Hoping things get back to normal...

For almost 8 days now, I have not posted a single answer on the newsgroups.  I haven't seen any of the questions on the microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.adonet in over a week because I haven't really had a chance to look at it.  I'm in complete withdrawal and hopefully things can get back to normal soon.  Moving just flat out sucks unless you have someone do it for you.  And it sucks proportionally to how many floors you have to move up/down, the temperature outside and all sort of other crap.  I was hoping to get a lot done and hang out with some friends back in Augusta this weekend, but EVERYTHING took longer than planned and while I raced around to do everything, I didn't get much done.  Move into the new APT on Wednesday so that should begin the process of getting things back to normal.

I started to play around with Visio this morning and realized I probably need to get a book on it.  Went to the bookstores to try to find some stuff on Visio as well as an advanced book on UML.  I guess I can hold my own on UML but I'm rusty right now.  Kind of irksome in light of the fact that I was a bad a33 in it back in college.  That really really really reinforced the value of learning stuff vs. memorizing things.  I bought Harry Lorrayne's Memory book before I entered grad school and got pretty darned good remembering stuff - and lots of stuff.  But that should go along WITH learning - never at the EXPENSE OF learning.  So I started having this itch of nostalgia for grad school and writing some old school C code.  Yep, that's C as in between A and B - no ++.  All I can say is boy did I start to feel spoiled.  Really spoiled.  Writing code in a memory managed environment really shields you from a lot of stuff.  Tons of stuff.  Just simple string concatenation is something that requires care.  And good old raw pointers.  Man it seems like years.  It became blindingly obvious just playing with some single string stuff  WHY XML processing is pretty slow lot's of the time.  But the part that really got me thinking is TYPE Safety.  I mean, you hear a lot about how .NET is inherently insecure and a lot of that Jazz.  One pass through Reflector is enough to scare a lot of people.  But the enhancements of type safety alone pay the price of admission to security. 

The whole thing leaves you feeling kind of wierd - on the one hand you feel like you need to go home so to speak and really think about what's happening under the covers.  On the other hand you remember what  an utter pain in the a33 that can be. Probably something I need to do once a month though just to refresh the old perpsective.