Classically, when I was confronted with a new language, one of the things I'd inevitably write was a Fractal drawing program. I've written programs to draw the Mandelbrot set in languages from C++, to VB, to Excel Macros, amongst many others.

Michelle recently got a T-Mobile G1 phone. One of the compelling things for this phone, for me, is the supposed ease of development for the platform.

I come from a Windows development world, centered on Visual Studio, so I expected to be a bit of a fish out of water trying to develop for a Java platform in Eclipse. What I didn't expect, however, was the alpha nature of the tools. In just writing the standard "Hello, World" style application, I had to issue arcane command line commands, deal with dialogs that spit up error messages telling me I needed to fill them out before I opened them, and dialogs with no fewer than four progress bars going at once.

I need to find an Eclipse for Visual Studio Dummies book, and reset all of my expectations on how an IDE should work. Either that, or figure out how to develop for Android in Visual Studio.

Well, I've survived my trip to Beijing and back again. In the coming days I'll get some of the pictures I took online, but for now, I'm just trying to recover from the jetlag, so you won't see much from me for a bit.

I'm safe and sound in Beijing. I have a rather busy week ahead of me, so I'm not sure I'll get to do much in the way of touristy things, sadly

And the trip to Beijing is back on. Tell you what, it's probably just better to wait till I get back to find out when I'm going.