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Bob's musings... (cc:world) OLDER PAGES        bob@jadn.com all.rss
Image - Saturday, 12 September 2009 Category: all 

I just like this image

Car Cast in the Market - Friday, 28 August 2009 Categories: all, android 

I finally took the plunge and put Car Cast in the Android Market. Whoo Hoo, the new phone books are here!! Car Cast is a BETA podcast downloader and player. Optimized for use in a daily commute, it features big buttons, large text, remembers last played location. Give it a try!!

New System? - Monday, 24 August 2009 Category: all 

I'm thinking of buying a new system to replace jadn.com (and/or for use in my consulting business). The image has the specs. Any comments?

Steamrolled by GOOGLE - Friday, 21 August 2009 Categories: all, android 

I've been working on my own podcast application, CarCast,... and just announced so has GOOGLE, http://listen.googlelabs.com/ Queue big and scary music!!! Yikes. I think my own feeble attempt might just be crushed....

Actually though, they do some things well, but some things I think CarCast does better.... The road has room enough for more than 1 type of car... So I'm going to continue tinkering on CarCast.

Microsoft suxs - Friday, 14 August 2009 Categories: all, opensource 

"Todd Finch, Dell senior product marketing manager, said the number of Linux returns are approximately the same as those for Windows netbooks. He categorized the matter of returns as a 'non-issue.' 'They are making something of nothing,' he said of Microsoft's claims."

Giving the Grails Console some recall - Monday, 13 July 2009 Categories: all, groovy 

The Grails Console is a handy way to try and tinker with stuff. If you switch back to your editor/IDE and change a domain or controller class, the console restarts. This is good, but it drops all the tinkering that you were doing. That can mean a loosing quite a bit of work.

At a coworkers suggestion, I tried modifying the Grails Console to save the current text during a restart. This is what I did and it works. Edit $GRAILS_HOME/scripts/console.groovy and replace the existing monitorCallback with this one

       monitorCallback = {
            def text = console.inputArea.text
            println "Exiting console"
            console.exit()
            println "Console had ---\n$text\n---"
            createConsole()
            println " Restarting console"
            console.run()
            // wait for inputArea to be constructed
            Thread.sleep(500)
            console.inputArea.text = text
        }
Yea, the sleep is grotty, but without it the inputArea wasnt always constructed in time (race.) It dumps the current script to the console as a cut/paste backup if the console doesnt reload in a happy way.

Pandora coming to Android - Thursday, 18 June 2009 Categories: all, android 

Whew! Someone is working on the Android client for Pandora. I've really gotten used to Pandora, sorry imeem. Woot Woot Pandora.

Boston Grails Consultant needed - Monday, 15 June 2009 Categories: all, groovy 

A friend of mine says

We are a small company in Waltham, Massachusetts looking for a full-time Grails contractor for 3 months (Q3). Even a talented J2EE contractor could be of interest (with a passion for learning new technology), although a Grails developer would be our first priority.
Anyone looking in the Boston area?

CarCast new logo - Friday, 22 May 2009 Categories: all, android 

Just like the first start up task is designing the tee shirt, I'm spending time tinkering with the logo for a program that is still pretty much a hacky prototope... ah well. Here's a New Icon for CarCast. CarCast is an mp3 player that's designed to be used in the car during a typical commute.

Car Cast - Wednesday, 13 May 2009 Categories: all, android 

Some screen shots of my Android application, Car Cast... it is still a work in progress... but it is fun!!

Swine Flu - Wednesday, 06 May 2009 Category: all 

So this is how swine flu spreads...

Part time Groovy Gig in Boston Area - Thursday, 23 April 2009 Categories: all, groovy 

A buddy of mine, @cutshot, is looking for a part time (1-3 month) Groovy developer to help out with a project. Any groovy people in the Boston Area looking for some work?

Hallmark be damned - Thursday, 09 April 2009 Category: all 

Time Saving idea...

Secrets of social site success - Friday, 27 March 2009 Category: all 

Interesting article, Secrets of social site success

Nice one. - Thursday, 05 March 2009 Category: all 

This is a nice mock poster.

IntelliJ and HumanTime - Friday, 06 February 2009 Categories: all, groovy 

Two interesting things I found today.

I use IntelliJ a lot when working on Grails and Groovy projects. Since IntelliJ doesn't have Eclipe's quick overview feature (Control-o), I do a lot of searhing when using IntelliJ. Alas the incremental search in IntelliJ, marks stuff yellow... and it doesnt clear it when you change your search. After a few searches your file is too yellow too look at. To clear all the highlighting, just hit escape twice. (thanks Ed for finding this one.)

I wanted to display how long it took to process something, but I wanted it to be readable by humans.

ie. Loading data took 1h 3m 33s
and NOT
Loading data took 28882 seconds
This little class makes that pretty easy, Date Formatting and Parsing for Humans in Java with HumanTime

Although I still wish I had a nice solution that would just do days.

println daysAgo( new Date(0) )
with output like
30 years, 2 months and 12 days ago

Mildly amusing - Wednesday, 21 January 2009 Category: all 

(copy/pasted from elsewhere)
Dear World:

We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of ideals of
democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption in
service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage
has been located, and the software responsible was replaced November 4.
Early tests of the newly installed program indicate that we are now
operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional on January
20. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage. We look
forward to resuming full service and hope to improve in years to come.

We thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

Google Phone with prepaid SIM - Tuesday, 23 December 2008 Categories: Java, all 

I bought a Google Phone from craigs list. I really like it. I'm using it with the pay as you go t-mobile plan (10 cents a minute for voice, no data plan.) I use a wifi connection at home and at work to use the applications with the network. It's really a great device, and a no brainer if you are a Java Developer with an interest in carrying around some power in your pocket.

Don't Drink or Drive - Thursday, 18 December 2008 Category: all 

A funny tee shirt from BustedTees.com, it is titled Don't Drink or Drive... Some of their tee shirts are offensive, but lots of them are funny.

Very interesting talk about religion from Sam Harris - Monday, 15 December 2008 Category: all 

Buy American - Wednesday, 10 December 2008 Category: all 

Buy American...

Make commuting (or treadmill time) fun with a groovy podcast downloader - Thursday, 13 November 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Make commuting (or treadmill time) fun with a groovy podcast downloader

I've received quite a bit of feedback on my earlier release of my groovy podcast downloader script. I've folded in this feedback.

Take a spin at http://github.com/bherrmann7/podcast-get/tree/master/src/pget.groovy Enjoy!! Please send along feedback! bob@jadn.com

Simple Podcast downloader for any mp3 player - Monday, 10 November 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

I use a small Groovy script to download podcasts into a single directory. It numbers the files uniquely and they can be simply copied to any mp3 player (for my long commute.) It uses an array of podcast urls as it's source. It keeps track of what is downloaded (so you dont get the same podcasts over and over.) You can stop the script and edit and re-run it (tweaker friendly). Rerunning is safe because it doesn't update the history until the end and it skips already downloaded files.

I wanted to try out git hub, so I posted it there. I'm interested in all feedback.

Download it at http://github.com/bherrmann7/podcast-get/tree/master/src/pget.groovy

Getting Groovy's Grape Going - Friday, 10 October 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Groovy's Grape looks wicked cool, but I didn't have much luck getting it going (posted on stackoverflow). Anyone else have success?

OSCON 2007 - Nathan Torkington - Wednesday, 17 September 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Open Source Therapy by Nat Torkington. The talk covers, "Open Source finds itself at a midway point in its existence, with unresolved trauma and an uncertain future. Join noted open source psychologist Dr Nat as he works through these issues and, hopefully, helps open source achieve stability." I found it very funny. I'm sure it applies to the Rails and Grails community as well.

Making list rows clickable - Thursday, 04 September 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Grails scaffolding generates list.gsp pages with tables. The default style when mousing over items in the list highlights the row. This provides nice feedback to the user about which row they are "selecting", but if a user clicks, nothing happens. This little tweak makes the click do the reasonable thing (which is drill down on the item clicked on.) In list.gsp, change

<tr class="${(i % 2) == 0 ? 'odd' : 'even'}">
to
<tr class="${(i % 2) == 0 ? 'odd' : 'even'}" onclick='window.location = "show?id=${YourBean.id}"'/>
This will make your users happy.

http://www.getjobdone.eu/ - Saturday, 23 August 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Get Job Done is a slick site for matching people and projects. Similar to grailscrowd.com, but "Get Job Done" is for all kinds of technology stacks. "Get Job Done" was written using Grails! Sweet...

Pandora - Saturday, 23 August 2008 Category: all 

Pandora rocks. Not sure I will ever play one of my CDs ever again. It is like a radio station that only plays music that you like. My profile at Bob's Pandora Profile

What could make finding Grails jobs easy? - Wednesday, 20 August 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

I was looking at te grails crowd website, grailscrowd.com and I discovered grailsjobs.com/. I wonder if either will get enough interest to make finding consulting grails work easy? I know about, workingwithrails.com and I think it must do wonders for the Ruby guys.

Twitter - Thursday, 07 August 2008 Category: all 

I've started Twittering using Twirl...

Talk with your kids about linux.... - Wednesday, 30 July 2008 Category: all 

Cute...

Ubuntu with Virtualbox running Vista - Saturday, 26 July 2008 Categories: all, opensource 

On Ubuntu I sometimes need to run the Turbo Tax Runtime (aka. Windows Vista), I recently installed the GPL Virtualbox from Sun Microsystems. It works great! and only took a few steps;

$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox
$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic
$ sudo addgroup bob vboxusers
$ virtualbox
Then create virtual disk for vista, install it from the the DVD ROM. To get the network going, install the missing network driver. Bickety Bam. Now I can test using IE7.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture - Friday, 25 July 2008 Category: all 

I found this pretty moving. The youtube link is, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Summer Reading - Friday, 18 July 2008 Category: all 

I listen to podcasts on the way to and from work. Right now my favorite podcast is the stackoverflow podcast with Joel On Software

They have a summer reading list. Looks interesting.

 
   1. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
   2. Don?t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
   3. The Non-Designer?s Design Book
   4. Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
   5. Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
   6. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
   7. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
   8. How to Win Friends & Influence People
I've already read 2, 5 and 8. Perhaps some of the others I should see if the library has....

Groovy/Grails contract work... - Thursday, 15 May 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Got an interesting email today

Please consider this position below, they are interviewing 10 people, and selecting 6.
 
The will HIRE OVER THE PHONE MONDAY 5/19!!!!!

Job details:

    * 6 contract positions
    * 2-6 month contracts
    * 3 internal projects that need to be developed rapidly 

    * Exclusive contract opportunities until Monday, 05/19
    * Up to 10 block interviews Monday, 05/19 

    * Prefers candidates to work locally, but will allow partial to 100% telecommuting
    * Will hire off of phone interviews
    * Must have documented experience using Groovy/Grails – please reference check all candidates
    * H1Bs with good comm skills are acceptable 

    * If we can’t find enough Groovy/Grails candidates, we will change the focus
      to Ruby on Rails.  We need to make this decision by Thursday morning. 

CJ Liles
Technical Recruiter - Technology Flex
Kforce Professional Staffing

2201 E. Camelback Road, Suite 405

Phoenix, AZ 85016

602-776-1179 (ph), 602-264-6969(fax)

We grow by referrals so please don't keep me a secret!

Cliles@Kforce.com

www.kforce.com

Great People = Great ResultsSM  

 

Join my network http://www.linkedin.com/in/cjliles 






Buying a Groovy book - Wednesday, 23 April 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Going to buy a book? I always check AddAll before making a purchase. They seem to always find the best deal. I was at Barnes and Nobel looking at Groovy book. B&N wanted $40+ for the book, but I found it via AddAll for $23.03 with shipping. Ordered. The book was "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" by Venkat Subramaniam. Sweet!

Grails Fishbowl - Friday, 14 March 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

I like Grails and Groovy. I do get to use it some in my current gig. Since I'm a consultant, I need to always think about my next gig... How do I find people and projects that are using Grails/Groovy? I know some people are working on a directory (grailscrowd.com) and I know other technologies have nice directories (workingwithrails.com), but I'm also impatient and like to noodle around, hence Grails Fishbowl.

But I recently discovered that linkedIn has a Grails User Group. I'm wondering why can't I just use that. Although I haven't figured out quite how to find the Grails User Group's list of people... but won't linkedIn do a much better job of this than me and my dinky hobby site?

2GX and IntelliJ license - Thursday, 13 March 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Did anybody get their IntelliJ license after attending 2GX? I went online and did what I was supposed to do - but I haven't heard a peep from JetBrains or 2GX. I intend to start using it for the Grails work that I do. Anybody else had any luck?

New site for registering your Groovy/Grails skills? - Saturday, 08 March 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Would it be good to have a site that registers people's Grails/Groovy skills? It would be a networking site for finding and locating people who have G/G skills for possible question answering and or finding/helping (full time/consulting) with groovy/grails work or small fun projects.

Does anyone think this would be a good thing? (comment, or send email bob@jadn.com) I presume it would be a non-for-profit free to join kind of thing. And the code and data for the site would be open. That would mean you could host your own Russian version if you wanted to - etc...

GX2 Conference - Saturday, 23 February 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

Today's the last day of the 2GX Conference. The conference was/is very good. The food has been amazing!! The conference has been like going to 8 Java user group meetings in a row... Two Ninety minute presentations on Thursday, four on Friday, and now the final two today... There is also a "coding jam" type thing to end the conference, which I'm looking forward to. Coming to this conference was a good idea.

