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Funemployment 2024

2024-04-30T11:02:06-06:00

On February 1, I woke up to an unexpected email from my employer.

"Today, Okta made the decision to eliminate a number of positions across multiple organizations. Unfortunately, your position has been eliminated as part of this reduction."

Not exactly the kind of email you want to read when you first wake up. But, I'm excited for the future!
— Matt Raible (@mraible) February 1, 2024

I laughed out loud at first, then smiled and felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. I went through a wide range of emotions that morning, but despair was never one of them. As a high performer on my team, I did not expect to be laid off. However, looking back over the last several months, there were a few indicators that it might happen.

I quickly realized the bright side of my situation:

It was the middle of ski season, and
I had nothing to do.

I was laid off on a Thursday morning and was scheduled to leave for Jfokus that Saturday. I was supposed to do a workshop, a talk, and help at the Okta booth. Since my talks used Okta products and it'd be weird to represent a company that just laid you off, I had to back out of the conference. It just didn't feel right.

The reason I had nothing to do is all of the activities I did on my computer were Okta-related. I didn't even have a personal computer. I did all my work on the company laptop and all of my open source contributions had a relationship to my work.

I received many inquiries from my tweet above and my LinkedIn post with the same message. I told everyone I was going to take a couple weeks to process things and skiing was my top priority. I've been unemployed in the past, but I never received any sort of severance, let alone one that lasted for months. I knew that this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Funemployment is the condition of a person who takes advantage of being out of a job to have the time of their life. This is my funemployment story.

First, I headed to Winter Park to stay at our Ski Chalet. There were several powder days and a few friends that joined in the festivities.

I returned home that Friday to attend a local Chi Phi Fraternity reunion in downtown Denver.

Then, Trish and I enjoyed a Pitbull concert at Ball Arena and I sent back my laptop and stickers.

My parents came to visit for 10 days in mid-February. We hung out with Abbie and Jack a few nights, including a night at Casa Bonita, the self-proclaimed "Greatest Restaurant in the World!"

I got a couple more powder days in at the end of February.

My sister proposed we go to Spring Training in Arizona and I leapt at the opportunity. I'd never been before and it seemed like fun. I highly recommend it if you've never been, especially the one in Scottsdale, Arizona. There are several baseball games every day, they're all within driving distance, and the weather is gorgeous.

Before flying home on March 5th, I made sure to announce my plans for the rest of the month. All these trips had been planned for months, except for Spring Training.

Hello, March!

⚾️? Spring Training in Arizona with my sister
⛷️? Celebrating a friend’s birthday in Vermont
🌴 Visiting @TrishPhoto’s family in Florida
☀️ Spring Break with friends in Cabo San Lucas
☃️ Spring Break Part II in Winter Park and Steamboat
— Matt Raible (@mraible) March 5, 2024

My friend Chris Morse's birthday at Sugarbush was outstanding. I expected a bit more snow, but we had fun anyway.

Then, I joined Trish in Naples, Florida for St. Paddy's Day with her family.

We teamed up with Bruce and Janene Snyder for Spring Break. They're empty nesters like us, our kids are both at CU, and shared the same Spring Break. When we originally planned our trip to Cabo San Lucas, we expected our kids might join us. We didn't mind going without them when they declined.

After a week in Cabo, we returned to Colorado and spent the weekend skiing at Winter Park and Steamboat.

2023 - A Year in Review

2024-01-06T18:16:02-07:00

2023 started with a celebration of love in the Philippines. Trish and I traveled with friends to El Nido and Manila to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. It was a two-week trip that filled our souls with lasting memories.

2023 was a milestone year for our family. It's the year Jack graduated from high school!

Then, the Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship, Jack started college at CU, and we became empty nesters. It was quite the year!

From last year's review:

I only have one goal for 2023: be present.

I live where I work, so this was easy enough on a physical level. However, I was forced to be even more present in Q4 of the year. My manager asked me to step up and be more present on my team in October. Then, sickness struck me down in mid-November after seven weeks of travel, allowing for some quality one-on-one time with Trish.

I will look back on 2023 using the following categories.

Personal

The ski season was excellent with trips to Winter Park, Devil's Thumb Ranch, Crested Butte, and Steamboat.

We celebrated my sister's St. Paddy's Day birthday with a week in New Orleans. We visited my parents in Montana for Mother's Day.

Recharging in the backwoods of Montana with family. Started the day with coffee, mimosas, and huckleberry pancakes. ☕️🥂😋

Happy Mother's Day to all the incredible moms out there! ❤️? pic.twitter.com/sjmChuzNpo
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 14, 2023

We jumped for joy during Jack's High School Graduation at the end of May!

We celebrated our son Jack's high school graduation this week and had a fabulous time with family and friends. Here are a few of my favorite photos.

