My name is Joe.

New year. New me. New blog.

2012-01-02T12:48:00.001-07:00

Out with the old and in with the new. What would it take for 2012 to be the best year ever?

The Landmark at Greenwood Village

2008-09-21T18:00:00.001-06:00

Saw Burn After Reading last night at the new Landmark Theatre at Greenwood Village. The Landmark is an upscale development just off of Belleview and I-25 with luxury condos ($800s - $2.7M), nice restaurants, pubs, and of course a movie theater.

The theater is nice. It has a decent bar in the lobby where you can obviously order a beer or mixed drink but also appetizers and/or unique treats like cherry jalapeno chocolate bars. The ticket price ($12.00) includes a complimentary popcorn bar and soda fountain. The best part is that it's self-service so you don't have to wait on a disgruntled junior high school student while the show is starting. Did I mention that the drinks and treats ordered in the bar can follow you into the theater for the show? I opted for a beer but the couple next to us cracked a bottle of wine during the movie. And for $2 more, you can upgrade to VIP seats. These are large leather "couples" seats with nice oversized armrests for food and drinks that are situated in the choicest location in the theater. VIP status allows you to seat before everyone else and place orders with a hostess for more treats from the bar.

The movie? I liked it but it wasn't my favorite Coen brothers film. All in all it was a great experience - novel for now but I'm sure the writing's on the wall for other theaters to follow suit.

Thank you Ticketmaster. May I have another?

2008-09-12T19:36:00.002-06:00

So I just bought a ticket to see The Dandy Warhols at the Gothic in Denver. A band I haven't followed much but kind of hits my sweet spot. $25.00 is a little high for bands rolling through the Gothic but I figured I'd pay a premium for a band the likes of the Dandies, especially to see them in a very small venue. So at checkout time on Ticketmaster.com I come to find they're charging a $9.10 convenience charge, a $1.00 charge for me to pick my ticket up, and a $5.15 order processing fee for a grand total of $15.25 in fees for placing my order online (I guess somebody's gotta feed the gerbils)! Of course, I could have chosen to print my own ticket for a $2.50 charge, evidently because the price of sending an email has skyrocketed lately. It made me pause and wonder if I've ever done business with another retailer that charges me over 60% in fees... but hey, I bought the ticket anyway. I suppose if you can screw the customer then screw the customer!

Thanks Ticketmaster. You suck.

Nice Camping in Colorado

2008-08-11T23:20:00.000-06:00

We spent the weekend at a nice campsite near Grant. "Nice" being defined as easily accessible by car on a Friday evening after work with no reservations and a four-year-old and six-year-old in tow.

Handcart campground is a little 10 site campground about ten miles west of Grant. Take 285 out of Denver until you get to Grant. About 7 miles past Grant, make a right on county road 60. Go about 7 miles on CR60 and you'll see the campground on the left - don't be fooled into turning off 4 miles-ish in, go nearer to 7!. And if you go a mile or two more and you'll run into Hall Valley campground, which isn't quite as secluded but offers an easy option in case Handcart is full. The caveat is, if you're traveling by car you might have to idle your way bumping down county road 60. The only vehicles I saw that could normally handle how rough it was were ATV's and a Hummer - it was brutal. But we did witness a Prius survive the drive so it is doable.

I thought campsites 6, 7, and 8 were the choicest spots, being closest to a creek. Apparently the creek is mineral-polluted (you can sort of see the discoloration in the pic above... iron ore maybe?) but it was nice to hear it in the background sleeping in the tent. Sites 7 and 8 are the most secluded with 8 being the furthest back. The entire campground is shaded really nicely. The host mentioned bear activity around sites 7 and 8 but that's really to be expected at any campsite in Colorado. There's no trash service so you'll have to pack your trash out and we couldn't find any hiking trails nearby; granted, we didn't venture too far away.

All in all, it's going on my personal favorites list.

p.s. we found out what 50% chance of rain means for Grant in August... it rains about 50% of the time. Thank goodness for modern tents - THANK YOU Sierra Designs!

Stumpers

2008-07-19T23:12:00.001-06:00

I'm always surprised and interested when I stump a place. The stumper then becomes my measuring stick for the value of the place and places like it. For example, "the cheeky monk, Denver, CO" confounds MapQuest but not Google Maps. I used to have a word (can't think of it now) that I would use to test dictionaries; if it existed in that dictionary I knew the book could be trusted. So sorry MapQuest, but I won't trust your site again until you get my stumper correct!

In the movie rental world, a stumper that really surprised me a couple years ago was requesting "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask" from Video One on Colfax. Video One advertises on their sign that they have over 10,000 movies in the store and I picked one they didn't have - a Woody Allen movie no less!

Today I easily stumped Amazon Unbox with Rome. It was my first search on Amazon so it was indeed surprising. For me it shows how far Amazon Unbox has to go to really threaten Netflix. And it makes me really question Amazon's pricing - $3.99 for a download movie rental?! I can see why Blockbuster needs to charge $3.99 but Amazon..? Don't I already pay for my Internet service? Sheesh! In the end I support Netflix not only for their (once) revolutionary distribution but for their dedication to a comprehensive library.

Man, I just LOVE this

2008-07-03T23:04:00.000-06:00

Thank you Matthew!

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Transformational Books

2008-06-25T22:55:00.000-06:00

Books that positively changed my life:

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
Winning by Jack and Suzy Welch
Head First Design Patterns by Elisabeth Freeman , Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, and Kathy Sierra

Ok, so maybe 3 and 4 aren't for you... 1 and 2 should be. A New Earth is a book I wish everyone would read and truly hear.

peace.

The Master Bathroom

2008-04-28T22:49:00.001-06:00

Master Bathroom Remodel

We finally pulled the trigger and decided to remodel our poor master bathroom. We liked to say that the bathroom was all original 1974 but I could tell during the demolition that some of it had been changed. In any case, it was as close to original 1974 as we probably want to get and it was in desperate need of some updating.

We had a vanity with a single sink. The vanity HAD to have been 1974 - kind of swirly-snot-yellow. The sink took forever to drain. The shower was like a small closet (and believe me, I'm not a big guy). The grout was worn with mildew. It was generally gross - we bought the house four years ago and neither of us used the shower even once! Our small closets were tucked in the bathroom, which we always thought was a strange design. We had linoleum and carpeting on the floor. The window was frosted glass. Unfortunately for us during the winter the window stopped working and we could never get it all the way shut again. We had dark wood vanity lights above the sink and a single fixture above the shower area. The room was dark blue. So, generally dark and gross.

We decided that this project would be way over my head so we hired John at Colorado Quality Construction. It was so nice going to work for nine hours and coming home and having nine hours done on the bathroom! John was great and did a great job.

We basically closed off the wall to the bathroom, adding a door. We knocked out the middle wall to make room for a double vanity and open the room up. This got rid of my wife's closet. We left the shower wall as a three-quarters wall for toilet privacy. Then we converted my closet into the full shower. We added recessed lighting on two switches and a fan. We were somewhat torn on adding a bathtub for a 5-piece. We have a tub in our guest bathroom, we don't really take baths, and the expense of the plumbing, etc. would have pushed the project to around $1,000/sq. ft. which we really couldn't justify. We then moved the closets to the opposite side of our room because we had room to spare. We finished out the closets with an Elfa system from The Container Store (which we love... hey, I'm a software engineer married to a CPA... what's not to love about uber-organization?!) We did a type of travertine from Arizona Tile. And just to add some color we designed a band of glass tile that runs through the shower. It's really gorgeous and it pulls in the color from the walls. We added a custom mirror that basically covers the entire wall - 7 feet wide by 4 feet high. The faucets were from the Purist suite at Kohler - we love the clean lines. We bought the vanity cabinets and the Silestone Quartz countertop from Home Depot. We also bought the closet doors from Home Depot. We replaced our current toilet with a Toto toilet because I was NOT going to spend that amount of money on a new bathroom only to have a weak toilet!

The only cautionary advice I would offer is to avoid buying cabinets at Home Depot. I had three rounds of problems with mine. Home Depot did a fine job of reconciling the problems but it delayed the project and definitely didn't go as smooth as if we'd had custom cabinets made. The week I had problems with my cabinets, our close friend had similar problems with hers' from Home Depot. So I'd try to avoid that again.

The Home Depot problems were really a sign of how tough the project was. Most, if not all, of the custom shops and showrooms are only open during normal business hours. It was extremely taxing to take off from work, drive across town, look at a bazillion different styles and jot down prices as fast as possible. That's where it was nice to walk into a Home Depot.

I am sooo appreciating this bathroom! It's a manifestation of our abundance and a sanctuary to start the day every morning!

United Airlines tacks on new charge for baggage

2008-02-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it, United started charging extra to check a second bag. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they all start doing it. The cynical side of me wonders if United's taking advantage of the fact that it's harder to carry on luggage these days. Oh well, for the time being I've got my three year old daughter to take responsibility for that second roller bag... but I guess she comes with the $399 price tag!

2008: ELEVATE

2008-01-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

Each year I choose an action verb that I can apply throughout the year to many different situations as a consistent self-improvement program. Generally three or four words come to mind when I start thinking about this in December. One word tends to stick by the new year and I really do keep the word in mind all year long.

This year my word is Elevate.

My word for last year was Execute. That was an effective word but my rule is "no repeats". So:

Elevate my execution. (oh yeah)

Elevate my sense of Love: giving and receiving.

Elevate my awareness of situations and my reactions to them.

Elevate listening. Elevate thinking.

Elevate my physical health.

Elevate my skills. Elevate my career.

Elevate my spirituality.

Elevate above and beyond negative energy.

Close... and Cold

2008-01-02T18:17:00.000-07:00

Happy Perihelion everyone! The day when the Earth is closest to the Sun was a pretty darn cold day in Denver! And to think, we're about 3 million miles closer than at aphelion in July... When I walked to work downtown every day for nearly three years I gained a different appreciation for our seasons. In fact, it got to the point where I could walk outside and guess the temperature to within 1 degree (relative to a bank billboard just down the street - take that for what it is).

Interestingly, Earthsky.org says today is perihelion and the U.S. Navy says tomorrow is. I'm not sure what the difference is there but maybe a few tens of thousands of miles. In that case I might side with the folks who's jobs are affected by a few tens of thousands of miles. And who knows, it might just be another Liberal attack on our understanding of the Earth's climate! (joke folks)

In any case, I love the comments with further explanation (about why it's cold and how you're slightly heavier) on the Earthsky post.

"I'm in love with this planet that I'm standing on" --Matt Johnson, The The

So Here's To Looking Back

2008-01-01T23:45:00.000-07:00

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." On the whole, 2007 was a very good year and in many ways a positively life-changing year. Here are some highlights and not-so-highlights:

I started off 2007 by introducing some bad juju into my family. Bingo was a great puppy in so many ways - he was beautiful and soo intelligent - but in so many other ways he was absolutely the worst experience of 2007. My earlier post pretty much sums it up but even in horrible times I take away valuable lessons, and Bingo taught us that we're just not dog people (any more). Upon reflection though, the energy spent and repercussions of the decision to introduce a puppy into our family were felt far and wide through the year. It was crazy but the Bingo decision became a win-win for all parties involved and that's my take-away for the year.

If anything marked my abundance this year it was the absolute highlight of visiting my brother-in-law in New York. Closing Saturday night at a party on the rooftop of a Bleeker St. building, looking out over the Hudson at the lights of New Jersey and back at all the buildings surrounding me in Manhattan was the absolute pinnacle of my night life this year. But our other trips this year were great as we pulled a road trip to Moab and Arches National Park and introduced our daughter to tent camping and hiking, and a trip to San Diego to introduce the kids to the beaches of southern California, Sea World, and Disneyland.

My son started Kindergarten this year and that was a huge, amazing step. He's in a great class in an excellent school and we feel fortunate to live in a community with the great people we've met.

2007 was very interesting on the technical front as well. I completed three JSF projects and feel comfortable working with pretty much all of the aspects of the technology and feel like I've applied them to a very broad range of industrial enterprise software problems. Along the way, Furl was a vital tool personally coming up to speed with JSF. I love Furl!

Other sites that caught a significant amount of my attention in 2007 were Facebook (of course) and Amazon's DRM-free music download service. Still, I can't help wondering what is Facebook?

And from a pure entertainment standpoint, the best (by far) books I read in 2007 were The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman. Though The Little Book That Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt and Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert were notables.

Finally, no reflection on the past year would be complete without the annual Netflix analysis: We consumed 85 movies in 2007, or 7 movies a month. Our high month was May with 11 movies and our low month was February with 2 movies. The only movies I loved (5 stars) were The Secret and No End in Sight. Notable movies I really liked (4 stars) were Apocalypto, The Fountain, Flags of Our Fathers, The Last King of Scotland, and A Face in the Crowd. The two movies I didn't care for at all were Happy Feet and Babel.

My word for 2007 was 'Execute'. So how did I do..? On the whole I feel like I executed in all aspects of my life... but I can always be better and that word was so 2007. It's time to move on. Happy New Year!

