Life Goes On

So I’m back from Utah.  Quite a trip.  I left New Jersey Monday morning at ~7:00AM EST and touched down in Utah ~11:00AM MT.  It only dawned on me when I got into the office there that it was quite a morning commute 🙂

Some of the highlights and commentary from the week that was (in random bulleted list format):

• Brad, our CEO, cooked for all of us one night at his house.  Made some very delish fresh baked bread, pasta, and jumbo tiger shrimp from Costco (I’m gonna have to go pick some up one of these days too).  I remarked to my wife that the square footage of his kitchen is larger than the footprint of our townhouse.
• I have a distaste for American cars.  Numb steering feel has to be my number one complaint.  The Cobalt just feels terrrrible with regards to steering feedback.
• Wow.  I was able to convince everyone on the team to use Subversion and Trac.  Amazing.  So I spent most of Thursday night setting up Subversion over Apache and also setting up Trac as well.  Took me roughly 6 hours :-S…and I’m still not 100% done.  But I’m excited.  I’ve just had terrible experiences with VSS.  It had gotten to the point where I was doing a daily .zip backup of my local files to an external HD since I didn’t trust the VSS repository.  It’s also great that it runs over HTTPS; much easier to bring new team members on board and we don’t have to worry about licensing.
• We also decided to go with .Net 2.0 and VS2005 for all new development.  Woohoo!
• Brad is quite excited about Trac.  I’m slightly concerned that he’s going to go crazy making tickets.

Now some not so random stuff.

It took me exactly 12 hours to get from Salt Lake back to New Jersey.  My return flight was supposed to stop over in Cincy, but because of thunder storms, we were diverted to Chicago.  Very scary stuff.  The pilot was trying to squeeze into a small window in the storms to see if we could get in there, but seconds later, came back on and let us know that we were running out of fuel.  We had to touch down in Chicago to pick up more fuel.  All was well, but I missed my connecting flight out of Cincy once I got into there.  So had to settle for a later flight :-S

I don’t think I’ve ever really been afraid of flying since I’ve been flying around since I was a toddler.  But for a brief moment, a deep sense of grief and fear overcame me as we were in the sky, being battered by the turbulence and hearing the pilot tell us that we were running out of fuel.

Aside from the return flight, it was a good trip.  I think we really had a better sense of team this time around and it’ll be good to have Brad around now since it gives a better sense of purpose and clearer direction.

I also finished the NHibernate documentation on the return flight.  Very good stuff.  After reading it, all of the stuff that I was struggling with the first two times around made much more sense.  NHibernate is perhaps too flexible and powerful for its own good; it offers so many alternatives to get at the persisted objects, that it really takes a lot of practice and study to figure out the use cases for each of the different access methods.

The only part of the documentation that I was really disappointed with was the tools portion; it was pulled directly from the Hibernate documentation and still referenced Java command line instructions and what not, which is obviously disappointing since it raises the question of where else the documentation could be wrong with respects to differences in Hibernate and NHibernate implementation and syntax.

NHibernate, at this stage, does almost everything that DLINQ does (from the early documentation that I’ve covered) with respect to ORM with the obvious exception of language integration (they’d have to write a custom compiler or comipler extension to get that).