GroovyGrails.com - Monday, 18 February 2008 Categories: all, groovy 

I'm going to the Groovy/Grails Experience this week! I'm looking forward to it. I plan to learn a lot. I'm curious about approaches for handling legecy SQL systems. How the plugin system works. Some more detail on creating DSLs. I'm also interested in Eclipse and Maven integration. It will all be goodness.

I like this image - Wednesday, 13 February 2008 Categories: all, linux 

I find this image amusing...

A Big fat nothing g2g0 - Saturday, 02 February 2008 Categories: all, olpc 

The second OLPC that I ordered was scheduled to arrive today. I tracked it being put on the truck. I was waiting for the driver to arrive, and then it happended. "Order canceled" showed up on the tracking site. A quick call to FedEx says that Brightstar canceled/recalled the order 2 days ago (1/30/2008). I think I'm going to just give up on this OLPC thing.

OLPC Update - Monday, 14 January 2008 Categories: all, olpc 

Well. I didn't hear anything from OLPC (I've contacted them numerous times, to no avail.), so on the last day allowed to make purchases (12/31) - I ordered another OLPC. I did file a claim with FedEx, they rejected it saying OLPC must make a claim. I expect the second order to arrive with no problems. I started the dispute process with my CC company for the first OLPC.

FedEx Fun - Monday, 17 December 2007 Categories: all, opensource 

I figured I would fill out the FedEx claim form just for fun (for my missing OLPC pc - see below.) So I printed out the claims form PDF. When I called FedEx to get my "claim control number", they were surprised that would be filling out the claim. The FedEx claims lady said 9 out of 10 times the sender submits the claim. She said they usually deny the claim when it is submitted by the recipient. She said even if they do allow the claim, that they will send the refund to the sender unless the sender sends FedEx a letter stating that I should receive the refund. Super.

Well hopefully I will get the call from the OLPC Donor Services manager today or early tomorrow and they are going to take all this pain away.

Otherwise I guess I can call American Express and see what options they offer me....

OLPC Update - Monday, 17 December 2007 Categories: all, olpc, opensource 

I called OLPC's "Donor Services" this morning around 8:15 or so. I had advised them that I called already on Friday and that I was looking to hear something like "We will file a claim with FedEx, and your replacement laptop is being sent immediately." Alas, Daisy said that her supervisor will call me later today or early tomorrow. So I will keep my cell phone with me at all times :-)

olpc g1g0 - Saturday, 15 December 2007 Categories: all, linux 

Where's my OLPC?

g1g1 - Thursday, 06 December 2007 Categories: all, linux 

OLPC gets own channel in YouTube - Friday, 30 November 2007 Category: all 

The OLPC project got it's own youtube channel... sweet. http://youtube.com/user/OLPCFoundation

OLPC XO Meetup - Thursday, 15 November 2007 Category: all 

There is a OLPC meetup group forming with plans to meetup and discuss modding and hacking the OLPC XO laptop. The group is named MOD the XO Laptop

I ordered an XO - Thursday, 15 November 2007 Category: all 

Woo hoo! I ordered an XO machine!! Sweet!

Mass production started - Tuesday, 06 November 2007 Category: all 

Mass production of the olpc started today! I find this stuff terribly exciting, for a number of reasons
  • I think school kids can really benefit from a laptop.
  • The hardware inovations are cool. (battery life, screen, simplicity)
  • I strongly believe in open source and enabling technology - olpc is that
I can't wait till Nov 12 at 8pm to order one for me (and a needy child.)

ssh and clearing the screen - Friday, 02 November 2007 Categories: all, opensource 

One annoying thing about using "ssh" is that it clears the screen when you disconnect. A lot of times I find I want to cut/paste something or just see something that I was just doing remotely. It finally dawned on me today that an easy way to avoid this problem is to just "disconnect" and not "logout". You can disconnect using the key sequence "~." and disconnecting doesn't clear the screen. Small potatoes for nearly everyone on the planet, but man - I find that nice.

Crystal and Bob's Honeymoon in Aruba - Thursday, 25 October 2007 Category: all 

Way back in 2003, Crystal and I went on our Honeymoon. We've been pretty busy so I only am posting the photos now...
For our Honeymoon, Crystal and I chose to go to Aruba. We were there for a week starting on Monday May 19, 2003.

Old Old Photos! - Wednesday, 24 October 2007 Category: all 

Found some Old Old Photos! from way back in 2003

Watij - Tuesday, 16 October 2007 Categories: Java, all 

If you develop web applications in Java, watij.com is pretty darn cool. It allows you to write Java code which drive Internet Explorer's interface. This allows you to write Java unit tests that drive the web browser. The JSSH plugin for Firefox allows you to script Firefox as well.

IUI - Friday, 10 August 2007 Category: all 

This is a neat library, called IUI for creating web applications (javascript) that resemble the interface of the iphone. Nifty.

DVD Backups - Wednesday, 01 August 2007 Category: all 

I bought 5 DVD Players. I backup DVDs using k9copy on Ubuntu. Mostly I backup titles that my kids watch in the car. The backups play fine in my kids Audiovox two screen DVD player, but the backups didn't play in my 4 year old living room player. So I went to walmart and bought a cheapy Magnavox DVD player, my DVDs still wouldnt play. Go get slightly different model. No dice. So then I buy three DVD players from Target and my disks play fine in the second one that I open. It is this one here. I return all the others. Sheesh....

Jadn now on Ubuntu - Monday, 23 July 2007 Categories: all, linux 

Jadn.com is now running on Ubuntu, a very friendly version of Linux... We finally moved off Fedora 4, which was getting very old. After trying out Ubuntu on Crystals machine for a few months, I finally decided to try it on the server. Basically it has been a delight.

Jbum 1.21 is out, groovy feature added - Wednesday, 04 July 2007 Categories: all, groovy 

A new version 1.21 of jbum is out. I implemented my first Groovy feature (I had already added the Groovy console in to jbum for development testing - see the help menu.) The feature is "Order images by filename" which was 20 lines of Groovy. Very cool.

Mock Ads of {JAVA,PHP} vs Ruby - Wednesday, 16 May 2007 Categories: Java, all 

These are pretty funny if you do web technologies. The funniest part is usually the endings.... wait for it... (Press the little triangle on the lower left of each video to watch them in-page)
Java vs Ruby
PHP vs Ruby

Usability - Wednesday, 04 April 2007 Category: all 

Nice little cartoon about usability.

click on the cartoon for a slightly larger version

Pete the Artist - Tuesday, 03 April 2007 Category: all 

This is a snapshot of my brother's Desktop. You can see that Peter is quite the artist.

Download Status Bar - Monday, 26 March 2007 Categories: all, opensource 

Handy FireFox plugin.... Download Status Bar (useful if you download stuff and get tired of the Downloads window)

My sister got married - Monday, 19 March 2007 Category: all 

My sister got married!!! WHOO HOO!!! GO SCOTTY AND DEE. I posted some photos.... (also mentioned on the kids page)

What ITA does - Tuesday, 06 March 2007 Category: all 

There is an interesting article on eweek, Python Slithers into Systems, which talks about what ITA does (I work @ ita.)

Friends don't let friend use web services.... - Thursday, 01 March 2007 Category: all 

A good mock interaction, The S stands for Simple, that helps explain why I shy away from web services (It is too complicated and it hurts my gentle head.)

Amiga Emulator - Thursday, 01 March 2007 Category: all 

Is this an Amiga Emulator? Your talking crazy talk!

Playing with Groovy - Monday, 26 February 2007 Categories: all, groovy 

I just started playing with Groovy. It's pretty cool. Bought the Groovy in Action book, and I'm still working my way through it.

Mackie is almost 1 - Thursday, 22 February 2007 Category: all 

Mackie is almost 1 year old!!! Some photos of Mackie test driving his first cupcake

Snow in Rome, NY - Friday, 16 February 2007 Category: all 

My father sent me some shots of the snow around their house

Dilbert has the Knack - Friday, 09 February 2007 Category: all 

Nice....

Photobook - Friday, 12 January 2007 Category: all 

For Christmas this year, I made Crystal a photobook from the pages on the kids web site. She loved it. I printed the book, Liam and Max Herrmann 2006, at lulu.com

I used a program I wrote to generate the pdf. If you want to know more about how I did it, shoot me an email.

Lisp and Javascript - Friday, 12 January 2007 Category: all 

I went to a nejug.org talk on Javascript. Mostly review for me, but covered a few interesting points and had some fun quotes. I like this one the best,

...Waldemar Horwat...lead Javascript developer... [at] Netscape... considered Javascript to be just another syntax for Common Lisp
--Eric Lippert's Blog I also found out that the initial version of Javascript was a common lisp DSL (Domain Specific Language.)

More Camera Phone Shots - Monday, 08 January 2007 Category: all 

Some phone camera shots taken at my office and on the ride home

My New Phone - Sunday, 07 January 2007 Category: all 

I took some shots with my new phone in December. Its a Motorola V325i which is verizon wireless most basic phone. I used the open source program bitpim to extract the photos (and thus avoid paying the carrier a toll).

moztraybiff - Tuesday, 02 January 2007 Category: all 

If you use Linux with Thunderbird (anybody left?), then you must install the moztraybiff plugin... it rules. It shows a little new mail icon in you tool tray. Something that thunderbird really should have built in (and I think does when it runs on windows.)

Electronic Voting - Wednesday, 20 December 2006 Category: all 

I like the phrase "snake-dancing simpletons" ... from The Dilbert Blog,
Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let's say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish.

added file upload - Monday, 18 December 2006 Categories: JBlog, all 

Updated Jblog.sf.net... Added ability to use a local file as the "blog image"... handy for posting little snippets, and for when posting images off the desktop... needs a little more tweaking to be really useful.

FireBug Beta - Tuesday, 05 December 2006 Category: all 

If you develop web applications, go install the new firebug beta....

person who does not believe in Zeus - Sunday, 03 December 2006 Category: all 

Intersting quote,

The faithful do resist the bogus certainties of religion—when they come from any religion but their own. Every Christian knows what it is like to find the claims of Muslims to be deeply suspect. Everyone who is not a Mormon knows at a glance that Mormonism is an obscenely stupid system of beliefs. Everyone has rejected an infinite number of spurious claims about God. The atheist simply rejects one more.
--Sam Harris Read the rest in RichardDawkins.net or this exchange, http://www.jewcy.com/dialogue/monday_why_are_atheists_so_angry_sam_harris

Synergy rocks! - Wednesday, 15 November 2006 Category: all 

Synergy ROCKS!! Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Selenium IDE - Friday, 13 October 2006 Categories: all, opensource 

If you develop web applications, Selenium IDE - a open source firefox plugin - rules. It lets you record and playback sessions with firefox. Excellent for testing a web application or performing some routine web browser task. Very cool!

Farm House progress - Wednesday, 27 September 2006 Category: all 

My father continues to work on his Farm House located on his Christmas Tree Farm.

Religion in School - Wednesday, 27 September 2006 Categories: all, religion 

Should we be teaching religion in school? Should the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster's belief's be covered? Something to think about?

ITA Software ranked highly - Monday, 25 September 2006 Category: all 

ITA Software ranked as #27 in Deloitte's New England Technology Fast 50. Sweet.

Basement progress - Sunday, 24 September 2006 Category: all 

I made some progress on the basement this month. I took some photos of the Basement progress. NOTE: I made this photo page using a new version of jbum, if you have any problems viewing the page, let me know! Thanks!

ITA Software - Thursday, 14 September 2006 Category: all 

I love this place. I sent a request for an extra battery for my laptop this morning. In about 10 minutes, I got a reply from the IT department that asked where I sat so they could bring it to me. When I went down their to pick it up, they apologized to me for not bringing it to me directly. ITA is oriented towards making developers comfortable and productive. Wow. Anyway, I have code to write...

ITA Software signs deal with Air Canada - Tuesday, 12 September 2006 Category: all 

ITA is in the news, ITA Software signs deal with Air Canada I work @ ITA. Nifty. [ More bizjournals.com ]

Helium Knowledge - Tuesday, 12 September 2006 Category: all 

A friend of mine works at www.heliumknowledge.com. I think the site is an interesting start. Trying to solve the information discovery or findability problem, but from a different angle. (The Q and A angle.) I'm interested in what other people think about this site.

Microsoft's Quickest Patch Ever - Thursday, 07 September 2006 Category: all 

if you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM. Read about Microsoft's Quickest Patch Ever

Ubuntu - Wednesday, 06 September 2006 Categories: all, linux, opensource 

What would you do with 700 million dollars? How about create a Linux distribution? Interesting article Really Free Software

Same video, this time on google - Saturday, 26 August 2006 Category: all 

Playing with uploading video to video.google.com (since youtube's upload api doesnt seem to exist.) This is the same video that I uploaded to youtube.

Interesting quote - Thursday, 24 August 2006 Category: all 

Have the courage to take your own thoughts seriously, for they will shape you.
-- Albert Einstein

Cygwin good - Friday, 18 August 2006 Category: all 

ummm... Cywgin good

Trying out youtube.com - Sunday, 13 August 2006 Categories: all, family 

Ok, Dvorak Is the last straw... I am finally going to try youtube.com. Here is small video of the Bean. When he was about 1 year old, I was giving him raspberry's and he responds. Ignore the sound of the cloths dryer in the background.

