Raible Designs

Skiing in Colorado - it's looking good this year

The last couple of weeks have been frustrating. Actually, it's really been the last couple of years. You see, I live in Denver, Colorado - a city that's close to some of the best skiing on the planet. Furthermore, skiing here is pretty cheap. Starting about 10 years ago, all the resorts reduced their "season pass" prices from thousands to hundreds. You can get a ski pass to Keystone, Breckenridge, A-Basin, Vail and Beavercreek (5 mountains!) for a mere 350 bucks.

When Julie first moved here, we were pretty regular skiiers. We both got passes and went skiing almost every weekend. In 1999-2000, I worked for a .com that had a "9-inch" rule, where we got to go skiing whenever it snowed more than 9 inches the night before. This happened to coincide with one of the best ski seasons ever, and we managed to ski an average of 3 days per week (including weekends). Needless to say, I went from being a decent "black skier" to skiing chutes and bumbs with ease.

Then the kids came. The first year it wasn't so bad. When Abbie was first born, I had my first book deal, and I started AppFuse - so I didn't notice the winter pass me by. That was the first year I didn't buy a pass in quite a few years. The next year, I made sure to buy a season pass and barely got my money's worth (only skiing 5 times). I bought one again last year, and still only made it up 4 times. This year I didn't buy one.

For the last 2 weeks, I've gotten a 9" snow report in my inbox almost every day! It is dumping in Colorado this year and looks to be one of the best ski seasons ever. This year I'm planning on taking Abbie up with me, and getting her started on the "slopes." The problem? Why haven't I been up there yet? Work - how bad does that suck? And it's not real work IMO. It's open source and conference preparation. Ugh.

I need to get in shape, I need to find a client with a 9" rule - and I need to get to the hills! Ahhh, the good ol' days. I miss 'em.

Note to self: mountain biking and skiing should have a higher priority than any of this career mumbo jumbo.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I have to admit, Thanksgiving is one of the best American holidays there is. No gift giving, no marketing hype - just good food and hanging out with friends and family. This year, we took a break from the norm and canceled our trip to Florida - instead opting to stay home and relax a bit. We're certainly glad we did as things are much less stressed and we had a great dinner with friends this evening.

Like previous years, I have a lot to be thankful for. I owe you, the readers of this blog, a huge thanks. Your comments and feedback are always appreciated. I also owe a big thanks to Virtuas for hooking me up with a kick-ass job and fun folks to work with.

Last, but certainly not least - I'd like to thank Julie, Abbie and Jack. You guys are the best part of this whole world and make it tremendously fun to live in.

Happy Turkey Day Y'all!

San Francisco

This week, I'm conducting a Spring and Hibernate workshop in San Francisco. I arrived late Monday night and will be here until Friday evening. So far, it's been an interesting trip. I woke up yesterday with some sort of stomach bug and almost had to postpone the class. Luckily, the pains in my stomach (and profuse sweating) went away 15 minutes before the class was scheduled to start. I made it through the day, but was pretty worn out afterwards. After class, I headed back to my hotel room and laid down for a power nap around 5 p.m. When I woke up it was 2:00 a.m. I went back to sleep and today I'm feeling much better.

The weather is beautiful here - upper 60s to low 70s during the day. This is quite a contrast to Denver - when I left, it was cold and starting to snow. In fact, our plane had to go to the de-icer before we could take off.

Effective Presentations

At Virtuas today, we had a workshop from Joel Hochberger of Effective Presentations. This was a very valuable training course that I learned a lot from. We started out by doing short presentations that were videotaped and criticized by other folks in the class. It was interesting to see myself speaking on video because I did a lot of "umms" and "ya knows" that weren't noticed by me or the audience.

After learning to pause more, quit shifting and have better eye contact - we moved on to learning how to better organize our presentations. Joel gave us some great tips that I should be able to really benefit from. The main gist was that you can easily create better presentations by simply thinking from the listeners perspective. What is the main benefit the listener derives from your idea?

The other two things that really stuck with me were: 1) ask for action from your listener (what they must do to achieve the benefits of your idea) and 2) summarize your presentation following audience questions. If you get a chance to attend one of Joel's workshops, I'd definitely recommend it.

Happy Birthday Abbie!

Today is Abbie's 3rd birthday. It's hard to believe how fast she's grown up. On one hand, I'd like to say it feels like just yesterday that she was born - but it doesn't. A lot has happened since she was born: Jack, a new house, new cars, the bus, speaking at conferences and writing books. Phew, I hope life slows down a little soon.

Happy Birthday Abbie - I hope you enjoy your birthday party as much as we will!

New Jersey

This week, I'm traveling on business in the great state of New Jersey. I've been here before, but it was for a wedding and I didn't get to see much. Today I flew in to Newark, rented a car and raced the sunset to my hotel. Damn daylight savings time. I like the cold, I love snow and I think winter is great - but I can't help agree with Russell a little bit.

I'm looking forward to this week, mainly because it's fun to talk about Spring and Hibernate to people that don't know much about it. It'll also be fun because time usually flies when I travel. The faster this weekend comes, the better. It's Abbie's birthday and the first DU Hockey home game.

I can't believe Abbie is going to be 3. It's pretty incredible that DU has been national champions for the majority of her life.

Pennies in the Radio

Julie took her car in to the stereo shop today b/c the radio was cutting out every once in a while. Actually, it was better than that - it'd quit working when she'd drive over a bump, and then start working again when she hit the next bump. The stereo shop called a few minutes ago to tell us what the problem was: someone has stuffed pennies into the radio, and they'd somehow fallen down and were shorting out the wiring below. I wonder who that someone was?

If you have a good "my life as a parent" story, I'd love to hear it.

Family Picture at Disney

It's been a while since I posted a family picture - here's one from last week at Disney.

Subversion options for open source projects?

I've been using Subversion on quite a few projects lately and I have a hard time switching back to CVS. I currently use CVS for most open source projects, particularly AppFuse and Equinox - which I work on the most. A discussion started this morning on the AppFuse Mailing List about moving to Subversion. While I'd love to do this, I'd prefer to do it at java.net - so I don't have to completely abandon our hosted environment there. However, I don't think java.net is planning to offer Subversion anytime soon. If we move source control to somewhere else, we're pretty much just using it for the mailing list. Then again, the mailing list archive kinda sucks and you can't get it archived by mail-archive.com.

That being said, it might be nice to host everything ourselves. This might allow us to get something like Jive Forums setup. WebWork uses it and it has a pretty cool feature that the mailing list and forums are integrated (messages go to both). While the idea of self-hosting sounds appealing, it also sounds like it might be a lot of work. For hosted SVN options, it seems that there's JavaForge, Codehaus (which I believe is invite-only) and CVSDude. Any other options you know of?

I Survived

I'm happy to say I survived the long weekend with Abbie and Jack. Not only that, but we had a lot of fun too. We managed to do some hiking, fishing and even pitched a tent in the backyard for a few hours. Unfortunately, the local Safeway was sold out of marshmallows, so we didn't start a campfire. Highlights of the weekend included dinner at Benihana and riding the Georgetown Loop Railroad. Abbie and I took a ride on it last year, and it was just as much fun this time.

Above all else, I got to know my kids a little bit better this weekend. They're truly special people and were a blast to hang out with. I feel like the luckiest Dad in the world right now.