See the full album on Flickr with Julie and Trish's awesome photos: https://t.co/XSoUZnjOSk

Congratulations, Jack! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/1Ea1LZrFML
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 27, 2023

The Nuggets playoff run was magical, and our half-season tickets came in quite handy. The Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship on June 12th. Crying from joy is a wonderful feeling. 🥹

I took a long summer vacation for the fourth year in a row. Thanks, Okta's unlimited vacation policy!

In 24 hours, I'll be starting my summer vacation. @okta has an unlimited vacation policy, and I'm taking full advantage with a month off! 😃

What will I do?

⛳️ Golf, raft, and bike
🛶 Live down by the river in a van
⛰️ Shoot the breeze in Montana
🌊 Tour Cape Cod#LifeAtOkta
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 13, 2023

I wrote about my summer vacation adventures in Summer 2023: Colorado, Montana, and Cape Cod.

Jack started college at the University of Colorado on his birthday. We loved the Coach Prime and CU football experience in September, while the Broncos were terrible. When CU started sucking at halftime during the Stanford game, the teams seemed to swap fates. We relished in the Broncos winning streak in October and November as our CU football fandom waned.

Abbie turned 21 in early November. We celebrated at the CU vs. Oregon State game and again in Las Vegas the following weekend.

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A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife)

The last months of the year were dominated by real estate transactions. We sold our rental house near the University of Denver in early November.

And we bought a new ski chalet near Winter Park in December. It has mountain views with a river nearby and close proximity to many miles of mountain bike trails. We plan to rent it most of the time. We've experienced many misty-eyed moments of joy in it already.

We spent Christmas in Florida with Abbie, Jack, and Trish's whole family. The sunsets were gorgeous.

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

We gave Stout the Syncro a lot of rest this year. We bought a relatively new Chevy Suburban as a new tow vehicle for our whitewater rafts. We celebrated our 10-year anniversary by rafting on the Upper Colorado River with both vehicles.

Hefe the Bus purred along with no issues. He won runner-up in his class this year at the Colorado Bug-In!

Professional

For those stumbling upon this post with no context, I'm an open source developer that works at Okta. My title is officially "Developer Advocate Architect" and all the code I write is open source.

This year, my main focus was leading the Java Community team as part of Auth0 by Okta Developer Relations. I worked with Deepu K Sasidharan and Jimena Garbarino to come up with ideas, write blog posts, and author tutorials for the Auth0 Developer Center.

My Americas Developer Relations team has one main function: cultivating relationships with developers via events. Personally, I like creating content more than events, yet I've also found they go hand-in-hand. The content I create often gets turned into conference talks, so I find it important to create new content if I want new talks. I mention this because it's not my main job to produce content. There's another team that does content, but they currently have no Java specialists.

I published two blog posts on the Auth0 blog:

We used the microservices post as the basis for Deepu and my Securing Spring Boot Microservices with OAuth and OpenID Connect workshop at Devoxx Belgium.

On the OktaDev YouTube Channel, I created four screencasts (down from 12 in 2022).

My most popular video was Spring Boot + Vue, with 8.6K views.

My Use React and Spring Boot to Build a Simple CRUD App screencast has 22K views, but it was published on December 29, 2022, so it doesn't count for 2023.

While at Devoxx Belgium, Deepu and I interviewed a bunch of Java community legends.

We had a lot of fun interviewing @errcraft and @Stephan007 at #Devoxx Belgium. 🤩 pic.twitter.com/XtIij77YI8
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 7, 2023

I did a couple more interviews with the OpenFGA team at KubeCon.

I updated and released new versions of the JHipster and Angular Mini-Books with the help of InfoQ and awesome tech editors.

InfoQ allows publishing them on other sites after six months, so they're both available online at jhipster-book.org and angular-book.org.

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 21 trips to 37 cities in eight countries. Nine trips were work-related; the rest involved traveling to see family or attending Celebration of Life events. That's three fewer trips than in 2022, and I had 109 days on the road (-14 from 2022). United 1K was enjoyed; I did not qualify for it in 2024.

My Speaker Deck profile shows 18 presentations at 17 events. Thirteen of those were in person. I also attended KubeCon to help the OpenFGA project. My most-viewed presentation was Comparing Native Java REST API Frameworks from the Chicago JUG in August. It had 1.2K views.

While the Midwest and Northeast JUG tours were a lot of fun, the highlight of the year was interviewing James Gosling at Devoxx Belgium.

Digging into all things @Java with the founder himself, James Gosling!

Developer Advocate @mraible had an insightful chat covering @Devoxx, Java and everything in between! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/2pfRIlZVhi
— OktaDev (@oktadev) November 27, 2023

Community

We stopped live-streaming Denver JUG meetups because we wanted to encourage folks to join us in person and grow our community. We're grateful to the folks at Thrive Workplace for donating their space. We hope to start meeting at their new downtown location near Union Station sometime this year.

Projects

I continued to maintain OktaDev Schematics in 2023. The project had four releases. According to npm-stat.com, it had ~42K downloads in 2023 (-20K from 2022).

I updated my Bare Bones Angular tutorial for Angular 17.

I updated my Bare Bones 🦴 Angular tutorial to use #Angular 17.

