challenge Academy (pictures with Chad up at CA), Camping at Butano State Park, CA

Guess I need to browse my own site more often, just found out that the ratings didn't work in my Photo Album, and that if you followed a permalink to a blog, the menu for my site didn't work. You would think that a software developer would do a better job of testing his own work, now wouldn't you? *sigh*... Both of these issues have been fixed.