Just Hanging Out

I’ve “gone dark” on my blog since coming to stay in Thousand Oaks about a month ago, primarily to focus on preparing to teach the Essential .Net 2 course for DevelopMentor. So far the prep has gone well and I’m past the half-way point. There are 14 lessons, and I’ve prepared technical notes, demos and a teaching outline for 8 out of the 14. I’ve also found time to practice-teach the lessons, so I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I’m also getting more into Linq and the next version of ADO.Net (vNext). I just set up a VPC and installed the latest bits. I hope to find time to play with it and put together a little info to present to the other at the DM “brains retreat” taking place Sept 7-8 in Toronto.

Today we’re supposed to reach 96 degrees Fahrenheit (35.5 Celsius) in Thousand Oaks, so we’ll likely take off for the beach, where it’ll only reach 87 degrees Fahrenheit (30.5 Celsius).

Just saw the movie World Trade Center, directed by Olive Stone. Great flick … two thumbs up from me. Some folks I know don’t like Oli and aren’t anxious to see it. But I thought it was very well directed with great performances, especially from Nicolas Cage. It’s based on actual events about two Port Authority police officers trapped under the rubble when the buildings collapsed. Pretty amazing how these guys survived that. What touched me most was how some ex-marines suited up and went down to ground zero, where they found these guys.

I’ve also been reading a book, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, which describes the latest cosmic discoveries theories in layman’s terms (as much as possible), including dark matter, dark energies and multiple universes. I’ll write more about this in a later post, but one interesting point is something called the Anthropic principle, which observes that certain physical laws seem to be fine tuned to support life, or rather that life would not be possible without these laws being just right. The conclusion is that these factors are what they are precisely because we are here to observe them. Does that offer proof of a divine creator? Some say yes, others theorize there are many universes out there with other physical laws, and ours just so happens to be one where the laws turn out by chance to support life.

The book has some amazing photos take by the Hubble Space Telescope of far away galaxies. What’s amazing, however, is that in a small patch of sky there are literally hundreds and thousands of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. It’s estimated that are 100 billion such galaxies. Some of the closest ones, like Andromeda, are 2-3 million light years away, while others are a few billion light years away. It’s mind-boggling.