Reverse Culture Shock?

In 10 days I’ll be standing where I haven’t stood for the last 2 1/2 years… My former home Arkansas USA.  Hard for me to even imagine how I’m going to be feeling. I don’t know if I miss it or loathe it or what.

I just know that I’m going to be there and I have this eerie feeling in my gut that after all the nostalgia, I’m going to be let down.  When I first came to Berlin I suffered somewhat badly from culture shock.

Hated every one and everything. Now after 2 1/2 years it’s starting to really feel like my home and I have only my in-laws to thank for that. They have done nothing but bend over backwards for Steffi and me and even regard me as their own child. *tear* My father-in-law is probably the most generous man that I know. He has a really big heart and over time he’s made himself a niche in the corner of mine. My mother-in-law has also taken a liken to me. Since I started this school I really feel that their on the side lines rooting me own. Even if they don’t say it in so many words. That’s kind of the point, they speak to me with what they do and not with what they say. It’s a sort of quiet confidence that I have come to deeply respect from them. I guess I could even say that I love them. I like my sister in law also but haven’t had the chance to spend very much time with her. So as I prepare to go home for the first time in a long time it’s also at a point in my life that I realize that there’s a second family that loves me just as much as the first one and I feel really torn between the two.

Till next time

Tony

A Little about myself

I’ve never really blogged before or really gotten into the whole social web thing ever. However I decided to give it a try. My name is Anthony Franks.

I’m 27 and going to school to become a Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung, in english that’s IT Specialist for Application Development. I’ve had a lot of fun learning all that I have so far. I’m very determined to turn this oppurtunity into a career and not just a Job. In fact, often after school I’ll continue learning somtimes even till bedtime, which makes for a long day .

I’ve explored quite a few different areas of programming and program development for example with the .NET framework I’ve created a compound Interest Calculator that solves for all variables in the Compound Interest Formula. That program was in C++. Also in C# I developed a guess a number game with Exception handeling and touch screen optimised user controls for my Samsung Omnia i900 Cell phone. That one was a lot of fun. I would even possibly enjoy continuing in the direction of Cell Phone Application development. I’ve toyed around with Direct X using C++ and created a 3 Colored triangle and binded three Keys, two for camera control and one to exit the program.

At the end of the C++ phase at my school I had to develop a program that basically worked as a database for leases. The most difficult part of that program was that when a lease was ended that a bill had to be display in order to be able to calculate the amount to be paid I had to first compare the beginning and ending dates to make sure that they made logical sense. Meaning that if I leased a car today then I can’t return the car yesterday . After that I had to subtract the one date from the other. Which is easier said than done. We had to use pure ANSI C++ with no additional libraries which means it was almost like C programming. Except for the Classes ofcourse . Anyways it took me over a hundred lines of code just to subtract the one dat from the other, most of this is because my date consisted of three variables, one for year, for month and for day and since I didn’t know anything at the time about using a reference date to turn my date into milliseconds I ended up having to do it the hardway.

Currently I’m learning Java in school which has also been a lot of fun. On my own I’ve been learing about Test Driven Development and I’m learning to really love my Eclipse IDE. Other than eclipse I use Visual Studio 2008. Back to eclipse I really love the “ctrl + space” content assist. It’s super useful and also”ctrl + 1″ for quick fix.

Still not sure what direction I want to go as far as programming is concerned. I really like the complexity of Direct X code with the Instant gratification  you gain as soon as you’ve compiled and “see” the results. I also like the idea of developing for Cell phones because for one thing the platform is constantly increasing in complexity and secondly it’d be cool to be able to ,via programming, control so many different devices in one compact package. I just think a person could really get creative with a platform like that. I’m still not certain about web. I honestly don’t know much about web programming and what that would be like.

At any rate I have to start looking for an Internship in german Praktikum soon. I’m quite concerned that I’m gonna get stuck serving coffee and not programming. That would be such a waste of time.

Till next time

Tony