I have been faced with a blank blog homepage for about the last month or so and decided it was time to do something about it.

I've been really busy with work, side work, life and other endeavors. Just finished my Interwoven Teamsite Technical Consultant Certification and am close to wrapping a side project, so soon enough I'll be back to normal blogging.

I recently attended my 20th high school reunion in Des Moines. Oh how the time flies... Seems like only yesterday that I was hating high school;) I'd skipped the 10th reunion and would probably have done the same for this one if I hadn't been able to talk Garry into joining me for the festivities. Garry and I were thick as thieves in high school, but hadn't seen each other since. He spent the years in-between bouncing around Europe and then Hawaii with the military, finally settling down in Hawaii when his time was up. We'd been in email contact for probably almost the last 10 years, so this was a great excuse to get together.

The reunion itself was pretty weird for me because I only attended East for a year and made few friends besides Garry. But people were very nice to me, once they figured out who the hell I was.

My sister (Kim) used my visit as a reason to get together the majority of the family members in the area for dinner at her place. We don't get to do this very often, so it was a nice treat.

Here are Garry and I at the reunion dinner.

I thought that I'd share my current Bookmarks of things I'm reading/browsing at the moment. I'll make a point to keep them up to date, as my interests and what I'm learning about is constantly changing.

Feel free to send me your interesting bookmarks. Maybe they'll make their way into mine...

Some of my favorite things are movies and tattoos, so a couple of years ago I put them together for the remainder of my days. My favorite movie is A Clockwork Orange so I had a tattoo designed and inked of Alex DeLarge. If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, Alex is the protagonist (or antagonist if that is your point of view). The movie definitely isn't for everyone, and certainly not for the squeamish, but for some reason it remains my fave, and I have the ink to prove it. Tends to scare small children...

DRE* and I spent most of last weekend watching every episode of the first season of LOST.

If you are unfamiliar with the show, the story is about the 48 survivors of a plane crash and their adventures on a very mysterious island. Almost sounds like Gilligan's Island... but certainly isn't. There are elements of the X-Files, The Prisoner and Survivor (among others). It is an ensemble piece that revolves mostly around 8 characters, but each week focuses on just one of them with flashbacks to their lives before the crash. It works really well to develop characters like that and you learn over time that even your most hated castaway has complex layers of personality and experiences. The good guys aren't perfect and the bad guys aren't perfectly evil. Shades of gray.

Needless to say the show is quite addictive. We just couldn't stop watching and next thing you knew it was Sunday night and we'd finished the whole thing.

Official Sites:

ABC Official Site
LOST

Fansites:

LOST-TV
Lost-Media

Other info:

Wikipedia

Today is my birthday...na na na na na na na!

DRE* got me a Herman Miller Aeron chair for my office. Aerons are emblematic of the heady dot-com days in IT. The are also the only chairs I've sat in which allows 18-20 hour days of coding without becoming crippled. Below are pics of it and of my new office decor.

Heading out to spend the weekend in Pensacola with JB & Mona and Jim & Michelle to celebrate 3 birthdays and and anniversary. Beach pics to follow in a few days (after recovering)...

Welcome to my blog. I've been working in software development for 13 years now. Most recently in ColdFusion, Flex and Java, but have been known to write stuff in C, C++ and Visual Basic. My blog to is intended to share coder monkey tips - as well as other miscellaneous rants, raves, observations, and travel photos. As always, comments are welcome. Positive ones even more so. Thanks to Raymond Camden for the blog code. He's one of the great CF/Spectra minds out there.