I thought I would start a series of posts titled “Living in Gilbert Arizona” that would chronicle our time living in the fastest growest town in the United States.

We moved here because it was a place where family lived and it was affordable. Now, however, the home prices have risen so much that I’m not sure we could afford to move here today. Nonetheless, it is a great place to live if you have small kids. It does have a bit of that suburban voodoo feel to it, where everyone’s the same and you just know that there are some Desperate Housewives’ stories going on around you.

We live in a new development called the Spectrum at Val Vista. I just came across this site (UPDATE: sorry, no longer available) detailing a new upscale retail and restaurant area called Main Street Commons. It supposed to be the centerpiece of the Spectrum master community and is described as an “open-air, mixed-use urban district” that will provide “upscale national and local retailers, dining and entertainment all within an inviting streetscape that focuses on pedestrian-friendly walkways and unique architecture.”

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Its the day after the Thanksgiving weekend. We had a wonderful time with friends that came out from California.

A family member here in Arizona has a cousin in Georgia who’s been through a horrible auto accident and is miraculously recovering. She has a long way to go but to call her recovery a miracle is almost not enough. Its simply amazing; you can read about Shea here.

To see the tragedy and the miraculous happen all in the same person has really impacted me as a Christian and shown the reality of God’s sovereignty in a real and practical way.

For the past several months, I’ve been thinking alot of seasons in one’s life. There are good times and bad times. There are hardly ever mediocre times, probably because we think of those times when bad things aren’t happening as good times.

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Where to start? So many things learned, so many new contacts made.

My time at Macromedia MAX was a very exciting time in terms of career goals. So many times I have wished that I would have learned a technology earlier. Take, for instance, Java. I remember in college when it was this new language that was going to revolutionize the internet. After going through the pain-staking ordeal of creating an applet that said “Hello World!”, I moved onto other things. Now, I wonder what my resume would have looked like with 8+ years of Java experience and I’m just barely holding my head above water to understand all the lingo and peripheral issues around Java (not to mention the language itself). Oh, well … now there is Flex and the Rich Internet Application.

I feel like I’m getting into this revolution early enough to be on board for something special, something that will take me places. I’ve worked a bit with Ajax and understand that enough. But, what’s really going to change things is not one single techology. Its a change in how we use the web browser. Now that we all have a practical understanding of the browser and how to use “web pages” (the document), the next step will be to actually use the web as a platform (application). But, again, this isn’t about Flex, or Ajax, or some other rich internet platform, its about the web platform becoming a part of our daily work flow.

The folks at O’Reilly have used the term Web 2.0. Yet, the term “Web 2.0″ has been used in so many different ways I don’t really know what it means. Wasn’t the move to database-driven web sites termed “Web 2.0″ back in 1999?

Anyways, I’m ready for the revolution, thanks to my new friends at Macromedia Consulting and the Macromedia MAX conference.

Its about the end of the day. I’m in Anaheim (my birthplace, by the way) for Macromedia MAX 2005. Its been a very cool conference for the first day and perhaps the biggest developer conference I’ve ever seen.

My early session was Flex Frameworks by Stephen Webster and Alistair McLeod. I’ve looked into Cairngorm before and, since my experience with J2EE was limited, I found myself trudging through all the MVC layers. I wish I could have seen this talk about 6 months ago as it was a breathe of fresh air. It helped me to see what goes where and how easy it is to add functionality to an application.

The next session was Architecting Flex Applications by Matt Chotin. This was a little rehash of the earlier session but it did include some useful new information. The preview of states and messaging in Flex 2 was especially interesting.

The General Session was a series of cool demonstrations and upcoming features in Flash and Flex. From my vantage point (as a Flex coder who is designing a front-end to a BI tool) the best was a demonstration of the NetWeaver component called Visual Composer from SAP. One of my complaints about BI tool vendors has been their lack of a quality web front end. Microstrategy, Cognos, SAS, and others have high-quality tools for drilling and disecting data, but their web tools are usually ugly looking DHTML messes. SAP has figured out how to take an interface that interacts with a UML-type object data model and then generate a Flash-based front end (via Flex). It’s elegant and it’s user-friendly.

More tomorrow.

