Marco has been in Toronto for the last two weeks. Tuesday I drove down there to meet him for dinner before attending the Java Users Group. At dinner I put a small can of tuna in front of him. This is a bit of a personal joke because when he was in Orillia for 10 months he ate a can of tuna every single day :) After the meeting we stuck around for another hour to talk about programming and his current employment situation. When we left, we were locked in the building! Marco unlocked the door, and as we exited some other people entered. They locked the door behind them.

The JUG meeting was great. This month's topic was trends in enterprise Java over the next few years. He pointed out a lot of things from Spring and Hibernate such as aspect oriented programming, dependency injection, and a few other things most of us have known about for years. He then went into Java's new support for scripting such as Ruby, JRuby, Grails, Groovy, etc...

A while back I was saying that there are two kinds of Java developers I know of: 1) The open source guys who use Spring, Hibernate, who like scripting languages like Ruby, etc... and 2) The guys who stick to JSR standards such as Enterprise Java Beans 3, Java Persistence Architecture, Java Server Faces, etc... Since I'm a #2 guy I was not too impressed with what he had to say. The most interesting part of the night was the poll he did with everyone at the meeting. He asked how many people would choose EJB3/JPA over Spring/Hibernate in a new project. Out of over 100 people, I would say about 6-10 raised their hands (including me). This was a real shocker because it seems like every decision I have made goes against the norm. NetBeans instead of Eclipse, Sun Application Server 9 instead of JBoss/Websphere/Weblogic etc..., EJB instead of Spring, JPA instead of Hibernate, JSF instead of Struts, etc... I'm sticking to my guns though, because I have read books on and used the alternatives before choosing what I use now. I am a strong supporter of the technologies I use; especially NetBeans IDE and Sun App Server 9/Glassfish.

I'm hoping I'll be able to find some people at JavaOne who have the same views about Java as I. Like everything else in computers, these topics are a bit religious and are often the source of heated debates. The airport shuttle picks me up in 45 minutes. JavaOne, here I come!

Lately I've been spending a lot of time documenting formal processes at work. I am *really* excited about this. We have been given the opportunity to make big changes that will get everyone working the same way in all areas of development. For example, today I was working on a Subversion Processes document that explains how to lay our your repository, branching systems, best practices, and a step-by-step guide with screenshots on how to handle every conceivable scenario using Tortoise SVN. Right now everyone uses subversion a bit differently and this is causing challenges. Getting everyone working the same way will improve our productivity.

I also have to write a document on using CollabNet Enterprise Edition so that we all use it properly and consistently. Right now we have an other issue tracking system that is used in a different way by almost every programmer. Some have mastered it, some don't really get what kinds of things should be a ticket and which shouldn't, and some don't use it at all. Hopefully this will make it crystal clear and we can all benefit from what CollabNet has to offer.

JavaOne is coming up very soon (May 8-11) and today I received an email informing me that I need to use their online scheduling tool to decide which semniars I will be attending on each of the days. The other day I had a dream that I arrived at the conference and realized that I didn't have a plan. I didn't know which seminars were available, where they were, when they started, etc... it was awful. The dream ended with me in a cafeteria eyeing up at massive piles of giant pankakes and a mountain of eggs done the way I like them.

The shower in my basement apartment is leaking a bit and I've got potential new tenants calling to come for a viewing. Grandpa is coming over Saturday morning to have a look. He thinks we're going to be ripping it down and putting tiles up the wall. I hope it doesn't come to that. It's not the money, it's the time and effort. I've learned that I really do not enjoy home improvement.

I'm 100 pages away from finishing reading the first part of my Solaris 10 book. After I finish, I'll spend a couple of weeks practicing on my Solaris box and doing the practice exams before taking the test. Then I'll have to read an other 200 pages for the second exam. If I pass both, I will be a Sun Certified Solaris Administrator. This is the first book I've read almost entirely in front of my keyboard so I can try out everything. I've found that my nearly 10 years of Linux experience (on and off over the years) has made a big difference. Working in Solaris isn't as difficult as I thought it would be.

After I pass both exams I will have covered everything I need to know about how to set up almost every aspect of my home network. I won't have an excuse to not get my home network servers finalized anymore. I bought those dam servers almost a year ago! Next I'll buy a Sun Ray 2 thin client, and attach it to my 52" tv in the living room using a DVI cable. I'll have a performant Solaris 10 graphical desktop in my living room on a big screen :) I'm not going to do it just for fun, I see value in Sun Ray clients and want to get experience configuring the server and managing it. They are pretty cheap, $250 US each.