Happy (belated) Holidays

2007-12-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

Our holiday traditions usually include a ripping game or two of The Settlers of Catan; somewhat of a mix between Risk and Monopoly. The picture shows one of the Seafarers expansion variants. In this particular scenario, players explore uncharted territories with ships; a cool twist where gambling with resources doesn't always pay off. We were introduced to the game a few years ago and immediately bought it. We've since introduced it to a few couples that have themselves immediately bought the game. A great time!

I wish for you and your loved ones to find peace and abundance this holiday season and into the new year!

Discussion of the Week

2007-12-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

My five year old son: "Dad, where do babies come from?"

(Dad, recognizing the significance of "a moment")

Dad: "Well, a mommy and a daddy love each other, and one day they loved each other so much that they made a baby."

(Dad thinking he nailed that one!)

son: "Yeah, but where do they come from?"

Dad: "Well, they come from Love."

(quit asking questions kid)

son: "Noo! But which body parts?!"

(hmmmmmmmm, give me a second here)

Dad: "Well, a mommy gets a baby in her belly then the baby is born through her vagina."

End of discussion. I figured that buys me at least another year or two.

Henry

2007-10-29T22:39:00.000-06:00

Our close friends' dog, Henry, passed away last week. Henry was the only dog I can imagine me being comfortable with letting my (then 10-month old) son lay on while he was sleeping. Henry was the most gentle knucklehead ever... We love you guys.

Get the Skinny on Your Town

2007-10-21T22:43:00.000-06:00

An interesting little resource worth checking out: ZIPskinny.

Link: The Right Brain vs Left Brain test

2007-10-20T13:48:00.000-06:00

Clockwise!? How I reconcile that with a certification in Java and eleven years of writing enterprise software I (now) have no idea. Interestingly, I was able to switch the dancer but it took me a while. Then it took me a while to switch her back!

Welcome to the Food Chain

2007-08-19T14:36:00.000-06:00

The other night we sat down as a family and ate dinner watching a show on tv. This is something "special" that the kids ask for from time to time and we grant on an even more limited basis.

This night my wife made her amazing salmon. I don't remember the show. But the show had animal characters and something came up about eating animals. One of the smaller animals said something to the effect, "Simple policy: never eat anything with a face."

With that, my three year old daughter looked at me and said, "we NEVER eat anything with a face"

and I said, "Yes we do baby, fish" pointing at the salmon.

And she said, "No, that doesn't have a face."

And I said, "Yes it did babe. That was a fish..." (pointing to the plate) "that's why we call it 'fish'."

You could see it register... she stared at the plate, then looked at us with utter disgust mixed with terror and disbelief.

Life and Music

2007-08-04T14:27:00.000-06:00

Thank you to the folks at Cold Hard Flash, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone for introducing me to Alan Watts!

Silversun Pickups

2007-07-31T22:16:00.000-06:00

I caught Silversun Pickups (and here) at the Ogden Theater last night. Great show. Most seem to compare them to Smashing Pumpkins but that doesn't seem quite right. To me their music is like Grunge refined for 2007. Almost a mix of Elliott Smith and Smashing Pumpkins... For me, Grunge defined college times and something with Silversun Pickups definitely resonates.

The pinnacle of the show, absolutely, was Lazy Eye. My favorite though was Dream At Tempo 119. Kissing Families also blew me away.

This band definitely has that IT factor. I felt fortunate to experience the performance though I'm not quite sure they're a band that should sellout even the Ogden (yet). Drummer Christopher Guanlao was absolutely incredible. He is a freak. I guarantee you have never seen a performance like the one Guanlao puts out on the drums! If you have a chance to go see them I highly recommend it.

New York I

2007-07-21T16:14:00.000-06:00

An amazing trip...

Thursday was Stamford day. Thursday night karaoke at Bradford's is a tradition with my brother-in-law (Bron) and his mates so I couldn't say no. Besides, why do I carry a list of "do-able" songs in my phone if it wasn't for this opportunity to take my show on the road and perform out from under the safe warmth of Armida's? The crowd was young and Bradford's song list was relatively shallow - two qualities that tend to make me less comfortable at a karaoke bar - but I knew I had to step up and represent for the posse. I introduced myself with a familiar standard I'm still trying to dial in: Brandy (You're a Fine Girl) by Looking Glass. One quality of a great karaoke bar is the crowd knows its role. Bradford's was exceptional. After a handful of singers (and corollary drinks), the entire bar was singing just about all of every song. It was easy to set 'em up and knock 'em down. Bron slayed with Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby. I followed-up with a heartfelt rendition of Santeria by Sublime (because there is no other karaoke rendition of that song). At one point, the crowd was so loud that I wondered if my mic was on..! So it may sound strange that Stamford Connecticut was a highlight of my New York trip but it definitely was. Stamford is like a small Midwest town that got big - kind of like a Madison - and I really appreciated that I got to experience it. And a tip-o-the-cap to the Bradford's crew... don't stop believin'. Then to bed at 3:30 in preparation for our big day in the city.

My first taste of New York began with chili and sangria in Grand Central Station. There's obviously more culture and atmosphere outside of the train station but it was a nice choice to start the long journey. And although it wasn't recognized formally, I had to stop for a moment and take in as much of the grand terminal as I could - it may have been the greatest indoor space I've experienced. As we exited the terminal onto 42nd street, Bron pointed out a pretty amazing event that was taking place. I estimate 20-25 police cars with their lights and sirens on "sweeping" 42nd going about 20 mph. He said the first time he saw this he estimated roughly 100 emergency vehicles. He said the sound was deafening. Bron has a close friend (Deanne or "Dean") who's lived in the city for some time - she said this "parade" happens nearly every day in different random parts of the city. Our common belief was that this is a show of presence and force by soldiers in the trenches. I've never seen anything like it and I believe it creates its intended effect.

Our goal for the evening was dinner with Bron's second cousin Alex and his wife Marie. Between Grand Central Station and then was filler for the city to provide - wandering was our goal. So we wandered into the public library and (I'm ashamed to admit) wandered out without seeing the great reading room. We wandered through Times Square which I believe had less of an impact on me since I had already experienced London (but hey, it WAS Times Square and it WAS amazing). We wandered through FAO Schwarz, which I very much appreciated as a retail experience, and wandered into Apple's incredibly cool glass box storefront. From there we wandered along the south edge of Central Park, catching great Friday afternoon street acts along the way. And finally made our way to Greenwich Village for drinks, dinner, and a museum.

Alex grew up in Greenwich Village and has been there his whole life. We ate dinner at a sushi place across from the White Horse Tavern - a place Alex and Marie call the best value in the village. Alex is a retired day trader who spends a lot of his time reading, especially about spirituality. We took the long way to the restaurant so Alex could give us some history about the neighborhood. After sushi, we made our way over to the Rubin Museum of Art - the first museum in the Western World dedicated to the art of the Himalayas. Friday evenings are free. It's a very cool space filled with beautifully intricate mandalas backed up with the subtle east-Asian sound of a live DJ. We had to cut this visit shorter than we wanted though because of an impromptu invite to Deanne's.

Deanne went to high school in Michigan with my wife and Bron. She's worked with a financial and banking services firm since college, with most of that time being served in Hong Kong. Suffice to say that Deanne has managed her finances well and owns an incredible apartment in the Tribeca neighborhood. Deanne's was the first time I've ever greeted a woman with a double-sided cheek kiss... or whatever that is. Deanne had a couple friends over for drinks, the first of which I met was a 42 year old retired Aussie who lives in Hong Kong and who had just sailed a 70-foot yacht from Australia to some other island that I can't recall... mostly because I couldn't help thinking I have nothing to add to this conversation! He did say some nice things he's heard about Denver, so I guess that was something. We did manage to acquire an improbable invite to a rooftop party that next night so we held onto that as a backup plan. Deanne and her group were off to see an "edgy" show at 11:30, so we decided to depart and call our Friday journey a complete success. Back in Stamford in bed at 1:30 to refuel for another adventure in the city.

Saturday's plans were set to begin with Lucie's 30th birthday party later that evening so we were pretty laid back. We took a little time to find a great burger for lunch in SoNo - South Norwalk (kind of a sleepy Pearl Street). The drive was nice and I got a good feel for Connecticut's beautiful country. We got back in time to get dressed and drive to Manhattan. Bron's favorite driving motto is "the goal is not to drive into Manhattan, the goal is to drive into Manhattan without paying a toll." And that he did with a series of roads that I cannot accurately describe other than we drove past Yankee stadium and crossed some bridge that is the toll-less key to whole journey, I think leading into the city near Harlem.

The celebration began at Medina. We simply found a parking spot without a meter and walked. If I had to guess, I'd say we were around the Chelsea neighborhood and Meatpacking District. I was impressed with the way women were dressed in heals and somehow managed to navigate those cobblestone roads. Once at Medina, we settled in with our group of 22 enjoying great conversation, great drinks and hookah smoking, and fabulous belly dancers mixed with (yet another) smooth east-Asian sound coming from the DJ. My clique included Bron, Carla from Brazil, Helena from Russia(?), and Kevin from China. Medina turns to dancing at some point and at that point we settled our bill ($140 worth of mojitos for Bron and I) and walked over to Earth to continue our evening with some dancing.

Earth was cool but I've been more impressed at other clubs, including here in Denver. My first impression as I walked in was "this is all Asians". I navigated the entire club to the restroom and back to the bar and again thought "this is all Asians". As I was standing at the bar, Kevin (from China) walked up to me and said, "you know what I love about this place? The mix of people!" I said, "really man? Because I thought this place was all Asians." and he said, "oh no. There are places here where it really is all Asians." I loved it. It's funny because I was actually slightly overdressed with black dress pants. The standard man's uniform was nice designer jeans, nice button-down shirt with rolled up sleeves (tucked optional), and nice designer shoes with maybe a nice watch thrown in. I was under the impression that jeans Saturday night were out. In many ways, I've thought Denver does Manhattan better than Manhattan! Maybe this was just another example of a flat world. Then again, it was hot and people are probably just tired of dressing in uncomfortable clothes.

Anyway, shelling out $12 for a beer really started to lose its charm so we decided to pull the rooftop party invite card. Somehow Bron got us to the building and the doorman did the rest. We found ourselves closing Saturday night down on the 11th story rooftop of some amazing lower west-side apartment building - looking out over the river at New Jersey and back at Manhattan. Unbelievable. Back in Stamford at 4.

So it maybe wasn't the typical first trip to New York. But I don't know that I would have had it any other way!

I feel so incredibly fortunate. One, to have a wife that decides to send me on adventures. And two, for the incredible people that surround me and enable these adventures.

Cheers!

NYC

2007-06-18T22:52:00.000-06:00

In a couple weeks I'm going to visit New York City for the first time. Life has led me to some great places so far: London, D.C., New Orleans, Kauai, Anchorage, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, Boston, Las Vegas, Toronto, Boulder, and even Lake Placid... but for whatever reason, I've never had reason to go to New York. My brother-in-law lives in Stamford so I'm going to spend a couple days with him in typical whirlwind fashion. We manage to have a great time going out in the U.P. so I have a feeling we'll find a way to have a good time in Manhattan.

I get in Thursday and leave Sunday. Saturday night is apparently accounted for. Lucie doesn't know it (or me) yet, but it sounds like we'll try to help her celebrate the big 3-0 in Queens. Other than that I have no agenda. Of course, I've solicited a few recommendations but I'm asking for a few more... anyone out there have any good NYC ideas or tips?

Thanks in advance. I can't wait.

Home Office Door

2007-06-08T00:29:00.001-06:00

The Biggest Mistake I Ever Made

2007-05-20T08:07:00.000-06:00

And Bingo was his name-o.

On New Year's Eve, my son was nipped on the face by a chocolate Lab. He was already nervous about dogs and the event basically pushed that nervousness over the top to full-blown phobia. Having grown-up with dogs my whole life, I couldn't imagine what life would be like if one were terrified of dogs. So I decided that we would get a puppy to help my son with his fear. My logic was that you can't learn to handle a dog by being around cats or guinea pigs... you learn to handle a dog by handling a dog. Secondly, I figured that a puppy would be more appropriate because he would grow up in our family with our kids being a normal part of his life. Conversely, our kids would be around the growing puppy and wouldn't have to deal with an adult-sized dog from the beginning. And I didn't want to worry about leaving my kids in the room with a rescued dog, not really knowing its history.

I still think my logic was sound but the actual implementation was incredibly more difficult than I imagined.

Since Bingo was a puppy, he nipped and his teeth and claws were sharp. Day one went very well because he was still figuring out the lay of the land around the house. But that's where "happy puppy experience" ended. I believe he nipped and scratched both kids on day two, which essentially ended "happy puppy experience" in our house. From that day, and for two months, Bingo was either completely separate from our family, or if he was loose in the house, the kids would literally lay on the very top of our couches to be away from him. This sounds funny, and some day it might be, but it was truly Hell while it lasted. Because my wife and I couldn't overlap time with the puppy and time with our kids, we basically had no time to ourselves or peace in our home. From 5:45 in the morning on my first walk with him until around 11 at night, my wife and I were busy looking after someone. I have never been so exhausted.

So we found an incredible home for Bingo (our dog trainer took him) and chalked that one up to the biggest mistake of my life. At least we learned that we're not dog people and that, if I have to stand up for my son during every encounter with a dog, it will be hundreds of times easier than trying to live with a puppy!