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is turning out to be one of my favorite books. In a way that I wouldn’t have thought possible, Gaiman characterizes American culture by its gods. Here is the full editorial review by Therese Littleton:

American Gods is Neil Gaiman’s best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn’t sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he’s been delivering since his Sandman days. Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow’s dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost–the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book. Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow’s road story is the heart of the novel, and it’s here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book–the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. “This is a bad land for Gods,” says Shadow. More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country–our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what’s real and what’s not. –Therese Littleton

Here are my current favorite albums:

Joy Zipper - The Heartlight Set

I’m sure I am not the first to make the comparison between the duo of Vinny and Tabitha from Joy Zipper with the brains behind Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. You can’t help but notice the influence. Yet, this is original music that is much more popier than Sonic Youth. It also reminds me of Echobelly and Lush. This album includes the song Go Tell the World that’s featured in the new Nike Soccer commercial which begins with a typical American sports DJ putting down soccer and explaining why no body cares about it in the US. The commercial then goes onto show many different places in America where soccer is being played and ends with the US National Team scoring against England in front of a packed crowd. Very cool. You can’t help but sing out loud to “Go tell the World! We’ve been here for too long.” The rest of the album is not as rowdy but the musical range this band has is amazing. I hear hints of My Bloody Valentine, The Breeders and The Velvet Underground. Also, this album is an import and you can’t get it through iTunes in the US. I got it from CDZone in the UK.

Ivy - Realistic

Originally released in 1994, Unfiltered Records re-released it in 2003. I had heard some of their newer stuff and really liked it. On iTunes, they had this available and I’m always interested in how a band develops over the years so I thought I’d start with this one. This is pop music to the core. Very shiny. Very happy. It’s not that I’m in a tremendously happy mood, just that this is the type of music I’m listening to these days.

Sloan - A Sides Win: Singles 1992-2005

This Canadian band has been around for a long time. Hence, the singles album. They will at first remind you of the Beatles, except that the more you listen to them, the more they don’t sound like the Beatles (if you know what I mean). This is a power pop band with, at times, some heavy guitar work. If you don’t know what that means then listen to Cheap Trick first and you’ll notice (1) how much better than Cheap Trick they are, and, more importantly, (2) where the catchy hooks and melodies come from. I love to listen to this after work, it puts me in a good mood.

A busy project at work has taken me to San Francisco three times in the last two months. Each time has been for a week. We’ve been working with some folks in Macromedia Consulting to build the next version of one of our applications in Flex.

A couple of things about this process have been very new and rewarding. The Macromedia folks are user experience experts. Its been good to see the process of learning how our clients use our application, understanding how it might be extended to incorporate it more fully into their workflow, and to see how design is instrumental to usability. I am amazed at how fun the process has been.

We’ve had usability tests and designed prototypes, proof - of - concepts, and put out more documentation than I’ve ever seen in any project. And we aren’t even to the development phase yet!

And finally, programming has become fun again. Doing things in ActionScript is so easy, I’m enjoying the Java (at long last) that makes up the server-side middle tier, and designing GUIs in mxml is just plain fun.

As far as the trips are concerned, I’ve put up two sets of pictures in the photos section: Tiburon, September 25 and San Francisco 2005. Enjoy.

I sure hope that Yale Economist Robert J. Shiller’s predictions in this NY Times article about our current housing situation in the United States doesn’t come true. We are in the process of refinancing our home since I want to get out of our adjustable rate mortgage while interest rates are still relatively low. We could sell our one-year old home for almost double what we bought it for. It does make you wonder though. The professor’s predictions are based upon a method - the Schiller Index - that incorporates “the actual financial return that houses produce for their owners”, rather than on the relative value based on what other houses around you are selling for.

I recently read Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street (highly recommended, by the way) and the author makes mention of how, historically, the relative value of company stock was such a hard concept to grasp. Two factors give me solace that the Shiller Index has more to do with “what my house is really worth” in some objective sense and not what its going to be worth in the current housing market. Those two factors are (1) the amount of people flocking to the Phoenix area and (2) the amount of empty space we still have here. The fact that they can’t build into that space fast enough for the demand also helps to drive up the value. The first factor may become a non-factor if interest rates or inflation rise but I don’t think its going to happen for some time.

But then, if the market ever does collapse by 40% (as Shilling predicts), I can move back to California and afford a house.

Its been four weeks since I’ve been home and in the office working. Seems like forever.

We got to spend some time in Ohio visiting family and friends from mid-July to about mid-August. The kids had a great time playing with their cousins. I’ve posted several pictures including my favorite one.

No sooner than we returned, I took off for San Francisco, where we (the other we, the work folks) are working with Macromedia — more on that later.

One of the things you hear about living in Arizona, where it gets really hot in the summer, is that its a dry heat. And, that’s supposed to make the daily high of 115 degrees more bearable. But, what they don’t tell you about living “in an oven” during the summer is about monsoon season. Here in the desert, they get wind-dust-rain storms during the month of August - supposedly monsoons - usually at night time. Yet, instead of cooling the place down, it makes it quite humid. Just humid enough so that 115 degrees feels like 400.

So, its not really a dry heat.