I FINALLY FOUND IT

The totally awesome Malibu Rum "The Bus" ("you're late") ad. Also, the "melons" ad.

TANOREXIA

Addiction to tanning. Nice. Suge Knight got shot? No way.

BUMP

I hit my head on a shelf over the changing table when diapering my daughter yesterday. Now, when I touch someone, an electric jolt courses through me, I launch into a poor imitation of Christopher Walken and can tell whether the person I touched had a bowel movement that day.

TRAGEDY

Today in the Hebrew calendar is the ninth of the month of Av, (Tish'a B'Av) in which we commemorate the destruction of the first and second Holy Temples, over two thousand years ago. This day is earmarked as an intense day of mourning and reflection on the tragic events as well as the failings of our nation that caused us to merit these calamities. It is also a day of fasting. Interestingly, Tish'a B'Av is one of two fast days on the Jewish calendar that begin at dusk the evening before -as opposed to sunrise of- the day itself. As Tish'a B'Av falls out during the height of the summer months, this means that it is usually the longest fast of the year. As I am a notoriously bad faster, I dread this day for this corporeal reason about as much as for its spiritual significance.

While my personal feelings towards the Gaza withdrawals are that they are a necessary political step, I moan the tragedy of uprooting families and communities that forged their existence out of blood, sweat and tears. It's prophetic that this action's first concrete steps are taken on this day of national mourning for the Jewish people.

UNRELATED TRAGEDY: I read today of a 737 crash near Athens (Greece, not Georgia) it sounds like a catastrophic decompression that caused the pilots to lose consciousness. How could they not have gotten their oxygen on in time to stave off a blackout? Interestingly, the news reports that Greek F-16s scrambled when the plane entered Greek airspace without making radio contact and shadowed the plane as it drifted into a hill. I'm actually impressed that the Greek Air Force reacted so quickly and effectively (as it were) to an airspace violation. How many times do we hear about airspace violations that go glaringly unchallenged even in the mighty good ole US of A?

IT'S NOT RELATIVE

When a Jewish terrorist strikes, the abhorrent act is immediately condemned by all facets of Jewish and Israeli life. The perpetrator is a terrorist and branded as such by Israeli, Jewish and world media. Mind you, despite dire predictions, this sort of thing only happens once in a blue moon (the last incident was around ten years ago) and the last two cases involved clearly unhinged individuals. So don't argue that we're all the same and we resort to the same (terror) tactics as our enemies. That lament just doesn't ring true.

PERFECT

Today's launch of Discovery and America's return to manned spaceflight was picture perfect. The new tank-mounted real time camera provided a spectacular view of the tank separation event from space. Spectacular though it may be, here's to hoping that NASA will get serious about a safer shuttle replacement this time and retire the aging beast as scheduled in 2010.

Word of the day: Nominal. NASA bureaucrats are congenitally incapable of exuberance. In this vein, a perfect launch is termed "nominal." Usage: "Wow, we just launched a 4.5 million pound Roman candle into space with a terminal velocity of twenty-five times the speed of sound. I feel nominal!" In a nutshell, this word sums up why manned spaceflight can, should and will be in the hands of private enterprise.

ADDENDA: The F-22 Raptor is America's primo warplane of the future. We paid a gazillion bucks for these things. Here's a pic of the first operational spec plane. At least it looks cool. Hat tip: Blackfive.  (The F-35 is the cheaper companion plane to the Raptor. It's not yet fully baked.)

LINKZOOKERY

Middle East for Geeks (hat tip: Tim Bray)

Google Maps goes hybrid (hat tip: Ars)

You do not want to light a match near this house. (Michael Yon)

Mowing the lawn with an Autistic son (hat tip: Ned Batchelder)

I will never get any closer to a Polar Bear (hat tip: me)

 

RANDY TRAVIS

Anyone see the King of the Hill episode where they attend a country music festival? It turns out Randy Travis is a schmuck -very funny. No offense to Mr. Travis, but the episode was hilarious.

RIP Scotty. The Lord hath beamed you up.

THE ARISTOCRATS

As a fan of the comedic arts, the movie the Aristocrats looks like a must-see. Watch the trailer here. Precious few movies that delve into the subject matter exist. Seinfeld's the Comedian was a noteworthy exception. Before that, I believe you have to go as far back as Punchline, with Sally Field and Tom Hanks. The small screen always has been and probably will continue to be a much better window for what fuels the creative process of a comedian with such fare as Dave Attell's Insomniac and Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm.

NYC SURVIVAL TIP (1 OF ??)

Muni meters are those big-box replacements for the ubiquitous parking meter. You can load up a muni meter receipt with pretty much as you want, and leave your car on a street parking spot in, say, the theater district for roughly 1/4 the price of a garage. The trick is having 6 to 8 bucks in change to feed the muni meter. For this I recommend keeping a stash of Sacagawea (or Susan B. Anthony) coins in your glove compartment. Alternately, going into a local shop and asking for change is a lot less offensive if you ask the shopkeeper for dollar coins. While proprietors may be reluctant to part with quarters from their register, they are usually more than happy to swap dollar coins for bills.