?? https://t.co/7fsyzOOaNP

It includes:

✅ New syntax for control flow
✅ Standalone components
✅ Unit, e2e, and CI testing
✨ Bonus: Angular Material, Bootstrap, and @auth0

I hope you find it useful!
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 4, 2023

I also helped with the JHipster project. It turned 10 in October.

Can you believe that @jhipster is 10 years old today?!

Happy Birthday, JHipster! And congratulations to its proud Papa, @juliendubois! 🎊

⭐? 21K stars on GitHub
🤝 52.4K used by
❤️ 696 contributors

It's been an excellent adventure! 🤓 https://t.co/VqZdoDRtBS
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 21, 2023

JHipster had eight releases and ~1.3 million downloads in 2023 (down 200K from 2022). Our biggest release was JHipster 8.0.0 on November 2nd. We released 8.1.0 in early December, and I updated my Get Started with JHipster 8 tutorial to use it.

My Getting Started with JHipster 8 tutorial is now available!

🤓 https://t.co/6nBfPR33Dk

Features:

🌹 Enhanced UI with Angular
🔐 Increased security with ownership checks
💜 Deployment to Heroku
🤠 CI/CD with GitHub Actions#jhipster #java #typescript pic.twitter.com/xE8Ra9E9w6
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 14, 2023

I also published a screencast of the tutorial just before Christmas.

2024

Professionally, I'm starting the year with two of my favorite conferences, Jfokus and Devnexus. Then, I'm doing a JUG tour in April to Salt Lake City, Dallas, Tampa, Nashville, and Detroit. I'm trying to make Spring I/O and JNation happen too. September's dev2next is sure to be a fun conference in Denver. You can see where my whole team will be on our events page.

Personally, Trish and I hope to visit the Ski Chalet frequently. The mountains are calling, and we must go. I'll be a half-century old in July. That's sure to be a good party, especially if it's during another month-long summer vacation.

I have only one goal for 2024: breathe.

I often pause, breathe, and smile when I'm skiing, mountain biking, rafting, and frolicking in the great outdoors. Sometimes it's nature's beauty that causes this, but often it's my own satisfaction with the situation.

If you want to watch me connect with developers and opt outside, please follow me on Twitter. I also post pictures of my favorite moments on Instagram and whole albums on Flickr.

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

2023-11-05T22:44:01-07:00

Our oldest child turned 21 today! She's a junior at the University of Colorado in Boulder, living in an apartment with three roommates. Abbie is a joy to be around because she's always smiling and cracking jokes.

We journeyed up to Boulder this weekend to join her for the CU vs Oregon State game. We had a nice family dinner, celebrated the big event at her uncle's tailgate, then watched the game. We tried to take advantage of the time change after the game and do some bar hopping, but Jack couldn't get in anywhere.

Her Mom, Julie, surprised her today by giving her a new car for her birthday. Abbie had no idea and was delighted with her first VW!

Next weekend, we'll celebrate some more in Vegas. Trish and I will be going, along with Abbie, her boyfriend (Joseph), and Joseph's parents.

Happy Birthday, Abbie! We love you to the moon and back!! 🥰

Farewell to the 2022-2023 Ski Season

2023-07-07T08:26:24-06:00

You can tell your Spring is a whirlwind when you don't have time to write your end-of-ski-season post until July!

My ski season started way back in October, on Halloween at A-Basin, to be precise. It ended with an Okta + Gradle Developer Ski Day on April 13th. I'm proud to say I achieved 39 days of skiing, with 15 being alpine skiing and the rest being cross-country skiing. A lot of the cross-country skiing was done in our backyard, on the neighborhood bridal trails. We got lucky this year because it snowed in early January and stuck around until February. That's rare in our neck of the woods.

The highlight of the ski season was celebrating Trish's 50th birthday at A-Basin. We rented a few spots on the beach, invited a bunch of friends, and had a blast.

The onesies were Trish's idea. 😅 You can buy your own from Tipsy Elves.

Other big moments include skiing with the Morse family and friends in Winter Park, cross-country skiing in Crested Butte during Winter Tech Forum, and skiing with Jack in Steamboat during his Spring Break.

I partnered with my friend, Brian Demers (now at Gradle), for a Developer Ski Day at A-Basin. He was in town speaking at the Boulder and Denver JUGs, and we're thankful our management approved the event!

After we put away our skis for the season, Jack celebrated his last prom with friends, I took the kids to a Denver Nuggets playoff game, and we got Hefe ready for show season.

We visited my parents in Montana for Mother's Day.

Recharging in the backwoods of Montana with family. Started the day with coffee, mimosas, and huckleberry pancakes. ☕️🥂😋

Happy Mother's Day to all the incredible moms out there! ❤️? pic.twitter.com/sjmChuzNpo
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 14, 2023

And we celebrated Jack's High School Graduation at the end of May. Congratulations, son!

We celebrated our son Jack's high school graduation this week and had a fabulous time with family and friends. Here are a few of my favorite photos.

