In Love

I just got back from dinner and I'm in love. No, I'm not going to leave my wife, she's the only woman for me (of course if Alison Hanigan or Drew Barrymore walked in the door that might make that statement a lot harder to stick to). I'm in love with Boston.

I wouldn't consider myself well traveled. I've been to more then a few places in the states and a couple on the other side of the big pond. I've been to big towns and small towns, but there isn't a single city that I've truly said "I would love to live here instead of where I'm at".

I've lived in the Chicago area all of my life. It's a great town to live in/around. The people are generally friendly and hard working. There's a good job market for what I do. There's a lot to see and do in and around the city for everyone. I can think of plenty of other places that would drive me insane if forced to live there (NYC comes to mind), but not Boston.

It may be that I just haven't spent enough time here, but there are so many things that Boston has done right. For one, the public transit system is actually useful and easy to navigate. Did I mention inexpensive (1/2 the price of an El ticket in Chicago). Oh and it goes where you need it to go. The city itself is just beautiful to walk around.

The Italian food in the North End is absolutely amazing. I had a lobster ravioli at Cantina Italiana tonight that would make the chef at some of the high end Italian places in Chicago feel completely inadequate. Seriously, if you EVER come to Boston make sure you at least have one dinner in the North End. I just wish that work would be paying for the whole amount, but it was sooooooooooo worth it.

There's only thing missing in Boston that makes me ready to head home. My family. So at this point I'm ready to head out. One more day at the conference and it's time to head home. I just wish I didn't have to drag my luggage with me everywhere tomorrow.

Quick Response

I'm not sure if it's through my twitter feed or from a google alert, but one of the developers found my appcelerator posts from last night. Just wanted to mention to anyone that might be reading this to check out his comments. One thing of note is that they will not be requiring the dev network login.

Time to see if I can get appcelerator to do what I want it to do. At this point I'm pretty optimistic.

Hello Appcelerator World

I've just gone through the "hello world" tutorial. So far I'm relatively impressed. The instructions were straight forward worked as advertised. I can't tell you how many "hello world" examples I've gone through that have typos or just don't work because the docs are out of date.

I've already started playing around with changing things around in the hw app. I like the fact that the changes are all compiled on the fly. Even the "service" java class is updated on the next access to the web page. Enough for tonight though.

Auto update

Appcelerator has an automated update feature that runs when you start a new project. I sure hope there is some way to override some of this network related features. While I'm normally connected to the internet and it's not a huge problem, sometime I have little or no connectivity.

Appcelerator - The start

I had a free workshop this morning that was promoting a couple of open source products. The first was a relatively new AJAX framework called appcelerator. I was impressed with the product enough to want to try it out. On top of that I think we've got a short term project that might be a good fit and a way to get some experience developing an RIA application.

I've now downloaded the SDK and installed it. First of all, the dev kit recommends that you install it as root. As a former SA I'm not really comfortable installing something that's not an official package from my linux distribution as root. However, it was able to install it to a directory off my home directory with a few minor hiccups. The nice thing is that it looks like ruby (never used it before) is able to download/update packages on its own.

So now that it's installed I've headed over to the doc section of the site to go through the getting started guide. Here's one of the most frustrating parts that I've run across so far. In order to run the project creation app, you're required to have an Appcelerator Developer Network login. I had to wait for an email confirmation before I could even continue the getting started project. I understand that appcelerator is a for profit company and they want to be able to try and sell their support services to people using their product, but don't force a user to login to your developer network just to start creating an application. That's rediculous. That's almost like if someone sold me a set of colored pencils that I couldn't actually draw with until I called and activated them.

Still hopeful that this framework is at least most of what I hope it will be. More to come.

Apple Picking

After digging thruogh some of the pics from our apple picking trip on Sunday I figured I'd post a handful of my favorite pics...

 

 

 

Heroes - WTF!

So the wife and I watched the first episode of the new Heroes season last night. If you intend on watching it and haven't yet, stop here!

After our viewing of the 2 hour season premier there were a few things that stuck out in my mind. The first was confusion. My wife and I both had a hard time remembering last season's finale which was quite a problem since there were no little reminder hints during the show. I spent more time then should be necessary trying to rummage through my mental archive of last season trying to remember key points about the characters. Needless to say it was a bit distracting.

On top of confusion, I pity anyone with a weak stomach that might have been eating during the show. There was way too much blood, guts, and violence. Just a quick FYI, I enjoy the occasional horror/action flick so violence doesn't really bother me that much. With that said, the first episode of Heroes was just too much. The scene with Syler picking Claire's brain was once such scene. The gore in this scene was just not needed. I actually went to check what the show was rated at one point.

The last thing that I noticed is that by the end of the show I didn't really care much about any of the characters. It could be that it's been so long since the last episode, but there isn't a single character I felt more then a little emotionaly attached to. If any one of them died it wouldn't phase me a bit.

At this point I just hope that the whole season is not like this or I just might have found some excuses to stop watching yet another show.