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The bags are packed and we are heading to Galveston tomorrow morning at 5am to board the Carnival Conquest. We will be hitting Jamaica on Wednesday, Grand Cayman on Thursday and Cozumel on Friday, returning Sunday the 9th.

The Dallas Stars saw their second loss in a row to the Senators Friday night. However, during intermission kids exhibition, the fans got to witness the best shot many have ever seen - and it came from a 9 year old Max Gerlach from Flower Mound, TX!

Check this out! How many scouts put him on their radar this week!??!

[youtube pn9BT7pkQR8]

I took my family up to Lake Texoma over the past couple days where both my brother and my parents have cabins right on the water in the Texins Club, which is mostly made up of current and former TI employees and Family.  As of this today, the water is 22 feet above normal and my brother's cabin is actually now *in* the water, which has been rising 1" hour for the past week with no sign of relief in the near future.   The full set of pictures is available here, but since you are already here, I will post a couple of notable pictures:

 

The baseball diamond there in the park.

 

Steps leading up to my brother's cabin.  There is usually a nice green yard between the porch and the water.

 

Same porch the next morning.  Notice the steps are gone.

 

The neighbor's porch swing. 

 

In case there was any question...

Wow.... like splashing icy water on my face, my alarm clock went off at 5:00am this morning solidifying the fact that I was back from one of the most awesome and surreal weeks of my life. After being pampered and catered to as we hopped around the Caribbean, I am back at my desk. I will probably have to make at least one more blog entry about the trip after I post my pics and video so please bear with me, but I wanted to at least post that I was back.

 

If anyone is trying to contact me the next week, I will be somewhere between Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel! For any World Wild Web Systems business issues or InstantSpot issue, please contact Aaron Lynch.

Until then.... look for me here!

 

 

 

From time to time I get requests to be added to people's networks in LinkedIn. Each time I get one of these I go out there and approve it (well, most of the time!). I then spend about the next 4 seconds looking at the requester's immediate network and leave. I then proceed to forget that LinkedIn even exists until they happen to send me a message telling me that their are 45,000 in my extended network or something, or someone else happens to request to add me to their network.

I assume that I am missing something here, but is there anything of more value that people are doing with it? Earlier it was pointed out to me that they are one of the current nominees for the Social Networking group of the Webby Awards. This would indicate that either they have a powerful marketing force or someone actually finds it useful. What is it that I am missing about LinkedIn? I will add anyone with a good answer to my LinkedIn network... since I am assuming that is a good thing!

I almost hate to publicly admit this, but the show Jericho is one of my guilty habits. There are only a few shows that I feel remotely attached to: The Office, Heroes (*much* more than remotely attached), Sopranos, and yes... Jericho. I can clearly see the flaws with Jericho. The acting is pretty rough, the love stories are borderline puke-worthy, the cheesy "superman" role of the way-too-mysterious Jake (Skeet Ulrich). Even with that said, there is still something really compelling about this post-apocalyptic town trying to survive that keeps me recording and watching the show. The last episode it finally hit me that in the intro where they show the title "Jericho" there is a Morse code message in the background, and it made me wonder if there were some messages hidden in the Morse code that might shed light on the story. From what I found, the Morse code is different every episode. Here is what I have found so far. If you know of any other messages or hidden stuff, I would be interested in hearing them.

 

1. JERICHO PILOT
2. JERICHO FALLO (fallout, last two letters not heard)
3. JERICHO THREE
4. HE KNOWS ROB
5. THERE IS A FIRE
6. THE EMP HITS (the spacing on this episode was really bad)
7. PRAY FOR NYC
8. ROB NOT FBI
9. AOV SURPRISE ( NOV SURPRISE; wrong letter sent )
10. IT BEGINS WITH
11. 6 AND ENDS WITH
12. BACK NEXT WEEK (this was the recap episode)
13. BLOODSHED (the end of the sentence from 10 and 11)
14. BLEEDINU KS (Message has a wrong letter in it, should be "BLEEDING KS")
15. 4 DOWN 4 TO GO
16. THEY WILL NEED IT
17. A COSTLY DEAL

I have had a couple of people recently catch me offline and ask what the heck was wrong with me since I basically dropped off the face of the earth starting about February.