Sweet Child O' Mine

2007-05-14T19:30:00.001-06:00

Is it possible to be a great dad and great at anything else?

2007-05-13T19:36:00.001-06:00

No.

Shout-outs

2007-02-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

One: To my brother, otherwise known as Somashine.

Two: To Sunday and her amazingly accurate Oscar predictions.

Three: To my close friends at Pink Pumpkin, Ink.

Cheers!

The Template's Dead, Long Live the Template!

2007-01-27T19:20:00.000-07:00

"They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom." -- Confucius

Ten

2007-01-06T16:59:00.000-07:00

Today marks ten years for me as a software professional.

On January 6th, 1997, I walked through the doors of the Corporate Express corporate headquarters in Broomfield for the first time as a Systems Analyst. I had four similar offers coming out of the College of Business at CU-Boulder. My starting salary at Corporate Express was $37,500 and I received a $5,000 signing bonus (which was taxed at nearly 50%)... remember 1997 in programming folks?! I had worked as an intern (code monkey) for about 10 months prior at a company called BDM Technologies, which folded into Avitek, which folded into BEA in Boulder (and subsequently Rally Software).

On my first day, I attended a SQL brown bag session put on by our DBA's. They had worked with large systems with Sprint and Andersen. I can't remember which version of Oracle we were working with but it was the rules-based optimizer and I was taught, literally from day 1, how to write optimized SQL for Oracle. I still see some of those guys almost weekly and they've graduated on to terabyte systems at Level 3.

My first project was implemented with Pro*C, Tuxedo, and Oracle stored procedures. It was an optimized version of an existing EDI 850 processor. It was also my introduction to heads-down coding, sitting at my desk when the vacuum lady visits, and late night Chinese food.

Since that day and project, I've worked on countless lines of code, created and fixed countless software bugs, worked on and solved some interesting problems, worked with interesting technologies, and worked with a whole bunch of really good people. Some of which I've managed to stay close with over the years...

Here are some other bits of reflections that help sum up my 10-year professional experience:

I've worked for four companies. Corporate Express is the largest. Since then, I've worked for three dot-coms. The majority of my experience, approx. 66%, is from within small dot-com environments.
My average tenure at a company is around 4 years. I had one anomaly of 6 months...
I've worked on UI's for three installed applications: one in Visual Basic, one in Java, and one in C#. I liked the C# client the most.
Most of my time has been spent within the confines of cubicle walls. I've had one office to myself. I once worked in a single office with four other developers - which was one of the best times I've had on a team.
I've experienced three layoffs. All of which I survived and wished maybe that I hadn't. After one, I negotiated my own exit.
In total, I've gone on three out-of-state business trips: once to PL/SQL training in San Francisco (by Steven Feuerstein no less), once to JavaOne in San Francisco, and once to Houston for a sales presentation.
I've been sent to training classes for third-party technologies a total of four times, or six days: SQL, PL/SQL, XML, and Java.
I've been certified on a technology once, as a Java developer.
I've pretty much always been an application developer. But that role's held six different titles: Systems Analyst, Technical Architect, Senior Analyst, Java Developer, Software Engineer, and Senior Software Engineer.
I'd approximate that 75% of my development has been done on Unix/Linux, and too much of that in vi or some other plain text editor.

So what will the next ten years be like..? I've said that by the time I hit 40 I don't want to be coding any more. To be honest, I don't know what that looks like right now. I suppose I can only hope that I get a chance to work with people as great as I have in the past and on problems as challenging and interesting. Bring it on!

Cheers!

My 2007 Word

2007-01-05T20:45:00.000-07:00

Instead of a list of fleeting New Year's resolutions, I choose an action verb that I intend to incorporate into as many facets of my life as possible over the course of the new year.

For 2007, that word is Execute.

Given last year's craziness, it could easily be misconstrued as "hang" or "behead"...

Seriously though, I tried less harsh synonyms such as "achieve" or "accomplish" but those don't hit the mark like Execute does. After a few years of performing this exercise - 2006 was Create, 2005 was Rise - I've found that the word just sort of comes to me from my gut and separates itself as an obvious choice.

One of the obvious personal experiences from 2006 that drove this word, I think, was keeping two stocks on a watch list and not pulling the trigger. I watched Marvel Entertainment (MVL) for months. It met all of my criteria... I called a broker when it hit $13 and he recommended against buying. Of course, now at $27, I sit kicking myself and cursing the broker. The other stock was Herman Miller (MLHR). I was actually sitting with a broker when I told him I'm interested in the stock but I wasn't sure. Literally the next day it jumped from $27 to 36$ on earnings news. Could'a, should'a... Execute. Maybe my relationships with brokers are earning the other form of "execute" this year.

The beauty of Execute is that there's a prerequisite planning that's built in. Plan and Execute.

My son is starting Kindergarten this Fall...
Plan what I what him to have going in: some reading, some writing, some math.
Execute in the form of flashcards taped around the house labelling items, a grocery list on the refrigerator with pictures and words that he adds to when we run out of something, a game that we made up called speed numbers involving up to 6 dice that we roll and figure as fast as we can, etc.

My house built in 1974 needs some love...
Plan small projects monthly and one or two large projects this year.
Execute in the form of listing priorities and budgets (more planning... recursion is very powerful), schedule time to take classes on home improvement, secure the tools or professional help and DO IT.

My body built in 1973 needs some love...
Schedule time to continue with yoga classes and consistent gym visits. Eat breakfast and pack my lunch.

My portfolio needs some love...
Research my options and pull the trigger on an index fund or services like Sharebuilder.

Set a morning routine to stay one step ahead of the daily madness.

Keep Java fresh.
2006 was a good year that involved CruiseControl, Spring (and Spring.NET), C#, .NET interfacing with Axis web services, RESTful vs. SOAP api's, XSLT transformations, interesting patterns like Strategy and Template Method, and JMX.
I need to keep the mo, possibly with the likes of Java 5, annotations, clustering, and Ajax.

And finally, (ironically) enjoy peaceful and love-filled time with friends and family. And I wish that for you as well.

Things To Do In Colorado Before Turning 5 or 34: Ski

2006-12-23T14:28:00.000-07:00

Last weekend marked the first time that my 4-year-old son got on skis. It also marked my first time on skis. I started snowboarding when I was 18 but I never skied.

We spent the weekend in Glenwood Springs and signed up for lessons at Sunlight Mountain. Sunlight has a reputation for being a family friendly resort just to the north of Aspen and it did not disappoint. The staff were probably the most friendly bunch I've ever encountered at a ski resort. We pulled into the parking lot at 9:30 and took the first spot two staircases from the lodge! My son's package cost $70 total. By comparison, our friends just took their son to Breckenridge for lessons and dropped $160. At one point on the lift, my instructor looked at me and asked if I knew what Aspen charged for his 4 hours of private service... $500.

I started my lesson in a group with a woman that had never been on a mountain and I was pulled out after 30 minutes because I was progressing quickly. The combination of snowboarding for 15 years and ice skating for 26 really made my transition to skiing relatively easy. In fact, my instructor scolded me several times for "turning up hill too much" when in fact I was intentionally stopping with a hockey stop like I've done probably a million times in my life. Stopping was exactly the same on skis as on ice skates for me, just longer "skates". And really, I think adjusting for slope and terrain is 75% of what you need to get down a mountain on either a board or skis. But I was most impressed with how easy skiing is on my body. On a snowboard I really torque my hip and knee in the lift line, strain my ankle on the lift up, pray getting off the lift, sit down to struggle with my less-than-limber muscles as I try to strap into my frozen bindings, push all of my weight to get up, then constantly work both edges of the board by twisting and flexing on the run. I felt like I spent 80% less energy up and down on skis. The most significant gains were getting off the lift and just gliding/going and just letting the skis release or not having to battle against the edges of the skis constantly. The day may have converted me... Talking to my friends that both ski and board, they said they like to board during powder days and ski other days or if they're with skiers. And come to think of it, I do still truly cherish my Ride Timeless!

Quote of the day, toilet wall scratches: Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer, but he never cries.

TC on Google... Aww Yeah!

2006-11-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

With a tip 'o the hat to Thomas, I've modified my Blogger template to include clips from Google Reader. I haven't really bought into the "all my favorite sites in one convenient place" notion yet (I kind of like visiting my favorite sites). But I think it's a nice tool for keeping track of blogs I regularly read. From time to time I'll share the ones that made an impression on me. This exploration into Google Reader also prompted a seismic shift in my Internet usage habits... more on that later.

4 Days, 4 Blogs: Congratulations Dad and Jan!

2006-11-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

My baby girl with her grandpa at his wedding, Saturday, November 18.

4 Days, 4 Blogs: Dad's Pontiac Solstice

2006-11-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

My dad bought a Pontiac Solstice this summer. My wife and I postulate that it was either the result of his early sixties or meeting his future wife (or both). In any case, I hope I'm fortunate enough to own a completely impractical car during my tenure here.

My impressions of the car:

It is a very cool car and fun to drive. I felt like Speed Racer driving it. I haven't driven it on winding mountain roads yet, but the suspension was tight through turns in city driving. The manual transmission seems like it was built for a true roadster feel - tight and somewhat unforgiving. Sitting behind the steering wheel, visually, it seems like they designed the hood line to rise up a little bit. I'm not a big guy and I couldn't really see over the hood - not quite like how some cars' hoods seem to "drop off". I thought this was cool and really gave it a unique feel driving it but I could see how it might annoy people who appreciate other sports cars. This was really the touch that I thought gave it the Speed Racer feel. The body is moulded around the seats so there almost wasn't enough room for me, my dad, and a box of bagels... but hey. The only drawback I felt was that the manual rag top seemed cumbersome to put up and down. Other than that, I appreciate the engineers at GM that designed and built that beautiful machine!

4 Days, 4 Blogs: MyLifeBits

2006-11-24T22:45:00.000-07:00

I experienced a number of reactions to Clive Thompson's provocative article, "A Head For Detail", in the November 2006 issue of Fast Company. The article explores the MyLifeBits Project, an experiment by Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research Labs that attempts to digitize, collect, and make sense of a lifetime of memories; literally, everything one encounters in life on a daily basis. Mr. Bell's tools: a digital audio recorder, a modified phone tap, a Microsoft SenseCam that hangs around his neck and snaps photos of everything, a tool like Slogger that stores a copy of every web page Mr. Bell looks at, a scanner to digitize every piece of paper, and experimental search tools developed by Microsoft.

The innovative side of me immediately understands how this project must be driving incredible innovation in search tools (and according to Microsoft, obviously developed on top of SQL Server). It's estimated in the article that a 72-year-old person would require 1 to 3 terabytes of space for an average MyLifeBits instance. Obviously that much personal data is useless without tools that help one make sense of it. Tools that no doubt will in some way enrich our lives in the future. The article also mentions DEVONthink, the information manager for the Mac that attempts to augment thinking. Likewise, concepts and technologies surrounding MyLifeBits are actively being pursued and utilized by psychologists because they have shown true promise in improving mental health; both in "normal" folks and in people who have experienced trauma.

But the human side of me (my gut, specifically) says that this kind of technology is just wrong as a standalone and widespread entity. Mark Federman, former strategist for the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology points out that "We'd all be on our best behavior. Reality would become reality TV." Mr. Thompson then goes on to ponder what happens to Microsoft's sensitive corporate memos when Mr. Bell leaves the company... Mr. Bell quips, "I'll need a lobotomy."

Granted, the point is made that we're already doing this in so many ways. We're storing our photos with tags on Flikr, we're uploading movies with tags on YouTube, we're keeping all of our email with Gmail, we're blogging our thoughts here. Yeah. At our discretion.

Part of me says this is just another form of hoarding, or the pack rat syndrome that I witness seemingly more and more. To that point, perhaps unintentionally, Mr. Thompson quotes an engineer on a related Research Labs project called Lifebrowser; a tool that lets you train it by rating different things. The engineer poignantly states, "No one ever needs to remember what happened at the regular Monday staff meeting." Exactly. So why keep it? The point was made that freeing our brains from trying to remember all of these miniscule events actually helps us to be more productive and creative. Remember the chord that Fight Club struck? Throwing it all away is refreshing too. In fact, Mr. Thompson describes some of Mr. Bell's more frustrating moments when he grasps for emails that just don't seem to be there or tries to find photos with tags that end up returning all sorts of documents that are not relevant to what he's looking for. That sounds like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Mr. Bell observed that the more he used the tools to replace his memory, the more he relied on them and the weaker his natural memory seemed to become - just like anything else that atrophies in our bodies.

My final thoughts:

Hope you don't forget your password.

Memory hacking. Sounds interesting.

Memory "enhancement" sounds more interesting. That strikeout you made as the last out... try game-winning hit! That strikeout you made with Sara... try...

person 1, "I didn't say that!"
person 2, "LET'S GO TO THE TAPE!"
(As if politics could get any worse)

eraseher.com - $10/mo. to filter and remove all traces of her

"August 29, 2033 After 7 delays in as many months, Microsoft announces that its new operating system will no longer support the .mem format ..."

4 Days, 4 Blogs: Quote of the Night

2006-11-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

Mommy, I can see her boobies.

