May 13, 2008
Well, I’m still working on my new blogs based on personal finance and technology. So far, I have about 20 posts planned out for the personal finance one, but I haven’t touched the technology one yet. I’ve been toying with writing my own blog engine for the technology one - not because there aren’t good blog engines out there, but more as a learning exercise (and it would use some of the newer .Net features that the other blog engines haven’t used yet). I’m not sure if I’m going to do that now or not…
I have maybe 3 personal finance posts written, but still need to proofread them before I make them public. My original plan was to not post anything on the personal finance site until I have about 14 posts ready to go so I can queue them up and start writing the next week or two worth of posts. That’s still my plan as of right now, but this is going to be harder than I imagined as far as keeping fresh content coming out. My target is to have one new article a day during the week. I just have to figure out a rhythm and then hopefully it’ll get easier, but I guess we’ll see.
I may go ahead and start the tech site as well with a series of posts about building a new blog engine. I’m not sure that I want to do that or not, but it may be useful and having feedback on the design as I go along would be helpful. Just have to find the time to do that too.
I’ve also been trying to get back into the habit of taking more photos and getting a little photoblog up and running, but I think that one is on the back burner for now. Just not enough time to do everything.
Posted in Life, Random 
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May 12, 2008
At the end of last month, I paid off my student loans - it was quite hard to write a $14,000 check, but once it was written, I didn’t regret it at all. It feels great knowing they are out of the way. The only debt I have left at this point (other than my primary mortgage) is a second mortgage I got when I bought my house (my down payment didn’t go as far as I had hoped due to closing costs, new house expenses, etc). This one is higher than my student loans ($18,000), but it’s possible that I can knock it out by the end of the year assuming no major financial issues arise between now and then. I may end up having to sell some stuff to make this happen, but we’ll see how that goes…I’m willing to do what is needed to take care of business.
This morning I sent in my monthly payment with a nice little $500 additional principle attached and I’m already starting to feel better. 
Debt free, here I come!
Posted in Life, Personal Finance No Comments »
May 10, 2008
I love Sci Fi Rewind - I haven’t had cable TV for two years now and the one show I wanted to watch, but couldn’t find legally online was Battlestar Galactica. Now Sci Fi finally has it online for free on Rewind. BSG may have been on there earlier, but I never found it until this season. The thing I really like about Rewind is the fact that the commercialsare short and the video automatically resumes once the commercials are over. I like ABC.com’s quality (particularly the HD feeds - really nice video), but I really dislike having to click the done button once the ad is over…I’m just fine with the ads, but please, show them and then get out of the way. I’m glad to see Sci Fi understands this.
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April 27, 2008
Wordpress 2.5 / New Theme
I just finished updating this blog to use the new Wordpress 2.5 engine. It’s really quite nice - everything on the admin side is much more refined that before. The upgrade process is amazingly simple - you just upload the new files, run upgrade.php, and in a minute or two (or longer if you have lots of posts) you’re ready to go. While I was doing the upgrade, I decide I would go ahead and update the theme as well. I liked the last theme, but I saw a new theme that looked a little better to me - so I just popped it in since I was already messing around with the site anyway. It is a bit more streamlined than the last one and more my style.
New Blogs
Over the last week or so, I’ve been planning out some topics that I want to blog about. I realize I haven’t been actively blogging for a while now, but part of that is because I can’t decide what I want to include on this blog. I’m always torn between putting all of my thoughts on this one blog or trying to keep them on different blogs so that each blog has a particular topic. The problem is that I would end up not posting at all. So, I have finally decided I’m going to dedicate time each week (and perhaps more often) to blogging in general and I have also decided I am creating more focused blogs going forward. At this point in time, I’m going to start maintaining three different blogs:
AdamByram.com
This blog will continue to be blog that is purely personal - more to communicate with friends and such than anything else. If I have a topic that I want to talk about that doesn’t fit into either of the two new blogs, it’ll end up here.
New Personal Finance Site
I’ll announce the name later once I finish getting things setup and get the initial content loaded, but I’m creating a new site focused on providing personal finance advice / observations for Generation Y. My generation has the opportunity to do great things, but I keep hearing (and seeing) how so many in this generation can’t (or don’t want) to manage money. To me, this is one of the most important things someone can learn. Money isn’t the key to happiness, but it’s one of those things what you need to understand and learn to use to help you achieve your dreams. So I’m hoping my new site will prove useful to people that want to start learning about personal finance, but don’t want to get bogged down in the technical details of it.
New Software Development Site
I’ll announce the URL for this once it’s up and running as well, but this will be the place that all of my software development related ideas will go. At the end of 2007, I started a new job at a software startup and I’ve had many experiences there that I’d like to blog about (as far as what works, what doesn’t, and things I’m learning about). I’ve wanted to do a blog like this for a long time, so we’ll see how it goes, but I think it’ll be fun.
I Tweet
I have also started using Twitter. I seems like a nice way to stay on top of the latest happenings, particularly in the software world. I don’t tweet non-stop or anything, but I try to tweet every now and then. I have my latest tweets in the sidebar of this blog and you’re welcome to follow me on Twitter if you’ve like - http://www.twitter.com/adambyram/.
That’s all for now - more updates to come.
Posted in Life, Random No Comments »
April 6, 2008
I just spent a few hours working on a small iPhone app using the Beta 2 iPhone SDK and thought I would share my my initial thoughts. Keep in mind that this is the first time I’ve tried programming for OS X period and I spend 99% of my time programming in C# with Microsoft’s Visual Studio.
Xcode itself is not even comparable to Visual Studio (I realize VS isn’t free, but even the free Express Editions are much, MUCH better than Xcode). I found out how to turn on the autocomplete functionality in Xcode, but it’s so unhelpful that I may turn it back off since it seems to get in the way more than it helps. I’m so accustomed to intellisense in VS - if you know nothing about a library, you can use intellisense to get up and running in a flash (usually), but not in Xcode. In Xcode, if you don’t know the frameworks you’re using in and out, prepare to be checking out Safari constantly. The whole Interface Builder application doesn’t really make sense to me yet, so I won’t really comment on it yet. The error messages from Xcode have been fairly useful so far, so that’s a good thing. The editor is decent in that it color codes syntax for you and it does have the ability to jump directly to specific functions from a menu (very similar to VS on this one).
Perhaps the bigger issue for people coming from a non-OS X background is the knowledge of all of the frameworks. It’s not nearly as expansive as the .NET framework, but it’s quite different - so you’re not going to be able to just pick up the frameworks and hit the ground running. The documentation on Apple’s dev center isn’t terrible…it takes a little bit to find what you need, but it’s usually there somewhere. The naming convention does make it pretty clear what you’re doing when calling a method, however, this is realllllllly irritating without intellisense. I’m still trying to figure out which classes do what and how to structure the View/Controllers in my application. The sample apps are really helping out there. It does seem like I have to write quite a bit of code for even fairly basic stuff. I just feel really unproductive at this point..I know that’s mostly the learning curve that I’m working through, but I would have thought Apple would have a better developer toolset in this day and age. I don’t think the Objective-C language will be that hard to pickup since it seems pretty logical once you get the syntax for methods and method calls. The frameworks are going to take some time and I’m sure things will still be changing between now and June, but hopefully I’ll get this stuff figured out soon so I can have my little app up and running in the simulator.
Posted in Geekery 1 Comment »
