I am the Burgerfan!

When we go on vacation, we tend to look for an apartment rental instead of booking a hotel. This has several benefits:

We spent some time in Buenos Aires this month. When I was looking at apartment rentals, there were some nice looking places, each with their own charm. It can be a little overwhelming trying to narrow down a search, but one place had caught my attention right from the first impression. It even has a name that draws you in: the Carlos Calvo Experience.

Named after the street it is located on, this apartment is in the San Telmo neighbourhood, the older and more endearing area of the city. It is on a quiet street, and all of San Telmo’s interesting sights are within a couple blocks. This was a treat — had we stayed in Recoleta, we night have taken a bus or taxi into the area once or twice, and missed out on all of the colourful hand-painted signs, the eye-catching balconies and door-fronts, the markets, and the local eateries that served as our daily backdrop!

The apartment was amazing. Equally as amazing was our apartment manager, Ruben, who was accessible the duration of our stay for local advice and information, as well as tour recommendations. On our first day, he gave us the low-down on places of interest near the apartment, explained the bus system as well as routes of interest, and gave us a right and proper tour around the Recoleta area, including the Floralis Genérica and the Recoleta Cemetery, providing interesting background details. He provided more information about Buenos Aires and its history than we got on some tours we went on during the trip!

If you find yourself in Buenos Aires, definitely look into the Carlos Calvo Experience.

Working through the tutorial I stopped at last time, I got an Edit Box and a button in place. When pressed, the button runs code that shows the contents of the Edit Box. I took it an extra step and figured out how to center the text. Here is my masterpiece:

It looks like a lot of the UI can be developed using XML. This feels similar to XAML in WPF. I’ll have to start reading more about what controls are available, and how they function. For now though, I’ll continue following the training materials.

Its fun to work on side projects. Even if they aren’t seen to completion, I find the sense of discovery or progress (depending on the project and its intended goal) made along the way satisfying.

Having carried around a Nexus 7 tablet for a while, I’ve decided I’d like to know what basic Android development is like. I’ve been playing a fair bit of Minecraft lately, and I figure I should spend some of that time trying doing something a little more productive.

As long as I remember to, I figure I’ll write about this side project for as long as it holds my interest. We’ll see how it goes.

This session’s goal was getting set up. Here we have the steps to get the SDK installed. The installer is a clean, straightforward process, and the SDK Manager seems to have a nice Package Management system.

Since it is recommended, I am going to try developing in Eclipse. My only previous experience with Eclipse was in a previous side project where I tried to develop an HP TouchPad application, and I did not enjoy using Eclipse. Since some of the Android walkthrough references this IDE, I will try it again in the hopes I will get a little more comfortable with it.

Everything seems to be installed and ready for development now. Time to start the tutorial…

For not knowing what we were doing, this seems to have gone well. We’re almost done, with some finessing on the final row, and later on, some baseboards and transition strip.

Here is a freeze-frame series:

I’m in the process of moving my web hosting. I think I have moved my blog over successfully, but I won’t know until I see what breaks in the coming days. Consider this the ‘hello world’ posting.

I hadn’t realized the effort required in moving a multimedia journal around, complete with postings, photos, videos, and links to other people’s postings. I don’t want any of them to go missing. For that matter, I want things preserved right down to the date and time of each posting. But at some point you have to say ‘good enough’, and it is what it is.

This isn’t the first major move I made. A few years ago I moved my site from the now defunct Microsoft Spaces blogging platform into my own WordPress site on a linux web host. Now, I have moved to a different web host, and to a Microsoft package. Wish some luck to this site…

We just finished a photo shoot for our upcoming Christmas card. Soon we will apply some post processing magic.

If you’re lucky enough to receive one, its going to be legen… (wait for it!)