Random things, Wordpress

Another fun entry in which I ruminate on various random crap! Also, I just installed the Wordpress 2.3 upgrade and want to make sure posting works properly.

Apple has announced that Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) will be available for purchase on October 26th. I’ve been using my MacBook more lately, so I plan to join the early adapter crowd and pick it up. I doubt I’ll do the Apple store on Friday night, but I’ll probably head up to Lyndhurst on Saturday to pick it up. Hopefully they still have some t-shirts to hand out or something.

Speaking of OS X… one thing that sometimes annoys me a bit about it is that it’s very mouse-oriented sometimes. For example, if you minimize a window to the dock, there’s no way to bring it back up short of mousing to it… or is there? I did a bit of digging and discovered that if you enable Universal Access, you can hit CTRL-F3 to highlight the dock, then navigate it using the arrow keys. It’s quite handy… I found a nice list of OS X shortcut keys here. I mention this here primarily for my future reference.

Work continues to go well, although it’s been insanely busy lately as I’ve been working on a bunch of customization stuff for one of our clients. The deadlines are pretty tight, which is a nice motivator, but it’s also a little stressful at times. I’ve been burned out pretty much every evening this week, and am hoping I can escape after lunch tomorrow to enjoy a nice afternoon off, as one of my good friends will be in town for my roomie’s 30th birthday party. He’s officially a broken-down old man.

I must say though… I’m becoming somewhat dissatisfied with C# and ASP.Net. Now, I used to work in Visual Basic.NET at my old job, and compared to that, C# has been wonderful… but I can’t shake the feeling that for a lot of applications, it’s just too heavyweight. Also, the page lifecycle is massive frustrating, especially when you’re using numerous user controls to reuse functionality. The one plus in that area is that they’ve announced a new System.Web.Mvc namespace that will apparently be quite similar to Castle Monorail. Still and all, though, ASP.net development has more overhead than I’d really like sometimes, and the compile step can be really annoying sometimes when it decides to bog down. Playing around with Ruby on Rails has spoiled me a bit, what with not needing to recompile.

Anyway, I think that hits all the major points…