See the full album on Flickr with Julie and Trish's awesome photos: https://t.co/XSoUZnjOSk

Congratulations, Jack! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/1Ea1LZrFML
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 27, 2023

June was fun too. We traded in Trish's Tesla Model X for a Chevy Suburban because the latter is a much better tow vehicle for our whitewater rafts.

Jack and I got to go to NBA Finals Game 2. We had a great time, even though it was the only loss by the Nuggets in the Finals.

We were afforded this luxury because we bought Nuggets half-season tickets this year. What a year to start being a season ticket holder! The Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship on June 12th. I may have gotten misty-eyed a few times after they won. 🥹

Now that it's summertime, we're getting back on the river, polishing our VWs for shows, and excited that both Abbie and Jack are going to CU Boulder in the fall. Next ski season, we're looking to get a place in the mountains again. I can't wait to see what the future holds!

For more ski season photos, see my 2022-23 Ski Season album on Flickr.

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

2018-11-05T22:14:21-07:00

OMG. My daughter, Abbie, turned 16 today! We celebrated all weekend with her grandparents in town and lots of smiles. Abbie hosted a birthday party at our house on Saturday night with a bunch of balloons, a campfire outside, and a plethora of friends around. On Sunday, we took my parents and both kids to the Broncos game, and tonight we celebrated again at Abbie and Jack's mom's house.

The highlight of the weekend was when Julie (her mom) and Dave (her step-dad) surprised her with her very own car. It was a complete surprise to her and very well executed by Julie and Dave. Let's just say it was an emotional event that won't soon be forgotten.

Abbie's favorite thing to do these days is to hang out with her friends. She's got a good group of girls and guys that she pals around with. When she's not giggling with them, she's horseback riding with Trish. Trish has had an incredible influence on her life, and I'm amazed at how good they are at riding. We have several walls in our house that are lined with ribbons from the two of them.

Abbie is a sophomore in high school this year, with excellent grades, and an eye on what's next after high school. It sure is fun watching her grow up and become an awesome woman.

Happy 16th Birthday, Abbie!

Happy Birthday Jack!

2017-08-28T16:05:14-06:00

Thirteen years ago today, my son was born. Jack has grown up to be a wicked smart and fun kid to be around. He started the 7th grade this year and is into Xbox, basketball, hanging out with his friends, and exotic cars. He dreams of driving a Lamborghini one day and enjoyed pretending he owned a bunch of Ferraris a few weeks back.

This weekend, I cleaned up Hefe to chauffeur Jack and his buddies to Dart Warz for an afternoon of fun with Nerf guns.

As expected, the boys had a great time. A few of his friends had a sleepover Saturday night and competed to see who could stay up the latest. They made it pretty late, but no one saw the sun rise.

My parents drove down from Montana to help revel in Jack's birthday. We had a wonderful time visiting with them and celebrating with his mom and her husband, Dave. Thanks to Julie and Dave for being such awesome co-parents!

Happy 13th Birthday Jack!

2014 - A Year in Review

2015-01-31T09:37:43-07:00

2014 was destined to be a spectacular year. When I wrote my thoughts down last January, I thought the Broncos would win the Super Bowl and my VW Bus restoration project would be finished by summer. To focus on finishing the bus project, I didn't submit any talks to conferences. Instead of traveling to exotic locations, we opted to visit a bunch in our own backyard instead.

I should've known it'd be an interesting year when the Broncos flopped in the Super Bowl.

For this Year in Review post, I'll use the format I've used the last couple of years.

Professional

I had three different clients throughout the year, all in the health care industry. I continued working on a project with John Muir Health where we developed a hybrid mobile app. I wrote about what I learned in Documenting your Spring API with Swagger and Developing an iOS Native App with Ionic. Since I wrote the article about Swagger's Spring MVC support, it has become much easier to integrate; now it only requires an @EnableSwagger annotation.

In April, I started consulting with a small company in Alabama. I helped them modernize their tech stack and implemented a number of web services with Apache Camel. I wrote about this in a four-part series in September and October.

I continued leveraging Spring Boot in my client projects and wrote about Building a REST API with JAXB, Spring Boot and Spring Data at the end of that engagement.

In November, I had time off between clients. I visited my parents and their awesome retirement home in Montana. I also took some time to refactor AppFuse to be a bit leaner and meaner. I signed up with a new health care client in December. It's been an enjoyable experience so far, especially since I'm only working 20 hours per week this quarter.

I'm currently booked with clients through the end of March, but hoping to find one with a challenging project in April.

Speaking

To optimize cash flow towards the bus project, I didn't submit any talks to conferences in 2014. However, I did talk about Comparing JVM Web Frameworks at the Denver Open Source Users Group and vJUG in February. I also spoke at local user groups (DeRailed and HTML5 Users) about The Art of AngularJS in the first part of the year. In the fall, I participated in panels on unit testing at Denver Startup Week and building a personal brand at AirConf.

