On The Run
Posted: 18 August 2004 at 19:30:00
Just left Mountain Home, Idaho. We’ve been on the road since about 3 this afternoon. I picked Thom up at 1 and we went to the credit union so I could deposit a check, to Wal Mart to pick up a few items, to Maverik to get ice, a couple hot dogs for me, and some other things. Then, we headed up to Layton to meet up with Juli and Matt at Matt’s house.
We’re riding up in Juli’s Durango which has been pretty good to us, but has had some intermittent air conditioning issues.
Juli’s been driving since we left Layton. For the most part, Matt, Thom, and I have been reading. Thom’s been reading a book called Travelling Music by Neil Peart (of Rush); Matt’s been reading some Java Enterprise Edition book; I’ve been reading a self-help book titled Crucial Conversations and I read the first chapter in Matt’s JavaServer Pages Developer Developers Handbook.
We’re headed to Boise where we will eat some dinner.
Thom and I bought some lunch meat and some bread at Wal Mart so we didn’t have to eat out every meal during our four days away from home.
Christine and I still haven’t found our digital camera. We’re pretty sure it’s gone for good. Christine and I talked about using the money I get from this “Sons Of Nothing — Northwest Tour” to buy a new one. I’ve been looking at an Olympus digital as a replacement for our Canon S10. If I had money to burn, I would get the Nikon D100, but the simple truth iS that we have to be budget-concious.
I have started doing work for a company based in Toronto, Canada called ODYC. I learned about this venture through my friend and co-worker at About.com, Dave Buchanan. He’s the development lead on ODYC’s project and felt I would be a good person to bring in on a contract basis to help get the project done.
I’ve got all the ODYC stuff on my laptop so I can get some work done while I’m on the road. I hope I can find time to do that because I want to devote some serious time and get deep into the existing code and design documents so next week I’m intimately familiar with everything.
The venue we’re playing at tomorrow night is a casino. Apparently, all the acts they bring in are tribute acts, hence our booking. It’s a little weird that we’re playing a casino, but if there’s a good crowd draw, we won’t complain.
As I mentioned above, I read some of Matt’s JSP book. The J2EE and JSP world is SO complicated compared to Perl. I’m having trouble understanding why so many entities choose Java for web application development. Just the amount of code required and the number of files which need to be created and edited, just to output a dynamic “Hello World.” to the browser seems an order of magnitude greater than with Perl.
I wish I had the J2EE or J2SE on my laptop so I could actually play with it a little bit.