- My son watching Matron Mama Morton (Queen Latifah) in Chicago

Never miss an NHL Game!

2006-11-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

Random Thoughts From the Road: MSU

2006-10-19T21:41:00.000-06:00

My wife and I spent last weekend enjoying Autumn's glory on the campus of Michigan State University. I love traveling simply because, to paraphrase my brother-in-law , "if you want to have new thoughts, you've got to do new things." So here are some of things hanging around in my head since the trip:

The Starbury. Worn in the NBA and always only $14.98. No comment from Nike, Addidas, or Reebok.

My impression after driving a PT Cruiser: fun to drive but I wouldn't buy one (it definitely prefers cruising to passing). Though I'm always impressed with the details that Chrysler engineers seem to focus on.

Michigan speed limits: how can you set a limit of 75 for cars and 55 for trucks? Lowest common denominator rules...

If Technology is a flattener, and software-as-a-service extends the metaphor, why is it hard to offshore parts of SAAS?

Why is nearly every mom we know a "sales mom"? How come we never knew about this racket? Another sign of a flat world..?

I'm seeing more and more about biofuels. How come I never see anything addressing the water supply that will help create biofuels? Won't water be much more scarce and in critical supply? Maybe it's not simple. Maybe changes to government, corporate subsidies, water law, and the iconic American farmer are involved. Maybe not. But it's time to start being frank and honest about the environment.

Airport security seems to be much more efficient and less congested when it's dispersed to locations near each terminal rather than centralized in one or two main areas. (Distributed systems rule)

Crushing a beer can in Michigan is offensive. Apparently the can machines need the barcode to pay back the $.10 deposit (or something like that). The general public response to the crush can be quite startling actually.

When I was in college it never, never, occurred to me that I might be talking to a married person in a bar near campus, and that their spouse might be right over there.

WE'RE ALL WASTING AWAY!

2006-10-09T20:18:00.000-06:00

Saturday night I took in a concert the likes of which I haven't enjoyed in a loooong time. I saw Kasabian (and here) with Mew and onethousand pictures at the Gothic Theatre in Denver. I'd never seen or heard really any music from any of the bands, aside from the annoyingly short blurbs on iTunes. But being a top-rated band from Leicester, England, and supporting act for Oasis, I'd heard quite a bit of buzz surrounding Kasabian and I liked enough of their annoyingly short sound to check them out. The concert came at an appropriate time, having read Britpop! just two weeks earlier.

I went through a period of about two or three years in college where I tried to cram in as many concerts as possible. Four concerts in five nights was not out of the question: Rollins Band with Sausage and Helmet, Sheryl Crow, Lemonheads with Better than Ezra, and The Cranberries (absent Suede). And I've always been pretty enamored with British bands. Maybe it's their understated stage presence and overwhelming sound, or maybe it's just because they're relatively hard to come by in Denver/Boulder. In any case, save David Grey (technically) and some group of Asian chaps rocking the The Dublin Castle, I haven't been touched by the British sound in about ten years.

Kasabian were awesome and that's just about all I can say. The Gothic is a small venue, holding maybe 500 people (300 of which approximately in attendance), and Kasabian absolutely blew the doors off the place, blew me away, and took me back to my first Brit-band show with Radiohead. It was amazing. And I usually don't look forward to opening acts, but both bands were talented in their own right and really caught my attention. Especially Mew with their abstract visuals playing on a huge screen behind them along with their abstract vocals - almost uncategorizable. Could one expect less from the top-rated band out of Denmark? But Tom Meighan, lead singer for Kasabian, was the star of the night... by far. He came off to me as a mix of Mick Jagger and Liam Gallagher of Oasis. A good friend that saw Kasabian a year ago mentioned it's apparent that Meighan's been influenced heavily by Gallagher in the year they've been touring. In any case, I felt lucky to be that close to the stage on that night.

Concert Quote of the Night, toilet wall scratches: God loves, Man kills

Conversation of the Week

2006-07-17T20:43:00.000-06:00

When I asked my four year old son what he learned at school (daycare) today, he said they were learning about water.

"Hey Dad, do you know what water's made out of?"

(Me, thinking, "well, I know what it's made out of but I can't possibly imagine what you're about to tell me.") "No buddy. What?"

"Um, two H's and an O."

(Me, thinking, "I can't believe you just said that; there's no way he knows what that means.") "Huh!"

10 second pause

"Yep. Two Hydrogens and an Oxygen."

(Me, thinking, "I cannot believe you just said that! Unbelievable!") "Wow! That is really interesting!"

"Yeah Dad."

(Me, thinking, "wonder if I should get him started on 'Six Easy Pieces'...")

Back From Outer Space

2006-06-05T21:08:00.000-06:00

My wife and I started new jobs on the same day in March and it has been an absolute time warp up to now. For me, I started with a company that I knew no one inside. For my wife, she started back as a professional for the first time since before she was pregnant with our son - nearly six years ago. For a little while we went into survival mode but Memorial Day weekend really marked a point where we've all gotten into our grooves and we're starting to create some time and space for ourselves (as they say in the NHL).

And what a better way to blow off some stress than to help my brother-in-law close down Armida's karaoke bar in Denver. Twice.

My brother-in-law lives in Wisconsin and works on a dairy farm. His girlfriend toured the world with a reggae band and has since become a bar favorite around the upper peninsula of Michigan. I've witnessed the jaw-dropping reaction she gets in bars up there... unfortunately, "jaw-dropping" is not the reaction we got when we took the mic but at least I've managed to expand my karaoke horizons.

The first time I ever karaoked I did just one song: Blister in the Sun by the Violent Femmes. I decided to start off with that one again just to get my legs under me. Unlike some bars that have karaoke off in the corner, Armida's is built around it. You're up front and on stage. So it definitely helps to drop a drink or two and pick a song you can channel, or one where you only have to sound like Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes. The other subtle point I learned is that there are a few songs that are bar favorites and you can't go wrong by taking a shot; it's smart to get the crowd on your side early. Case in point, my next song was Brandy (you're a fine girl) by Looking Glass. This is a song that I didn't nail but can certainly dial in on. And, after having won over the bar with my opener, had two random young ladies grinding me on stage (which actually threw me off because, c'mon, Brandy's just not a grinding song). Then there's the closer. In a crowded bar, this is the one that everyone's pretty much drunk for. And again, for some reason I can do Turning Japanese by the Vapors halfway decently - which is all you really need for the closer. Champagne Supernova by Oasis, though slightly off-topic lyrically, was thrown in there somewhere as well...

The next outing wasn't nearly as successful but nonetheless fun. My set included: Tainted Love by Soft Cell, Everything to Everyone by Everclear, and Turning Japanese again in a desperate attempt to win back a portion of the bar. Along the way I took note of such bar favorites as Living on a Prayer by Bon Jovi, Santeria by Sublime, Centerfold by J. Geils Band, and Creep by Radiohead. Look out Michigan, I'll be touring the UP this summer!

Random Netflix Musings

2006-03-17T22:07:00.000-07:00

Well, the numbers are in for 2005. We watched 116 Netflix movies last year. That's an average of 9.6 movies per month at $1.88 each. Netflix doesn't exactly make it easy to figure this out - except that they send emails that can be collected. Maybe there's some sort of Long Tail or Web 2.0-ish opportunity here...

I wonder how many Netflix disks were lost because of Hurricane Katrina?

The Economics of Expertise

2006-03-04T15:48:00.000-07:00

Kathy Sierra, contributing author to O'Reilly's Head First series, Sun's Java certification exams, and Creating Passionate Users makes some interesting points in "How to be an expert". It's another great post embodying the unifying theme of how to kick ass.

In my opinion, there are some very real economic decisions made when evaluating how far down the expert road you want to get. I tend to agree that we practice the things we're already good at. I also agree to an extent that we avoid things we suck at, but I'm not sure it's because we make a decision to be mediocre. I think it has as much to do with the value of our time, or an organization's time, as much as anything.

The point was made, "Yet the research says that if we were willing to put in more hours, and to use those hours to practice the things that aren't so fun, we could become good." I totally understand the point of this sentence. From a pragmatic standpoint, this could describe more time in test-driven development, or an extra evening at a user's group meeting, or really digging into SOAP with that next web service. But I only have 24 hours in a day and I need to sleep for some of that time! So those other 17-ish hours of my day have some real economic value to me, my family, and possibly other people.

It seems the value of becoming an expert sometime in the future is constantly weighed against the near-term value of that time. And the distance into the future seems to be significant as well. For example, O'Reilly's home page currently displays a heading: "Technology Doesn't Wait-- Neither Should You". In other words, we have a relatively short amount of time to maximize our expertise in a technology. Entity beans? Stateless session beans is the way to go. EJB? Why? Don't you know that Hibernate with Spring probably solves the same problem? Struts? You should consider Ajax with JSF. JavaScript and JSP? Why not a C# .NET smart client..? And on and on for eternity. Sure, I can still put in more hours and become an expert in C or SmallTalk. And yes, being an expert in anything at any time is worthy of some merit. But what it comes down to is this: is the payoff at the end of the expert road worth the time that I missed on other things, particularly, playing with my kids? In technology, that value is diminished with every passing day.

So this is probably the reason why I still have not actually changed the oil in my car myself. There are experts out there that can do it for me. And in the end, I guess I'll live with mediocrity in investing, remodeling my house, or playing that saxophone that's in my basement. But that's because I am trying as a software engineer. And frankly, I'm able to convince my employer to pick up a portion of the economic cost of traveling down that road. But most importantly, I'm well on my way to becoming an expert at being a dad. And I think the economic benefits of that to our world will probably outweigh my contributions as an engineer.

Open AJAX Consortium Looks to Ease Development

2006-03-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting points that Laszlo Systems CTO David Temkin makes in this interview is the relative lack of good UI developers out there, specifically in the J2EE realm. I think he's correct in stating that a good J2EE developer tends to be proficient more on the server side than on the client. And maybe that's because there's relatively much less Java code actually involved in the display when you're talking about a web application - witness the rise of Ajax. Also, a good UI developer has to be so much more than just a software engineer. A good UI developer needs to be part psychologist, part designer in the pure sense, part artist, part engineer, a users' advocate (gasp), and extremely detail-oriented. On top of that, a good J2EE UI developer probably needs to work well in other technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML/XSL, and even Flash. True, these are not so much of a technical stretch compared with J2EE technologies, but it is a bit of a stretch to expect the same person to be truly exceptional in all of the technologies (jack of all trades, master of none).

The one thing that catches my attention most about Ajax splashed across java.sun.com, developerWorks, and TheServerSide is that these same people were touting XP not very long ago. And granted, I understand that these folks must live on the edge. But I find it so interesting that we've shifted from test driven development and best-practices to getting something out the door quickly. And a "something" which isn't based on a standard framework (as this article points to), can't easily be unit tested, has very little tool support, and actually isn't even grounded in Java!

I'm excited about these developments but I'm also interested in watching how they play out with Windows Vista and XAML lurking around the corner.

BITS problem solved

2006-02-23T19:46:00.000-07:00

The server does not support the necessary HTTP protocol. Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) requires that the server support the Range protocol header.

The latest application that I've worked on is a C# WinForms application that incorporates the Microsoft Updater Application Block to handle automatic updates. For Java developers, this is basically the equivalent of Java Web Start. Under the covers, the Updater Application Block uses BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer System) technology; the same technology that's running when you install a security patch from Microsoft. We encountered the above error with a single client site and it took an incredible amount of time to figure it out, and there was only a smattering of clues published on the web.

The error message may lead you to believe that the problem stems from a misconfiguration on our server. The following is a snippet from BITS documentation:

HTTP Requirements for BITS Downloads

BITS supports HTTP and HTTPS downloads and uploads and requires that the server supports the HTTP/1.1 protocol. For downloads, the HTTP server's Head method must return the file size and its Get method must support the Content-Range and Content-Length headers. As a result, BITS only transfers static file content and generates an error if you try to transfer dynamic content, unless the ASP, ISAPI, or CGI script supports the Content-Range and Content-Length headers.

BITS can use an HTTP/1.0 server as long as it meets the Head and Get method requirements.

To support downloading ranges of a file, the server must support the following requirements:

Allow MIME headers to include the standard Content-Range and Content-Type headers, plus a maximum of 180 bytes of other headers.
Allow a maximum of two CR/LFs between the HTTP headers and the first boundary string.

But the actual cause in this case was our client's firewall configuration. The firewall (SonicWall pro 5060) was interfering with the response from our server. The solution: our client opened our IP range on their CFS Exclusion List, Gateway AV Exclusion List, IPS Exclusion List, and Anti-Spyware Exclusion List.

Hope this helps someone else out there!

Lessons in SOA

2006-02-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

Although I agree with the comments of George Carey about this article, I wanted to add a little personal experience to the underlying theme of the article that a SOA needs to be based on a loosely coupled abstraction layer. This is absolutely critical. Why? Because services can easily turn into a maintenance headache that is, "write once, maintain forever."