I hope to attend and speak at more conferences in 2015. To help facilitate this, I've published a list of talks I'd like to present.

Devoxx4Kids Denver

2014 was the inaugural year for Devoxx4Kids Denver. In April, I announced our first meetup. It was an Introduction to Server-Side Minecraft Programming, taught by Denver's own Scott Davis. It was a wild success and the kids had a great time hacking.

I didn't plan any events during the summer, but we held a couple workshops in the fall: one on littleBits and a second on Greenfoot. The kids had a lot of fun with littleBits thanks to Juan Sanchez of Tack Mobile.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the Greenfoot workshop with Steve Pousty, but I heard it was awesome. Thanks again to Dan Allen for assisting with this class.

I haven't scheduled any Devoxx4Kids Denver meetups for 2015 yet. If you're interested in speaking, please let me know!

Projects

AppFuse: I didn't have many posts about AppFuse in 2014, but I did work on it from time to time. Upgrading its dependencies was a good way to stay up-to-date with open source frameworks, in addition to lots of reading. InfoQ covered the AppFuse 3.0 release and I continue to write for them.

In December, I removed 10,000 lines of XML from the project without affecting any functionality. In the past month, I've added support for generating CRUD for all its web frameworks (including AppFuse Light's). This includes Spring + FreeMarker, Stripes and Wicket. GWT support is still in progress. I hope to do a release soon; there's only 10 issues left as of this writing.

Roller: I didn't contribute any code to Apache Roller in 2014, but I upgraded this site to the latest release, upgraded to Java 8 + Tomcat 7, and integrated Wufoo Forms. I hope to make some scalability improvements to how I've deployed Roller in the near future.

Personal

I started off the year with a trip of a lifetime: Heli Skiing in British Columbia with CMH Gothics. An excerpt from my blog post:

Everyday was awesome, but Wednesday was incredible. It snowed 10 cm on Tuesday night, which turned into knee-deep powder and face shots. The hoots and hollers from everyone floating down forced my face into a sorta perma-grin. For many of us, it was the best skiing day of our entire lives. The video below tries to capture how much fun we had throughout the week, but ultimately fails. It's one of those things you have to experience to really appreciate. I ended up skiing around 80,000 vertical feet in four days.

After returning from British Columbia, Trish and I skied Breckenridge and Copper before taking the kids to Aspen for three feet of powder on Super Bowl weekend.

We skied all over Colorado in February and March. We even did some winter camping in the Syncro for Valentine's Day. It snowed a lot that night.

I wrote about all our skiing adventures in Farewell to the 2013-2014 Ski Season.

On April 10th, I reminisced that 10 years ago today, I bought a VW Bus. In that post, I explained some body-work quality issues the current restoration shop found. Nevertheless, I still thought it would be done in just a few more months.

We journeyed to Florida with Abbie and Jack for Spring Break. We relished in a super-fun family vacation where we golfed, swam and even spent a day frolicking with their Mom and fiancé (now husband), Dave. We're pretty proud that we're all still a family even though Julie and I are divorced. I wrote about our vacation in Spring Break in Florida: Golf, Beaches and Boats!

The hospitality from Trish's parents was like no other. I especially enjoyed a fishing trip with her Dad Joe in the Everglades. I love these people!

Our winter activities in the Syncro were incredible. Trish sold her Nissan Xterra (the one with the sick bass) in December. Yes, that's right - we only had one vehicle during ski season last year. The fact that it worked so well is amazing. In May, we kicked it up a knotch and drove it to Moab for Syncro Solstice. My parents went with us and we experienced fabulous weather and met a bunch of super-cool Vanagon owners.

We made record time from Moab back to Denver (5 hours). The next day is when things started to go downhill. I washed the engine for the VWs on the Green show. On that Monday, the engine started "lurching" where it seemed like it wasn't getting gas (it turned out to be caused by a lack of air). We drove the lurcher for several weeks, journeying to Campout for the Cause and a exhilarating raft trip down the Yampa River.

We had the lurching examined in mid-June by Rocky Mountain Westy; we also had them install some bumpers (for a better trailer hitch) and refreshed the tires.

The ol' van looked pretty good when our Dads arrived in Denver for some whitewater on the Arkansas.

In July, we skipped the annual road trip to The Cabin in favor of a romantic road trip to see old friends in Santa Fe. The Syncro's engine seized on that trip and I experienced my favorite breakdown ever. The engine froze at a gas station near our Ski Shack and I was able to walk home. Luckily, Trish's Dad had recently (over Father's Day weekend) gifted his Nissan Maxima to us. After a train ride to fetch our other car, our road trip continued and we celebrated our first anniversary at The Broadmoor.

After we returned from Santa Fe, I turned 40 years old. We rocked out a Journey concert to celebrate and Trish surprised me with a birthday visit from my kick-ass sister. The following evening, a bunch of friends took me on a Craft Brewery Tour in a school/prison bus. Both nights were epic.

At the end of July, Trish had one of her favorite photos featured on the cover of Whisky Magazine.

