As you know from my last blog entry, I set out for Portland, OR last week to give a talk at OSCON. I arrived Wednesday nite, head south 50 miles or so to Salem, OR - where I stayed with some family. The next day - Thursday evening - I made the trek back up to Portland (in my Uncle's giant, immaculate GMC pickup truck from '89!) for my talk on using Spring Integration to connect business with their customers on Friday morning. My time in Portland - Thursday night and part of Friday afternoon - was very fun. I met Jeremy Grelle. Jeremy was also presenting that morning; his talk was on the Spring Web Stack. (If you didn't know, Jeremy works a lot on the Spring web stack - Spring Web Flow, Spring MVC, Spring BlazeDS, Spring ActionScript, etc.) A Friday at OSCON is a slow day. This particular one was only half as long as the regular conference days. So, as soon as Jeremy and I had finished our talks (they were both well received) we (two colleagues from the Shopzilla engineering group, Jeremy and I) cut out for some food and beer at Deschutes brewery not too far by train from the conference hall.

I took the chance while in Oregon to head south a little bit and visit family in Salem, Oregon. I have a lot of family up there on my dad's side. Oregon's a beautiful state, Portland a beautiful city, but Salem... Salem is a beautiful capital. There are things about Salem you'll have to see to believe. The people are nicer, the air - with Oregon being the greenest state in the union - is cleaner. I spent many a summer in Salem as a kid - making the long trek down to Bend for summer activities, enjoying the parks, the forest and - of course - the jam.

This trip felt like coming home again; I got to visit with aunt, uncle, assorted family, brother, and my niece and nephew. Time flies. I was very glad to see my brother Cary and my sister-in-law Sandy, and their family. It's been a few years, I'm afraid. His son, my nephew, is Curtis. His daughter, my neice, is Samantha.

Honestly, these sorts of stories make me feel old. Curtis was a giant! I hardly recognized him! He handily dwarfed both my brother and myself in stature and size. Whatever they feed those kids there, it's working! He has grown into quite a guy.

Curtis took my dad and I fishing on Saturday. He navigated and was the oreseman, guide, baby-sat us city-folk, handled re-baiting the lines and untangling the poles, and he still caught 5 fish (while helping ensure that dad and I each caught 4-5 fish!) It was amazing! I thought I'd seen everything. It was a catch-and-release river, so we didn't keep or eat anything we caught, but had a lot of fun nonetheless.

On Sunday, dad and I head out to Detroit Dam where we spent the early morning hours - 6 AM to 10AM - with a line hanging off the side of the dam fishing. It was as if the fish were queuing, single-file, and then jumping on our hooks.

Next comes my time with my niece, Samantha, now 16 or 17, going on 40. We spent the afternoons watching her play in a city-wide basketball tournament called Hoopla. They cordoned off certain roads in downtown Salem and had groups of all ages play in matches. First, you have to admire a town where they have the initiative to close down major streets to provide such an outdoor, summer time activity for the youths. Second, my niece was excellent! Her team was ultimately eliminated on Sunday, but it was quite a riveting few matches getting there!

I've long enjoyed Salem. It's a small city with big-city folks. I laughed so hard I hurt myself a few years ago when my aunt and I set out for something and she impatiently came to a stop at a street with THREE cars on it at rush hour. She didn't appreciate being dragged out into the rush-hour traffic - a rush hour of THREE cars. She really didn't appreciate having to stop. I poked my head out the window to see why traffic (I use the term loosely) had come to an abrupt stop, and almost fell over. There was a duck crossing!

I look forward to doing it again next year. What a good trip, with great people. And, being from Southern California, I more than appreciated the 85 degree-highs on a Summer day!

Waiting for a long running process to finish up. Started screwing around on the internet and found a useful little application called TweetCloud. It generates a neat looking image-based cloud of your tweets. Here's my tweet cloud. I'm @starbuxman, if you're on that busy network and wanna chat.

I have a lot to be thankful for. This year saw my wife and I move to Los Angeles, where we've been well received in new jobs and by family. I've experienced success speaking at various conferences, and this year saw the publication of my first book, Apress' "Spring Enterprise Recipes." Recently, I was in a pretty bad accident (a big-rig rear-ended me) and I emerged alive. I have a wonderful wife who has always supported me, and I have made good friends. I am thankful for the readers of my blogs. I am thankful for my loving friends and family.

I hope you have a long list of things for which you're thankful, too. Happy Thanksgiving!

What a busy couple of months!

