The Lotus at Infineon

Here are a few laps at Infineon Raceway recently. This camera is mounted on my helmet, so sorry about the leaning.

Long time, no blog

Hello Earth.

It has been a very long time since I wrote a blog entry. I have been a *very* busy bee in all aspects of my life. I was traveling for most of the month of March, and am now finally home and chillin' out. I am still at Apple and still participating in the Java Posse podcast. I have been to a few track (racing) days lately, and am trying to ramp-up back into racing a lot more than I have been in the last year (since I bought my house). I will be getting a Lotus Exige S as soon as possible (after property and federal/state tax day).

Anyway. I am still alive, and plan on getting back into this bloggery.

Really Getting Into Flickr

I have had a Flickr account for ages... but finally started to really use the thing. You can check out all of my photos here. Many of them are great visuals to go along with the many posts I have put here.

JavaOne SF 2006

JavaOne 2006 is now over... phew. What a wild ride!

The Java Posse was a great hit this year, and we met a lot of folks that listen to our podcast. It was really fun for us to get the live feedback that folks appreciate what we've been doing. Wow. I guess a whole lot of folks fill their spare time with our geek-speak.



Dick ordered some crazy-ass hats for us to wear and they really added to the ambiance of our BoF (Birds of a Feather) session. Folks really got a good laugh out of them, and apparently one person liked them so much that Tor's was stolen right off of his head! At least it happened at the bar after our session - and not during the session itself! Of course, perhaps that would have been even funnier...

I'm getting back into the swing of things here at work... so back to the grind. Long live the posse.

TopCoder Open 2006

Hello folks... long time no talk.

I am at the 2006 TopCoder Open in Las Vegas. The Java Posse was invited to attend the conference and record our podcast here live. Well, semi-live. We still have to mix audio and upload. The recording part is live, however - which come to think of it is always live. I am also here on official Apple business doing recruiting for the online Apple Store.

This competition is crazy. There are two tracks of the competition, component design and algorithms. The design competition has a much longer lead time - several months before the finals, so the "finals" are really just design review and appeals. The algorithms competition is a total pressure cooker. The competitors have an hour to code up solutions to a set of tough problems while the audience watches. At the end, they have a "challenge phase" where they get to bang on eachothers' code and steal (or lose) more points. Then a system test runs on the code and the winner is determined.

These folks are really hard-core. Impressive.