In August, we flew to Boston to celebrate Trish's Dad's 75th birthday. My parents joined us, we visited my Dad's family in New York and took the kids to the Big Apple. They loved the Statue of Liberty.

Abbie started middle school (6th grade) in mid-August and Jack started 4th grade. They looked great on their first day of school.

We were pumped about our new engine in the Syncro when we left Denver for Rafting the Green River through Desolation Canyon. We celebrated Jack's 10th birthday on that trip and had a very memorable expedition with some really cool people.

Trish's photo from our last night on the river makes me want do it all again.

In October, I started considering health over wealth when we embarked on a 21-day Sugar Detox. I'm proud to say that, as a result, I'm off blood pressure medication and continue to lose weight and feel better. We're cooking at home more than ever, exercising daily and I've lost almost 20 pounds in the process.

Medallion, the horse that Trish and Abbie were leasing (and almost ready to buy) got sick with colic on Friday, October 10. I remembered the day without looking at a calendar because Trish called me to tell me about his illness. She was out of town on a business trip and was absolutely distraught. She told me about the situation and asked me to visit Medallion while he endured extreme pain. I worked out of my van at the stables that day, checking on him every couple hours. They had to put him down that evening. Abbie took it pretty well when I told her a couple hours later, but there were heaps of tears later that night.

Our little girl turned 12 a few weeks later. The kids put on some dark costumes for Halloween.

A week later, I visited my parents in Montana. We played cribbage, ate scrumptious meals and trounced around the woods looking for bucks. I marveled at the beauty of my parents' retirement home.

I neglected to blog or tweet about my self-caused Syncro accidents in Q4 of 2014. Long story short: it's been getting body work done for quite some time (two accidents!) and I look forward to getting it back in tip-top-shape next week. Thank goodness for USAA insurance.

The biggest event of the year happened just before Christmas: THE BUS IS PAINTED!! HOLY CHRISTMAS PRESENT BATMAN!

2015

It's hard to believe that 2015 could possibly top 2014. I started the year heli-skiing and ended it with a painted bus. However, the bus isn't done yet. Last year, I wrote:

My goal for 2014 is singular: finish The Bus.

I continue that mission this year. I've negotiated a deal with ReinCARnation to have it done by April 1st. Yes, it seems strange that April Fools is the finished bus delivery date. However, I'm confident they'll make it happen. This could be the year I've dreamed about since I was in high school. It was in 1991 that I first fantasized about putting a 911 engine in a VW Bus.

This year, I hope to be cruise around Colorado in two running VW Busses. From there, I plan to surround myself with the laughter of our children, the enthusiasm of our border collies and the warmness of Trish's love. It's gonna be a really great year!

Spring Break in Florida: Golf, Beaches and Boats!

2014-04-14T20:34:59-06:00

Florida is a beautiful state, with sandy beaches, excellent fishing, fun people and a great enthusiasm for golf. When I dreamed up Trish, I knew she'd have an awesome family, but I never expected her parents to have a house on a golf course. Trish's grandma, Claire Stanley, is a legend in her own right. I've never met her, but I knew I loved her when Trish's dad first told me about her "layered shots". When I saw Claire's name listed several times on the walls of the The Country Club of Naples, a deep respect came over me. Claire picked out her house on the 17th hole (Trish's favorite number) of the Country Club in 1966, when the establishment was founded. My bus was born in 1966.

Today, Trish's parents have turned it into a golf and relaxation oasis, complete with beautiful orchid gardens, a sweet pool and Japanese decorations from the country where they first met.

As a golf enthusiast, I'm embarrassed that we've only visited her parents in Naples once before. We bought Abbie and Jack golf clubs last year for Jack's birthday, and they both like to play the game. To make up for our lack of visiting family in Florida, we took our kids on a golf vacation for this year's Spring Break.

We learned a technique for kids golfing in September 2012: have them tee off from the 150 marker so they have a chance to par the hole. We arrived in Naples on a Saturday, had a nice family brunch on Sunday and played golf with the kids that afternoon. The kids had a really good time, even beating us on a couple holes.

The sunset on Sunday evening was gorgeous, especially with the kids frolicking in the waves.

On Monday, we woke up early and boarded the Key West Express before sunrise.

We arrived in Key West around noon and hung out by our hotel pool for most of the day. That evening, after marveling at the sunset, we took the kids on a Key West Ghost Tour. It was a bit long at 1.5 hours, but the story of Robert the Doll was excellent.

Tuesday morning, we met up with Abbie and Jack's Mom, Julie, and her fiancé Dave. They had Dave's kids with them, and we all headed out for a sailing, parasailing and jet skiing adventure together. Everyone had a great time, as is evidenced by the photos below.

Trish and I handed the kids over to Julie that afternoon and spent a few more hours in Key West. We rented bikes, visited the southernmost point in the US and enjoyed a cocktail on the beach. We especially liked seeing the house that Trish's Mom, Maureen, grew up in.