ALTERNATE MUSINGS: Are bullet points evil?

ON HUMOR

Wife & I made it out to see Mike Birbiglia last night at Caroline's.  It was billed in his advance newsletter as an experimental hourlong session with lots of new material, so we were excited to go. Plus, we never seem to get out anymore what with the baby & all. Mike didn't dissapoint, IMHO. Some notes:

• The bit on everything these days also having a built-in camera got us laughing. Reminded us of the Malibu Rum ad we just saw with the melons. Those Malibu ads are hilarious, I wish they were available on the 'net -they're some of the most original and funny ads out there.
• I forget the joke, but Mike made use of what I've called the 2-5 progression. Basically, jumping from the number 2 to the number 5 seems to be funny, as in: "Sex between two people is wonderful...between five it's fantastic" -Woody Allen, Standup Comic (sometime in the '60's.) I've heard that progression used in comedy before and it's a good one.
• The guitar sketches are new and quite funny. I hope this doesn't mean Mike's becoming a prop comic, though. I wonder, does the atheist's menu choices (bagel, cream cheese) indicate Jewish origin?

Sure fire way to initiate a monsoon in your neighborhood: Start watering the garden.

Peace out.

FASCINATING TIDBIT

David E. Davis Jr., former editor of Car and Driver magazine and founder of Automobile Magazine wrote ad copy for Automotive News in the '50s alongside Elmore Leonard. The Elmore Leonard. The master was just embarking on his career as a novelist at the time. Man, what a lucky break for DED.

SLICE OF LIFE

I haven't been posting as of late because all that's on my fragile little mind that I feel like writing about it technical in nature, and we all know how that pans out for my loyal reader(s).

Basically, life's been good, even though my muse seems to have left me for the time being. We watched "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton" last night, which is a cute ditty of a movie with a surprisingly good cast. Topher Grace is, well, Topher Grace. He basically plays Eric Foreman in everything I've seen in him so far, with the notable exception of playing a long-haired Topher Grace trashing a hotel room in a fit of romantic rage in Ocean's Twelve. Honorable mention goes to Gary Cole, Lumbergh of Office Space fame, for the movie's best line: "Have her back by dawn. And NO COCAINE!"

The little one continues to grow in size and capabilities each day. She -amazingly- gets cuter every time I lay eyes on her.

We are having a farewell barbeque for my big sister Bena this Sunday , who's leaving to Israel for time period undefined. I will miss her something fierce.

TIP OF THE DAY: Watching the grenadine dissipate in  a Tequila Sunrise is neat. Drinking said concoction can cause temporary loss of consciousness, though.

NOTES, SECOND ACT

Another geek post.

I do a lot of work with IBM/Lotus Notes/Domino. That's IBM as in the purchaser of Lotus and Notes as in the core service that also provides Domino web applications. It's been my bread and butter since I graduated from college. I've been looking for alternative technologies that could provide similar services to what I do for a living with this combination for a long time. My criteria is:

• Ease of development- The Notes Designer is unparalleled in its ability to quickly get a secure robust application deployed on the internet -Bar none.
• Ease of integration with existing data sources -Notes can interface with relational data and its getting easier with each release. It's still not as simple as using the native Notes data store, though.
• Substantially lower cost of entry. A Notes server runs somewhere in the $8k range. This is just enough to trigger bells in large enterprises that don't have existing Notes infrastructures and usually beyond the budget of the SMB market I'd like to target more.
• Decreased vendor-dependence.
• Easier component segregation (i.e.: LDAP for security, RDBMS for data, Apache for presentation)

I've looked at several possibilities including:

• IBM Workplace, definitely doesn't lower the cost of entry or equal ease of development yet. I wouldn't be surprised if IBM improves on the product and offers an SMB solution as Workplace matures and gains traction.
• Zope. Pros are it has a rich object extensability and Jon Udell like it. Cons are that its pretty much a web browser development environment, which is a royal pain in this day and age.
• Struts/Tiles/insert "rogue" Java web framework cutesy name here. Aside from Struts, which is showing its age but seems to be the de-facto leader in mindshare for now, there's no standard that everyone can agree upon here. I worry about committing to a possible orphan product. Also, there aren't any acceptable GUI-ish drag and drop development environments for these tools (that I know of)
• J2EE. No way Jose.
• PHP. Cool, but lacks a good IDE. Dreamweaver sorta does PHP, but not really. (IMHO.)