Liam turns two! - Wednesday, 02 August 2006 Category: all 

Happy 2nd Birthday Bean!!! I can't believe he's two years old already!

Fixed more RSS issues - Monday, 31 July 2006 Category: all 

I fixed the RSS dates (after using http://feedvalidator.org/ to find out my rss feed had issues.)

FireFox Beta! - Friday, 28 July 2006 Category: all 

I've just started trying out the FireFox 2.0 Beta 1 and I love it. How did I live without spell checking??? (It does the red squiggly line when you misspell)

RSS is back - Thursday, 27 July 2006 Category: all 

Not too long ago I added rss feeds to jbum (the software that powers this blog), but I manged to botch it up a few days later.

Well, RSS should be working again. I've been noodling with a different client (since RSSOWL has problems on Linux - thats SWT for ya.) My rss client of choice is now liferea it is very good.

Note: the main rss feed is now http://jadn.com/~bob/all.rss

Google Tech Talks - Thursday, 27 July 2006 Category: all 

Google keeps and hosts videos of Google Tech Talks made at their campus. Cool...

The Rotarian Menace - Wednesday, 26 July 2006 Category: all 

My parents are involved in a Rotary Club back home, so I was suprised to hear that Muslim fundamentalists don't like Rotary Clubs. But once you read the story (or I listened to it as a podcast on my way into work), you can understand how the situation arose. The Rotarian Menace

This Linux logo rocks - Saturday, 08 July 2006 Categories: all, linux, opensource 

This Linux logo rocks... from a story about Apple Hates Grandmothers... or basically about how proprietary sucks.

JBlog: Added Categories - Saturday, 08 July 2006 Categories: JBlog, Java, all 

I added categories to JBlog (The software I wrote to generate this site.) Some testing is still in order, but it should also be generating rss feeds for each category. I want to stick my site into a planet site, and I really need categories for this.

JavaOne 2006 online - Wednesday, 05 July 2006 Categories: Java, all 

JavaOne 2006 conference slides and audio are online - Woo Hoo!

Moving to Linux from the Mac - Wednesday, 05 July 2006 Categories: all, linux, opensource 

Lots of geeky internet types are moving from Mac's to Linux (including one famous guy who has a mac tatoo, Cory Doctorow.) This guy, Mark, posted some advice about Linux programs that correspond to Mac ones. Even though I'm a die hard linux guy, I found his post, Essentials, 2006 edition, recommended a program or two that I need to check out...

ITASoftware - Wednesday, 28 June 2006 Category: all 

Well the winds of chance of changed, and now I'm heading off to work for www.ITASoftware.com. They apparently do lots of stuff with Linux/Lisp/Java . So I should fit right in. I found an article, Carl de Marcken: Inside Orbitz, which seems to give some real details of how the business works there.

No Apple - Tuesday, 27 June 2006 Categories: all, opensource 

At lunch today, I was on my Microsoft is evil shtick, someone suggested I go Apple. I explained that, to me, Apple is just like a mini-Microsoft. But a blog post by Mark Pilgrim, When the bough breaks, does a much better job of explaining why I don't embrace Apple.

When people hear Free and/or Expensive - they usually think of money, but I usually relate them to freedom and time. I use Linux not because it costs nothing, but because it gives me freedom (to make any changes I want.) I don't avoid commercial software because it costs money, I avoid it because it doesn't do what I want and it costs me more to work around it's annoyances. (Google Toolbar spellcheck rules.)

Google Toolbar - Tuesday, 27 June 2006 Category: all 

I installed the Google Toolbar, , because it was on http://blog.russnelson.com's site. And I know Russ is both smart and very savvy. So I thought I'd try it out. I love the fact that it gives you spell checking in Web Forms!! Since I can barely spell, its hugely helpful!! Give it a spin yourself.

My OPML - Monday, 26 June 2006 Category: all 

I've been using the RSSOwl program for a few months now. I really like it - it helps me stay on top of whats going on. I track these sites myrss.html and the same list in opml format.

Flash can be good - Wednesday, 21 June 2006 Category: all 

An interesting advertisement http://www.bobscube.com/ and a good use of flash.

Damn sites that steal your content - Tuesday, 13 June 2006 Category: all 

Another thing I hate is these online photo services who let you upload high res photos, then only let you share them in a online photo album as low res photos. Shutterfly bad!

How to Succeed... - Monday, 12 June 2006 Category: all 

I find Ben Stein interesting. He wrote a short article about getting ahead, How to Succeed in Hollywood -- and Anywhere Else. He is pushing his book, but an enjoyable article none the less.

FireBug Debugger - Wednesday, 31 May 2006 Category: all 

I do the occasional JavaScript development. I was surprised this weekend when debugging some JavaScript to find that FireBug, already an excellent FireFox development tool, now includes a JavaScript debugger. Wow! Works great!

comment system added - Friday, 26 May 2006 Category: all 

Well, I used Ruby on Rails - and some JavaScript including using the Prototype library to layer on a commenting system on to my blog. It's pretty simple (so be nice.) It's kinda of neat that the page itself is still static html, the comment system is layered on as an AJAX application.

Classmates.com and LinkedIn.com suck - Thursday, 18 May 2006 Category: all 

Classmates.com and linkedin.com are interesting social network sites. But I hate when they try to hold you hostage. For example, I wanted to email someone in LinkedIn and I get this....

Contact SOME PERSON directly through InMail™ To send an InMail now, upgrade your account or purchase individual InMail credits.
This is annoying and limits the growth of their system, as many people just wont use the system. Nobody wants information to be locked up... yet that is exactly what classmates.com and linkedin.com do, they try and hold information for ransome. I ranted and I feel better.

I've been learning about Ruby on Rails - Sunday, 14 May 2006 Category: all 

Intersting article on rails, What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails?

tcpmon - Tuesday, 09 May 2006 Category: all 

Finally a public TCPMonitoring utility.... I can't even remember how many of those I'v written over the years.... why didnt I opensource any of mine? I think they were small hacks.... Yea, I know eclipse/wtp has one built in - but I like small little utilities that have source code - so I can go in an beat it when needed....

Linux is easy - Monday, 08 May 2006 Category: all 

If you know what Linux is, then you should check out this awesome user testimonial. Game on.

Cringely is sometimes interesting - Monday, 08 May 2006 Category: all 

A strange but interesting article It Doesn't Take an Einstein to Realize Why Microsoft Is Headed Down and Google Is Headed Up

Most popular programming languages.... - Thursday, 04 May 2006 Category: all 

The tiobe site, http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index, shows how popular different programming languages are. Although I mostly do Java (21.316%), I'm learning both Ruby (0.456%) and C# (3.271%).

RSS feed added, RSSOwl rules - Thursday, 27 April 2006 Category: all 

My good friend Greg asked me about an RSS feed for my page, so I added one. It is the feed.rss link near the top of the page.

RSS is most often used with a news reader. Since I wanted to test out my new feed.rss, I tried to find a decent free RSS client. I tried google's reader and I thought it sucked. Then I found RSSOwl and it rules! It's built on the eclipse engine so I'm not too surprised.

More kids photos - Monday, 24 April 2006 Category: all 

I added a smattering of kids photos to the kids page

JavaOne Remote - Thursday, 20 April 2006 Category: all 

Finally, the JavaOne 2005 presentations are completely online (slides and audio.) I've only ever been to one JavaOne, but sometimes I would like to attend a presentation (via the web), finally I can. This rules!

New Job - Miva - Friday, 14 April 2006 Category: all 

I now work for Miva.com as a senior architect (cloud-dweller). They do search and advertising stuff. I added the search box on blog home page Ads on the side of this page to toy with search/advertising stuff.

What exactly does Miva do? Well, from Miva's investor relations (Miva is a public company) here is a description;

MIVA's new media platform facilitates performance marketing for partners (publishers), advertisers and consumers (end-users). Our primary focus is on providing our partners with a complete set of innovative solutions enabling the acquisition, retention and monetization of their online audiences. For our advertisers, we provide solutions to manage, optimize and measure return on investment from keyword-targeted and context-related performance marketing programs. We generate traffic and leads to our advertisers through our network of publisher partners. Our integrated e-commerce merchant solutions allow online stores to capitalize on leads by offering robust online storefront, shopping cart, shipping, and payment capabilities.

Wanna B Archie-Tech - Friday, 03 March 2006 Category: all 

I designed the process for withdrawing money from an ATM. I created a class diagram, sequence diagram and an activity diagram. (I assumed the card holder only ever has 1 account.) Pretty cool.

- Monday, 20 February 2006 Category: all 

I just got a Garman C320 for my wife (Happy Valentines day honey!) I've been in cars that have GPS systems before, but I was never the driver. And I was never familiar with the display. After having tinkered with my wife's for a few hours, and then used it in the car - I was blown away. It's just amazing to have all that additional information available. Its like having a symbolic debugger for your travel. After only using it twice, I feel naked when driving without one. The C320 was almost $400. Amazing.

- Sunday, 19 February 2006 Category: all 

I'm an advocate of open source software. My rational is simple. I want whats best for everybody and I think the best thing for everybody is open source. Closed source has advantages primarily for the proceducer of software (developers). Open source gives advantages to the users. Since there are usually many more users than developers, typically the common good is for the software's source to be freely available. Thus open source software is in the commmon good. Open source enables freedom. The freedom to change, modify, and redistribute. Even though most users (and most developers) never do drop down and make changes to open source software, we all benefit from the developers who do. In the same way all citizens have certain rights and even if they don't all exercize them, everyone benfits from everyone having those rights.

- Saturday, 18 February 2006 Category: all 

Two new entries on the Kids page, Max is arriving in the "Year of the Dog" and we cleared out the cameras of all of our fall shots.

tech - Saturday, 04 February 2006 Category: all 

My coworker says the real power in EJB3/Hibernate is in the associations. Just mapping an object to the database is good, but mapping an object graph is better. So I expanded Person to have a collection of Subscription. Like so,

@Entity(access = AccessType.FIELD)
public class Person implements Serializable {
      @Id
      String email;
      String name;
      @OneToMany(mappedBy = "email", cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
      List subscriptions;
}

So then I had to create another class, Subscription....

@Entity(access = AccessType.FIELD)
public class Subscription  {
      @Id(generate = GeneratorType.AUTO)
      public Integer id;
      public String email;
      public String subject;
}
Pretty simple. At first I didn't have the Cascade property on Person.subscriptions, so I was having to load/save them myself (yuckie). After adding the Cascade my life got easy again, woo hoo! I then split the simple driver (from previous blog entry) into two classes, a SessionFactoryFascade (for setting up connections to hibernate), and a FileLoader which reads a bunch of Person's and adds a bunch of Subscriptions. The I wrote Dumper to query the database and print the results. Nice.

- Friday, 20 January 2006 Category: all 

At work we are tied to WebSphere and thus jdk1.4. So for the past 2 years I haven't ventured out into the land of Java5 or EJB3. Well, I have a small project that I wanted to do here at home, so I decided to try out both Java5 and EJB3. After two hours of tinkering, I wrote a class named Person;

@Entity(access = AccessType.FIELD)
public class Person implements Serializable {
      @Id
      String email;
      String name;
}
Then I wrote a simple driver, and Wow! I'm reading/writing my POJO into the database without writting any SQL (not even to create the table!) Sweet!!

- Friday, 13 January 2006 Category: all 

I attended a NEGeeks dinner on Wednesday. It was cool to meet up with some other geeks and trade stories. I did learn one important thing. Never, if dared, agree to drink the contents of an upside down frisbee filled with beer. I turns out 5.5 cans of beer can be poured into such a vessel. Good to know!

- Saturday, 24 December 2005 Category: all 

The new fedora logo is cool. Its got the 'f' for fedora, and the infinity symbol for freedom forever. Swell.

- Wednesday, 21 December 2005 Category: all 

We are expecting our second child in March. Do you guess boy or girl?

- Wednesday, 21 December 2005 Category: all 

This site, http://reddit.com/, is a cool geek site. It has user rated links to other interesting bits of geek news.

- Tuesday, 06 December 2005 Category: all 

Seems like Sun is starting to get it. Back in 96, when I worked at Sun, I thought it was pretty simple. When Unix wins, Sun wins. So doing everything possible to promote Unix was good for Sun. Including open sourcing all products (from Schwart's blog) Seems they finally agree with me.. although did they leave out java?

- Monday, 31 October 2005 Category: all 

Posted some photos of our trip to Disney on the kids page

- Saturday, 22 October 2005 Category: all 

Released 1.7 of jbum! Mostly this added the menu item "File/Order images by exif date". This takes your photos and arranges them by the date stored in the photo. This is really handy when you use more than one digital camera on a trip or multiple people use their cameras (say a birthday party) and you want to merge the results into one story.

- Friday, 12 August 2005 Category: all 

The Bean turned one last weekend. One of my little projects was to do the artwork for a CD in the party favors. check it out

- Saturday, 23 July 2005 Category: all 

Updated the Bean's page with photos from our Family Vacation to Florida.

- Wednesday, 01 June 2005 Category: all 

Some people visit their parents and enjoy the relaxing warmth of home. My fathers idea of warmth and comfort means asking me to help go out to the tree farm and burn some trees... In these photos, you can see that the warmth part was pretty covered!

