Author: Andrew Huey

ASP.NET MVC

I went to the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter event in NYC on Saturday. It was an all-day (9-5) event with several speakers talking about various aspects of the MVC framework, and some associated topics. Nearly everything that was covered was new to me. I’m somewhat familiar with the idea of the MVC design pattern, and I’ve played around with SubSonic a bit, but I hadn’t really read much of anything about ASP.NET MVC specifically. I feel like I’m pretty far behind the times, given that most of the stuff I do in work right now is still in ASP.NET 1.1.

I still need to learn LINQ too. I haven’t really had time to sit down and play with that yet either.

Microsoft stuff

I went to a Microsoft Heroes Happen Here event today in Edison. I had registered for the NYC event that happened about a month ago, but things came up at work, and I couldn’t make it. Stuff came up at work today too, so I had to skip the developer stuff in the afternoon. The morning track basically covered Windows 2008. It was pretty interesting, and I did learn some new stuff. They gave out a software bundle that included Vista Ultimate, VS.NET 2008, and a few other things. Honestly, the bundle o’ stuff is one of the main reasons I went to this event.

I’ve put off installing Vista on my main desktop machine at home, for a variety of reasons. Now that I have a free copy of Vista Ultimate with SP1, though, I decided to give it a shot. I’m not doing an upgrade install, though. I’m still afraid to try that. Instead, I’m wiping out my Ubuntu install, and putting Vista on my second drive. I’ll have XP on my 250 GB main drive, and Vista on my 100 GB secondary drive. I’m hoping that dual-boot between XP and Vista works out OK. I’m running the install right now; it’s been going for about 20 minutes. I think it’s almost done.

I also registered for the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter event in NYC that’s coming up this weekend. It’s always a little hard to talk myself into spending a whole day indoors on a sunny Saturday, in a Microsoft office, but I really need to keep up with some of this stuff. And I think it’ll be kind of fun.

NY TImes: Comics

In today’s NY Times Book Review section, John Hodgman takes a look at some great comics, including Kirby’s Fourth World stuff, Eric Shanower’s “Age of Bronze” and Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s “Y: The Last Man.” It’s great to see stuff like this getting covered in the Times, and Hodgman does a good job of summarizing this stuff for a general audience, without dumbing it down or over-generalizing or sensationalizing it.

RiffTrax Live in SD

The RiffTrax guys will be doing a live event during the San Diego con this year, riffing on Plan 9 From Outer Space, at the Balboa Theater. This would likely be quite fun, though it’s on Saturday night, and there’s going to be a lot of other stuff happening on Saturday night. Of course, since this is a ticketed, off-site, event, this might be a good way to escape the craziness of the convention center for a little while.

WSJ.com – Opinion: The Digital Future of Books

Interesting article about the relationship between our devices and our attention spans. The author quotes Jeff Bezos, who hopes the “Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention.” I guess we shouldn’t expect a Twitter client to be built into the Kindle any time soon!

oops – follow-up

Well, my domain did fall off the internet for a couple of days. It’s back now. I need to remember to renew the domain early next time. That’ll be May 2010.

I’ve got a cold right now, so I’m not feeling real lucid. I took today off, and I might wind up taking tomorrow off too. I just feel really bad. Hopefully, a couple of days of rest (and Stargate SG-1 DVD watching) will help.

summer stuff

Is it time to start thinking about summer concerts yet? I just took at look at the Central Park SummerStage and River To River pages. Someone mentioned to me today that Sonic Youth are playing on July 4th as part of River to River. That sounds good, but will probably be pretty crowded. I see Vampire Weekend on the SummerStage schedule on June 14, and Junot Diaz doing a reading on July 17. I’m curious as to how a reading would work at the SummerStage venue. It just doesn’t seem like the kind of space that would work well for something like that. It might be interesting to go to, if only to see if it works.