One of the fun things about marrying an Iranian woman is that you get to go to all sorts of new festivals. No, I didn't spend Sizdah Bedar in Vasona Park yesterday (it's tradition for all Iranians to celebrate that day by going to a local park. Most, like this guy, go to Vasona. We went to Memorial park in Cupertino instead. No crowds and I got to relive my childhood (I was there on the day they opened that park in the 1970s).

Hey, I notice a few friends are trying to corner the market on my shares on BlogShare. Isn't that speculative insider trading? Hey, if I told everyone that my stock would go up over the next week or two, would that make it go up? Well, consider yourselves disclosed -- I'm bullish on my own stock and plan on buying in soon. On the other hand, it didn't work for Martha Stewart. Consider yourself warned.

Heh, I am getting quite a few IM's from friends who say "I didn't have any clue you weren't a programmer." My friend Robert Lantry, who wrote quite a few of the things that run on the Tablet, said "you're the best non-programmer programmer I've ever known."

Another friend asked me "so, what will you build?" That's an excellent question and might be one reason I've never gotten the motivation to go all the way yet. I ultimately want to build a utility to turn all my Outlook email into an RSS feed. Boy, wouldn't you all like to be bored 24-hours-a-day with questions like "where can I buy the NEC tablet?"

Richard Weber takes me to task for believing that .NET is only for Windows. Good point!

Now a few other friends are saying "so what about the licensing agreement at Pressplay?" You get unlimited downloads and stuff for $9.95 a month and it's a great service, they say. I agree, which is why they got my $9.95 this month.

If I ever need a tool to help me do .NET stuff, here's the big list of .NET tools. Thanks to Sean and Scott for that link.

Kevin Marks told me today:

I don't want you locked in the trunk as Dave & Joel put it.

Have a look at Runtime Revolution - english language scripting with GUI tools (based on HyperTalk - the most readable language on earth). It runs on Mac & Windows, and builds runtimes for Mac, Windows & various Unixes - free trial download:

http://runrev.com

Then there's always Python - see Marks 'Dive Into Python' or this beginners guide:

http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/

My comment? Great advice, except there are some very specific reasons why I want to learn .NET. Those will become clear to you over the next few years. Remember how I was talking about "technology waves?" Well, you gotta decide which wave to surf. I've decided to go .NET. Your wave may vary in height.

The programming advice continues flowing in. Here's some from James Roberts:

I’ve been writing code for over 20 years. I normally write in 3 languages on any given day. All I know about programming is self taught.

I’m thinking that you might be better served by starting with plain old C. Starting out in a RAD environment may be more confusing because you’re thinking more about forms and properties. You need to get the basics of programming down before you work with more esoteric things. Remember that the Forms etc is only the UI part of building an application. The C language is close enough in structure to C# to be transferable.

There are only a six things you do in programming.

Storage - Declaring space to store values

Assignment – storing a value

Comparison – comparing values

Arithmetic – manipulating values

Reiteration - looping through a list of values

Presentation – displaying values.

You will notice that the word values come up in each of the processes. Think in terms of data and what you need to do with it.

Remember two things.

Keep it simple. Every line of code you write is a potential bug.

As far as algorithms go, start with a simple one maybe converting temperatures.

jr noded.blogspot.com

[Scoble is], to use his own words, lit, says Ronald Pihlgren. Heh, another one of my friends suggested doing an "Am I Lit or Not?" website. Or, a "LitRoll" of people I think are "lit."

John Walkenbush takes me to task for recommending PressPlay.