Archive for November, 2007

I’ve been playing with VS2008 over the holiday weekend and have to say I love it. The more I dig into Linq, the more I think of all the possibilities it opens up both for rapid extensibility and ease of development. Below’s a quick example…

var userNames = from user in users
select user.name, user.email
where user.name.startsWith(“Bill”);

The compiler isn’t a sloppy JavaScript interpreter with the var label, it will discern that it’ll cast to 1..n number of class user and userNames is actually cast as such, and not left in type variant. After that it looks a lot like SQL script, but there’s more to it, but will let you find that out for yourselves. You can even use Excepts and Unions and Intersections – dealing with collections and dictionaries has simply never been easier (or faster).

Given the tight timetables we so often wind up having to face, having this new tool in the arsenal is going to help tighten up turn around times even moreso than before.

Importing projects from prior versions of VS happen very smoothly (it does prompt you to upgrade the project to the latest version – and as with the last time around, once the project has been updated you won’t be able to go back to open it again with the last version). However one way around that is to make a copy of the project file first, then you can use that file to open the solution with the older Studio version once the original has been taken over by 2008. The actual project files themselves aren’t changed at all with just the update, and both my personal projects as well as work projects were all able to build under 2008 without a single line change (woot).

Will post more thoughts as I get along further into it all.

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Megan Meier (above) was an 8th grade volleyball player who loved what any typical teenage girl loves – dogs, music, being outdoors, and of course, boys. She had a troubled past, including treatment for depression and ADD, and severe self-esteem issues. But she had been improving, losing weight and regaining her self-confidence after ending a lightswitch friendship with another girl. Megan’s mother, Tina, attributed the positive changes to her new MySpace friend, Josh – a boy who thought Megan was pretty.

Name them, and let them face their shame. Demand justice for Megan Meier.

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Another pleasant holiday done and nearly gone, went out with a few people to the Top of the Mark downtown, and it was just fabulous once again. It was later than the normal time for me to have the holiday meal, and also the first time I’d ever been at the Mark during sunset. It was really very lovely, and a great reminder of how beautiful the City and the surrounding area is.

The Bay area is a problematic place live in – especially in terms of expense and traffic congestion. But in the end there’s a great sense of the hope that permeates the place probably all the way back to its real founding during the gold rush. People are here because it’s a fringe frontier, where things are a little bit surreal in general (Castro during Halloween, anyone?), but take it to the edge – being in the hot and heavy crossroads of all things tech (Silicon Valley, Biotech, etc). The notion that someone isn’t a workaholic is almost taken as an odd idea – with that gold mine always just around the next corner. People play hard and work even harder, but always with the hope that the next start up that they spend a few years at, working out of someone’s garage will be the next big thing. It keeps us all hopeful, and thankful.

Even during the great dot com crash of the turn of the millennium, instead of the jumping from rooftops that happens in places like New York when the stock crashes happen, or Detroit when another car plant closes and moves overseas. Here it just keeps on churning, you lose one job, and you go on to another. Or you have yourself and four unemployed friends keep yourselves busy by creating your own new idea and make your millions that way.

It was a surreal fantasy land back in the late 90s. Anywhere that you could literally walk out of your company – look around the block and pick out your next place that interested you, walk in the front door and have an offer before the coffee that the receptionist had gotten you had grown cold.

It’s not that way still, to be sure, but it’s not that far off either. But it is harder to get yourself into the door to begin with when you’re first starting out.

For all the jobs I’ve gone through, I’ve been fortunate to have had a good amount of luck in finding those next positions when the times did start to get rough, but now I’m closer to a position where I can relax a bit and should (god forbid) the time come around that I need to move on from IGN to somewhere new, that it’ll be closer to those experiences of the 90s than it was 5-7 years ago.

I’m thankful for so many things – and I’m not as successful as I’d have liked, but I’m still working on it. I may never “make it” either, but I’ll keep on trying. This is the bay area after all, and that’s what it’s all about. The Quest, not dwelling on the downsides of life.

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 A near-intact shipwreck apparently dating from the 17th century has been found in the Baltic Sea, Swedish television has said.

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The first time was last year, but then it hadn’t really struck me to look anything up. A few weeks ago another person whom I’d known only in the briefest of passing from Maryland Faire had passed away from an auto accident. Given the number of people we know, it’s tragic but bound to happen, and we make the best of remembering them in each of our own ways.

What had struck me as different this time around was that it was the first time a person I’d known that had passed away that I also had both on MySpace and LiveJournal. I went back and perused his pages, and it makes it much more of a real person that’d just vanished off the planet. One day they’re blogging about having gone out to the movies w/ friends, or complaining that their job was dull. The next they’re just gone – and their SO is posting a message saying they’ve passed on.

It’s how the world has gone, and I think it’s a good thing, definitely. We can go many years after the fact, and have a much clearer sense about the feel of the person. How they wrote, things that struck them to talk about, what annoyed them, and of their photos. It’s always been that we might have had a few letters from a lost loved one, but that’d be about it. Now there are the photos, the quips, their musings, even their postings on DeviantArt. Those lives are not longer subject to being lost in the vagaries of a shoebox photo album in the back of a closet. They’re able to be pulled up and revisited as the mood strikes from time to time wherever one may be. And you can post comments/thoughts/feelings on their pages like never before.

It’s a sad time to think that another senior member of the community will soon be lost due to age, but they’ve never had any of these things, and I’m sad to think that I’ll not have those same memories available.

How technology has changed how we live, and also what we leave behind when we pass on…

Technorati Tags: Blogging, MySpace, Musings

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