The end of January/early February marked the tail end of a painfully long rewrite of a mortgage loan origination application in which we ported all existing functionality of an existing, poorly written, legacy application, plus huge new feature set into a new slick Mach-II application. Aaron Lynch and I have been the principle developers on the project, and when it came down to crunch time, we were working 16-18 hour days in succession for far too long. Poor InstantSpot had to take care of itself and take a breather from constantly receiving new features. On roll-out things only got worse as the team that was responsible for making sure the hardware end was in place had misconfigured our load balancer, which wreaked utter havoc on our application for more than a week while they worked to resolve it. Then it finally happened...

I hit my moment of total burnout.

With our frenetic pace this past year+, I knew it was bound to happen at some point. I simply couldn't get excited about programming and the idea of "fun" programming like InstantSpot didn't even feel fun.

After getting a couple of Jeeping/Camping trips in and stepping away from coding for a short bit, combined with finally getting our application stabilized, I think I am healed.

Aaron have been working hard on a new spin-off site from InstantSpot and are really excited about its potential.

Then the past few days we were back to our old routine of getting home from the day jobs, getting our respective kids all tucked in, jumping online and banging out code like a couple of madmen. Guess what? Code is fun again!

This week InstantSpot finally got attention again! We added some very cool new features that are helping take it to the next step as a social networking tool rather than just a bunch of linked sites. Until this week it was next to impossible to be added as someone's friend. This fact completely negated how friggin cool our Shoutbox is that allows friends to message each other on individual Spots. We added this ability at midnight last night and already people are adding friends and creating their own conversations on their Spots. It is very encouraging to see and is pretty dang rewarding.

We also added a number of control panel enhancements to help with Friend Management and just ease of navigation . For those of you Spot users that read my blog, go check out the new features. We are pretty proud of them or at least go read about them here !

So what do *you* get out of this? (non-InstantSpot users I mean, if you are still out there!)

Well, I have had a lot of experiences lately that I am logging for future blog material. Things like:

• How Ajax made me cheer... and cry.... and cheer again!
• How Load balancing is great if people know what they doing!
• Why does Microsoft hate web developers?
• How reinitting your application in rapid succession can make you run out of memory!
• More experiences with Reactor
  
• ...more...

So, anyway, I am back in the saddle again and not much worse for the wear.

You might want to double check those directions before your next trip!  This makes me dizzy.

Directions to North Brunswick  

 

In times of such regular doses of dark news, it is so refreshing to see a story like this. Recently a man named Yves Rossy found a way to fulfill his dream of being able to fly like a bird. He has created an incredible machine that weighs about 100 pounds and is worn like a backpack allowing him 5 minutes of controlled flight using kerosene powered jets. The thing that is amazing about this to me is that there are no directional controls. The "plane" is maneuvered by what he says are instinctual movements, and really gives one the feeling of true flight.

For more on this story, check out this news article, and certainly go see his website .

After being fascinated by this story I did a quick search and came across this video. Enjoy!

[youtube SHYXrqoS08o]

My father and I decided that this was the year that we would hike the North Rim to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I know this seems crazy, but it is actually a paperwork challenge to be able to hike the Grand Canyon. There is an application process in which you have to fax your request in the 1st day of the month 6 months before the intended date of your trip with a detailed itinerary, including where you will be sleeping and when. We sent faxed our paperwork in and held our breath on the 1st of April, 6 months before we hoped to go in September. After no word for a month we finally contacted them, only to find out that we had been rejected. Discouraged, but not beaten, we laid out the calendar to see if there was another time that would work. We decided that November would be acceptable, albeit a little colder. It should be in the 60s in the bottom of the canyon though where we will spend the majority of our time. Once again, we laid out our itinerary and faxed in on July 1. My dad received a letter today dated July 6, 2005 telling him that they were sorry, but they were unable to accept out application. He spent a good hour walking around the house cussing and feeling terribly disappointed. A bit later my mom noticed there was another letter from the Grand Canyon dated July 7, 2005.

So in 3.5 months, I will be taking this in....