I started last month (from October 2nd to the 11th) at the Java2Days conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. I gave three talks on Spring and JSF, Spring and jBPM, and Spring Integration (the Spring ESB-like framework). I think the slides will be available there in shortly. Meanwhile, here are some photos of the event below, though you're encouraged to log in to Facebook and check out the full galeries there.

The name of the gentleman on the far left escapes me, but that's John Lewis, Emo, and yours truly on the right

From left to right: Ivo Penev, Gisele Consoline, Rob Harrop, yours truly, John Willis, and Heath Kesler

I had a great time at the conference. The audience was great the discussions great, too. The drinking was good, too! :-)

At some point, I got some sort of stomach bug (perhaps in Greece?) and when I returned home, I was severely dehyrdated. I spent a little time hooked up to an IV and then spent the subsequent week pounding antibiotics, gatorade, and soup. There's a thousand ways to get sick, only one way to get better!

After that, I got deep into the final edits for my book "Spring Enterprise Recipes." Really enjoyed that process - it's fascinating to see what goes into writing a book. Trust me, the book is far better for the effort of the amazing editors at Apress! :-)

I spoke at the Pasadena Java User Group on using Spring Integration - that crowd was very cool and the discussion that ensued was also good.

Recently, my sister got married. I wish her, and her husband, many happy days together.

I think that wraps up the highlights. I'll start chiming in more frequently. A lot has happened of late, including the debut of Google's Go programming language, The Motorola Droid, the continued standoff between Sun/Oracle and the European Union over objections to Oracle's accquisition of MySQL, and more. Exciting times...

Today started off nice enough... I went to Malibu Seafood today and enjoyed a lovely day on the beach and came back to check my blogs and, blam! mistake-in-the-face!

In my last blog I discussed that I'd updated the software powering this blog, and that there might be some bugs to work out.

Boy, am was I on the money on that one! Turns out, I updated the logic used to implement my RSS feed and Atom feed (eh, mainly, the switch - I'm embarrassed to admit - was to actually use the token that ROME expects to generate an Atom feed instead of the RSS 2.0 type of feed.) Bluntly: if you subscribed to my Atom feed, you only got an RSS feed, because I fat fingered the 'feedType' parameter on that one!

Apologies to all those were spammed this morning with 'duplicate' (essentially) blog entries! Everything except this and the one before it are old and can be marked as read... thanks.

What a month! I know this is a little late, but boy has it been a crazy month! April's shaping up to be no less crazy, too.

First, there was much ado about nothing early in the month when the court in Tempe, Arizona scheduled me for jury duty only to relieve me of it the day-of.

Then, on March 17th, I drove to Las Vegas for the conference - my first big speech - at the The ServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas (which reminds me, I need to remove that banner on the right side of the page... ) which went off fine enough. More usefully, I have some very interesting new friends. I was especially happy to have had a chance to see the Mandalay Bay Aquarium, which was amazing.

From Las Vegas, I drove to Los Angeles, CA to meet my friend Srinivas who I'd invited to join me for a weekend there. We drove 500 miles in 2 days just inside of Los Angeles, and another 400 when we shared the drive home to Phoenix, Arizona. We went to the Laugh Factory and were delighted to find that Dane Cook was a special, secret guest-of-honor. Awesome!

Then, I came home. I had given notice at my job at Wells Fargo and so the last week of March I spent closing up shop there and preparing for the next step. March 31st was my last, very sad day at Wells Fargo. I said good bye to everyone -- good people I should like very much to keep in contact with -- and packed up a few computers and books (and clothing, I suppose.) and drove to Los Angeles (again!) to start a new job there April 1. My wife and I are moving here, but the first step is getting out here and finding a place to live and so on. At the moment, I'm staying with family and my wife will join me soon.

These last few days have all about getting into the new job - interesting people there, too - and reuniting with some old friends.

Boy, am I glad to be back!

My favorite show on television used to be The West Wing. The show was witty, and featured arcane, blissfully self contained plots and narrative.. dialogue... banter that would tickle Shakespeare. It was amazing. It was an ideal view of the White House and the men and women inside the executive branch. There were, with rare exceptions, no ludity, no over-the-top romances, no digressions into the characters' personal lives. Except, of course, where these digressions served the episode's plot. The plot - the challenges these characters faced in day-to-day governance - was the only thing respected.

It appealed to me in the same way that The Watchmen (which, btw, I'm going to see tomorrow, days ahead of the US premiere!) appealed to me. It was layered, multi faceted. Each episode featured many continuations that - while they often dovetailed nicely one with another by the end of an episode - didn't always have anything to do with each other in substance. Every show was like an essay. The series took the art of narrative to a new form, and entire episodes were often just very ornate interjections into an argument or discussion. People walking, and talking.

