Baseball Season Is Done

My son's Bronco PONY team made it to the finals but lost 4-0. They did really well and I'm proud of all the kids on the team. We hit the ball hard but they went straight to fielders.
I managed to pickup the pitching signals and were relaying what I could to the batters but the balls just couldn't find any gaps.....sigh....maybe next year.
Anyway, it was a great season. Our regular season team went 14-1 and took the league championship, the All-Star team was very competitive, and I got to coach one of the best group of kids ever. They were by far the most talented, had great personalities, and were a just plain fun to be around.
I'm looking forward to next season. Which will probably be the last season that I can coach my son. But until then......football season is coming :)

Flex Killer?

I recently stumbled on Pivot, which is a Java framework that seems to want to provide similar functionality as Adobe Flex and Air (and also Microsoft Silverlight, etc). Mainly, the ability to create more interactive/functional web applications and at the same time support the creation of stand-alone applications using the same cross-platform framework.
I ran their demo and was sorely disappointed. On my system it took about a gazillion "Internet Seconds" to load, had a lot of paint/refresh problems, was not very responsive, and didn't look very appealing. Now I haven't looked at the code, documentation, or even the tutorials, but after the demo....what's the point.
I'd really like to see and use a Java solution, but this is definitely not it. I think Flex has a lot of issues, but for now, it seems like it's the cream of the crop.

Blog Cloud

I got this from aaron...who got it from someone else. Anyway, I thought I'd put my blog posts in there to see what came out. I'm glad that search came out very prominently since that is something that I'm interested in. Other than that.....I think Wordle is a pretty cool application.
'nuff said.

Power Naps

I've been testing this out recently (heh) and it really does a world of good. I remember sitting at my desk on some afternoons, my mind and body slowly dozing off. It would be impossible to concentrate on solving any problems or do anything constructive. I'd basically be doing busy work to stay awake until the end of the day.
Since I now work from home, if I get into this state in the afternoon, I just take a 15-20 minute nap and I'm recharged for the rest of the day and into the evening. It really does work. And I've found that a bit of coffee right before makes it even better. I just feel totally energized.
So far I have always got back up, without an alarm, in about 15-20 minutes. I'm not sure why but I just pop awake and by the time I walk back to my desk, I'm fully awake.
Here are a couple of articles that discuss this. Here and Here.
So go and pitch that "quite room" with a couch idea to your boss. 20 minutes of downtime for several hours of productivity at the end of the day. ZZZzzzzz......

Twittering Development

I was wondering if using Twitter in a software development team would be useful. Twitter is a pretty unobtrusive application. Messages just show up and it's very easy to disregard the messages if they do not pertain or interest you. If the message does interest you, you can easily follow up with the person using a more traditional communication tool.
For a development team, I thought it would be useful to know what other developers are working on or have accomplished. There may be times when you could help each other out or would be aware if someone is going down the wrong path or has solved a problem that you couldn't.
I think it could be a good tool. Right now I'm on a project with another developer. We're going to try using Twitter to communicate "stuff". I'm hoping that we will be able to tweak our Twitters to be beneficial to each other over time. I'll post my findings on the Twitter Experiment. Let me know if anyone out there has already tried this or something similar or if you have any suggestions of things we should try out.

Blogging Direction

I've been direction-less when it comes to what I want to blog about. I sort of want my blog to have a point and be interesting and maybe even have an impact on someone. But after talking to aaron, I think I'm going to just go back to blogging about whatever the heck I feel like.

I'm going to try to increase the frequency of my posts. I'm hoping that this will create enough diversity that every now and then you'll be able to find something interesting....but for the most part, it'll just be a lot of incessant barking.

Home (Summer) Schooling

Summer is here and for us that means Summer school for my son. We decided a couple of years ago to tutor him at home during the summer instead of sending him to summer school. The times that we did send him, it seemed as though he didn't really learn much.
So I'll be in charge of Math, Computer skills, and Science. My wife is in charge of the Reading and Writing.

For Math, I'm going to do some review on conversions, things like changing km/h to miles/sec and calculating amounts based on rates. He seemed to have a hard time with that during the school year. I'm also going to start on basic algebra. For computer skills, I'm going to focus on getting his typing speed up. If there is time, and interest, maybe creating a web page. I'm thinking of punting on Science this summer. Experiments take too long to prepare. I was thinking of working a little on his Googling skills and getting him to think 'out of the box' instead. Maybe an Internet scavenger hunt or something like that.

Anyway, classes begin next week Monday. He's got this entire week to play around. But on his first day home at 10:00 AM he says to me..."I'm bored".
I can't wait. :)