- Saturday, 23 April 2005 Category: all 

If you know Javascript, then check out greasemonkey. It lets you modify webpages by injected javascript into every loaded page. It's crack

UPDATE 05/17, there's now a story on wired about greasemonkey

- Friday, 01 April 2005 Category: all 

I wonder if I will be like this when the bean is older...

I updated the Bean's Page with some pictures of him and his pals

- Thursday, 31 March 2005 Category: all 

My home town, Rome New York, has an Amtrack Train station. My father snapped some photos at the dedication today... go pop!

- Wednesday, 23 March 2005 Category: all 

I updated the bean's page with photos from Maine and St Patrick's day...

- Wednesday, 23 March 2005 Category: all 

Let us realize that the privilege to work is a gift, that power to work is a blessing, that love of work is success. -David O. McKay

- Sunday, 13 February 2005 Category: all 

Well, after getting the top replaced... I had the new car for three days and then I got into a fender bender. Oops... It was just after a big snow storm and the roads were a little slippery.... Ah well, accidents happen.... I should soon have it all fixed up....

- Sunday, 23 January 2005 Category: all 

Woo Hoo, we get a new car... Here are some pics. Here is a pdf document showing exactly what I ordered. Happy Driving!

- Tuesday, 30 November 2004 Category: all 

While visiting my parents, I took a trip up to my fathers Christmas tree farm to pick out a tree for Christmas. I took some pics.

- Wednesday, 17 November 2004 Category: all 

A sometimes funny page, joy of tech had a funny anti microsoft image today... They have a new image every day....

- Sunday, 19 September 2004 Category: all 

Updated Liam's page with some shots of him at 5 and 6 weeks...

- Saturday, 18 September 2004 Category: all 

I updated my photo to web program, jbum.sf.net, fixed some more bugs, made it easier to use... enjoy!!

- Tuesday, 31 August 2004 Category: all 

My father is getting city water... He sent me some photos of the water works. I like the heavy equipment... cool stuff..

- Friday, 27 August 2004 Category: all 

An excellent essay... How Will Companies Ever Make Money Off Open-Source?

- Wednesday, 18 August 2004 Category: all 

More farm house Rehab 5

- Wednesday, 18 August 2004 Category: all 

I now have a son... see my son's page over here

- Sunday, 01 August 2004 Category: all 

I thought this is a funny comic

- Sunday, 25 July 2004 Category: all 

We get some Big Visitors in our neighborhood.

- Sunday, 25 July 2004 Category: all 

Some shots of the new desk for Crystal

- Wednesday, 21 July 2004 Category: all 

My father sent out another update from Rome, New York...

Rehab 4 on the farm house

- Sunday, 11 July 2004 Category: all 

My father continues more work on his farm. I even helped with some of it.

Isn't retirement for rest?

- Saturday, 15 May 2004 Category: all 

I got a new gig at ph.com. I am helping move some Microsoft (C++/MTS/COM) stuff to Java.

My office is a desk in a hall way.... Crystal didn't believe me, this is my proof....

- Saturday, 15 May 2004 Category: all 

Here are some pictures from our four days in Florida for a much needed vacation... We stayed at the South Seas Resort on Captiva Island... A Fantastic Time!

- Wednesday, 12 May 2004 Category: all 

My father is working a little project.... Nice to be retired.... although is this really "taking it easy" ?

- Sunday, 25 April 2004 Category: all 

Crystal and I did some yardwork (last weekend) and took a small hike in our back yard... Photos

- Saturday, 24 April 2004 Category: all 

If it doesn't have an open-source reference implementation, the term "standard" is an abuse of the language.
--Eric S. Raymond, from Q&A: Raymond Expounds on Open Letter to Sun, McNealy

- Thursday, 22 April 2004 Category: all 

I got a new camera. The nice thing about my new camera is it's small size. It is a Casio EX-M20U.

- Wednesday, 14 April 2004 Category: all 

I cut up the card board boxes from babypea's crib and dressers into nice 2 foot by 3 foot strips. I bound them together with twine. Then I see the recycle guy come by and go, leaving my nicely bound and cut up behind... Sheesh... why do I bother... I felt like this cartoon.

- Sunday, 28 March 2004 Category: all 

If you program in Java, you must try it. Eclipse m8 is out. Eclipse rules.

- Monday, 22 March 2004 Category: all 

Choosing a language for the Desktop.... Java, Mono, or C++? Naturally, I tend to favor java... but this Essay is an interesting overview.

- Monday, 22 March 2004 Category: all 

Marc Andreessen, Netscape Co-Founder, 12 Reasons for Growth of Open Source

  1. "The Internet is powered by open source."
  2. "The Internet is the carrier for open source."
  3. "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
  4. "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
  5. "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
  6. "Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
  7. "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
  8. "Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
  9. "Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
  10. "There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
  11. "Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
  12. "It's free."

- Monday, 22 March 2004 Category: all 

How much in our lives is real reflection, and how much is just spinning our wheels?

Quote: "A friend of mine once characterized the majority of computer scientists as people who would rather spend weeks of hard hacking than an afternoon in the library."

I wonder, am I more the *library* or more the *hack* type? I more likely to just take the afternoon off and search the web to see if someone has already done the 'hard hacking' :-)

- Thursday, 11 March 2004 Category: all 

We finally got our baby's web page started.... Woo Hoo!

- Thursday, 04 March 2004 Category: all 

My father recently took a walk through the snow in upstate new york to visit his Christmas Tree Farm he emailed along some photos of his recent walk. Updated the link My father put up a more detailed version.

- Thursday, 04 March 2004 Category: all 

"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire

- Thursday, 04 March 2004 Category: all 

A quote from the Halloween 10 article, "The brave new SCOsource business model is now clear: sue your customers, shill for Microsoft, kite your stock, and pray you stay out of jail."

- Thursday, 26 February 2004 Category: all 

Cute... (click on the image) "Something bad is about to happen...."

- Wednesday, 25 February 2004 Category: all 

Good article about opensourcing Java. Much better than Eric's plea. I like this quote "A GPL-ed Java would be Microsoft's biggest nightmare."

- Wednesday, 25 February 2004 Category: all 

An interesting interview...

"Einstein once noted that an explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. ... Explaining the world through a collection of objects is just too simple! The world is richer than what can be expressed with object-oriented syntax."

- Wednesday, 25 February 2004 Category: all 

[Note: this has heavy programmer speak] Software today is all about complexity. Systems seem to grow until they are so complex that they collapse in on themselves. Something needs to be done to make things simpler... I think this Naked Objects is an interesting idea about how to use a framework that exposes all the details of your objects. I also like the idea of the user and developer having the same frame of reference. This stuff looks pretty neat. I think it will be important.

- Thursday, 19 February 2004 Category: all 

UPDATED - Pete finishes the floor!

My wife's office is getting a new floor. My brother Pete is doing the install. Go Pete!

- Wednesday, 18 February 2004 Category: all 

Wow, I was mentioned in my buddy Bryan's weblog!!!

I thought it was funny that I mention his blog, he mentions mine, I mention that he mention mine. Funny because a lot of people reguard the entire blogging thing as pointless drivel... and I was kind of making fun of that. Too much subtlety.

- Thursday, 12 February 2004 Category: all 

My buddy Bryan finally got a blog. It's only got one entry so far, but way to go Bryan :) He mentions that he leased an Audi...

- Thursday, 05 February 2004 Category: all 

Interesting article, Why 802.11 is underhyped to quote, "With some 802.11 radio chips approaching $5 price points, Wi-Fi will likely be embedded in every electronic product under the sun. ... Make no mistake about it: 802.11, or one of its backwardly compatible descendants, will dominate the wireless communications sector over the next 10 years the same way the x86 architecture dominates computing and that Ethernet dominates networking.".

- Thursday, 29 January 2004 Category: all 

This image from the Mars rover was just seconds before it started having problems.

- Friday, 02 January 2004 Category: all 

I have been trying to learn and use UML for years... but it never seems to stick (other than the simpliest class and object interaction diagrams.) So, I like this quote...

"UML reminds me a lot of the old OSI seven-level network model: Everybody learned it, everybody referred to it, and everybody knew why it didn't apply to their particular situation." --Ed Nisley, Dr. Dobbs Journal, December, 2002, p. 74

- Saturday, 27 December 2003 Category: all 

Here is Our Weddding Announcement in the local Billerica newspaper.

Yea, this ran in the paper almost a year ago... Crystal has been sick (Flu?), so I have been catching up with my backlog of photos.

- Thursday, 25 December 2003 Category: all 

Well, this is our first Christmas in our house. Here are some shots of our first Christmas.

- Thursday, 25 December 2003 Category: all 

Here are some photos from our Griswald Family Vacation. The Gelinas Family somehow got the idea to go on a cruise for the week before Christmas. A good idea, warm sun and fun instead of shopping in the mall. The Gelinas's invited the Cameron Family. So we all went. It was good time, although the weather wasn't as sunny and warm as we would have have liked.

- Thursday, 25 December 2003 Category: all 

Sometimes I think I spend too much time on the computer... But then I look at see what other people do with thier free time... and I think... maybe I am ok...

- Saturday, 06 December 2003 Category: all 

Well, jadn.com is finally back. I ended up returning 2 hard drives to Maxtor for replacemtent... lets see how long the replacement lasts....

- Friday, 31 October 2003 Category: all 

A nice quote,
"Next time one of your non-tech friends asks for system advice, suggest a Mac. You'll be doing the entire world a favor." from this blog entry... The blog entry is a comment on the register story I quoted 2 days ago.

- Thursday, 30 October 2003 Category: all 

I call my wife Sweet Pea. I had some fun using an image program to make an image of her as a sweet pea. I found it amusing.

I used the www.gimp.org to merge the images.

- Tuesday, 28 October 2003 Category: all 

A interesting story about security, Joe Average User Is In Trouble Notable to me because I have started playing with Java's WebStart stuff. It is pretty cool.... I love this little quote (from the article)

"Do you update your anti-virus software regularly?" I'll ask them. Most look at me as though I'd just asked them if they refloozle their hossenblobbets with tinklewickets.
Sometimes I forget how non-programmers see things.

- Monday, 20 October 2003 Category: all 

An interesting read, An Open Letter to Microsoft, suggests to Microsoft to play nice with Linux. Good idea.

- Monday, 20 October 2003 Category: all 

My buddy Jerry's company got a write up. Interesting... Revivio Vies for Backup Bucks

- Friday, 17 October 2003 Category: all 

I work for Sun Microsystems. They make Unix systems. Developers love Unix. But Sun seems to do so little to keep developers happy. I hate Microsoft, but Microsoft does such a good job of making developers happy. When will Sun rise to the occasion?

- Tuesday, 14 October 2003 Category: all 

This article was pretty good... He focuses mostly on WiFi, but talks about the growth of technology in general.. I like this quote,

"Innovations happen when people have the opportunity to add value"

Atree4u.com - Monday, 13 October 2003 Category: all 

I recently got my father's web site, atree4u.com back up and running . It had been down since we got reset because of the hard drive crash. It looked to me like he updated his site since I last saw it... cool...

- Monday, 28 September 2003 Category: all 

If you follow the Linux -vs- SCO, you might appreciate how funny I thought this was

"In an apparent oversight, SCO forget to issue a press release this morning asserting yet another ownership claim against parts of the Linux kernel. Worse, no one has filed a new lawsuit against SCO today or even offered to indemnify Linux users against this predatory company's actions."
The whole story is here

- Saturday, 30 August 2003 Category: all 

Two weeks ago Crystal turned 30. We had a birthday part at a nice resturant in Boston. Here are some shots

- Tuesday, 05 August 2003 Category: all 

I was suprised to hear today that the Apache Group is creating a new project in it's incubator. An open source EJB container... Yet another J2ee engine... wow. Seems kinda late to the game, but Apache's licensing terms might make this an attrative option for some companies.

- Saturday, 26 July 2003 Category: all 

We had a hard drive failure... Yikes!!! Luckily I had a backup, so everything got reset to early May. Ah well, maybe monthly backups would be a good idea.... humm...

- Monday, 28 April 2003 Category: all 

I havent said anything thoughtful in a while.... how about "The unchallenged mind is fertile ground for the whims of any ideology"... I read a weblog by Dave Winer and he is always coming up with interesting insights.

- Wednesday, 09 April 2003 Category: all 

I enjoyed reading the story C# is just Java�only a little worse, but I tend to like stories that strengthen my own beliefs.

- Saturday, 05 April 2003 Category: all 

On November 9th, 2002 Crystal and I got married. Here are the photos from the wedding! Enjoy.

- Tuesday, 01 April 2003 Category: all 

I read this article about Understanding the Psychology of Programming and it stuck with me. I think it was an interesting read. Enjoy. Kinda scary picture of the author...

- Tuesday, 18 March 2003 Category: all 

My next geek toy has to be a Wrist PDA available this summer. It runs palm's OS which is an excellent PDA. The palm is great with storing appointments and ToDo lists. Plus it works well with linux - Sweet.

- Thursday, 27 February 2003 Category: all 

The Watertown NotYourAverageJoes has been my favorite restaurant of late. We tried the Arlington one, but weren't very happy. The "baked pasta" special in Arlington wasn't as good as the Watertown one. Disappointment. The Watertown version uses bow-tie pasta in a tomato and cream sauce that is very awesome. The Arlington version was a strange pasta with plain tomato sauce... boo...

