Today was the funeral, it went by fairly quickly. Thanks to everyone who came, the family appreciates it. Good-bye Nana, I'll miss you. One day we'll meet again.

My course ended tonight as well. We gave back the laptops and went out for dinner. I get my certificate in the mail soon. I thoroughly enjoyed that course. I was quite nervous when I first signed up and started the course. My vb6 background isn't quite Java though I had spent many months reading books about various Java technologies, and had experienced some Java several years ago when I was in college. The books I chose to read were about various technologies and frameworks that seem to be industry leading and important to create a whole system. They are big topics to cover. When I took the course I found that my reading helped me grasp things quickly because I already understood similar concepts (for example Struts in class is similar to JSF I read about, EJB entity beans in class is similar to the Hibernate library I read about, design patterns I read about, etc). The course gave me lots of hands on experience, plus gave a brief introduction to many of the technologies I had wanted to learn. Each one could be a book because they are so big. It was great to see a bit of everything. I've got the big picture now, and some hands on.

Next my plans are to study Java 1.5 changes including EJB3. I also want to study content management systems and portal technologies. I will create a CMS as my practice project at home. This will replace my old PHP website. I want a very rich GUI, at least from the administration side.. rich like gmail, google maps, etc... This should be a really fun project and will likely take several months of my spare time once I get started. I've talked about doing this so many times before knowing it would be done with Java but each time nothing happened because I didn't know where to start, which book to read first, etc... I'm now 90% ready.