Just took a 2 week vacation back to Magic city. Now I'm back in the city of lights. It feels good. Especially seeing how foreign the US is becoming to me. But it was also good to see the family after a long time apart. Little Mac met his cousins and relatives. And the happy, chubby little boy is happier than ever. He also has a few more teeth than when he left, which was a pain in the ass on the flight back. But he toughed it out and slept through the entire trip all 9 hours.
For me, it's back to programming and getting ready for the next point release. I'm still working on getting the kinks out of my media center PC. I would like to take the keyboard away and use it exclusively for movies, music and storage. But I'm still waiting for a proper remote. Come on Philips, get the SRM 7500 to people that want it.
I've been here for atleast 2 years. I've been in Paris for a little less than that. tomorrow I'll be taking a trip home with my family to see my family. I'm that cousin that everyone sees every few years. Before Paris it was college. and before college I was busy preparing for college. While Costa Brava was fun nothing takes place of seeing grandma and mom. Mac will see his cousins and will know he has 2 grandmas, and a great-grandma. I'll visit my friends, and see the places I used to hang out as an old Miami head. And I'll see how my favorite city has changed since the last time I was there.
I'll also be interested in how the housing market has changed. When I left, the price of property was eclipsing the salary of what people could afford. Before leaving I was looking but saw that there was nothing I could afford on the salary I was getting paid. I also learned that people were taking exotic loans to afford the McMansions they were buying. It's funny, but Paris is even more expensive than Miami but the salaries are better and the price of property is more. But there is nothing like living in building built by true craftsmen of their time. From my window I stare out to another building (a pied-a-terre) that resembles mine, but the similarity stops there. The iron bars, balcony, and window decorations are all different. Some have faces of angels sculpted into the shelf that supports the balcony while others have flowers. My living room has a fireplace with an oval window above the fireplace. Created by an architect that used skillful ductwork to move the flue along. Between Miami, Paris, and New York there is quite nothing like any of them.
In software development I'm a bit of a polyglot. Here is a short list C# (weapon of choice), VB.Net, XML, SQL, CSS, PHP, HTML, and Javascript. I've been avoiding PHP because I want to. And now I'm working a lot in Javascript. Using Javascript is quickly becoming a fav. It wasn't long ago that the tools were mediocre at best, and debugging it was a nightmare. Between browser and platform incompatibilities I spent a lot of time starring at a screen looking for a bug that only occurs on a specific version of IE6 running on windows2000/XP SP#. If you wanted to do any serious productive work than staying in the compiled languages was the way to go, unless you needed another dropdown menu.
That's why I'm looking forward to the next version of Visual Studio 2008. I have the beta installed and I've been using it lightly. Javascript support was a good start in 2005 but the reflection works so much better on this version. 2005 would usually meet me 33% with the intellitype. 2008 is probably 50-75% there. And lots of lovely new features (note: I'm still not convinced Silverlight is going to approach Flash in the immediate future, but it will put a fire under Adobe's ass :-P)