Ah well, the new house in Tewksbury is far away from any Joes...

- Wednesday, 19 February 2003 Category: all 

How do you like that, having my own blog isnt edgy anymore.
As Internet trends go, the practice of publishing Web logs, or "blogs" for short, has followed the usual trajectory. In 1993 having an e-mail address was edgy, but by 1995 it was fairly common. So it has been with blogs, which started to really enter the cultural consciousness last year. See the rest
Sheeh

- Tuesday, 18 February 2003 Category: all 

Only 10 days left before we move into Our new house, OH JOY!!!

- Sunday, 16 February 2003 Category: all 

A recent article in, "I, CRINGELY" entitled How to Avoid the Almost Certain End of Sun Microsystems was a interesting read. A bit scary for people who (like me) work at Sun... I have always felt Sun could do a lot better by making Solaris more like RedHat. RedHat bundles thousands of useful tools with their release, Solaris comes with almost nothing by comparison. It is a shame that Sun doesnt adopt a RedHat like approach to delivering functionality in/on Solaris.

- Tuesday, 11 February 2003 Category: all 

If you are a linux user, then you should also find that switch to linux flash animation is hilarious. It mimic's the now famous "switch to mac" advertisements.

- Saturday, 08 February 2003 Category: all 

ZDnet has an interesting story on Blog's, "Blogs become key tools for developers"

- Saturday, 08 February 2003 Category: all 

Frank first mentioned the Shuttle PC after he read a review on Tom's Hardware. He was really excited about its small form factor and wide range of capabilities for a reasonable price. Some of his excitement rubbed off on me. And for Christmas I got one. (THANKS HONEY!!) The shuttle comes as just a case, power supply and mother board. I added;
2.4GigHz Pentium 4 (over clocked to 2.7 Gig)
a 60 Gig Hard Drive
512 Meg Ram
a CD-Rom RW
a GeForce2 MX-400 Video Card
and loaded with RedHat 8.0, It is a sweet little machine!

- Saturday, 25 January 2003 Category: all 

I am visiting my buddie Bryan in NYC. I went to Linux expo on Friday for an hour or so, pretty boring. We went bar hopping last night, that was fun.

- Wednesday, 22 January 2003 Category: all 

This here is an interesting story on a cloned kitten. I love the name of the company that did the clone, "Genetic Savings & Clone." Kitty so cute.

- Tuesday, 21 January 2003 Category: all 

A cute image :-)

- Monday, 20 January 2003 Category: all 

Well, Linux World Expo is happening in NYC this week. So there should be lots of exciting Linux news!! Woo Hoo!!

- Saturday, 18 January 2003 Category: all 

I have a new contract with Sun Microsystems. I work on the Capacity Reporter part of Sun's networks storeage management software, ESM Suite. It is great to be back at Sun and cool to be learning about new technology.

- Wednesday, 15 January 2003 Category: all 

Wow, this could be very cool... google doing a pricing engine.... froogle.com

- Wednesday, 08 January 2003 Category: all 

Some people whine about how opensource will destroy the software industry. I have always felt this was incorrect but I couldnt eloquently explain my position... I like this quote from Russell Pavelick (who is quoting Doc Searls)

Imagine a housing market in which trees are scarce. In that market, much money is made by the few companies that control the expensive commodity called lumber.

But then imagine that someone discovers a nearby land with bountiful forests ready to supply vast quantities of inexpensive lumber. Suddenly, the once-lucrative lumber trade is no longer the virtual gold mine it once was. Instead, the home builder becomes the chief money maker in the new resource-plentiful housing market.

Has the discovery of cheap resources destroyed the housing market? Not at all. In fact, the new market is likely to flourish because more people will be able to afford new homes at significantly lower cost. Has the market been disrupted by the change? Yes, because those that build the total solution (the house) stand to make more money from higher volumes, while those that provide lumber will only make modest profits on building materials.

Open source does much the same thing to the software industry. It will no longer be possible to charge exorbitant prices for basic software resources. There still will be plenty of room for profit in services, solutions, and even highly specialized closed-source software. But the days of high prices for basic resources will come to a close.

- Sunday, 05 January 2003 Category: all 

Heard the film, Spiderman, is all that and a bag of chips. We rented the DVD, but we weren't blown away. Crystal liked it. I didn't enjoy that much, I felt let down.

- Saturday, 04 January 2003 Category: all 

Crystal and I are buying this house. We can't wait to move in!!! We close on Feburary 28.

- Saturday, 04 January 2003 Category: all 

My page is a weblog. I mimic'ed slashdot.org, my favorite site, in setting up the layout of my weblog....

Anyway, lots of people now have weblogs. The technorati site keeps track of which weblogs are the most popular. Pretty cool! You can check it out here, http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/top100.html Chock full of interesting reading.

- Wednesday, 14 August 2002 Category: all 

Jerry and Gail had a BABY! I (per usual) snapped some shots

- Wednesday, 14 August 2002 Category: all 

Crystal's Birthday was August 13th. To celebrate we all went to Crystal's favorite Lobster restaurant in Maine. And I shot some photos.

- Tuesday, 6 August 2002 Category: all 

I just got a new toy! The Logitech Digital Camera, it works best in bright light (it has no flash.) Here are some sample shots

- Sunday, 28 July 2002 Category: all 

Some photos of the trip Crystal, Zuzu and I took to Rome right before the Fourth of July.

Sunday, 21 July 2002

Jen, Crystal, Dave and I traveled to Martha's Vineyard last weekend. This set of photos has more shots than the set from our engagement. Here are the shots.

Friday, 19 July 2002

Crystal and I got engaged last Saturday (July 13.) Here are a few select shots from our Martha's Vineyard trip.

Tuesday, 02 July 2002

Crystal's cousin's Tammy and Eric had a little boy (little Eric) in March. This weekend they had him Christened. Crystal is the godmother.

Wednesday, 03 April 2002

Four months back in early December, Brian and I climbed the Monadnock mountain in southern NH. It takes like 2 hours to drive to the mountain, 3 hours up, 2 hours down, and 2 hours driving back... 9 hours in total... so it is an all day thing.

Wednesday, 03 April 2002

On Saturday, December 9, I did one of my traditional weekends of helping my father with the Christmas tree farm. He gets busy with customers and so I help out by greeting customers, answering questions, taking money and generally being there. Well, I took some shots with my camera... so here they are

Wednesday, 03 April 2002

I snapped some photos while My father and I visited the Belmonts (my sister's family.)

It's hard to take pictures of the twins because they are constantly moving, and don't pose for pictures.

Monday, 01 April 2002
I almost always carry my camera. Although lately I haven't been taking many shots.... Here are a few that have piled up. Mostly because Crystal asked me to grab a shot here or there.
Monday, 18 Mar 2002
Slashdot had an interesting post, It's Not About Lines of Code, that outlines an important point about software productivity. Sometimes the most productive developers dont appear all that productive. I'll have an another mochaccino.
Thursday, 7 Mar 2002
more pictures, These are some random shots from evenings out in Boston
Thursday, 7 Mar 2002
Ok, some more pictures from around Christmas (ok, not so timely - I agree.)
Tuesday, 12 Feb 2002
Some pictures of the New PC Assembly!
Thursday, 7 Feb 2002
Today's Quote from Mono and GNOME an interesting post,
"There is a point in your life when you realize that you have written enough destructors, and have spent enough time tracking down a memory leak, and you have spend enough time tracking down memory corruption, and you have spent enough time using low-level insecure functions, and you have implemented way too many linked lists."
Hey, that is why I started using Java!!!!
Wednesday, 6 Feb 2002
[Image]

Evil evil evil... "Playing with the .NET SDK, the cross-language support looks impressive, but the illusion holds true only until realizing that all languages in the mix are virtually identical. Microsoft has actually invented the concept of skinnable language: changing a language's most superficial aspects, and claiming the result to be a new language. "
     From this article which examines the .NET SDK.

Monday, 4 Feb 2002
The new computer.

I recently felt the need to get a new computer. After talking with Frank, this is what we came up with. Its a nice scrappy little AMD machine. The motherboard has built-in sound and networking. I was thinking about a duel AMD box, but the extra costs of mother board and an additional CPU persuaded me back to the single AMD solution. Most of the computer was purchased at www.googlegear.com, but the case/powersupply/RAM were from www.newegg.com.

CPU AMD Athlon XP 1700+ 1.47GHz Processor Retail $130
MotherBoard ECS K7S5A SiS735 Athlon/Duron Skt A SDR/DDR ATX MB Retail $68.5
Hard Drive IBM Deskstar 60GXP: 60GB 7200RPM ATA/100 Hard Drive $113.5
Video Card Asus V7100 Pro Pure 64MB GeForce2 MX-400 Video Card Retail $82.5
CDROM Sony 16X DVD w/Software $60.99
Floppy SONY FD MPF920 1.44 (3945) White $10.99
CASE EVERCASE|P4ATXMD NPS E4252W00A $22.00
POWER SUPPLY SPARK FSP300-60BTVS $34.00
Memory DDRAM 512MB|64X64 PC-2100 MUSHKIN $140.00
Shipping FedEx and UPS combined $65.19
Total $727.00

All the parts should be arriving today. NEW TOY, OH JOY! I plan to dual boot RedHat 7.2 and Win-XP.

Thursday, 31 Jan 2002
Quote from a neat article about Microsoft Settlement written by the author of the Reiser Filesystem,
"The only thing worse than a government controlled economy is a monopoly controlled economy."

 

Saturday, 26 Jan 2002
Somebody is actually researching whether or not Money and Happiness are related.
Turns out that Money can't buy Happiness
Friday, 25 Jan 2002

 

Last weekend, Crystal and I enjoyed a nice Sunday. Here are the shots to prove it.

Friday, 25 Jan 2002

[Image]This article from the Register is very nerdy, but I couldnt help but find it amusing.

           How Microsoft drove me to Linux
Thursday, 17 Jan 2002
Dave Barry talks about Windows!!  

[Image]"But my point is that because of computer weirdness, I regularly see an entire morning's work -- sometimes as many as 18 words -- get blipped away forever to the Planet of Lost Data. Needless to say, I use Microsoft Windows. I've been a loyal Windows man since the first version, which required you to write on the screen with crayons. Every year or so, Microsoft comes out with a new version, which Microsoft always swears is better and more reliable, and I always buy it. I bought Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1415926, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows RSVP, The Best of Windows, Windows Strikes Back, Windows Does Dallas, and Windows Let's All Buy Bill Gates a House the Size of Vermont.

My computers keep having seizures, but I keep buying Windows versions, hoping I'll get lucky. I'm like the loser in the nightclub who keeps hitting on the hot babe. His shoes are squishing from the pina colada she poured on him, but he's thinking: "She's warming up to me!"

--Dave Barry
Read the rest in Miami Herald

Wednesday, 09 Jan 2002
"The way I look at it -- and I borrow this idea from Richard Dawkins -- the universe has been around for 15 billion years, during which time I haven't existed. According to astrophysicists we have another 15 billion years to go, during almost all of which time, I won't exist. Then there's this tiny flicker in the middle when I find myself here. I want to know what that means. Where did I come from? Where am I going? What am I doing here? And quickly, I haven't got long."  From an article that Pete recommends , The emotional machine. The article is a bit long but I like the ending quote.
Tuesday, 08 Jan 2002
[Image]I really don't like Microsoft.  Sometimes I think they are going to succeed in taking over 100% of the software development market.  I wonder, should I just give up and start learning VB.net?  Today, however, I found this article which helps sooth my concerns as a semi-devoted Linux/Java/OpenSource hacker.  The short article talks about how IBM failed to lock the market with it's big hammer of the day, the MicroChannelArchitecture.  A good read.   The image to the left is an oldie, but a goodie.
Monday, 07 Jan 2002
[Image]I have always found the work habits of programmers to be very strange.  I have often felt like I do not "get into flow" as often as I would like.  I was delighted to read this article by Joel and see that I am not the only one who struggles with this problem.
Friday, 04 Jan 2002
[Image]
Crystal, my father and I went out and toured the Trinkaus Manor Chrismas display in downtown Rome, New York. I snapped some shots. For fun, I took some with flash, some without flash.  Interesting to compare the shots with a flash and the ones without.  Hard to tell if the flash is a good thing or a bad thing.  Kind of strange stuff for a Christmas display,  most of the displays are mother goose stories...  
Thursday, 03 Jan 2002
[Image]  Crystal and I visited Rome for Christmas to see the Monkeys enjoy their first 'real' Christmas. Last year they were a bit small to understand it all, now they are almost 2.5 years old. So they speak, walk, and make their demands known.  Here are some shots from Christmas morning.
Wednesday, 02 Jan 2002
[Image]  Since Crystal and I were going to be in Rome, NY for Christmas, we celebrated Christmas with her parents and her brother Corey on Sunday, December 16th.  Here are some photos from the Cameron Christmas.
Friday, 28 Dec 2001

How about some Jokes?