Today I received an email from Marco. He and his employer will be in Toronto in a couple weeks. Their company is merging with a similar company in Toronto and they need to align their IT? Marco said he could get me a job managing a small team of developers if I'd be willing to move to London England and work in an office with a close view of Big Ben :/ What an offer. I let him know how greatful I am for this opportunity but I had to turn it down. I am loyal to IJWS, almost 9 years now. I like the long term job security of IJWS. Also I prefer writing software to managing. That will probably change as I get older but not right now. This is the third job offer I've turned down in the last year. Crazy eh?! I'm not even looking for a job, it's through people I know.

Last night I drove Marco to the airport and dropped him off. Other people were waiting for my spot so we were a bit rushed. I helped him unload his bags onto a cart, we said our goodbyes and we left. Before I left I told him that I'll come visit him in England in a year or two.

I drove home and then it started to hit me. Marco is gone. When I got home I went into the house... empty, just me. I remembered the last 10 months, and realized it's all over now. I miss him already! It feels so weird to be in my house alone. I never felt alone because there was always someone downstairs. Now I really feel alone. I won't be renting that apt until September 1st or so because I want a college student. That will give me time to get my new puppy house trained, and to do some work to the appartment (paint, etc).

A couple days before Marco went home he lost his wallet and a wad of cash while he was in Toronto. I won't go into details but it wasn't good. When he gets back he'll have to get all that sorted out, buy himself a car, get insurance, and hunt for jobs in London. He will then move into an appartment in London and will pay more for for a tiny bachelor pad than I pay for my whole house plus utilities! I hope the job pays well. I'm going to give him a really good reference.

I haven't heard from Marco yet. I hope he landed ok. I tried phoning, no answer. Marco if you're reading this, please give me a call or email.

I've been pretty quiet on here for months. It all started back in early March when I took on more responsibilities at work helping to manage a rollout to over 120 sites of a hotel chain. This consumed my entire work days for months and I did very little programming. I sometimes found it a bit frustrating that I couldn't make progress in my own projects but I was needed for this and did my best to help. Initially I was a bit overwhelmed because it felt like I did as much work in a day that I used to do in a week. Things are looking good now, the rollout begins July 1st. Now things at work have settled down a bit and this week I was able to spend almost all my time programming!! It's great that I'm getting this kind of management experience. It will better help me decide which direction I want my career to go : management, or continue as a programmer.

My friend Marco who was hired on a 6 month contract is leaving June 12th. His project wasn't complete on the original departure date (Feb 9) so we had to extend his work permit. It was interesting having a friend living in my basement appartment, hanging out with him a lot, but also being his boss at work and having to push him to get things done faster. It was a very akward position for me, and I'll never put myself in that position again.

I had a 6 foot lattice top wooden fence built in my backyard and the driveway paved. It makes a huge difference! I've still got a deck to build, and need to level/resod my backyard. I also bought a miniature schnauzer. He was born a few weeks ago, and I have to wait for July 7 before I can get him. That's going to cause a bit of trouble because I'm going on a 2 week vacation in the beginning of August. Because the pup will be so young, the breeders said they'd take him back for free for those two weeks. Very nice people. It's a boy, and his name will be Chief. (at least that's what I have in mind right now).

James from work and his wife had a baby yesterday. It's a 10lb boy, Victor. When I go see them this summer I'll get to see the new baby.

This weekend Marco and I went to the Toronto Science Center. It was under heavy construction and a lot of exhibits were gone or inaccessible. I remember when I was a kid there were replica moon landers you could go in, a real moon rock, and neat things about space that made me wan to be an astronaut when I grow up. Now there's barely anything in the space exhibit. There was still quite a bit to see and we had a good time. Later we watched an omni max film where the entire wall and ceiling is the movie and covers your whole field of view. It was pretty impressive, though anything that's a straight line gets distorted such as buildings, vehicles, etc...

After, we went up Young St. and checked out all the business going on but didn't stop. On our way back up the 400 we stopped at the new Vaughn Mills shopping mall. It is definitely a huge mall and since it's brand new everything there looks great. We walked around but didn't go in many stores, maybe one or two? We were more interested in having dinner so we ate at the food court. I had Chinese food and Marco had a KFC combo. One of the "stores" has several in door go-cart tracks, a bowling alley, arcade, etc.. very neat. This mall is probably the coolest place to hang out for teens in the area. It's not as cool as the Orillia Square Mall though :)