Time flies

Time for some update. It has been almost a month since we arrived. So much to tell, so little time.

The house is nice. And big. The living room has more furniture in it than the one at home. Nevertheless it is so huge, that we could easily fit in a table-tennis table, a pool table, a table-football table and still have a dancefloor for 20 people in the corner! Actually it feels a bit empty, to tell the truth. We could use some more stuff. To make it less empty hangar-like. We've had to borrow a lot of things, especially for the kitchen: cutlery, pots and pans, etc., etc..


My father has been living with us most of the time. It's confusing for him. He keeps wandering from one house to the other: ours, my sister's and his own, which is empty most of the time. He doesn't like to be alone at home. My mother is still at the hospital, although lately her situation has improved a lot. She's started to come home in the weekends. A step in the right direction, although the weekends become rather stressful for the two old people - they tend to raise each other's level of stress.

I started working the day after arriving. I've spent most of the time on getting acquainted with the technology that I will be working with: M$ Visual Studio .NET for developing in C#. Enemy territory indeed for someone in love with Java and religiously anti-monopoly like me! I haven't changed my mind a bit, but I must say that the package is appealing. They really have created a framework and a toolset that is appealing for developing web-based solutions. Damn! And it is hard not to be grateful for the documentation and tons of splendid tutorial videos. I have started on some proper work lately, though, and realized - again - that the cool wizard-like tools have a dark side as well: it's hard to get at the code behind the visual representation. Inevitably, on real-life projects you need to do something beyond the one-size-fits-all problems that the wizard can solve in five seconds.





A picture can lie better than a thousand words.


The weather? Look at these photos. What do you think? And by the way: I'm sitting on the balcony and writing these words, enjoying the sun and wishing for a display with more contrast. It's really true! You thought that it was all rain and fog, that we had to stay indoors every day and eventually catch a cold? Well, look at the pictures!