Around happy hour, after visiting the World of Beer, we boarded the Key West Express and traveled back to Trish's parents.

The rest of the week was an ideal vacation: golfing, swimming in the pool, swimming in the ocean, walking on the beach, dinner on the beach and fishing in the Everglades. Trish's Dad, Joe, booked us a fishing trip in the Everglades, starting from Everglades City. He and I had to wake up before dawn on Friday to meet our guide, who was waiting for us at the dock at 7:30. From there, we spent six hours boating, casting, reeling, catching some, losing some and having a fabulous time. Our catch at the end of the adventure was two Trout and one Flounder (caught by our guide, Tony). Nevertheless, we had a delightful day and savored the sun and the water in a beautiful location.

Saturday, we played some more golf and took an evening flight home. It was a fun spring break and I'm glad the kids got to enjoy it with both parents and multiple grandparents. More than anything, thanks to Trish's parents for their hospitality and fun-loving lifestyle. We had a blast!

For more pictures, checkout Trish's Spring Break 2014 or my Spring Break in Florida.

2013 - A Year in Review

2014-01-31T08:53:10-07:00

2013 was an amazing year: Trish and I got married, celebrated on a 'round-the-world honeymoon and invested in a new 4x4 VW Bus. I finally achieved my goal of vacationing 25% and I got to spend more than two months in the presence of my wonderful parents.

For this Year in Review post, I'll use the same format as I did last year:

Professional

For the last few years, I've generally had one client per year. That changed this year when my contract with Oracle ended in May. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to develop a cool dashboard application before I finished. I wrote about it in a four-part series.

I engaged in a month-long contract with Travelport to keep me busy in June. They hired me to develop a portal consolidation prototype, which I did with AngularJS, Grails and LDAP. I showcased that application at Devoxx in November.

In September, I started a new gig with John Muir Health. I was hired to help with their mobile architecture, and spent my first couple months doing front-end optimizing and helping get their MyJMH product released. Once the release was complete, I proposed a mobile architecture and started assisting with the development of their mobile application.

We're developing the Mobile API with Spring Boot. I wrote about my initial experience in A Webapp Makeover with Spring 4 and Spring Boot. My contract with John Muir Health is through the end of March and I hope to start something new shortly after.

In October, I started Writing for InfoQ and I've really enjoyed it so far. You can see the articles I've written on my author page or by clicking the links below:

Speaking

I spoke at five events in 2013:

Denver JUG on The Modern Java Web Developer and Java Web Security
Devoxx France on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks and Play vs. Grails
HTML5 Denver on Bootstrap
JavaOne: I spoke for the first time and received a Rock Star Award
Devoxx and a Nordic Countries Speaking Tour on The Modern Java Web Developer

It seems that folks liked my presentations since they were in the top 1% of most viewed on SlideShare in 2013.

Trish took many beautiful photos as part of our trip to Devoxx France.

We stopped in Iceland on the way home to see the Northern Lights.

Projects

AppFuse: I released AppFuse Light 2.2.1 in January and switched AppFuse from JSF's MyFaces to PrimeFaces in February. I blogged about AppFuse's GWT integration in March and celebrated the project's 10 year anniversary in April. AppFuse 3.0 was released just before Christmas.

Roller: I didn't contribute any code to the Roller project in 2013, but I did make this site responsive with CSS media queries.

Personal

Trish and I started our world travels in March with a trip to Magnificent Mexico. We had a wonderful time playing with old friends and renting a house on the beach.

Our trip to Paris and Iceland was a dream come true for Trish. Watching the Aurora Borealis dance in the sky is something I'll never forget.

To end the ski season in April, we completed the trifecta (3 ski resorts in 3 days) with a fun family weekend.

The last week of the ski season was epic, as I described in a life update.

The last week in Winter Park was the best skiing of the year. The first (Tuesday) afternoon, I started skiing around 1pm and it snowed all afternoon - resulting in several inches by the end of the day. The next day was smooth and empty, followed by a day of deep powder and knee-deep runs down Eagle Wind. I had one of the best runs of my life that day.

I wrote about the '66 Bus Project and how I removed it from Motorworks Restorations after six years.

We spent the first weekends in June on the Colorado River. One of the biggest highlights for me was catching a 16" Trout, right after Trish saw it jump and told me exactly where to cast my line. The fact that I was able to cast it to the precise spot was cool enough, but getting the fish on my line moments later was exhilarating. Shortly after, a majestic Bald Eagle flew over us and we all dropped our jaws in amazement.

Trish and I started a two month sabbatical in July to get married in proper fashion in the town I grew up in. She looked absolutely stunning.

During the ceremony, I surprised her with a 162-page book I built with my words and her pictures.

When asked if I'd take her as my lawfully-wedded wife, I shouted as "YES!" at the top of my lungs. Trish agreed enthusiastically and we were pronounced husband and wife.

Our wedding week was an unbelievably fun experience with many, many friends and family. We look forward to celebrating it over and over again as long as we live.