"What we know about Osama bin Laden is this -- he's worth $300 million, he has five wives and 26 kids ... and he hates Americans for their 'excessive' lifestyle."
-- David Letterman

"The leaders of the Taliban said today that killing bin Laden won't solve the problem. But, you know, it couldn't hurt."
-- Jay Leno

"You read about all these terrorists, most of them came here legally, but they hung around on these expired visas, some for as long as 10-15 years. Now, compare that to Blockbuster; you are two days late with a video and these people are all over you. Let's put Blockbuster in charge of immigration."
-- Jay Leno

"More and more facts coming out about Osama bin Laden. You know, he never sleeps in the same place two nights in a row, just like Clinton."
-- Jay Leno

"This Osama bin Laden guy, spoiled rich kid worth $300M. I have three words for this guy: Anna Nicole Smith. We send her over there, she'll get his money, he'll be dead in a week."
-- Jay Leno

"CBS News finally received anthrax in the mail. As usual, we're number three."
-- David Letterman

"Things have really changed here in Hollywood. Used to be people in this town couldn't wait to get an envelope full of white powder."
-- Jay Leno

"Postal inspectors have been given advanced warning that Publishers Clearinghouse is sending packets of laundry detergent that could be mistaken for anthrax. Oh, good timing! What genius came up with this promotion? What's next? A ticking alarm clock? Let's put that in a box."
-- Jay Leno

"The FBI is! urging all Americans to beware of any letters or packages that have badly misspelled words. Man, this is going to be terrible news for the rap industry."
-- Jay Leno

"Tomorrow night on NBC a very special episode of West Wing, it makes a direct reference to what happened in New York City. The exact plot is being kept top secret. We are the only country in the world where we put our battle plans on CNN, but the plots to our TV shows are top secret."
-- Jay Leno

"Pakistan's ruler Pervez Musharraf predicted the Taliban will fall for hiding Osama bin Laden. Ex-king Zahir Shah is standing by to replace Mullah Mohammed Omar. And the most ominous sign of all, President Bush has learned all their names."
-- Comedian Argus Hamilton

"There was a rumor that Jesse Jackson was going to go over there to talk with the Taliban; apparently they were having trouble rhyming the word Jihad."
-- Jay Leno

"U.S. Government has said they are now going to go after the terrorist's electronic banking system. You know what they should do? They should transfer bin Laden's funds to my bank. They'd mess up his deposits, screw up his statement and nickel and dime him to death with service charges."
-- Jay Leno

"People want to say there isn't racial profiling at the airport, but let's be honest. If you first name is Mohammed, and your last name isn't Ali, arrive at the airport extra early."
-- Jay Leno

 

Thursday, 27 Dec 2001
[Image] Again with Joel... This time an   entertaining story  about the difference in work environments of two companies (Microsoft vs Juno)
Thursday, 27 Dec 2001
[Image]Do you develop software?  How does your company do on the " The Joel Test" ?  I think it is an awesome metric for measuring a software group's basic effectiveness.
Thursday, 20 Dec 2001
[Image]Gotta love Microsoft... Their latest OS, XP, is totally insecure.  Just connect to the Internet and you are vulnerable. Scott Culp, manager of Microsoft's security response center says,  "Every Windows XP user needs to immediately take action." Gartner is calling this problem "plug-and-prey."
Thursday, 20 Dec 2001
[Image]  If you care about XML, this is an interesting summary of Jim Clarks talk at the  IDEAlliance XML 2001.  Jim Clark is one of those "Super Genius" kind of people who works super hard on developing standards and donates free software that people use as a reference for working with standards.  He talks the talk and walks the walk.
Wednesday, 19 Dec 2001
[Image]   This guy, Joel, is worth reading (especially if you are involved in creating software.)  He posts stuff to his web site every so often.  Here is a little piece on Hiring the right people. Even though I don't agree with everything he says, I can understand his position.  I enjoy the clarity of his witting. 
Wednesday, 19 Dec 2001
[Image]There is a company here in Boston (actually Cambridge) that makes software for Linux called Ximian.    I use their 'red-carpet' update utility to keep my machine up to date.  I just bought a 1 year subscription to have priority access to updates.  If you run Linux, check them out.
Tuesday, 18 Dec 2001

[Image]If you haven't yet seen oddtodd, then by all means go see it now.  It describes the life of the dot.com unemployed and is hilarious!
Tuesday, 18 Dec 2001

[Image]

I recently heard about this software called CityDesk.  It is a windows software package for creating and updating personal web sites.  If you run a website, you might want to check it out.

31 Oct 2001, Wednesday

Click here to see Crystal and I camping in NH. We went for 5 days in late July after getting laid-off. We camped along Tripoi Road in the bottom of the White Mountains.

7 Oct 2001, Sunday

Click here to see some pictures I took with my new camera.

4 Sep 2001, Tuesday

 

The outhouse project is now COMPLETE!! We just had to do some finishing touches.

 

4 Sep 2001, Tuesday

 

The project continues with painting the outhouse.

 

3 Sep 2001, Monday

 

This week I am helping Pop ease into retirement. I started helping with building an outhouse for our farm/camp site. Check out our pics

 

3 Sep 2001, Monday

 

Crystal and I are going on a cruise leaving on Aug 8th. Woo Hoo. Not working is a difficult way of life. The cruise ship info is here

 

Aug 10, Friday 2001

 

Crystal and I took some shots of our trip to Atlanta to visit Rebecca, Keith and Alex.

 

Jun 20, Wed 2001
Last weekend my sister rented a vacation home for the family's Cape Cod Vacation. It was a lot of fun!! My father put together these shots

 

Jun 05, Tue 2001

 

Took a trip to Rome, New York on Memorial Day weekend. Snapped some shots of my dad playing with his tractor and a tractor trailer that had overturned!

Jun 04, Mon 2001

 

On Friday I took a canoe trip on the Charles River and snapped some pictures.

May 15, Wed 2001
Dad continues to improve the twins site. He now uses little thumbnail shots in the picture index. Very nice collection of twin pictures.
May 2, Wed 2001

 

My sister's twins turned two years old and had a party. My father took the shots and built the page. Go Dad! They apparently rented a inflatable house for the kids to jump around in. Nifty!

Apr 29, Sun 2001
My father is still playing with his new scanner. Here is all 42 slides from the 1970 desert campout. My father isn't in any of the shots, just my late uncle Richard and me. Some of the shots are double exposed. At the time, I think his camera required you to remember which shots you have taken and manually advance.
Apr 23, Mon 2001
 

As a big fan of AOL's instant messaging system, I found the article "My Two Cents on AOL's Blockings" very interesting. It explains when they have blocked clients and why.

Apr 17, Tue 2001
 

Here is a picture of me during a camping trip with my father and his brother in May of 1970. I was four years old.

 

Mar 08, Thu 2001
Good news for me. A recent survey by Gartner,Inc says "Java Careers Still Hot". Whew!
Mar 05, Tue 2001
Today's quote
"[...] open source has the potential to bring the software industry back to the marketplace; following a decade in which one company determined what innovations would take place, when and at what price." ZDNET: Microsoft's spin on linux
Mar 04, Sun 2001
Some interesting quotes....

First annoying Microsoft says something stupid

"Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer," Microsoft's operating systems chief Jim Allchin said, "I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business."
http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2001/02/15/unamerican/index.html

RedHat, a Linux vendor, Responds,

"I'd argue that a worldwide monopoly, enforced by business practices that a federal judge has found to be predatory and anti-competitive probably has more to do with killing innovation than anything the open source movement could ever do." Red Hat's CEO
from http://www.zdnet.com/sp/stories/news/0,4538,2689856,00.html

Richard Stallman rules! He says,

"The Free Software Movement was founded in 1984, but its inspiration comes from the ideals of 1776: freedom, community, and voluntary cooperation. This is what leads to free enterprise, to free speech, and to free software. "
Richard's article is interesting. Reat it here in this article
Mar 02, Fri 2001
 

Try out Voice of the Web. I have been helping to hack it for months now and it is ready!!

 

 

Feb 25, Sun 2001
 

This Boston globe article ECONOMIC PRINCIPALS Gates vs. the poets kicks ass! Amazed that a print paper understands these issues.

 

Jan 03, Wen 2001
Some pictures of snow from Rome, NY
Dec 14, Thu 2000
I think this article is a good read, for us geeks anyway. It is an interview with super geek Eric Raymond. Here is a quote,
IBM, it is now the policy of that company, announced by its president, [...] every new piece of software written at IBM must be issued under an open source license, unless the development managers can make a specific business case why that should not be.
Nov 28, Tue 2000
An interesing article about aggregation sites.
About 400,000 people now use aggregation services that gather financial information, up eightfold this year, Marenzi says. With major banks and Web portals joining the fray, he predicts the total will double by year's end and reach 8 million by 2004.
Oct 9, Mon 2000
Microsoft pisses me off.
[..] Microsoft defended its statements in court by saying its reference to defining the standard "is mere puffery upon which consumers cannot reasonably rely and, therefore, does not constitute false advertising." Whyte [the judge] then examined the legal basis of puffery, or "puffing," as it has been defined in earlier false-advertising cases. Whyte noted that "puffing" is an exaggerated, generalized or ambiguous claim and not "a statement of specific fact upon which a consumer would reasonably rely."

From this story

July 19, Wed 2000
An excellent geeky article about the new Honda Insight. It a new electric/gasoline powered car from honda. Very nifty!
July 12, Wed 2000
WOO HOO!! I read a book! That hasn't happened in a while. I give this book, "The Perfect Storm" by Sebastican Junger, an A-. Very entertaining. Filled with interesting details and facts about fishing, weather, boating, emergency rescue, etc... I can see why the book spent 10 months on the New York Times Besterseller list! I thought the story wandered a bit, but the book was pretty hard to put down. I liked the colorful and descriptive language used. The character descriptions were quite good.
July 5, Wed 2000
Now an article in the Boston Globe, Lumapath lights the way for Web surfers
June 27, Tue 2000
My company's first press release, LUMAPATH Inc. Launches Online Branding Solution, WOO HOO. And they changed their name to Lumapath from Netcontext.
June 4, Sun 2000
Good article Java and Linux. My favorite two technologies!!! The coming Java-Linux duopoly A must read for you geeks!!!
May 24, Wed 2000
Short but good article on Open Source The Cold War Bits.
May 23, Wed 2000
Updated my Resume to include my current work at NetContext. Since I suck at the written word, PLEASE LET ME KNOW if you find any boo boos. Thanks!
May 17, Wed 2000
Clearly my father is trying to out do me in the web photo album catagory of life.

See his latest entry A few shots on the twins new birthday swings to see what I mean!

May 15, Mon 2000
My fathers got some shots of some easter twins in fancy duds
May 10, Wed 2000
My sister twins had their first birthday party, and I grabbed some shots. I started writting little notes next to each picture. Then I got tired of that. Also I forget peoples names and such. Bad me.
March 31, Fri 2000
some pictures from the office featuring myself and Ed.
March 29, Wed 2000
Ok. Day 2 with camera. I bought the recharging station and a 48 Meg Compact flash for the camera. They should arrive in a few days. Just for fun, I took some shots at dinner. Here they are. I tweaked the software to generate 3 levels of detail: Thumbnail, 800x600, and the orginal image. I changed to three levels because of complaints from Ed about how long the images take to view. I hope you are happy Ed!!
March 28, Tue 2000
Bought myself a new toy. A Canon Powershot S10 digital camera. Its neat-o. It is very compact (fits in shirt pocket.) Here are some shots I took today (just to test it out.) Frank and I getting pizza at Bertucci's
March 05, Sun 2000
Jerry, Gail, Frank, Pete and I ventured out into the real world briefly then quickly ducked into a theater. We saw the movie The Sixth Sense. It was a very good film. It was a little bit scary, a little bit of a mystery, and a little bit of a love story. Everyone pretty much enjoyed it. I would encourage people to see it. I would grade it an B+/A-. It was very thought provoking too. One of those films that you think/re-think and talk about for quite a while. It doesn't leave your mind very quickly.
March 04, Sat 2000
My father recently got this nifty camping chair. He says it is good for sitting in parks or up at the farm. It weighs 9 pounds and takes about 2 seconds to remove from the bag. The bag is hanging on the door knob. It cost $13 at Kmart. Life's simple pleasures.
Feb 21, Mon 2000
I am no sports nut. But I can understand the circumstances that led to this creative solution.
Feb 18, Wed 2000
Here is a story about the mill complex that our company is in. Kind of sets a boom or bust kind of tone that I am not too wild about. Hopefully the dot.com economy has some energy still in it.
Feb 9, Wed 2000
The startup that I work at is called www.netcontext.com. We are still building our product in secret, so the web page is pretty vague. Ah well... That will probably change in a month or two...
Jan 23, Sun 2000
I work inside the mill in Maynard. Check out http://www.clocktowerplace.com/ for the scoop on the mill. Its a corporate site so you might want to get some coffee first.
Jan 02, Sun 2000
ESR's message on DVDs and piracy was a good read.
Dec 28, Tue 1999
Here are some Christmas day snaps of my sisters babies!
Dec 27, Mon 1999 1999
An excellent article, Pied Piper of Technology, is all about Bill Joy. One of the many crazy brains at Sun.

"Voracious Reader at Tender Age of 3 A tousle-haired Shakespeare fanatic who consumes as many as a dozen books on an extreme range of topics daily, Joy still browses in the local bookstore, even after becoming Amazon.com's second-largest individual customer."

I am overjoyed when I read a book a month. Sheesh...

Nov 28, Sun 1999
Articles by Bill Gurley are always a fascinating read. He seems to make the complex obvious... like this article on stock valuations. killer.
Nov 25, Thu - Thanksgiving 1999
We had a splendid Thanksgiving here in beautiful Rome, NY.

