I lived in Illinois for 41 years. Moving from Illinois to Texas was one of the hardest things I’ve done. But it was the right decision. I’ve now been living in Texas for almost 5 months. We caught the end of the hot summer and are now in the mild winter. I thought I’d write a bit to share our impressions of life in Dallas.

The iPad is a natural device for kids to play with and learn from. Due to my occupation as an iOS software developer, we always have extra hardware and so my sons have both had their own iPads since roughly 18 months of age. Their iPads are the heavier first-generation iPads with the relatively thick aluminum case. To this date, both iPads have survived intact with rigorous daily use and frequent abuse.

From TechCrunch this morning: It’s a time when startups are competing against Google and Facebook offers of $150,000 in base salary for fresh computer science graduates. That’s for the n00bs. Consultants and designers are getting $150 - $225 an hour. It’s a good time to be in tech.

Saw this article recently. Computer Science-related jobs are doing well with Software Engineer as the #1 job, Computer Systems Analyst as #9, and Web Developer as #15. Healthcare and wellness-related jobs dominate the top 20 with: #4 Dental Hygienist #6 Audiologist #7 Occupational Therapist #11 Speech Pathologist #12 Optometrist #13 Physical Therapist #14 Pharmacist #17 Dietitian and #19 Chiropractor And good news if you like math as Actuary is #2, Mathematician #10, and Statistician at #18.

I recently wrote a post on my old blog about my predictions for “the new iPad” that was released in March. Let’s look and see how accurate my predictions were: New Retina display. Completely correct, down to the resolution. Pretty much a no-brainer. Faster processor but not the A6. Also correct. Instead of an A6, Apple went with a new version of the A5 with a faster GPU. 1080p video / iPhone 4S camera.

I am now using a lovely plugin which will automatically create a tweet whenever I publish something here.

Last year I deprecated my old ForkBender “brand” in favor of aggregating everything under CharlesSieg.com. However, I had a lot of great posts on the old blog and have just finished importing them into this new blog. Unfortunately, it looks like I will need to go through and reorganize a few items and clean things up a bit.

For the past year (maybe longer?) my blog has been hosted on Posterous. It’s still there at http://charlessieg.posterous.com. However, Posterous was recently acquired by Twitter and I suspect their days of focused blog hosting are coming to a close. Thus, I have moved my blog back to WordPress, hosted at Rackspace, and am looking forward to doing more writing soon. When I have time, I’ll look into porting the content I created on the old site over to this new site.

Alinea Wine

Choose Your Own Adventure books dissected