Rats, Cake and a Geek

Lots of thoughts this morning. I woke up at 4 a.m. and felt wide awake. I don't know how my friends with insomnia deal with this kind of thing.

- As you may know, I attended Lotusphere 2010 last month. This is an IBM technical conference that is meant to both teach the developer new tricks and show you what is out there in the technical world that you don't often get to see. I always come away from this conference re-energized and ready to go home and do more. We are so busy at work that I don't have much time to learn on the job but that's ok - I'm happy to do much of it in my free time. That's why I am a geek.

Anyway, I've been slacking on both the expansion of my technical skills and keeping up with this page. While I'm happy with the overall look I've decided that I need to improve the function. Thus, I am probably going to be dropping the current GUI ("graphical user interface" and not any of the other thoughts that may have entered your head) and going with something more plain that will allow me to have more links on the homepage and more room to write stuff on the content pages.

Besides learning, my main goal for doing this is that I'd like to join the ranks of the regular developer bloggers. There are many very talented people on the web that contribute to the developer community by posting what they've learned and code samples. I'd like to be one of these people. I'd also like to start my own blogs about atheism and geeky stuff.

Fear not (like you were?) - I don't plan on yammering on about that stuff here. I plan on having different URL's for these other side interests but I'm having a difficult time coming up with domain names. After all, my wife still takes flack for the poor english that I used in this domain name. If you have any recommendations, I'm all ears. And no, I'm not interested in "thenakeddeveloper.com" or "godhater.com".

- I go back and forth on the band "Cake" (you can hear them by clicking on the PLAY button in the bottom left-hand corner of your browser, assuming you're reading this within a month of its writing. I usually change once a month). Cool pop songs or niche band? Boutique rock and roll?

- PETA is back in the news. On the surface I think they do bring some good to the world. Like many other causes, you sometimes have to shoot for the stars in hopes of settling for the moon. My problem with them is that 1) they often resort to terrorist-like tactics and 2) their goal is to have all animals be completely free. Yes, this includes your pet.

So their new goal is Punxsatawney Phil. The new campaign is to try to get this rat sent back to the wild. I think the bigger crime is spoiling this stupid rat in the first place. Think about it - they spend a year pampering this mullet just so they can pull the damn thing out of a cage for 2 minutes a year. Misuse of resources?

- An update on the baby situation:

As you know we are expecting sometime in the late summer. What you might not have known is that there were actually two babies but we had been told that it was highly unlikely that the second baby was going to make it. Despite a few weeks of hope as #2 seemed to be growing, the doctor was right and the baby didn't make it. We were prepared for this scenario but it was still a bit sad for a couple of days.

- I've been listening to Cake as I wrote this blog - I think I'll put my vote into "niche band" as I'm already tiring of them.