Which leaves me with my current contender for the crown: Java Server Faces. JSF is a JSR standard, which reassures me that it will have acceptance. It's based upon existing JSP technologies, which are NOT J2EE (whew!) and don't require full J2EE software and support (It can be used/mixed with J2EE, though.) JSF has at least one competent drag 'n drop GUI IDE (Suns' Java Studio Creator) with more on the way. In particular, Sun's Java Studio only costs $99/year for developers and the apps are free (as in beer) to deploy. JSF has a component model that should encourage third-party developers to create widgets that can be easily incorporated into any JSF IDE/project. Still to come is better security control inside the development environment and components that utilize the AJAX principle for outstanding application interaction.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE: This interview with Rob Smigel, my current obsession, is illuminating and, yes, funny. Here's a classic Smigel bit as Triumph, the insult comic dog.

WORD OF THE MOMENT: Folksonomy

PREVIOUS WORD OF THE MOMENT: Meme

ANAKIN

Finally got to see Revenge of the Sith last night. I was disappointed. While the movie was clearly better than the first two, and finally offered a decent basic plotline, the nuances were awful. I mean, why exactly did Anakin turn to the dark side? A more plausible scenario than the one given would have involved him paying too much for car insurance. Overall, a decent flick, but a letdown for a mythos that has captivated me since I was six.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

So I'm experimenting with JXTA using the JXTA Programming Guide. I've bought several books on the subject but I found them difficult to grok(that's read and comprehend, in geekspeak.)  The guide, also, would serve as the best reference for the latest and greatest version on the JXTA API, which changes constantly. Well, at least on paper, JXTA's programmability is supposed to be getting easier with each released iteration. I'm not finding that to be so true in practice. For one thing, the documentation isn't suited for someone looking for a high-level abstract toolkit to build a peer-to-peer application on. To be fair, the material is outside my usual ken, which is more of a gluecode kind of work, but I should be able to pick it up. Anyways, I continue to plug away. One nice discovery is that the latest and greatest version of NetBeans (4.1) is turning out to be a pleasant surprise to work with. I'm not sure if it will replace Eclipse as my primary IDE, but NetBeans seems purer in concept and less daunting to the casual coder. Eclipse definitely has the leg up in features, though, but it can be maddeningly confusing to use. Does anyone know if NetBeans has an equivalent to Eclipse's templates? A nice presentation of NetBeans' current and future is here.

I'm posting this using Sauce Reader 2.0 Beta. I've been using Sauce in its earlier iterations for well over a year now to compose my blog posts. I find its superb editing environment to be unequaled. I'm wondering, though, what happened to spell check in this release?

Darth Vader's blog, Memoirs of a Monster, finished up today. It was/is a fascinating read that sought to portray the Dark Lord's innermost feelings regarding the events between A New Hope and The Return of the Jedi. Kudos to the author, Matthew Heming on a fine idea, finely executed.

Got a gas (propane) grill over Passover and have been rigorously grillin' ever since. Lorraine marinates a French Roast for me to grill for our Friday night dinners and it's scrum-diddly-umptious! Having some friends over tonight for some steaks and turkey burgers. Can't wait. Got tiki torches for the occasion. For a primer on gas grilling in America read Patio Man and the Sprawl People, by David Brooks. Also, watch King of the Hill.

OUR SO-CALLED LIVES

Watching Office Space for the upteenth time with my wife, I realize what draws me to this movie and its ilk on screens big and small: It's the chronicling of the mundane in such artistic fashion. Mike Judge, who wrote the script, is also the genius behind the brilliant King of the Hill (and Beavis and Butthead) cartoon which also captures the inanity of life in America hilariously well. The Simpsons was the first of the modern generation of screen productions to capture this zeitgeist, which somehow seems to be the exclusive domain of the Fox network and comedy central.

TWO BAD GUYS

What do I do while eagerly awaiting the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode III, The Revenge of the Sith? Why, I read Darth Vader's blog, of course. Astonishly well written and funny.

Johnny Knoxville hosted SNL last night. Skit after sit, he amazed us (wife & I) of how eerily he resembles a young Jack Nicholson in look and manner.

ALL IS WELL

You ever get that feeling that all is right once again with the world? The trees are blooming, birds are singing, the stream near the house is bubbling with the cool mountain runoff. Yes, that one. The feeling you can only get when a favorite series of yours is revived from the dead, like once-dormant flora. Sigh, I'm so happy now that Family Guy has started up again. Last night's first new episode answered such age-old questions like what would it be like if Ralph Cramden actually decked Alice and why the hell did Jesus just sit and take it?

Also, we bumped into an old acquaintance, Marci, over the Passover holiday, who hails from where I now live and was home visiting. It turns out that Marci is quite the vocal talent, check out her demo at the William Morris agency here.

Pesach (Passover) Mania

Here's something you just don't see anywhere else but a heavily fortified Orthodox Jewish Community. Tip: (Bachrim = Yeshiva students [male, plural])