I’m fat and happy this morning. It’s beautiful outside (Weather.com says “Abundant sunshine. High 81F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.“), I’m at home (not on the road), and it’s U.S. Open week. I’ll have the Open playing in the background while I work today. I might even take a midday break and fly my Corsair.
My big task today is to finish August’s Wicked Code column, which is due Monday, or at least to get it as close to finished as possible. The subject of the column is asynchronous pages in ASP.NET 2.0. Async pages are easy to build in version 2.0, but as of beta 2, there is next to no documentation on the subject. Dmitry Robsman, the ASP.NET team member responsible for the new async features in 2.0, was kind enough to answer a few questions for me and deepen my understanding of what goes on under the hood. I have all the sample code written, so now it’s just a matter of writing a few thousand words of text around the samples. Writing is easy when you have an exciting subject to talk about and abundant samples to serve as a guide. Should be fun.
I meant to mention this sooner (been a busy week), but I did fly my jet this past Sunday. Talk about a head rush; it was right up there with the very first time I flew an R/C plane. The F-18 absolutely screams. I should mention that someone else did the take-offs and landings for me. I had the good fortune to meet David Payne, a world-class R/C pilot who lives not too far away in Chattanooga, TN. He’s been flying jets for years, and he took me under his wing to introduce me to the nuances of ducted fans. He handled the take-offs and landings and stood by me while I took the sticks in the air. Good thing, too: there was a strong crosswind Sunday and I’m not sure I could have gotten the jet down in one piece. Landing a jet is different than landing a plane and it requires a technique that’s new to me. I’m going to get a few more lessons from David before attempting to solo. It’ll mean more trips to Chattanooga, but the investment should be well worth it.