Coming from EJB/JSP-land, it's not initially apparent that point-to-point services are bad. Both Microsoft and Sun are selling how easy it is to produce and consume web services. But it becomes obvious over time that you're actually writing a public API rather than remote procedure calls. This is a significant shift in thinking and practice and shouldn't be underestimated. Under the basic constraints of API development, service signatures cannot change and contracts can't be broken. This can lead to versions of methods like getDocument(int) and then getDocument2(int, boolean), etc. Then in the future when a bug is found, you may end up maintaining getDocument() and getDocument2(). Of course we strive for proper encapsulation, but sometimes even good encapsulation cannot prevent the possibility of breaking a contract. So then you may even wind up maintaining different versions of compositions that basically perform the same task. Or, in the unlikely event that a database primary key changes, it may reverberate all the way through the system unavoidably breaking a contract. And even in a system with relatively few web services, this amount of maintenance can quickly become unacceptable.

My point is that in order to be successful with a SOA, you probably need to put even more work up front in design and more forethought in policies such as managing deprecation. And I understand that implementing a SOA is different than implementing a few web services. But as this article points out, this fundamental understanding needs to get to the core of an organization before the "if you build it, they will come" mentality.

Indiana Jones and the...

2006-01-19T19:20:00.000-07:00

I rely on my brother to filter only the most important Ain't It Cool News. Thank you Steve. And thank you to all the creative folks out there suggesting titles (readers talkback) for Harrison Ford's swan song as Indiana Jones.

Remote Prosperites

2006-01-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

Last month, I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Cyd in London (Camden Town). It was a short but incredible trip; made more comfortable by the fact that I flew business class both ways. It's disgusting how they treat you in business class. I highly recommend it.

Day 1 involved:
1. Making it onto the correct tube train and realizing I'm sitting in the absolute middle of the train, with my luggage, 8am on a week day (packed), I'll need to navigate off the train soon with my luggage, and I'm American. DOH!

2. Trying to decipher Cyd's directions out of the Underground station. "Go straight out of the station" can be interpreted in many ways when you're faced with a 6 point intersection, cars driving on the other side of the road, and no street signs (street signs are on the buildings - I didn't know that until day 2). In fact, it took 3 tries to head in the right direction. Have a look for yourself... which way would you have gone?!

3. Trying not to succumb to spontaneous REM sleep. In the famous words of Evan Dando, "I know what it feels like to be MAARK today." (paraphrased)

My prescription for shaking off GMT-0700 was spending some quality time with myself in the crisp air of Regents Park.

And then a few more hours exploring the catacombs of Camden Market. I think I probably heard at least 20 different languages while wandering through.

4. And later after a short nap, wandering to a tiny little back-alley with a couple boutique stores, drinking hot sangria, and helping Cyd find a bobble (Christmas tree ornament).

Day 1 conclusion: Absolutely amazing.

Day 2 involved:
1. Waking up at 6am. That's the time my son usually wanders into our bedroom every morning. This strikes me as completely bizarre as it's 6am London time.

2. Knocking out the things I absolutely had to see: Sir Isaac Newton's sarcophagus in Westminster Abbey and John Harrison's clocks that won the Longitude prize. Along the way, I got to see the rest of London via the Thames and Greenwich. Very satisfying.

3. Listening to some very bad karaoke in a local pub.

4. Loading up the jukebox at the Camden Castle, birthplace of Blur, and partaking in an obligatory G.W. discussion with a young Londoner currently residing in Barcelona.

Day 2 conclusion: Absolutely amazing.

Day 3 involved:
1. Waking up at 6am again.

2. Wandering to and then through the Tate Modern gallery. Rodin, Picasso, great views of Saint Paul's, etc.

3. Wandering through Picadilly Circus and the theater district to find some amazing Indian food.

4. Eating amazing Indian food.

3. Spending some quality time at a local pub with Cyd's international mates over a few bottles of wine.

Day 3 conclusion: Absolutely amazing.

So Cyd asked what the best part of the trip was. The best part of the trip was the conversation with Cyd about life and actually spending time with Cyd's mates. It was just being there.

By the way, I just saw King Kong the other night and the commercial they played before the movie had Kate Winslet walking here.

Hey Cyd, take a close look at the Camden Lock... you'll see some of Banksy's work (hanging painters). My brother picked up on it in this photo that I took.

Cheers!

Create

2006-01-02T20:43:00.000-07:00

Instead of coming up with a list of fleeting New Year's resolutions, I choose an action verb that I intend to incorporate into as many aspects of my life as possible during the new year.

For 2006, I choose "create."

Create abundance.
Create time.
Create love.
Create health.
Create opportunity.
Create prosperity.
Create something unique.

Here's to a happy, healthy, prosperous new year! Cheers.

Context Lost

2005-11-09T21:06:00.000-07:00

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.
-- Frank Zappa

Context is lost with technological advancement.

Back in September, Sunday finally succeeded in getting rid of Cyd. Smashingly brilliant! One of the best parts of the evening was when Sunday broke out her 10 year old Polaroid camera. When I first met Sunday and the topic of her camera came up she said, "I love it. Instant gratification." Today, not only is the gratification still instant, it's just downright freaky.

Ironically, every day we move into the digital age we lose context. Or, life.

My wife and I just purchased a 5 megapixel camera that replaces our 2 megapixel camera. We take thousands of pictures and keep a fraction of them. We regularly hand the camera over to our three year old son to take as many pictures as he can (yes folks, I predict in about 17 years an unprecedented revolution of photographers who've been taking photographs nearly their whole lives). We store our pictures with an online service and view them in perfectly formatted HTML tables or play them in high definition slide shows. We change them at will from perfect color, to black and white, to sepia, and back to color again.

Context.

I can remember wondering why everyone was so unhappy or serious in all of the childhood pictures of my great grandmother, born in 1891. Later someone explained to me that they all had to sit very still for a period of time so that the exposure would take. That's a story behind the story in every one of those photographs. How uncomfortable must they have been? What kind of day must they have had preparing for the photograph? What must have been going through a mother's mind anticipating the proposition of getting her child to sit still..?!

But even in my lifetime, context has been lost. I possess two photo albums filled with roughly 50 of my baby pictures. The photo paper is thick and the ink is tinged a subtle greenish-brown. Cameras, film, and film processing were not cheap for a new family. The photos have faded with time.

The physical nature is gone, and with it, the experience it embodied. The same can be said for programmers who turned in punch cards once a week to get processed. I cannot imagine the cost of a single compilation error in that system!

But maybe there is a continuity. Maybe one day my son will lament the day when Microsoft endorsed a technology incompatible with JPEG and his parents failed to convert the thousands of JPEG's they had of him. Maybe my daughter will lament the tens of thousands of digital files that we've entrusted to her but organized in a naive, 2004-like manner that is so counterintuitive to the technologies she uses. Maybe static photographs will be our lost context.

(In any case, Sunday, thanks for porting those photos to the 21st century!)

Relative Champs

2005-10-24T21:34:00.000-06:00

Two last place teams that split apart, formed one team, then won the league...

Top row, left to right:
Cam Stewart, Goon. Goal Scorer. Father.
Mike Smith, Software Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Rob Ford, Architect, Level 3 Communications
Dave Skema, ex-Kent State club team member
Josh Sims, ex-Steamboat Springs club team member
Rick Pease, ex-Connecticut area goaltender
Patrick Gates, DBA, Level 3 Communications
Jason Snider, 18 years old with energy to burn

Bottom row, left to right:
me (Joe), ex-goaltender with a taste for scoring goals
Claire Solohub, Calgary, Alberta native
Jamie Slorf, Goaltender. Father. (holding real gold-colored metal trophy)
Sloane Stricker, DBA, Level 3 Communications
Steve Sangalis, ex-U. of Indiana club team member
Molly Meehan, Marketing, Avalanche/Nuggets/Rapids

Not pictured:
Brian Snider, Edmonton, Alberta native
Brian Yarosh, the enigma
Free pitcher of Molson

How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily

2005-10-09T21:43:00.000-06:00

This is an excellent presentation by Dr. Michael A. Covington of the Artificial Intelligence Center at The University of Georgia. He makes such interesting points and I think this has so much relevance to some goals I have for this blog and to engineering in general.

Some thoughts...

I've found that it's very hard to translate personal technical knowledge into elegant, interesting writing that engages a reader. I've also found that you really need to know what you're talking about inside and out and exactly what the goal of your writing will be. This really dawned on me when I wanted to write about Apache Axis handling web service calls from a .NET client. I realized that I didn't know how we had deployed Axis, or really how it actually worked, even though I was writing to it every day for months. I think this is common, especially in large companies. One of the ironies of engineering is that well-engineered products shelter developers from having to know their internals, but we generally end up digging in and learning them anyway. To some extent, this is one reason why I've posted very little of what I want to say with my technical voice.

In my book, the King of translating deep technical knowledge into interesting and engaging writing is Rod Johnson. By far.

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way." --Marvin Minsky

Dr. Covington makes this same general point in one of his "Clear Understanding" slides (#92). This is something I've personally witnessed through myself working with different languages and life cycles of projects and in engineering in general. For instance, it's truly remarkable to have an epiphany about the elegance of a design pattern (or hideousness of an anti-pattern), or come back around on a database design decision for a project that supports some totally unforeseen requirement from some unrelated project. Most recently, Threading has been the foremost area of personal learning for me along these lines - probably because, in order to truly know threading, you must be bit in the ass by it hard a few times.

"Better to keep your mouth shut and let people assume you're stupid than open it and remove all doubt." --anonymous

I've read various buzz about managing projects through blogs or wiki's. Blogger's team support is intriguing and I've checked out cool services like Backpack. I've realized that the stumbling block isn't the tools support, it's motivating other engineers to actually write (sentences). I think this is one subtle underlying reason why the XP tenet of self-documenting code is one of the easier XP practices to actually adopt.

"The more I see, the less I know..." --Matt Johnson, The The

So in the end, Dr. Covington is really giving a nod to all the technologists out in the blogosphere. For me personally, his presentation is an affirmation of my methods to figure out what I know and continue my journey of learning.

NHL celebrates opening night with historic 15-game slate

2005-10-04T21:38:00.000-06:00

The National Hockey League opens its 2005-06 regular season Wednesday with 15 games, 30 clubs in action, dozens of storylines and 600 players in uniform in front of an expected quarter-million fans at sold-out arenas, marking the busiest playing date in the League's 88-year history. NHL teams had combined to play as many as 14 games on nine occasions, the most recent of which was Nov. 1, 2003.

It also marks the first time that all NHL clubs are in action on the schedule's opening night since 1928-29, when 10 clubs were featured. The last time all clubs in a major pro sports league played on the opening date of the schedule was in 1969, when the National Football League kicked off with all 16 NFL clubs and 10 AFL clubs participating.

Here are some fearless predictions for the Avalanche by people "in the know":

John Buccigross, ESPN: 9th in the Western Conference
Jim Kelley for ESPN: 9th in the Western Conference
Adrian Dater, The Denver Post: 7th in the Western Conference
Scott Wraight, SI.com: 13th overall in initial power rankings
Linesmaker.com: 20-1 odds to win the Stanley Cup
Canadian Press: Joel Quenneville as 1st coach fired, 3 teams headed downward

From what I can tell, these guys are only focusing on the negatives of losing Foote and Forsberg (who, by the way, has been injured for the majority of the last three seasons with the Avalanche, and last season with MoDo).

Here's why I disagree and think the Avalanche will finish no worse than 5th in the Western Conference:

Their head coach has a Stanley Cup ring.
Their goaltender's name is on the Stanley Cup.
Rob Blake, Norris Trophy winner, All-Star.
Joe Sakic, Hart Trophy and Conn Smythe Trophy winner, All-Star.
Milan Hejduk, Maurice Richard Trophy winner, All-Star.
Alex Tanguay, career high 79 points last season, #1 star with 2 goals in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals against the second best goalie of all time.
New addition Andrew Brunette, 49 points last season under Lemaire's defense-first system.
New addition Pierre Turgeon reunited with coach Quenneville under whom he scored 66 points in 55 games of clutch-and-grab hockey, last season notched his 16th consecutive season of 40+ points.
Leadership: one current, and three previous NHL captains: Joe Sakic, Rob Blake, Pierre Turgeon, and Steve Konowalchuk - captain of the Capitals when they went to the Stanley Cup Finals.
Karlis Skrastins, second only to Blake last season in Time-on-Ice minutes - ahead of Foote(3) and Sakic(4).
John Michael-Liles, Team USA defenseman.
No more team/press soap opera that is, "No offense to you guys BUT is Peter ready to play again? Will he be back? Will he? Will he? Please say he's ready..!"

Stay tuned hockey fans! It will be interesting!

Rules

2005-10-02T09:43:00.000-06:00

Our neighborhood pool closed a couple weekends ago. We took the kids for the final day to wrap up the summer. While we were there, I couldn't help but observe one mother's interaction with her son, Jacob. Jacob was pretty wild and his mother spent a majority of the time trying to rein Jacob in, specifically with the following sentence repeated over and over:

"Jacob! Stop! That's against the rules Jacob!"

Her choice of words was very interesting to me. Instead of, "Jacob, that makes mommy angry because you're making a mess. Now you'll need to clean it up.", or "Jacob, do you see that he doesn't like getting water splashed in his face?", or "Jacob, I don't like to see you run because you can fall and hurt yourself." or even, "Alright mister, TIME OUT!"

