Congrats to Evan O’Dorney, winner of the National Spelling Bee. What's interesting about this is that the distribution of homeschoolers v. nonhomeschooled kids was unexpected (for me.) I expected more homeschoolers!

I'm a bit miffed. I apologize. Really. I want a new aggregator, I'm really a bit busy to write one, and I keep thinking that somewhere we (as a community) could write something that ended up not being a ton of crap.

While at JavaOne 2007, I recorded a podcast with Gordon Jackson from DataSynapse, an application virtualization vendor. We talked about what application virtualization meant, and the value that virtualization offers developers and deployers.

From CNN: Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84. This royally sucks. I always found Vonnegut's writing to be bitter, liberal, funny, and dishonest in an admirable sort of way.

Would you be willing to test out instantiation of a namespace in JNDI on Glassfish startup? I can't figure out for the life of me why I can't get JMS resources to survive a restart.

Kathy Sierra's situation with threats sent to her blog is intolerable, but sometimes the reaction to it - being applied to sites found unpleasant - is wrong too. Let's ALL grow up some.

My rabbi - well, okay, my father's rabbi, really, but I'll claim him - asked me to write a poem for my father to use at his funeral. I'm no poet, but I wrote this despite my lack of skill.

Barry Morton Ottinger 1934-2007 Human Being Rest in Peace.

As I'm watching my father surrender rather quickly to a blastoma: treasure the time you have with the people you love. The memories you have, the impact you have on your people... those last forever and are a huge part of what makes you who you are.

Five things you probably didn't know about me because you didn't realise how much you didn't care but you probably do know how much you didn't care now...

Tim Bray posted "Two Approaches to Journalism" in which he said, among other things:TheServerSide.com ran a story whose title was a lie, without talking to me or anyone, presumably looking for flameage, and they got some.Well, Tim, in all honesty, I

I am SOOOOOO MAD. I am so mad I could chew rebar and spit out thumbtacks. I'm hopping mad, furious. Why, you ask? Well, boy, are you in for it. Pardon my venom; like I said, I'm mad as hell. So our stupid neighbour ended up suing us over the fe

Apparently, with Vista, MS is going to allow people to change Minesweeper's mines to flowers, instead. Let me please add my voice to the chorus: WHAT THE....

At a recent JUG, Matt Quinlan dropped by to show off JBoss' clustering capabilities. Really neat stuff: just enable the clustering, start the servers, and run. It doesn't install that way in the real world, but golly, it works.

I thought I'd explain the length of time since I've last blogged to a wondrous thing: Family 2.0! Yes, that's right: a new edition of my family! Congratulations are welcomed, esp. in the form of, well, money.

If only I was in eighth grade, I'd be a math wiz.

Adobe is running a new beta program for JRun. That's newsworthy, right? So why didn't I publish it on TheServerSide? I wanted to, honest... but I couldn't, not without providing a disservice to the readers.

I'm normally one who sees the term limits for Presidents as a good thing - because it means that regardless of how crappy a President is, he'll be out of office soon enough anyway. But I'm wrong. Bush has to go. NOW.

Check out my personality profile! Of course, for all this, I do disagree with certain aspects... I'm an INTJ, according to Jungian thought (and most tests, although I also occasionally score out as INTP) and the biggest disagreement I have is that

I like Sun, I like Scott, I like Jonathan... I'm just a liker, not an arguer, I guess. But I see Jonathan's promotion to CEO as good primarily because I think it makes transition to the man who will save Sun easier.

This was originally going to be 2007's April Fool's joke, but let's be real: my memory doesn't last that long.

I'm annoyed by Solaris 9 + my linksys wireless router. I can't figure out how to get my solaris 9 machine to get and use a static IP!

Matt Luce, in "Three years too many," has a point when he says we've been in Iraq for too long (pointing to the beginning of the invasion.) He's going to attend rallies for peace. Good idea, but we're already in it; can't back out now.

I've been struggling to work out how to explain to various framework authors and supporters why I think what they are telling people is not right, or why the frameworks are flawed, with very limited success. But I think I know the secret now.

This is my life in a nutshell: wasted opportunities. I woke up this morning, started making my coffee (hard work, mostly consisting of turning on the coffee pot thingy), and... started admiring the mixer my wife and I bought last night.