My sister's twins are Christmas ready.

Nov 14, Fri 1999
Check this link, www.microsith.com specially if you hate Microsoft.

3 more baby pics right here

Oct 15, Fri 1999
This kitty should cut back on the crazy lifestyle.
Oct 9, Sat 1999

Ok, where do I find parties like that? I hope my next job is in a bigger box.

Oct 8, Fri 1999
Continuing with my immature theme, here is a spoof on a popular commercial. DOH!
Oct 5, Tue 1999
Ok, a friend of mine sent me this picture of a city cross street. Can you figure out why he mailed it to me? (clue: He isn't my most mature friend) This is in pretty bad taste, but humorous.
Oct 4, Mon 1999
Here is an intesting place to pickup unusual ideas, www.memepool.com. They even have a link to that Jive Delta Clip (that I posted below)
Oct 3, Sun 1999
Rented the off beat but funny movie Office Space and ended up seeing it twice. If you have ever worked in cubicle, I strongly recommend checking out this film. It has a lot of dilbert style office humor.
Sep 26, Sun 1999
Updated my Resume to include my current work at Radnet. Also updated some of the company links. Sweet. Let me know if you find any boo boos. Thanks!
Sep 21, Tue 1999
Updated the joke about the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. It appears to be an urband legend. See below.
Sep 21, Tue 1999
This audio clip is a 'Jive Delta Airlines Commercial' farce. It uses strong language, but it is very funny.
Sep 13, Mon 1999
Here is the latest from my sister... arent they just the cutest!

My Father posted more pictures here

July 28, Wednesday 1999

FYI!!! This is (NOT) an actual radio conversation between a United States Navy aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and Canadian authorities off the coast off Newfoundland in October, 1995. (The radio conversation was released by the Chief of Naval Operations on 10/10/95 as authorized by the Freedom of Information Act.)

Canadians: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.

Americans: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.

Canadians: Negative. You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.

Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.

Canadians: No, I say again, you divert YOUR course.

Americans: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS LINCOLN, THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIED BY THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS, AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE 15 DEGREES NORTH...I SAY AGAIN.....THAT'S ONE-FIVE DEGREES NORTH.... OR COUNTER-MEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP!!

Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

Ok, that story is pure urband legend... Not too suprising, but someone did actually check;

"That story about the USS Lincoln is pure BS. At the time it was supposed to take place the ship was on the West coast in dock. I can find no record of the USS Lincoln having ever been near Nova Scotia. My information came from official naval records."

- Mike.macmonagle@hill.af.mil

July 18, Sunday 1999
Well, FYI, I quit laying about and got back to work. I am working at www.radnet.com on a Portal type project. It is interesting work with smart people. How can you beat that?

I updated my Links to be the sites that I currently check daily... the old list was pretty beat.

May 21, Friday 1999
                                                [ FYI, someone emailed me this, I didnt create it. -- lllike PLEASE ]

                                                Start with a cage containing five monkeys. In the cage, hang a banana
                                                on a string and put a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey
                                                will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the Banana.  As soon
                                                as he touches the stairs, spray all of the monkeys with cold
                                                water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same
                                                result --aaall the monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon,
                                                when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will
                                                try to prevent it.

                                                Now, Turn off the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and
                                                replace it with a new one.  The new monkey sees the banana and wants
                                                to climb the stairs.  To his horror, all of the other monkeys attack
                                                him.  After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to
                                                climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

                                                Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with
                                                a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The
                                                previous Newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm. Again,
                                                replace a third original monkey with a new one. The new one makes it
                                                to the stairs and is attacked as well.  Two of the four monkeys that
                                                beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs,
                                                or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

                                                After replacing the fourth and fifth original monkeys, all the monkeys
                                                which have been sprayed with cold water have been
                                                replaced. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs.
                                                 
                                                Why not?
                                                 
                                                Because that's the way it's always been around here. And that's how
                                                company policy begins....
                                                
May 8, Sunday 1999
Last weekend, Pete and I visited Rome and my sisters twins. Got some some photos right here.
April 28, Wednesday 1999
My sister had identical twin girls today!!! Woo Hoo!!! Pictures here!! Lets hope the circus is still hiring!
April 20, Tuesday 1999
An interesting article about the future of trading.

MICROSOFT LINUX, say it isnt SO!

April 6, Tuesday 1999
My brother and I recently saw The Matrix. We both thought it was a good movie. At first I was worried because the last movie that I saw Keanu Reeves in, Johnny Mnemonic, really sucked. I read the book (Burning Chrome) that Johnney Mnemonic was based on so perhaps that set my expectations too high. Mnemonic just seemed to get so cheesy so fast. But "The Matrix" was much better.

Another reason I was surprised to like this film is, I knew most of what was going to happen (ie. I saw the trailer). So I was surprised how much time I spent after the film mulling over all the things that were in play. The movie certainly provided some mental entertainment beyond just the smooth visuals and decent acting, it provided some paradoxes and situations that kept me thinking through stuff. Nifty.

April 5, Monday 1999
Jerry and Gail are moving into their new house. I helped a little by helping move the dining room table and packing 5 boxes of Jerry's computer games. Joy.

Getting rid of Jerry's games put me into a spring cleaning mood. I finally got rid of all the boxes of books that I had lying around. The books are now sorted into four sections:

  • Books to donate to the library (1 box)
  • Reference Books (1 box)
  • Books I enjoyed and want to keep (1 box)
  • Books I should read (3 boxes)
The "Books I should read" is my biggest category. I now have about 120 books on my "to read" book pile. Damn you amazon.com!!! Actually most of the books (about 60%) are science fiction books Jerry as purged from his collection. About 20% are books on computer languages and systems. The remaining 20% are on general science and self improvement stuff.

So If I were now to set out and read a book a week (a blistering pace compared to my current rate of a book every month or so), I would be done in about 2 years. Woo Hoo!

March 30, Tuesday 1999
Ok, It has been been a while... I have no excuse for not updating this. I have been not working since February 15th. When people ask, "Why are you not working?" I give a variety of reasons,
  • My hands need a rest (I have some RSI issues)
  • As a consultant I can afford to take a few months off
  • My brother Pete says, "I am rich powerful and lazy like the rich of the world"
  • My brother Pete and house-mate Matt were looking for jobs and I envied their job free lives.
  • Because I hate getting up on Monday's to go to work.
  • I miss summer vacations.
  • Because I can.
There is truth to all of these. Not working kicks butt. Although keeping entertained is an issue. I have been using the time to visit friends and family. I also have been playing with the Dragon Naturally-Speaking product and doing some additional hand/arm/shoulder exercises. Fun.
Feb 5, Friday 1999
Updated the picture page of my parents house. My father supplied me with a graph of their yearly gas consumption. These people know how to party!
Jan 8, Friday 1999

Here are some shots of my family and me at Christmas. Kooky!

Dec 23, Wednesday 1998
I helped out with tree farming on yet another weekend. Here are the photos to prove it! My father ownes and operates a tree farm. This is his tree farm webpage.
Nov 29, Sunday 1998
Ok, by popular demand! Here are some photos of Thanksgiving and Tree Farming. Enjoy!
Nov 7, Saturday 1998
Jerry, Frank and I watched TimeCop. It is a pretty good film if you like action films. Jean-Claude Van Damme does a pretty good job of acting. The action combined with the time travel issues make for an entertaining combination. I would rate the movie a B+.
Nov 1, Sunday 1998
Just finished reading "The Microsoft File". It was an interesting book, although not very well written. It seemed like it was smattered togther from many interviews and/or news accounts. It didnt have much of a cohesive story, but it certainly seemed to draw out a "pattern of behavior" of microsoft business practices. Basically Microsoft is pretty "evil". Concerned with its own survival and growth above all. Basically a disgusting a organization.
Oct 27, Tuesday 1998
Volume 2 and 3 of the South Park DVDs showed up today! Frank and I rewatched two classics "an elephant makes love to a pig" and "Tom's Rhinoplasty." The image quality was not especially noteworthy. Every episode has a mini-introduction from the south park creators. The intros are funny but also somewhat lame. Worth seeing once, but I wouldnt recommend buying the DVDs for them.
Oct 26, Mon 1998
I suffer from RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury.) It sucks. I recommend reading Erik Barkley's experience to gain an idea of what this is like. I have experienced and/or read about everything mentioned.
Oct 24, Sat 1998
Well, Jerry and Gail got married. I have some pictures here, http://jadn.com/wedpics/. They did a fantastic job (fast bit in the Church, open bar at the reception.) Dave Goldblatt has some pictures here, http://www.psyton.com/ibrowse/ (see the nuptials section.)
Oct 17, Sat 1998
Movie Madness continues (I have been seeing a lot of films lately) with "The Player". I would give this move a letter grade of B. This movie was recommended to me by JC, someone who actually works in the movie industry. JC is really friend of a friend. JC has done some music videos and worked for Tom Cruise for several years. He thought that the movie really captures the craziness of Hollywood.

I was expecting the Film to be a light hearted satire of the movie making business, but it was much darker film. It definitely did draw out the Hollywood scene, but the main character, played by Tim Robbins, was hard to identify with. For most of the film, he is "trapped" in a situation that he is unable to resolve. The situation slowly grows to nearly consume all his attention and then slowly wanes. For much of the film, he seems caught in a kind of low grade panic. The film does do this interesting thing of constantly reflecting upon itself (like the opening scene being one big shot.) Overall it was an enjoyable piece.

Oct 16, Fri 1998
I watched the DVD "Wag the Dog" tonight. It was a good film. I would give it a B+. It would have been a bit better if the Clinton thing hadn't occurred and made the story less of a satire. I enjoyed the movie enough to review the DVD supplemental material. It was interesting to hear Dustin Hoffman's approach and difficulty in playing the producer role. Especially since I thought he did such an excellent job.

I didn't like part of the films ending, so I was pretty pleased to hear it discussed in the supplemental material. After hearing the producers thoughts I can at least appreciate why that part was done the way it was.

Oct 14, Wen 1998
Saw my hand occupational therapist, Elaine, today. She recommends that I;
  • run my wrists under cold water every 2 hours for 30 seconds (to reduce swelling)
  • take Ibuprofen every day for 2 weeks (to reduce swelling)
  • stretch every 30 minutes (raise palms in a stop sign motion and move hands forward slowly straightening my elbow, then repeat with fingers pointing downward) (to keep tendons from shortening?)
  • finger stretch (hold palm flat and upright, use other hand to hold three fingers flat then curl remaining finger to palm. Repeat for each finger of both hands except thumbs.)
  • She recommends using the "no hands mouse" to rest my tired tendons...
She is the boss! Can you say "RSI sucks? Sure you can."
Oct 13, Tue 1998

I rented 2 DVDs today. "Wag the Dog" and "The Player", two films I have been meaning to see. I didn't get time to see them tonight. We (Frank and Matt) stopped off for dinner at John Harvards. I tried a "Milk Stout", which sounds really gross, but was pretty tasty. Sweet and smooth. After dinner we stopped over at the Hong Kong Restaurant/Bar/Club to play some darts and have a drink with many straws...(Frank had never had one.) I kicked butt at darts and won both games!

Oct 13, Tue 1998
I saw the movie Mr Bean this evening. Overall I would give it a C+, you really have to be a Rowan Atkinson fan to enjoy this film. It had many funny moments, but it seemed to take a while to get to them.

I was hoping that the DVD version would have some extra gaffes or an interview with Rowan, but no luck. It only had the trailers.

Oct 12, Mon 1998
Ok, A hacker broke into our site, so I have been pretty busy with rebuilding our system (only secure this time.) This month's Scientific American has a pretty good article about hackers.

Saw the movie Boogie Nights staring Marky Mark (or Mark Wahlberg). It was a trip. Toto this isn't Kansas anymore. It was similar to pulp fiction in that the film told the stories of many characters.

The DVD was pretty cool. It contained about 11 scenes that were cut from the film. The DVD also had a sound track where the director, Mel Smith, talks about the film. It is cool to hear the thoughts and intentions of the director. It gives extra depth to the film and the craft of film making.

Sep 22, Tue 1998
I saw a Harvard Healthcare primary care physician on an express visit last Thursday. He diagnosed me with chronic tendonitis. Which basically means the tendons in my forearms have been hurting for a while and not healing on their own. Seems like I use the computer too much. Bummer. Especially since I tend to make my living from using the computer (for now anyway!)

The doctor agreed to send me to occupational therapy. I will be seeing a Hand Therapist, Elaine LeCroix, hopefully soon. (UPDATE: Scheduled for Oct 14th)

Sep 10, Thur 1998
We recently had a programming lesson here at the house. Frank had a hard time at first. As you can see from the picture on the left. On the right, Jerry is teaching all about binary math...
Sep 10, Thur 1998
My father recently went to a renaissance fair and snapped some photos. He says he was just experimenting with the camera, so expect shots of the family or great lighting effects... Good to see Pop is getting out of the house! :-)
Sep 4, Fri 1998
I am going home for the long weekend. Lucky me! Must remember to snag the camera... Might camp out at the farm, don't yet know for sure.
Aug 23, Sun 1998
I installed a new door bell for our house. Notice the professional attention to detail, like the nail posts to wrap the wire on. I did a good job.
Aug 17, Mon 1998
If you think my pages are ok, check out roger's pages. A pretty wild ride...
Aug 11, Tue 1998
Ok. The vacation pics are ready. Actually my father beat me to the punch. He hosted the vacation pics here, enjoy!!
Aug 10, Mon 1998
I haven't gotten bored with updating this. Ok, maybe a little. But I also have been battling a RSI flare up. Mostly my tendons in my forearms. A good posture, keeping your wrists straight, and taking breaks are important to prevent this painful and crippling condition. YOU SHOULD TAKE ACTION NOW. Goto http://amazon.com and search on RSI. buy and read.
Aug 9, Sun 1998
We have been invaded. Jerry and Frank's cousin Matt has just moved in. Check out the first day of his job search here. GO MATT!
July 29, Wed 1998
Just got back from a week long vacation in South Haven, Michigan. My family was having a annual get together. The house was right near the beach and town. It was pretty sweet. I have some pictures of the trip. I will post them soon... :-)

Here is a Blast from the Past Check out this news paper article from when Jerry and I were little kids... sweet.