In other words, Jacob's learning to live by the letter and not the intent. He's learning about rules but not really about the reasons why we have them. And he's learning that they shouldn't be broken (or, that they're easily broken with little consequence).

I don't want my children to be afraid of action simply because it's "against the rules." Things get done and innovations created against the rules. I want my children to have a deep understanding of the rules, which rules are sacred, and which rules are made to be broken. A rule by itself is a hollow shell that's easily broken or blindly followed by the Inconsiderate. I want my children to grow on a solid foundation of consideration.

And the Oscar for Best Picture goes to...

2005-10-01T11:46:00.000-06:00

Crash

Written and directed by Paul Haggis, the guy who did the screenplay for "Million Dollar Baby", "Crash" is a much more engrossing film that was emotionally gripping in a way that "Million Dollar Baby" lacked. It's hard to pick one shining performance from this amazing cast of actors; I thought they were all brilliant, especially in the minor roles. I thought Matt Dillon really shined and Brendan Fraser far exceeded expectations (yet again). This was a real acting movie in the vein of "American Beauty". I really hope IMDB is wrong and this movie is eligible for an Oscar next April.

To date, the best movies that I've seen this year are (in order):

Crash
Batman Begins
Oldboy
Sin City

These are the movies that embody the essence of why I spend valuable time watching movies.

One other personal observation about "Crash"... The underlying theme of the movie is racism and the setting is Los Angeles. I've only spent a grand total of about 2 weeks in L.A. My impression of the city and other large areas in California such as San Diego and San Francisco/Oakland is that those cities are indeed racially charged in a way that I haven't really experienced in other parts of the U.S. I'm curious if local movie buffs thought "Crash" was an extreme representation of undercurrents in Los Angeles or if it was really close to the actual vibe of the city.

Microsoft, JBoss link up

2005-09-27T21:41:00.000-06:00

The deal doesn't mean Microsoft is softening its hard-line stance toward open-source development or becoming a Java enthusiast, Platform Technology Strategy Director Bill Hilf insisted. But with a significant number of JBoss customers deploying on Microsoft's platform, it's in both vendors' interests to ensure those deployments go smoothly, executives from the two companies said.

I guess only the JBoss and Microsoft guys really know the motivations behind this relationship but it sure is interesting. I wonder how much visibility the optimizations will have in open source software.

The article goes on to say that "JBoss...estimates that half its customers run its JBoss Enterprise Middleware System on Microsoft's Windows Server." I guess I'm surprised at how many customers are running JBoss on Windows Server. Or, I'm surprised that I'm surprised... I've only had about five years of J2EE experience and it's always been deployed on Solaris or Linux. My impression, shaped by senior managers, is that Windows Server is not reliable or secure enough to run a production environment. Either this is naive or a lot of JBoss customers aren't running in production environments (probably the former). I'm curious about other perspectives.

Cheating

2005-09-24T13:38:00.000-06:00

A good friend of mine started in the MBA program at the University of Colorado - Denver last week. We talked about how all the classrooms are wi-fi enabled, how everyone takes notes on their laptops, how you can search the web for topics or people that you're discussing right at that moment, or how you can blow off the discussion and just surf or IM. Certainly none of this is a surprise to me but it's definitely different than when I last attended a college lecture.

What did surprise me is the rules for taking exams. Apparently they shut down wi-fi access (but if you're enterprising you may be able to find an unsecured access point). And they will allow laptops on some exams. But on other exams students get a few pieces of paper and a calculator only. The most surprising rule to me was that they don't allow cell phones in the exam. Apparently students have taken photos of the exam, emailed them to friends, and then received text messages with the answers! Man, if these students put in half the effort to studying that they do in coming up with nefarious cheating methods...

It reminded me of my favorite cheating incident while I was an undergrad at CU-Boulder. I was finishing up my first CS programming course (Pascal!!!), and it was the last assignment, which is to say that it was the toughest yet and we had to put a lot more time in at the lab. We also had the choice of working with one or two other students in a group. My professor for the course was an engineer at Ball Aerospace in Boulder and I guess he wrote embedded software for satellite systems. Anyway, at the end of one of the last classes of the semester, the professor called up a group of three guys. I was sitting in the front row and heard the whole thing (picture an angry professor/engineer and three stunned 19 year-olds):

"Did you guys write the program that printed this output?" (holding up the printouts)
--- silent nodding ---
"There is no way that your program could've created this output."
--- edgy silence ---
"So here's the deal... one of you gets an 'F' for the semester. You guys go and decide who and come back and tell me."

DOOOOOOOOH!

The temptation at the time was to pull scrap printouts from the recycle bin at the lab. I don't know if that's what they did, but if so, it obviously wasn't very smart (think about why they're in the recycle bin).

My other reflection on cheating is that I was most exposed to it in natural science courses that were part of the pre-Med track. I really resented students that spouted off constantly in Chemistry lab or BioChem lab about how they sat in on a surgery or rode in the ambulance, etc. then would copy lab assignments at the last minute... In fact, the cutthroat atmosphere was what ultimately drove me away from natural sciences and the pre-health track; well, that and an honest C+ in Chemistry. Looking back, and also giving a nod to close friends who became doctors, I'm confident that the medical school pipeline eventually weeded out those hacks.

For Posterity

2005-09-19T20:21:00.000-06:00

This album really made an impression on me and I just thought I'd share... Dusk by The The.

CU-Boulder Ranked 11th Best Public University In World

2005-09-18T13:44:00.000-06:00

A new survey of the world's top universities cited in the Sept. 8 issue of The Economist ranks the University of Colorado at Boulder as the 11th best public university.

It's nice to see my alma mater get some positive recognition that it deserves.

You might ask how this ranking is reconciled with some of CU-Boulder's more notorious rankings in the past. I think the answer is pretty simple. One ranking is faculty-side while the other is student-side. The intersection is the opportunity to either take advantage of a world-class education or squander it; the institution won't hold your hand. I believe that this experience closely models life after college. And isn't that why we make such an investment in our college education; to find an avenue of pursuit in life and be prepared for it?

Colorado Avalanche Camp Opens

2005-09-15T21:36:00.000-06:00

In case you hadn't heard, the NHL is back! The Avs opened camp this week. The NHL will have a new look this year and if you've ever been remotely interested in hockey this is a great year to start getting into it. Chances are that your hometown team has as much of a shot to win the Stanley Cup as any other team (well, ok, the Red Wings and Stars don't have a chance...)

I personally celebrated the return of the NHL with a goal in our men's league championship game victory. It capped a personal best five-game scoring streak. That's not bad for a guy who grew up playing goalie. And thanks to Scott McNealy, I get to play at a pretty nice rink.

So why does this year have so much potential to be more exciting than years past?
A few reasons:

A salary cap has been put in place that forced a lot of teams to shuffle their lineups. Many superstars have switched teams. The financial playing field has been leveled significantly for small market and Canadian teams.
Sidney Crosby, the most highly touted player to come out of the Canadian major junior leagues since Mario Lemieux (think Wayne Gretzky or (gasp) LeBron James). Interestingly, Crosby lives with Mario and will be playing on a line with Mario in Pittsburgh this year.
New rules designed to open up the game and increase scoring. I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to this. I think the shootout will be huge. I like that ties are gone and fans have to leave the rink happy or sad. In truth, I wished that the owners would remove some seats and put in place international-sized ice sheets. The impact to revenue would be significant but I think we'd finally see truly awesome hockey. Anyway, maybe we'll get to see Peter Forsberg play hockey instead of football (sigh).
Players will be more involved in marketing campaigns. Players will be more recognizable like they are in the other three sports. Rumors are going around that goalies will be able to customize their uniforms like their masks, and possibly sell advertising on their jerseys. All this coming from the "aw shucks" league or "I got lucky on that last goal. I'm just trying to work hard and take it one game at a time." ZZZZZZ zzzzzzz ZZZZZZZZZ zzzzzzzz.

And finally, the true reason to get excited again is the Stanley Cup will find its way back to its familiar, comfortable home in beautiful Colorado. I can't wait to see my third Stanley Cup parade.

Office Space

2005-09-14T15:25:00.000-06:00

Scene from our office break room today: VP of Operations, Manager of Customer Support, Software Engineer (me).

I walked in to grab a plastic spoon. The drawer with the spoons was empty so I grabbed a new box from the cupboard, grabbed a bunch from the box and put them in the drawer, then took my spoon.

The Manager of Customer Support laughed. Just before, she noticed the spoons were gone, took out the box, grabbed one spoon and put the box back.

And just before that, the VP of Operations looked for a spoon, couldn't find one, and made due.

In other words:

The VP of Operations recognized the problem and redefined it as non-mission critical.

The Manager of Customer Support reproduced the problem, immediately discovered a work-around for the person experiencing the problem and passed it on to an Engineer for further examination.

The Software Engineer reproduced the problem and implemented a relatively short-term solution because, well, a better solution like purchasing non-disposable silverware would probably be too time consuming and costly. And anyway, he probably won't have to deal with the problem again very soon. In fact, one could almost argue this is a marginal use case as forks work in almost any situation. And if the forks and spoons both run out..? Well who wants to work for a company that lets that happen?! I bet Google doesn't have that problem.

Driver's Seat

2005-09-08T23:10:00.000-06:00

The best driving advice I ever heard was given by Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the Car Talk guys. They gave advice on how to set your sideview mirrors to eliminate your car's blindspot. In other words, when you're changing lanes, you can simply trust your mirrors completely without having to glance over your shoulder. I implemented their solution about a year ago and I love how it works. I really can't believe they didn't teach this in Driver's Ed. back in the day, and the more I happen to drive other people's cars, the more I see that not many people use this really handy piece of advice.

So here's how it works: picture a car coming up behind you that will pass you either on the right or the left. Ideally you want your mirrors arranged so that, as the car moves out of range of your rearview mirror, it moves into range of one of the sideview mirrors. In other words, you can always see a part of the passing car; at least the tail-end of it or the very front bumper. As the car passes, it will move out of range of the sideview mirror and into range of your peripheral and forward looking vision.

So here's how to configure your mirrors for this to work: sit in your driver's seat (I'll assume an American car with the steering wheel on the left). Tip your head the left so that it bumps right up against the driver's side window. With your head tilted and looking into the driver's side mirror, adjust the mirror so that you can just barely see the backend of your car. That will seem to be adjusted pretty far out when you sit upright. Now for the passenger side. You basically do the same thing, but it's a little trickier. You may have to sit in your driver's seat where the controls are and estimate the correct position, imagining what the angle would look like. Or you can sit in the passenger seat, but imagine tilting your head all the way over from the driver's seat. You may have to tweak this side a little as you go.

It doesn't seem right at first. The mirrors seem spread too far apart and you can't see directly behind you in either sideview mirror. In fact, you may have to sell the system on your spouse if you share cars... But give it a chance for about a week. Test it out by watching closely cars coming up and passing you. It absolutely works.

Winning

2005-09-05T20:09:00.000-06:00

Finished Winning by Jack Welch. It's a sweeping, no b.s. business management book that covers everything from leadership, change, competition, strategy, mergers, etc. to managing your own career. Not surprisingly, the book's anecdotes are set in the context of huge corporations but its messages are certainly applicable to very small companies with tens of employees. The book is written in "Welch's optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind-set" and it's a refreshing, quick read for anyone that's a student of Business.

Here are some points that I really took away from the book:

Winning in business is a good thing. Winning businesses create economic opportunity for families, they create revenue for governments, and they create opportunity for people to give back to their communities.

Differentiation, or the 20-70-10 rule. This is a process by which managers differentiate their people into 3 categories: top 20%, middle 70%, and bottom 10%. The top 20% are treated like all-stars. They should be showered with bonuses, stock, training, perks, whatever. They're treated like the best. However, the middle 70% may be your most important chunk of workers because they're your majority. They should be managed with training, positive feedback, and thoughtful goal setting. People in this category should be moved around to test their leadership skills. People are cultivated and moved up from the middle 70%. Then there's the bottom 10% that makes this system seem cruel - they have to go. Welch's point here is that if expectations and goals are clearly communicated and the person is still not performing acceptably, it's better for everyone, including that person, to move on. It's likely that person will go onto other pursuits and will most likely be happier in a position they're performing well in. I think this makes a lot of sense. Of course, this entire system is based around a formal review process and setting clear-cut expectations.

Acid Tests for assessing people for a job. The first test is for integrity, the second for intelligence, and the third is maturity. He also goes on to explain the 4-E (and 1-P) framework: positive energy, ability to energize others, edge (courage to make yes-or-no decisions), execute (ability to get the job done), and passion.

"Create effective mechanisms - read: money, recognition, and training - to motivate and retain. ... People need to get differentiated rewards and recognition to be motivated. And companies need to deliver both for retention. It's that simple."

"Spend plenty up front, and put the best, hungriest, and most passionate people in leadership roles. ... One thing is for sure: new businesses with limited resources and good-enough people stay small."

And finally, regarding work-life balance: "Outside of work, clarify what you want from life. At work, clarify what your boss wants, and understand that, if you want to get ahead, what he or she wants comes first. You can eventually get what you both want, but the arrangement will be negotiated in that context."

Which Framework Should I Use, .NET or J2EE?

2005-08-27T18:50:00.000-06:00

(series cont.)

