We had a great time at Grace's 7th birthday party. We had Marcus the Magician and his lovely wife, Angelique come and perform for the party. Pretty good stuff. Let me know if you want to book him.

I'm thrilled to see that Honda Motors has set up a facebook web page dedicated to spreading the word on Peak Oil. It includes the work of Gail Tverberg and the staff of TheOilDrum.com who synthesized the mountain of data pertaining to oil alternatives, into a succinct essay. Kathy McMahon presents ideas surrounding the impact realizing Peak Oil has on a person.

I always lose my build notification sounds when rebuilding a laptop. Here, for posterity, are some I've been using since my last rebuild. Download the zipped files here.

We had the annual block party last weekend. I put together a little ditty to commemorate it. If you hate piñatas, you'll love this video.

Okay, this is just shameless filler on my blog so it doesn't appear stale. The cute bit's at the end of the video.

As other folks have tried to do, I'm trying to reduce the 80MB bulk of Axis2 to keep my already bloated client code as trim as possible. For whatever reason, be it that Axis2 is used in so many different ways, I wasn't able to find what the minimum would be for a client using xml beans as the binding framework. After some digging, this is what I got:

Funny thing, but I noticed a few months ago that my site was throwing a syntax error when trying to bring up any page. I wasn't too worried about it, thinking that it was some upgrade Dreamhost had done on my hosting server; I'd have to create a trouble ticket and get it resolved. I was wrong, I'd been hacked!

We did some sledding today to celebrate our neighbour, Luc's, birthday party. Even shot a little video!

A prospective client asked for a code demo and I'm happy to oblige. I put together a simple web application that manages job listings. It's quite simple: list, create, retrieve, update and delete are all supported. the idea is to show:

A) I know what I'm doing
B) I can write Java and .Net software
C) I'm ready for anything. Bring it on

granted, I got a little carried away with that last point.

The code is written in Java 1.5 and the Spring Framework (MVC) 2.5 (complete with 2.5's MVC annotations configuration.)

fall has yet again returned to Maine. In fact, we're actually approaching the end of the most beautiful part of it. Our backyard has two maple trees, one of which has already dropped it's leaves. As someone who has lived in a city environment almost all my adult life, I'm enjoying watching what these trees do. Today, for example, the maple, which heretofore had held onto it's leaves, decided to drop almost all of them en masse on the space of about an hour. It wasn't uncommon to see during the 20 minute span of time I watched to see 20-30 leaves sailing to the ground simultaeneously.