My new favorite TV series is with no qualifications House. I noticed that a lot of other nerds/engineer types like this show, as well. Follow any sampling of the programming world on twitter and you'll see people speaking to their fondness for the show in 140 character exclamations. It's riveting for a problem solver. Dr. Gregory House is a diagnostician in at the ficticious Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital where he and his team tackle medical mysteries deemed otherwise unsolvable. House's character is brisk, lacking all tact. He doesn't suffer fools, hates wishy-washy ideas founded on expressions of feeling. He is a scientist to the last, often refusing to even see his patients and instead letting the symptoms - the facts - stand on their own.

He would make a very fine programmer. He is the quintessential "debugger."

The Wikipedia page I linked you to elaborates on some of the parallels between House's character, a doctor, and Sherlock Holmes, a detective. Their staunch adherence to the facts, their disinterests in what people say or think, and their abilities of deduction. Apparently, Sherlock Holmes himself was based on a doctor, so it's something of a full circle.

Now, I'm wondering what other shows are popular among nerds. I appreciate shows that can pull off the art of satire, of deadpan, well. I also love shows with strong "whodunnit" plots. I appreciate shows aimed at resolution of issues. I love MythBusters. I appreciate shows dripping in irony, and really like a lot of the programs on the BBC, because a lot of that sort of humor is unavailable here in the states.

What do other people watch? What kind of show is interesting to a nerd?

A lengthy upgrade process caused my blog to die, but it's back!

Usually when I upgrade the software it's not so big a deal, but this version introduced a few new components into the architecture, which complicated things. I really ought to open-source this sucker.

Anyway, there's very little that you - dear reader - would likely see in the new software. But stick around, that's to come!

In my last post I talked about habits geared towards acquisition of skills. It does sometimes happen the other way – where you need to unlearn something, or re-frame an existing skill in a different way in order to advance with it. This is a natural part o moving forward in life, of adapting. I like to think that I do an acceptable job of keeping current, of adapting.

The proof is in the pudding: how many skills do I have the have been obsolesced*? I hadn't counted, honestly. I'm still not going to count (not that you will see, anyway!) but you might try taking a look at the Obsolete Skills Wiki to see if anything you've learned has become irrelevant, and whether you've successfully crossed that chasm.

Don't freak out if you see something you swore was still relevant – some of the entries are on the site, but are disputed!

Some are pretty dead on, or scary. "Counting back change" is - saddeningly - appropriate. How many merchants do you know that employee people who can count back change? How many people do the math to leave a 20% tip?

How many things do you know that have become irrelevant?

---

obsolesce - become obsolete, fall into disuse; "This word has not obsolesced, although it is rarely used"

Has the word "obsolesce" ... obsolesced?

My lovely and charming wife is out of town for 5 days, helping my mother out. They're going to go to Philadelphia, and my wife'll get a chance to see some of New York City, as well. I'm excited for her, and happy that my mom invited her, but I'm most looking forward to the chance to get some code done unabated by distractions of living with somebody: synchronized meals, activities, favorite TV shows, etc. No disractions. Not if I can help it.

Often, I will run across an idea or concept that I'd like to explore but don't have the time to immediately pursue. I acrrue these ideas in an email thread sent to myself. I call it my "negative resume" - a listing of all the things I don't have any experience and can't claim to know.

When that list gets too long (for me that's about 10 items), I start popping things off the queue, attacking each entry. The items on the list are usually innocuous. Occasionally I'll add significant changes / ideas that involve starting in on a rapidly new technology. In this case I make sure to either qualify a very specific, obtainable success scenario, or I diminish the other suggestions and move them to another list. In a way, the process is very much like updating a bug tracker.

I'm tracking bugs in my knowledge. Deciding which bug to remedy first requires prioritization.

You can imagine how complicated this process was before I added, "learn basics of Project Managment" to a list!

The last list included the following: "try out H2 database", "See if you can get Seam Framework 2.0 working under Maven," "check out Hibernate Search," "Read a few chapters from Manning's iPhone In Action," and so on. I don't like to let more than 10 things accrue because then there's no chance I could get it push through all of them in a weekend - even with intense focus (which I am not usually blessed with on weekends, above and beyond my day-job hours. )

The sentiment behind these bursts of learning is simple. As my dad always said (I'm sure he still does, he's just no had reason to recite of late...): "It's a sinch by the inch, hard by yard."

This weekend I've got another such list. I'm looking forward to address some of the items on this list with no direction or instinct besides the chorus of prioritizing voices in my head.

What do you want to learn?