My Thoughts on the Financial Crisis

This is a bit off topic from the computing subject, but we are living in a remarkable time in history right now. The financial markets are about to crash probably next week. Washington Mutual just folded today and I'm certain more will follow soon. In a way, I feel that these companies deserve to fail because they were imprudent and lacked integrity. My reaction at this point is to let the market do what it does for the next few weeks before any government intervention is introduced. I know that it will hurt business since the money supply will be tight for the foreseeable future, but that's the cost of these times. The markets will eventually work themselves out without intervention from the Bush Administration, although it may be quite painful. I don't believe the role of government should be insurance for failing banks. Perhaps at the end of this mess, common sense and integrity will return to the business of banking. Well, I'm not much of a banker, and perhaps I'm all wet, but that's the way I see it.

First Blog Ever!!

Hello everyone: This is my first ever blog, hard to believe since I work in the technology field. I guess I've just been too busy writing code. Well, now that the market has slowed some, I have time to write a blog! At the risk of sounding like a dating summary, here's some information about me.

I live in Milwaukee, WI and work in the IT line of work as a C# or VB developer. Most of my days are spent at home writing code for my clients. I enjoy writing code and helping others solve a particular problem with their computer.

My hobbies include reading, playing the violin, bicycle riding, working on the house and sometimes, very rarely, due to money, I pilot small aircraft such as a Cessna 172.

I have a strong faith and honesty and integrity are important to me. I strive to give my clients good value and provide straight answers to their questions.

I read a lot of books just to keep up in this crazy work environment. One of the books I'm going through now is called asp.net unleashed 3.5 and it's a massive book that weighs a lot. When I'm through, I plan to use it as a boat anchor, since by the time I finish it, something new will have arrived. I find when I'm reading it's not enough to just read, so I started my own website http://www.csharpsolutions.net.  I can run through the examples in the book on a real working environment. It's much easier to retain knowledge in my humble opinion, when you actually write the code and play around with it. The website is hosted at home in my garage and is on a Vista based PC, (Dual Core AMD processors 3500+ for you techies).

All of my website code is written using Microsoft ASP .NET version 3.5 framework and Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio and the .NET framwork has made leaps in usability and functionality and is much more feature rich than previous versions. Previously, most of my html scripting was done with Dreamweaver and then the coding done in Visual Studio. Now that VS2008 has html scripting and smart code features, I prefer to use only VS2008. I firmly believe there is no other comparable development environment out there for writing business applications. 

To host my site at home, I use a third party name hosting service called ZoneEdit to redirect my assigned Time Warner IP Address to the URL. It's very handy to host the site at home, but it's probably not a good solution for business app hosting since Time Warner limits the upload bandwidth.

Well, thanks for reading my blog. I plan to write reviews on books I've read as well as submitting code examples and techniques I use to solve a particular problem.