In this article, Matthew Murphy concludes by asking, "So Which Framework Should I Use, .NET or J2EE?"

One compelling answer is: Use both. Together.

If you've deployed an application server like JBoss or even a servlet container like Apache Tomcat, it is relatively easy to publish Java web services with Apache Axis. Likewise, it is incredibly easy to consume services in .NET. The bridge is XML. And by combining the built-in XSD tools of Visual Studio .NET (or a product like XMLSpy) and a Java-to-XML binding product like Castor, you can build a completely interoperable application in an amazingly short amount of time.

XML works great if you need to pass a complex object from a .NET client to a Java web service. One way to do this is to pass the XML as a byte array and unmarshal it on the other side. You can even compress the array before it goes. Though this is not extremely straightforward, Castor and C# make it relatively easy to do. When a complex object is not necessary or required, I have not experienced a problem with passing primitives, or arrays of primitives, between the two technologies. One exception would be passing a Date. The way I've worked around this problem is to format the date with W3C formatting and pass it as a string.

Another pretty cool feature of this architecture is that C# .NET reports exceptions that occur on the Java web service side. I believe this is due to C# .NET's handling of SOAP faults and wsdl:faults.

The potential snag that I've faced with this architecture is that C# .NET does not have a remote transaction manager (as far as I know). Where we've needed rollback capabilities, we've had to build processes from scratch. I understand how critical this is, but we've found ways around it (admittedly not as elegant as a remote transaction manager...)

So why go down this road? I believe that we're delivering best-in-class technology solutions to our customers. By "best-in-class", I mean a rich UI that is not sluggish or awkward and that users are actually impressed with and identify more with as an installed application. And importantly, a UI that is actually distributed over the web and utilizes HTTPS. Then that, coupled with server technology that is extremely reliable and secure as well as open and portable.

Star Wars and the Vocabulary of a Three Year Old Boy

2005-07-26T09:36:00.000-06:00

"Mister Yoda"

"Darth Small"

"Andy Skywalker"

"lightsaver"

... And, no. He hasn't seen the movie. And he won't see the movie until he can handle it. He sees all the other marketing crap and tries to make sense of it.

Mark Helprin

2005-07-24T14:44:00.000-06:00

I saw Mark Helprin at a book signing at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Cherry Creek last Thursday. I've read two of his books, Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War. A few of his books are considered literary masterpieces. I felt like I was sitting in the same room with Charles Dickens or Herman Melville; it was truly awesome.

He filled the evening by telling roughly twenty or so stories. He could have gone another hour and nobody in the audience would have flinched. His stories generally involved language in some way (which isn't surprising if you've read his stories and understand how incredible his mastery of language is). He said he speaks seven different languages and spoke at least four to us. He alluded to The Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, Don Quixote, and other stories like he had memorized them. He joked around a lot. It was kind of like I imagine being in a room with George Burns - I'd be nervous to be alone with him because he's so sharp it's almost scary.

He grew up on 1,000 acres of forest next to the Hudson River in New York; in his words, "1,000 acres of birds." His father worked directly for Samuel Goldwyn in the film business. Mr. Helprin said his parents didn't drive him to play groups or really socialize him so he grew up walking around the forest thinking. He said that being around other people made him really uncomfortable, so he would tell stories as a sort of mask.

When he was 17 years old, he went to France with a female classmate. He was going to meet her in a city and decided to try and impress her by arriving on a motorcycle "James Dean" style. So even though he'd never ridden a motorcycle before, he rented one and drove to the city. Just before he got there, he flipped the bike going about 40 miles per hour and it landed on him critically injuring him. He had internal injuries and a head injury that almost killed him. He was attended to on a U.S. Navy ship on its way to Barcelona. In Barcelona, he ended up in a seedy hotel, bandaged up with little medication. He said he thought he was going to die there.

One night around three in the morning, he instantly awoke and all of his pain was gone. Not only that, but he had realized that his head pain was gone and that he'd been dealing with it literally his whole life. There was a nightstand next to his bed with a pen and pad of paper. He wrote down a description of an ancient cathedral that was converted from a Muslim mosque into a Roman-Catholic church. He said he woke in the morning, read what he had written, and couldn't believe the writing that he'd done; that it was something his professors or professional writers would write and not something that could be conjured up by a 17 year old boy. He said from that day on he was a writer. He said, "blame it all on a brain injury!" Incredible.

Mr. Helprin is truly a Great man. His views on our world are interesting to say the least. Though I find his opinions hard to swallow, I seek them out as diverse information points. Check out the following links if you're interested: WSJ opinion and the National Review.

What's Your Special Skill?

2005-07-19T22:19:00.000-06:00

A Special Skill is something quite ordinary, odd, and typically frustrating in life that you find you're extraordinary at performing in an alarmingly consistent fashion. Examples of Special Skills might be, "able to drive my kneecap into the leg of a table when sitting down at wedding receptions" or "able to choose the line containing the longest wait at the supermarket checkout".

Interestingly, my Special Skill has evolved over time. It used to be that I couldn't fold maps back up to their original state once I had unfolded them. But over the past year, it's turned into this weird pattern of watching consecutive or near-consecutive movies with the same actor (or character) in them. I seem to do it quite unconsciously - in fact, I conscientiously try to prevent the situation so that I can really appreciate different characters that actors play.

Most recently, I watched Morgan Freeman in Batman Begins and then again in Million Dollar Baby. But here are some other recent examples:

A strange coincidence of Mount Rushmore being featured in North by Northwest then again in Team America World Police!
Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda then again in Ocean's Twelve.
Jude Law in I Heart Huckabees then again in Closer.
Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill Vol. 2 then again in Silver City.
Sean Penn in The Weight of Water then again in 21 Grams.

I caught the situation again tonight when I managed my Netflix queue and noticed my next two movies were The Machinist with Christian Bale and Kinsey with Liam Neeson. Again, the movie I saw last Saturday... Batman Begins.

Personal Reflection on London Bombings

2005-07-12T19:08:00.000-06:00

This post does not address the bombings per se and I have nothing else to add that the blogging community hasn't already. That said, my family's prayers go out to the loved ones of people who lost their lives.

The bombings marked a significant moment in my life. I was working from home that day and I saw the news first on Yahoo and followed it throughout the day. The significance of this was that it didn't even occur to me to turn on the television for news coverage. This was quite an alarming but amazing revelation for me (the next day, on my way to work listening to public radio).

I go to work on the Internet every day and it has now replaced television as my news source of choice.

Aftermath of the Knife

2005-07-06T19:54:00.000-06:00

Our son's umbilical hernia operation went well. The surgeon was done in about 20 minutes. The craziest thing about it is that our son went from having an "outie" belly button to now having an "innie". It looks totally different - the doctor did an amazing job. Check it out.

Blind Search

2005-07-01T17:01:00.000-06:00

One thing I've been thinking about recently is that it's still very hard to find information about something on the Internet if you don't know anything at all about it in the first place. Google is awesome. But I think we're a far cry away from the Mr. Wizard kiosk that David (Haley Joel Osment) seeks answers from in the movie Artificial Intelligence: AI.

This problem dawned on me when we bought a house and inherited a large garden with all types of plants and flowers that you typically see in Colorado. The garden lines the entire front of the house so we like to put some work into keeping it looking nice. But with some of the plants, we don't know if they're a weed or not. I found out that it's very hard to search for a plant that you only really have a physical example of. I'm sure brilliant minds are thinking about this problem and even starting down the path of accepting a photo as search criteria (an awesome notion when applying it to plants or glassware, but downright frightening when applied to people and faces).

Anyway, our garden provided another challenge of this sort when I met a current resident.

You could say that I'm pretty uneasy around snakes, especially snakes that I meet when I'm gardening (the introduction typically involves squealing like a little girl and running). So in the short amount of time that I give myself, I needed to gather as much information about the slitherer so that I could identify it on the web.

Fortunately there's a great resource for doing just this: The Colorado Herpetological Society, Key to the Snakes of Colorado. With this key, I was able to easily identify our friend as a Coluber constrictor or Racer.

I also took note of the key because it's a great example of a wizard user interface. It's an extremely effective UI and it couldn't have been done more simply: an HTML table and some anchors.

So if you're ever in Colorado and you meet one of our native slithering residents, take a moment to notice its tail and scale pattern and appreciate how one web site solved a pretty hard problem in an elegant way.

Under the Knife

2005-06-30T21:56:00.000-06:00

My son is having surgery for an umbilical hernia (aka "outie" belly button) tomorrow. Actually, an "outie" is just a symptom of it. Sometimes the umbilical cord opening doesn't close completely and it needs to be stitched closed in the abdominal wall. The scariest part for us is that he has to be put to sleep with anesthesia. The docs told us that there's actually a greater risk that his airways could close with local anesthetic. Doctors recommend that the child refrain from vigorous physical activity for a couple weeks after the surgery; I'm not sure how we're going to reconcile this with a three year old boy who loves to do back flips off couches.

Jaundiced Jelly

2005-06-20T14:29:00.000-06:00

Heads-down coding usually involves two things for me: candy and music.

There is a Jelly Belly brand jelly bean, yellowish in color, that's vomit flavored - or mimics vomit flavoring closely (you know, like how their Chemists didn't get "pear" exactly right). Trust me and avoid popping it in your mouth. I'll post a picture of the offender if I can. It blends with lemons so avoiding all yellow-likes is not a bad policy for now.

And along with that little nasty, I'm still trying to get the taste of Gorillaz Demon Days out of my mouth. Blechh. I never really thought Damon Albarn of Blur was incredibly talented (in relation to his peers) and was not impressed with this release. I didn't know what Gorillaz was all about, besides bland music, and I'm only slightly more impressed with the whole "cartoon band" thing. Of course, I have a three year old boy and have become a connoisseur of animation over the past year as well. I seem to remember when Blur's Parklife won the British album of the year award back in its day and Mr. Albarn's acceptance speech read something like, "WAKE UP AMERICA!" Hmmm. At the time, I don't remember hearing Radiohead (or Bush for that matter) whining about their record sales in the U.S.

Pondering Potential

2005-05-28T23:43:00.000-06:00

My son exclaimed, "Hey Dad, watch me jump off the couch!"
"Be careful." I replied.

Be careful.

It's usually the first response out of my mouth when my son's about to attempt something that I think could remotely harm him. But it struck me recently that "Be careful" may be the least constructive bit of parenting that I could conjure at any point in time.

I contemplate if that canned automatic response, though certainly well-meaning, is slooowly prodding my son down the well-traveled path of mediocrity; if my intentions of raising a child that has any chance of thriving in an ever-scarier world are actually being undermined by such an insipid response.

When I think of Great people, "being careful" is definitely down the list of personality traits and practices that I'd attribute to their greatness.

What about Happiness? Obviously Greatness and Happiness are significantly different. But I think the two are entwined in a way that is affected by a child's upbringing.

Is my son destined for Greatness? That's nearly impossible to answer. But is my son less destined for greatness after growing up on a steady diet of stale notions and empty advice? My careful mind is telling me yes.

Java vs. C# Series: Productivity 2

2005-05-20T15:36:00.000-06:00

C# developers have a dirty little secret. We all have a list of annoyances, bugs, and workarounds that we deal with every day while we write C# code. These are the Anti-Productivity features of C# .NET.

I was first clued into this at the beginning of my .NET tenure when all the controls disappeared from a form I'd been working on for days. We had just hired an experienced C# programmer to mentor the Java guys as we got up to speed with .NET. When I brought him over to my desk and showed him what had happened he said, "ohh, yeah, sometimes controls do that with WinForms in Visual Studio..." This was the beginning of a long personal list of problems and subsequent workarounds that I've now collected over the past year.

See for yourself. Go to Google or Google Groups and search for "A failure occurred while attempting to start the compilation." This little goodie happens randomly as you compile your project throughout the day; meaning, you'll be working happily for the first few hours of the day then you go into compiler hell for the next two hours. The kicker is that it seems to happen AFTER the compilation is complete. And the problem is obvious by its description, isn't it?!

Or how about this ugly little compiler error: "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process." Which file? Who knows!? Which process? Who knows!? Microsoft knows about this one and it looks like it will be fixed with VS 2005. That's no consolation to developers using VS 2003 every day. All that's painfully clear is the stress you might have been feeling before from a project deadline has now been magnified 100 times because you can't get a BUILD for CRYING OUT LOUD!

Also, as you're perusing the problems people are reporting on the web, notice that there aren't many answers out there. Dr. Spock! This... doesn't appear... to be... open source. And does Microsoft really have the gall to charge for a patch that fixes something that Visual Studio should just DO anyway?

The reason these annoyances frustrate me so much is because I can't remember dealing with bugs like these while programming in Java. And although I probably have, the point is, its such an extraordinary circumstance that I don't remember. I can remember using JBuilder and NetBeans years ago and being frustrated with their performance; but at least they worked properly. I do run Eclipse now. I can say that my experience with Eclipse' performance is much worse than my experience running Visual Studio. Then again, I work with code on a remote location when I'm running Eclipse. And frankly, Eclipse does exactly what I need it to every single time I run it. In any case, I think there's a subtle but significant difference between performance issues and things that just plain break. It was fascinating to me how our experienced C# guy was just resigned to the fact that this was normal. I guess I'm there too to some extent...

