WombatNation

There was flame and smoke at our cabin in the Tahoe National Forest early this morning, and it wasn’t from the Incinolet burning off the remains of a burrito. An electrical fire in the wall upstairs resulted in about 2/3 of the cabin suffering major damage. The new part of the cabin didn’t burn, but I suspect the smoke damage is probably pretty bad.

The most important thing, though, is no one was injured. My step-niece and her husband unfortunately had to be the ones up there when it happened. Nothing like arriving late at night while it’s snowing, turning on the lights, smelling that distinct ozone odor, then watching in horror as smoke and flames start coming out of the walls.

I have fond memories of Shiner Bock from when I lived in Austin, and I always have a bottle or two when I go back to visit my brother. I agree with Stan at Appellation Beer that while Shiner doesn’t make the greatest of beers, they are better than a lot of people give them credit for. I didn’t see the Helles anywhere when I was in Austin a few weeks ago. I’ll have to look for it next time.

The Bohemian Black Lager, which I had had before, was available at Artz Rib House. I developed an appreciation for Schwarzbiers during a couple of trips to Germany. The Bohemian Black has a very nice malty flavor, but lacks somewhat the intense roasted coffee flavor of the Schwarzbiers I tried in Germany.

This Shiner ad that Stan linked to is also pretty great.

I also went to the Independence Brewing brewery when I was in Austin. The 1st Saturday of each month they give out free beer samples at the brewery. $5 gets you a logo pint glass, which then gets you free refills. They make very nice amber and brown ales, as well as a pale ale that sounds like it would be very similar to Sierra Nevada. I tried the Southside Special Ale and really wanted to like it, but just couldn’t get excited about it. Perhaps it was the “hint of cardamom” that was throwing me.

The tour was excellent and very educational, as you get to walk up close to all the brewery equipment and owner Rob will answer just about any question about how they brew their beer. Go to El Meson for lunch and then show up at Independence at about 1:15. The initial crush of people will have already gotten in and started on their first beer.

While in Orlando visiting a prospective client this week, I stayed at the Peabody Hotel. This chain of three hotels is famous for having ducks march down a red carpet and hop into a fountain in the morning. In the late afternoon, they hop out and head back up the red carpet to a more private location in the hotel.

In case it’s not obvious, the photo to the left is the roof of part of the hotel.

I had seen video footage of the ducks doing a leisurely waddle down the red carpet at the original Peabody in Memphis, but the Orlando ducks were doing something closer to running. And I swear I was not making any comments about making my famous smoked duck and andouille sausage gumbo. At least, not in a language they would have understood.

I went to JavaOne last week and was once again amazed by the number of attendees. I heard someone say 15,000 people had registered. I believe it. Other programming languages like Python and Ruby might be gaining in popularity on Java, but Java is still pretty dominant.

And just like last year, the queues for getting into the sessions were chaos. The people trying to organize the queues were trying hard (well, a few were), but the space where people lined up for the biggest sessions was the least conducive to organization. Someone at Sun needs to go to a major theme park and take lots of notes. Theme parks figured this out long ago.

And then the last thing you want to hear about happening when you were recently in a crowded space with 15,000 of your best friends did happen. On Friday I got an email from Sun that about 70 of those best buddies (actually, almost all of the 70 were workers not included in the registrant head count) caught a highly contagious norovirus.

I shared my pass with some co-workers, so I was there only on Tuesday. Fortunately, none of us got sick. The best sessions I attended were:

• More Effective Java
• Defective Java™ Code: Turning WTF Code into a Learning Experience
• Let’s Resync: What’s New for Concurrency on the Java™ Platform, Standard Edition
• Real World, Not Hello World: GWT Development for Java™ Technology Shops

I was really impressed by the quality of the web apps that had been built with GWT. I co-developed an app at work using GWT, but the part of the UI I developed was not nearly as cool as what these two companies built. It made me want to do some more work with GWT.

While I was impressed with JavaFX Script, the presentation Tuesday morning went at much too slow of a pace. Although 50 minutes had elapsed, I felt like only about 15 minutes of material had been covered.

The EBay presentation was also sort of interesting, but it felt too much like “here’s a little bit of info about a lot of cool technologies we have developed, but it won’t be much use to you since there are a lot of interdependencies and it’s closed source.” In the Q&A session they said they were considering open sourcing some of it, but I would understand if they didn’t. It would probably take a very large amount of work to unwind all the internal dependencies on their other infrastructure.