It’s bread o’clock somewhere.

aside from being attacked by a snake and a tick today, so far so good.

My Brother had a story published in the online version of the literary journal Barrelhouse: Uneasy Rider He has some background of the story here.

Travelling sucks. I did have some good experiences though. Thanks to Paul Zastoupil, of Freeciv fame, for making me feel welcome and pointing me at Old City San Diego to get some food, see a touristy but nice part of San Diego, and get a gift for Allison. If you find yourself in San Diego thats a good place to stop to grab something to eat and see a bunch of cheesy tourist shops. It got me out of the vicious circle I had developed of going to the Jackington mall in La Jolla every day and marvelling at the knife shop and all the stores that wish they were The Gap.

Paul also hooked me up with some sweet Schwag which will require me to finish up Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando and Jak2 before using. Thanks again!

You will all be happy to know that the King of Knives does indeed offer sharpening service.

Hearing your child’s laughter is.

I was looking for some clever way to end the above phrase. But then I realized it doesn’t need any other description. It just is. And any other description detracts from it. It must be experienced to understand how it can make you overjoyed, strong and energized at the same time.

by the way, I just read Eric Sink’s Entry on staying out of his way at the airport. And I couldn’t agree more. Although he did forget one critical thing. Those moving sidewals, like the Jetson’s had, are not a RIDE!. It even says above them, “Express walkway” and not express standway.

Sure I understand certain people could use a break in the day to just cruise at 1.5 MPH as the facinating artwork and other dumb airport stuff goes by. But please pull your seven suitcases and your grandparents off to one side, so people can walk past.

Here is a list of things I saw or noticed during my trip so far:

• cat sized goldfish in the hotel lobby
• An outdoor mall, that has one indoor part for their food court, and also an ice hockey rink
• A crappy fitness center that is open from 6 AM PDT – Midnight PDT making it fairly useless for my morning workout just leave it open all night!
• Hitch, although I purposely didn’t watch it on the long flight. Instead I read about 300 or 400 pages
• The Knife King
• dippin dots

Now to go do some work. By the way travel sucks, luckily my return flight leaves San Diego around midnight eastern time and gets into PHL around 5 AM. Here’s hoping for a window seat in an exit row.

I wonder what interesting things are going on in San Diego for the few free hours I will have the next couple nights. Or where to find out.

Mike’s thoughts on PhillyJUG meeting. And I generally agree, except for the religiously part. If Iget free books every time, I won’t miss a single one.

Plus I got to hear about all the ways that Java 1.5 Annotation, and the work of Gavin King, Marc Fleury and the other JBoss guys make EJB 3.0 actually worthwhile. Shaun’s talk was pretty good. Rich Friedman who is in charge of trying to actually make money had a, slightly less interesting to many of the attendees, presentation also. The lack of interest was hurried along with some eye-chart slides. I was interested primarily in hearing about yet another way people are trying to make money in software since I like making money and software.

There is some promise to what he talked about, but he definitely has an uphill battle. His presentation would probably go off better at a more management centered group, like a Eastern Technology Council event. Assuming the slides that looked like nutrition labels and legal documents get changed around to be more friendly.

Anyway thanks to Dave Fecak from PhillyJUG and JBoss for this event.