So to join this back in with my Productivity thread, I just want to make it clear that I truly have been more productive using C# .NET... but I could be so much more productive if I didn't have to deal with all of these inexplicable issues.

Moneyball for Software

2005-05-13T19:18:00.000-06:00

In Moneyball, author Michael Lewis outlines 5 simple rules that Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, kept in mind as he was shopping for players just before the trading deadline:

"No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can't afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you're fucked."
"The day you say you have to do something, you're screwed. Because you are going to make a bad deal. You can always recover from the player you didn't sign. You may never recover from the player you signed at the wrong price."
"Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You can put a dollar figure on it."
"Know exactly who you want and go after him." (Never mind who they say they want to trade.)
"Every deal you do will be publicly scrutinized by subjective opinion. If I'm [IBM CEO] Lou Gerstner, I'm not worried that every personnel decision I make is going to wind up on the front page of the business section. Not everyone believes that they know everything about the personal computer. But everyone who ever picked up a bat thing he knows baseball. To do this well, you have to ignore the newspapers."

Points #1 and #2, and to some extent #3, directly relate to small software companies and the software developers who work for them.

#1 is interesting. As a software developer I'm trying to gain new skills every single day. I've often found that when you start to get comfortable it starts getting dangerous for your career. Newer, better technologies are released out to the world every single day. I think a fundamental misunderstanding that business managers without a background in software have is that software and systems are like a car: when they get to the end of the assembly line they're done. In reality, software and systems are a moving target and need to be considered and managed as such.

The interesting part about his second sentence in #1 is true, you need to get something out as quickly as possible in a small software company and this process needs to be repeated many many times in rapid succession. However, taking on revenue at all costs and building short term software solutions can eventually become your costs when you do get bigger.

Point #2 touches on something similar that Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape (who?), once said when asked about his next challenges at the company. He said something to the effect of, "protecting against bringing on mediocre people." Jack Welch also talks about this in Winning. Companies without a stable and thoughtful hiring plan can easily end up hiring basically the first ones in the door out of necessity for a warm body or the necessity to find the cheapest labor. Likewise, companies without a stable and thoughtful technology strategy can find themselves locked in by past mistakes. Panic sets in and more bad decisions are made. Really, the market conditions snuck up and something that could have been predictable ends up hurting those companies in the long run.

Test styles

2005-05-09T21:30:00.000-06:00

Link

I've revisited Rusty Miller's post about various test styles. Cem Kaner's paper is a nice refresher that got me thinking about how we could do so much more with our software testing processes.

The subtle point I take away from Dr. Kaner's paper is that it takes excellent people to drive quality into software. Quality is not a bi-product of a collection of test cases per se.

I think primarily because of a very limited budget, we have relied pretty heavily on dogfooding our products to users through Beta programs. But even with all the money in the world, it's been invaluable getting real users using the product as soon as possible. This is especially true with business process software that is usually highly customized to a company's internal processes. There is no way a bunch of isolated developers is going to get it right. Get something in front of users as soon as possible.

It's certainly a fine line though. Customers can lose faith immediately if they encounter a blocker bug or an excessive amount of significant bugs. I think that's where exceptional expectation setting (hand holding, hugging, donuts, etc.) by your project manager is absolutely critical. It's also a challenge to keep users using the product and providing feedback through constant bug fix cycles. This is especially true if they have alternatives to the software or their daily job functions don't require the use of your product, or simply because they're too busy. Having a formal communication channel like public bug tracking, user groups, or even simply a daily conference call helps this. What you don't want is to ask the question, "who's using our software right now" and not know. The value of a Beta program is diminished nearly completely when this situation becomes reality.

Also, the most common reaction to Beta software is, "it would be really cool if it could do 'x'." Suddenly the project you thought was going to wrap up in a month or two has doubled with remaining work. I think this is where the contract process or statement of work process is so critical. It's nice to fall back on an agreement for the original scope of the project. Obviously you can't think of everything up front so implementing processes that produce shorter code cycles after a release are critical. Its always easier to break it to a client that a feature didn't make it in this release but will be in the next one only four weeks out.

Java vs. C# series: Productivity, pt. 1

2005-05-08T21:49:00.000-06:00

Advantage: C# .NET

I want to start my series with the main reason why I was ever exposed to C# .NET in the first place - frustration with how long it took to implement J2EE solutions. The interesting thing to note here is that we as developers weren't necessarily frustrated but our managers and President were. I'd also like to add that I was very skeptical that we would be more productive in C# .NET and actually a little resentful that our managers considered the technology to be the main barrier to shorter cycles and not the very complex problem domain. Frankly, going in I was looking for reasons why it was worse to work with C# .NET than Java.

Productivity can be such a nuanced term. We didn't come up with a way to truly measure our productivity after a year - more like I know it when I see it... And after a full year working with another critical thinking Java developer on the project, I think we're both surprised at how quick we are to say that we are indeed more productive in C# .NET.

Interestingly, Rod Johnson discusses this very issue in his new book Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB. However, our case was subtly different than the architecture issues that he discusses. In fact, we've implemented areas of our application to utilize Spring, message driven beans, web services, etc. In our case we were specifically looking for more bang on the client-side.

It may not be completely fair to compare C# WinForms to working with JSP. There are so many obvious issues ("our clients run Linux", etc.) that I won't go into them - I will say that we are afforded some solid assumptions with our customers' systems and policies. I came from JSP where I spent *years* bending over backwards with dynamic HTML and JavaScript to bring our UIs to just within "tolerable" by our customers' standards. And I think we've done some pretty amazing things. But it was sooo nice writing object oriented client-side code that actually runs very nicely on our customers' machines.

Productivity gains with client-side C#:

Extremely rapid application design, feedback, and turnaround time on the UI.
Able to create extremely rich user interfaces.
Object oriented client-side code that runs optimally on Windows.
Unit Testable client-side code.
Good WYSIWYG IDE with solid debugger and auto-code-completion.
Excellent integration with xml and web services.
Easy to transition from Java to C#.
Quicker, more confident code cycles (1. & 4.) meant more focus on the problem domain.

There are caveats to some of this that I'll get into more. But again, it really surprised me how nice it was to work with C#.

Java vs. C# series, Intro

2005-04-30T12:28:00.000-06:00

I am a Sun Certified Java Programmer. I've implemented Java based solutions since 1999. I've implemented solutions including Applets, Swing, JavaServer Pages, Servlets, Enterprise JavaBeans, JDBC, Java Messaging Service, web services, and related technologies.

For the past 12 months I've been implementing solutions using C# .NET. And not using C# .NET in a completely different context (like mobile, compact, or embedded), but implementing it to solve a lot of the same business problems I was solving with Java - mainly client/server business applications accessing relational databases. Additionaly, I've had no formal training in C#.

I am starting a series that compares my experiences using Java related technologies with my experiences using C# .NET. In most cases I'm going to isolate a feature and say which I liked better for reasons that may or may not be highly technical. This is because I find real solutions to business problems that may or may not inherently be highly technical in nature. In other words, I won't address which is faster: Java StringBuffer or C# StringBuilder because in the type of work I do there is a very poor diminishing return on that knowledge. In some cases I'm going to explore the beauty of when these two technologies interoperate with each other, getting close to the published blueprints of Sun's and Microsoft's utopian worlds but probably bucking a little notion of what they actually had in mind.

Another one of my all-time favorites

2005-04-30T12:03:00.000-06:00

My favorite baby girl.

Jack Welch

2005-04-28T21:28:00.000-06:00

I met Jack Welch today. Yes, the Jack Welch. I attended a book signing for his new book Winning at the Tattered Cover Book Store in lower downtown Denver. An excerpt from the Introduction to the book: "I have been asked literally thousands of questions. But most of them come down to this: What does it take to win?"

The book is meant to serve as a roadmap for every level of worker that's passionate about business and I'm excited to get started.

At the very least, by shaking his hand I seriously upgraded the position of my 6 degrees. And talk about an impressive man in person. He commanded the room. He fielded questions off the cuff ranging from (paraphrased):

Should a guy stick with a top 5 Fortune 100 company that is stuck in the Stone Age and struggling to change or should he jump to a company that's driving change?
A: 5 criteria, stay or leave:
1. Do you like the people you work with?
2. Do you learn from the people you work with?
3. Did you compromise to work there? Just to live in Colorado, stay close to Mom, your wife's job, etc?
4. Will the company's brand lead you to bigger opportunities with other companies later on?
5. Do you enjoy going to work every day?

China's and India's impact on America's global economic dominance of the past century:
A: He sees a glass that's half-full. Everywhere he speaks he hears stories of more and more people with great ideas starting to play in the game. The economic climate's much better now than it's been in the past 30 years.

The procedure for firing an employee:
A: Deferred to the boss' boss. This procedure's in place so that someone couldn't be fired because the boss didn't like their brown eyes...

We're finished with the 15 year R&D cycle. Now what?:
A: Where's your funding? There is more money out there right now than ideas. People are swimming in money right now looking for an idea to invest in.

How do you get funding?
A: You formulate a crystal clear vision. Not a PowerPoint presentation 3 inches thick. A couple slides with razor-sharp vision.

Bush's tax cuts and energy policy:
A: Nine months before Clinton got out GE's orders fell off the table with Mr. Welch at the helm. Clinton barely escaped an economy that was plummeting. High gasoline prices are the results of two strong and growing economies in the U.S. and China.

Compare GE's ethical obligations to their pensions with United Airlines' handling of their pension plan:
A: No one at United Airlines wanted to lose. But they lost. They didn't have a plan to control their costs and they lost. People are frightened of their jobs at United. GE has a tutoring program for school kids that 43,000 employees participate in. By winning in business, GE affords their people the opportunity to go out in the world and do good because they're not worried about losing their jobs.

That's it. Hope to post more about the book soon. If you're ever presented with the opportunity to hear Jack Welch speak, DO IT.

One of my all-time favorites

2005-04-26T19:06:00.000-06:00

Somewhere near Silverthorne, Colorado with my son.

C Flat

2005-04-24T19:57:00.000-06:00

My first blog unexpectedly converged with cycling yesterday. That is, I experienced an unexpected flat tire (is there any other kind?) on my ride and the event unexpectedly became the foremost topic for my blogging debut.

Amazingly, I've never had to change a flat tire in the thousands of miles that I've surely ridden in my life. Not from my Viper days of endless summers riding-n-jumping anything that presented a glimpse of hope that I'd catch over a foot of air. Not from my StumpJumper days of driving an hour to some mountain pass to catch some singletrack where I was sure I wouldn't see another human. And not even from my days at CU-Boulder where my bike was the only vehicle I had but still disregarded it enough to leave it under a winter of snow.

No, not at any point during those times. And so I've never had the chance to abstract from the experience (and, after all, it was only a flat tire). But there are some correlations between dealing with a flat tire and say, dealing with a hardware failure or software defect.

Lesson #1: Don't panic.
Dealing with a flat tire obviously begins the moment you notice you have a flat. If that's on a downhill run when you're clocking over 27 mph, it's best to keep your head and calmly stop the bike. Dealing with a critical bug in an application is the same. It's best to stay calm in the face of panic that sometimes ensues from important customers communicating their disappointment. Sometimes important information is lost in panic at a critical time: your cadence magnet fell off somewhere in the past 50 yards, or, exactly who was doing exactly what on the system when this exact problem was first discovered?

Lesson #2: Clear your mind.
Take a deep breath. Gather your senses. Focus on the problem at hand.

Lesson #3: Be prepared.
The items I hauled on every ride and figured I'd never use were my saviors.
Things that saved me: saddle bag, extra bike tube stored in plastic bag, tire levers, and CO2 inflation system air chuck with CO2 canister.
Things that didn't have a chance to save me: cell phone left on the kitchen counter.

Luckily I had read about how to change a flat. Actually practicing it at some point before I took my bike out would have been better. I think that anyone who's ever had a vested interest in hardware disaster recovery understands that this is critical. And also in software, select the best tools for your bag and know them.

Lesson #4: Find beauty in the situation.
Stopping and taking in a 360 degree view of the horizon yielded a deep appreciation for a first Colorado spring day, gorgeous mountain views, and for how utterly alone and dependent on my own competence I was.

Lesson #5: Buy yourself time.
One canister of CO2 shot into a new tube is enough to get you back on your bike and back to home base. Take it. Don't make the situation potentially more disastrous by pushing it. Dealing with a critical software defect is oftentimes the same; get a patch out as soon as possible that addresses the issue. Then start work on a permanent fix that addresses the root cause and write comprehensive unit tests to ensure the problem never surfaces again.

Lesson #6: Debrief.
Time to reflect and communicate. If my son were a little older, I could have talked to him about these lessons I've learned that have been reinforced. I could show him how to change a flat tire. I need to take inventory of my saddle bag and replenish the supplies I used before my next ride.

In software this is sometimes mistaken as assigning blame... that's another blog. In some cases, we may have discovered a systemic problem with some implementation that we need to communicate to all developers. Or we may have touched on an organizational challenge like QA resources.

In any case, I believe this lesson is critical to doing your job better tomorrow than you did today. This time I changed the flat tire. To be sure, next time I'll change the flat tire in no time flat.