July 15, Wed 1998
Woo Hoo, Jini, the really cool Java technology for distributed computing, is out of the bag... read about it here;

July 14, Tue 1998
Ok, here is a joke.


A farmer walked into an attorney's office wanting to file for a divorce. The attorney asked, "May I help you?" The farmer said, "Yea, I want to get one of those dayvorce's."

The attorney said, "well do you have any grounds?" The farmer said, "Yea, I got about 140 acres." The attorney said, " No, you don't understand, do you have a case?" The farmer said, "No, I don't have a Case, but I have a John Deere."

The attorney said, "No you don't understand, I mean do you have a grudge?" The farmer said, "Yea I got a grudge, that's where I park my John Deere." The attorney said, "No sir, I mean do you have a suit?"

The farmer said, "Yes sir, I got a suit. I wear th to church on Sundays." The exasperated attorney said, "Well sir, does your wife beat you up or anything?"

The farmer said, "No sir, we both get up about 4:30."

Finally, the attorney says, "Okay, let me put it this way. "WHY DO YOU WANT A DIVORCE?" And the farmer says, "Well, I can never have a meaningful conversation with her."


July 11, Sat 1998
A big howdy hi! I have been pretty busy working... Our product at work is supposed to go into "Beta" in 5 weeks and I am the guy who has to test it! Belch. So I have been pretty busy writting/worrying about automated testing and getting enough coverage.

As you can no doubt see, I have finished the paperback book on the right. I thought it was a pretty amazing read. It was just so weird to read Ben Franklin's own words. He talks about setting up shop in Boston and traveling to and from London. It is remarkable how down to earth the living legend was. In all of his writing, he is amazingly humble... Perhaps I could learn from him. Nah, I don't need any improvement. :-)

July 8, Wed 1998
I recently finished this book, How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. It is an excellent book! It describes evolutionary psychology, which is a way of looking at how humans are designed and built. Basically we, like dogs, cats and mice, have evolved in a Darwinian fashion. This implys that natural selection has crafted behaviors that cause us to live and reproduce. Little things like why we compulsively choose to eat cheesecake, or why guys are so much more aggressive than gals... This book explains the current state of the art in understanding how evolution has shaped us... And it is a pleasure to read!! I strongly recommend this book, click on the image to go to amazon and get a copy now!
July 7, Tue 1998
Not much is going on today, so here is a blast from the past. A lot of people point out that my writing skills suck, but here is real proof that they have improved. Click here to see a writting sample from when I was 13 years old (in 7th grade)... Probably not my best work...
July 5, Sun 1998
Frank and I left Rome around 5:30 and arrived back home in Arlington at about 10pm. I had fun this weekend. My aunt Roberta, cousin Jennifer, and Jennifer's cousin Sarra were visting. I see them about every 5 or so years, so it is a little like remeeting them everytime. I left the air hockey table in Rome. I will have to get it next time... It was quite fun playing, but it did make our hands a little sore...
July 4, Sat 1998
A nice dreary 4th, a good day to cuddle up to the keyboard or go shopping or do both. We did both... hit the dollar store, K-mart, and wall-mart... bought some odds and ends... including an air hockey table for $65 bucks... Don't know how I am going to get that home... Maybe Jerry and Gail can fit it in their car... humm...

Check this out , an excellent article by Dave Barry about Windows

July 3, Fri 1998
Rome I am in Rome, NY today! The 5.5 hour ride out here sucked, but the traffic was very light. Frank and I made a wrong turn near Albany, so we spent 15 minutes driving towards NYC. I am showing my Dad how to use http://quote.yahoo.com and setup a stock portfolio. It is a pretty cool feature of Yahoo to let you track your investments.
July 2, Thu 1998
A-OK! There was much rejoicing today. The product we are working on was accepted by the customer. Woo Hoo... At work we were a little nervous about this because we found a number of problems in the past few weeks, but we think we have it straightened out now...

I tried race walking today... Race walking is just like regular walking except you do it really fast... This causes a lot of hip swing and rapid arm movement, which in turn causes you to look and feel like a goof. But a race walk workout is as effective as a jogging/running workout with much less chance of injury. (Much lower impact) I might try changing 1/3 of my daily run to incorporate race walking...

July 1, Wed 1998
bug Happy Joy. I helped find a big bug in the product today (I am wearing a Quality Engineer hat this week.) It was a major flaw. At first I thought it must have been the test that was broken. We now believe that the problem has been there all along, but our customers just haven't come across it. It is good we were able to find it first! It is also good to feel I made a positive contribution. DOH!
June 29, Mon 1998
News Pretty normal day in the office until 4:30... Then Dave and I cut out and went to see the X-Files Movie. I don't do well with suspense films. Apparently the X-Files is big on suspense... The loud Jaws like music would set me on the edge of my chair... Quite frankly the Movie scared me and I don't enjoy being scared. So I got up and walked around the outside of the theater for awhile. I then continued to watch the movie but only by standing at the back of the theater near the door (so I could duck out.) That is just they way I am. It kind of sucks, but such defects are better than bone cancer. When I was little I watched the Wizard of Oz from behind the couch. I guess one of the things that make me "me" and diffrent from the "average person" is this funny problem of not being able to distance myself from the violence or suspence in a film (or a book.) Even though I know it is just a film or words on a page, part of me reacts to the idea of the circumstance independently of actual occurance. I once took a date to see "The Fly" and I had to get up and leave during the film because it freaked me out too much... Now that was scary and embarrassing...
June 28, Sun 1998
Spent today debugging problems with my IDE controllers and hard drives. Still don't completely know why certain configurations (Master/Slave) don't work while other configurations do... (all my hard drives are Maxtors...) But after many hours of jiggling and trying and tweaking, the system seems to be in a stable state... very cool.
June 27, Sat 1998
I lead an exciting and rewarding life. In part thanks to companies like Staples who by selling the simple and beautiful Bill Payment Center help to make my life a joy. I cannot even begin to convey how much this simple device has brightened my life. Gone are the stacks of bills, hunting for the check book, searching for stamps... I feel like a new man!! Seriously though, it is pretty clever... click on the image for more details.
June 26, Fri 1998
Today we visited provincetown. A very artsy and "expressive" place... Naturally we went up the Granite Tower, very cool. We also did some shopping (naturally.) I bought some Tee Shirts (like what else) and a plain (but quite nice) baseball cap (so I don't look like Don King when I first get up in the morning.) As the evening drew to a close, Frank and I realized we had nearly gone 48 hours without Internet access. Since the house had to be vacated Saturday morning by 10am (so the next renters can take over), Frank and I decided to get back to Boston. We made it home at about 1am and spent the next hour or so Surfing the net... :-)
June 25, Thu 1998
Today we went to the beach, great fun. Layed around in a folding lounge chair underneath the hazy sky... I only got a slight burn on the back of my neck (the Sun poked through late in the day), but Frank, somehow, managed to burn both his legs and his arms pretty good. Perhaps the slight tan that I got on the camping trip shielded me.

While laying about on the sand, I did get some major reading done. My sister loaned to me John Grisham's The Partner. It was a very good read, although more like an ice cream style read than a substantive meal like read. None the less, reading it was Fun!

June 24, Wed 1998
Ok, on Wednesday night Frank and I packed up and left for the Cape at about 8:30pm, so we didn't get to the house Jerry and Gail rented until about 11:30 (we stopped for eats at Pizza Uno.) The house they rented was interesting. It was a simple smallish 2 story A frame house, like you might find vermont near the ski slopes. The house had two strong themes; 1. it was decorated with lots of arty nick nacks that look like they were done by the owners wife (lots of painting of chicks and stuff) 2. the house looked like it was assembed with scraps from a 1000 other construction jobs (the owner was a builder.) So every window was different from every other one, every piece of trim was different from every other one... The house it self was almost art like in the strangely disconnected way everything was tied together... Perhaps Jerry snapped some shots of the house...
June 23, Tue 1998
Not much new... Jerry and Gail are lounging at the Cape so Frank and I are going it alone... although we plan to go out to the Cape Wednesday evening and hang out through Saturday. Roger Goun (the guy on the right) recently asked me If I intend to go with Jerry and Gail on the honeymoon too? I would just like to say that I haven't been asked, but my bags are packed.
June 21, Sun 1998
Well, I am spending this weekend working in the office. Oh poop. We have a deadline to meet, and I want to take Thursday and Friday off to hang out with Jerry, Gail and Frank in the Cape. That should be like camping, no computers. :-)
June 18, Thu 1998
Well, I mounted the computer tray onto the table. Sweet.

Brian and Linda Romano are visiting this weekend. They arrived this evening. They also brought thier mutt, Elvis. Jerry and Gail are going to play tour guides on Friday and show them around a bit... Fun fun...

June 17, Wed 1998
Watched SouthPark and B5. Kick ass. Ran twice today, once in the morning and once when I got home from work... Don't know what came over me... It was just a nice cool evening and I had the power! Bumming because I did want to finish setting up my "new improved computer desk"... I am in the process of attaching a keyboard tray to the folding table that I use as a computer desk... I will have to snap some pics of this project. As Red Green says, "If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."
June 16, Tue 1998
Still cleaning up after the big hard drive problems... Lots of images in the picture gallery have gone funky... I am working to restore or purge problem images... :-(
June 14, Sun 1998
Installing Red Hat 5.1 did not go well. (should have been about 4 hours took about 10 hours) My IDE controller suddenly didn't like my second drive... Which was the one that held all my data (after installing RedHat Linux cleanly on to my first drive.) I think everything is back to normal now... but I still need to "deal" with my flaky controller... I think I will wait for "system doctor" Frank and seek his advice.
June 13, Sat 1998
Rainy weekend. Good weekend to upgrade server. So, today is the day I install the new Red Hat. Cool once I have it all going... suckey as I expect it will take a few hours of horking to get it all the way I want it.
June 11, Thu 1998
I worked from home today... that was a nice change... gets rid of that ugly 1.5 hr I normally spend riding to and from work... I was also able to run some errands. Like getting my hair cut (thank god), buying some new running shoes (asics gels - nice shoe), and some roller blades! Cool, now I find out it is going to rain all weekend... Must not use rollerblades on wet surface. Must not use rollerblades on wet surface. Must not use rollerblades on wet surface. :-(
June 10, Wed 1998
Saw SouthPark and B5... both good episodes... SouthPark was mostly about Jimbo and Ned's local access show titled "Hunting and killing". B5 had londo finding out that his home planet is guilty of attacking all the aligned worlds.
June 9, Tue 1998
Worked like a dog today... 14.5 hours in at 9:30am out at 2:30am (time off for lunch and dinner.) We were making a product release deadline. We made it, just barely.
June 7, Sun 1998
Saw the The Truman Show. It was weird. The film's story was as advertised, but result left me with many things to think about and contemplate. It is certainly an unusual scenario. It left me asking questions about "What is reality?" and "What is morality?" Overall I would give it a B+, and recommend seeing it.
June 4, Thu 1998
Updated the nolan page. Hacked on some demo Java code for dee. Went to a morning conference on Sun's "Ultra AXI" mother board. Mostly to drag out information about the JavaChips... Sun seems to be taking the "some day soon" approach to getting JavaChips released...
June 2, Tue 1998
Beat on this page a little. Got the dates soft colored (gray) and in the upper left. It is good to have goals in life. Installed JBuilder2, it looks complicated. I think I am gonna stick with just emacs and the JDK. The gas pedal on my truck got stuck again today. That sure puts some excitement into the routine. It seems to loosen up with a few stomps, but it doesn't always happen at the best times... 1998
June 1, Mon 1998
Frank bought (actually had me use my charge card) two sound cards at MicroCenter. The Diamond Monster Sound and the Turtle Beach Montage (or something). They are both PCI cards. He bought two because he already had a problem with one Diamond Monster and want's to rule that out by buying another one, and bought the Turtle Beach in case the Monster is just in compatible with his system. He is running Win98!

June 1, Mon 1998
Ok Ok Ok! Changed the images sizes for the animations to be small... Shesh doesnt everyone have a cable modem? :-)

May 31, Sun 1998
Redid this home page. Always a work in progress.

May 35, Mon 1998
Went camping at the farm! My father and I took some snapshots...

May 20, Wed 1998
Put picture of my cousin's baby Nolan online. Bryan and Bev Bundle of Joy.

May 18, Mon 1998
Dee keeps whining about updating the images... like I have the time!!

Apr 26, Sun 1998
Jerry and Gail got engaged, to each other! Oh Joy!
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