Post Dalai Lama WTF

This is the first email I read after leaving yesterday’s talk by the Dalai Lama in Maribor. There’s voodoo at play here that I just can’t put my finger on.

dedo revitalized

I’ve been busy in the after-hours helping TheWife(tm) and TheSisterInLaw(tm) get their show on the e-road. Crawling through catacombs, experiencing ruins on a regular basis. Very cool stuff for a simple Canadian boy. I love what they do and it was an honor and a thrill to hash out a simple WordPress installation for them. The site still has a long way to go but looking at it gives me the sense that I should have chosen a different career path.

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This just in …

“Nostalgia is good when kept in reasonable doses. i know people who never managed to break away from the past and more or less live the same lifestyle. good times, but you have to move on.”

Copied verbatim from Skype to living memory. I love the people I meet.

The Curse of Global

I’ve been ordering flowers online from the same home-town shop for about 10 years now. They’re fantastic and the results always bring a smile to my “ladies back home.” Yesterday, I was a bit surprised to find that they had introduced Youtube-style regional content blocking when I hopped on to buy some Mother’s Day flowers.  Like I said, they always managed to provide excellent bang-for-the-buck so I had no problem leaving the final choice to their discretion. “I’ll pay max $XX; you just take care of the arrangement and delivery.”

I’ve been thinking a little bit about this. It’s actually the first time where I was restricted from shopping online based on where I live. I’ve seen specific products blocked; RedBull was banned in France for example causing stress on a previous-life product and the Android market is full of stupidity in this regard; I’ve however never seen entire sites blocked. I’m hurt.

Regardless of whether or not this was intentional (and I’m inclined to believe it wasn’t), I’m just worried about how this sort of thing will evolve. Is the internet really contracting into a group of protected cells? I certainly hope not.

D

Hey mimovrste.com!

$( function() { $( "#searchmainform" ).focus(); } );

Or something like that.

Man is a giddy thing

Actually spent the time to “google” the lyrics to a song I’ve had on rotation for the better part of the past year.

Amazing.

Love it will not betray you, dismay, or enslave you.
It will set you free.
Be more like the man you were made to be.
There is a design, an alignment to cry, of my heart to see.
The beauty of love as it was made to be.

Noted as possibly the best lyric ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1PpeDRfxp4

Gory Gory

To the project managers and agencies who insist on making promises that no small army could tackle:

Ebeans

Just spent the day converting a performance-dogged application from the Java Persistence API to Ebeans. If you happen to be working in a tight environment (bytes & cycles), it would be worth your while to give Ebeans a try. Despite the documentation/site being a bit on the crappy side, getting into the “flow” took me only about an hour. The app now flies (JPA can suck it) and the code is super clean.

Now I’m just wondering if I should scrap my much loved factory strategy. Who needs MyEntityFactory.listStuff() when Ebeans.find( Entity.class ).findList() is available?

Well, I’m a skeptic. Factories stay.

Hello

Today we said goodbye to a very close friend. It got me thinking: the only thing worse than saying goodbye is never saying hello. I’m certainly not the first to say this. I’m just glad I did.

Hello.

McIntyre’s Ablaze

I’ll skip the bits about how cool it is to have my brothers with me here in Slovenia; it’s been a blast. In the short time they’ve been here, we’ve gone through at least a life time’s of adventure. As proof of this, I present the following video shot just a few hours ago.

Carbonite!

They have this tradition here in Slovenia where carbonite is placed in a barrel, soaked in water, and then tapped with something hot; a stick-on-fire is apropos. The explosion is something akin to a canon. Now, normally all goes on without a hitch. Until a Canadian shows up. If you haven’t already guessed it, this is not what’s supposed to happen.

Enjoy the show.