We had a day of rest following the wedding, then drove back to Denver to begin our 'round-the-world honeymoon without phones. We spent a month traveling to Ireland, Italy, Thailand and Fiji. It was a wonderful journey and we greatly enjoyed all the people, places and experiences.

We arrived back in the US at the end of August, just in time to celebrate Jack's 9th birthday.

In September, we got loud at the Broncos Home Opener, and experienced beautiful Colorado fall weather with trips to Estes Park and Aspen. In October, we traveled to Minnesota for a best friend's wedding. We also visited Pennsylvania to spend some time with Trish's parents.

We Bought a Ski Bus in October and celebrated Abbie's birthday in November. Shortly after, we departed on a whirlwind six-country speaking tour in Europe. We visited 14 countries in 2013.

In early December, we flew to Idaho to pickup our new Syncro. We anticipated a few VW Adventures when we bought the bus and haven't been disappointed.

The Syncro drove back to Denver just fine, but started experiencing cooling issues driving around town. We got it fixed and drove to Montana for Christmas. We broke down on Christmas Eve in Bozeman, tried to fix it, but eventually gave up and rented a car. Straightaway Motors replaced the thermostat over the next week and we were able to drive it back to Denver with no issues. It started overheating again a couple days later. We've only recently got it running smoothly, with help from Rocky Mountain Westy. You can read the full story on thesamba.com.

Christmas Vacation was spent at The Raible Homestead, enjoying my parents new retirement cabin and a sweet sledding hill.

We finished the year skiing at Big Mountain, where I learned how to downhill ski in grade school.

2014

My goal for 2014 is singular: finish The Bus. I finally found the restoration shop I wish I would've found years ago. They're very quick and efficient, and send me daily (picture) updates of their progress. With any luck, it'll be done in a couple months (sound familiar?).

Last year, I wanted to slow down and I feel like I did that on our honeymoon. My wife scoffs at that notion. This year, I hope to simply take more time to do things, instead of trying to cram many things into tight timelines.

I plan to spend less time traveling and speaking at conferences and more time at Volkswagen shows. With our 4x4 VW Syncro, we hope to camp, raft and spend quite a bit of time in the Rocky Mountains. We also hope to take the busses to a few art shows to show off Trish's majestic photos.

Professionally, I hope to continue developing HTML5 apps and APIs with JavaScript, CSS, Java and Groovy. I might dive back into Scala and I'm intrigued by Node.js and Spring Boot. Since I won't be doing as many conferences, the technologies I use will likely be driven by client engagements. I expect 2014 to be a big year for HTTP/2.

Last year, and the year before, we watched the Broncos fail miserably in the NFL playoffs. This year, they're in the Super Bowl. With a kick-ass Ski Bus, a Porsche Bus on the way, awesome kids and a great wife - 2014 is destined to be spectacular. I hope the Broncos are too!

Magnificent Mexico

2013-03-05T10:53:53-07:00

On October 30th, 2012, shortly after I'd woke up, I received an email from my old friend Jess (of Jess and Lili's Legendary Wedding). Its subject: "Wanna go to Mexico?"

We are taking a trip to Mexico Feb 16-24 with some friends from here and have one spot that just came open in the house we are all renting together. It's a sweet spot, 1 hour north of Puerto Vallarta. It has seven bedrooms each with own bathroom, a cook, private beach and nice pool, link below. Works out to about $1100 per week per couple.
...
http://www.laspalapas.tv/home.html

As you can imagine, I was immediately enticed by the opportunity. I checked my schedule, verified they had high-speed internet and responded We're IN! a couple hours later.

A couple weeks ago, we embarked on this journey and had a great time. The house was awesome, the company was fantastic and the views were spectacular. Not only that, but the town we stayed in (Chacala) was very authentic. No resorts, hardly any paved roads and nary a tourist in sight.

We didn't take our kids, but a few families did, resulting in 19 people total. Everyone got along swimmingly, the home-cooked meals were wonderful and the weather was beautiful.

For the most part, we didn't do much throughout the week. I had to work, so I spent my days on the computer with an occasional break to play a game of volleyball. I experienced the same issue I did in Maui and Kauai last year, where my MacBook Pro couldn't find my hard drive. Yeah, it's a first-world problem: my laptop tries to stop me from working when I'm on a beach. Luckily, I had a backup (external) hard drive that I could plugin and work from.

We did a whale watching and snorkeling trip on a Catamaran one afternoon. We didn't get any good whale pictures, but we had many sightings.

I only ventured into Chacala once, but found it to have a lovely beach, good music, and tasty restaurants.

Thanks to Jess and everyone else for inviting us to this magnificent place in Mexico. We had a great time, made a lot of new friends and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

For more photos, see my Mexico 2013 Album or Trish's Mexico Trip 2013!

Happy Birthday Jack!

2012-08-28T12:12:46-06:00

Eight years ago today, Jack was born. Today, it's hard to even imagine him as a baby or a toddler. But then again, we all looked quite a bit different back then.

These days, Jack has his own website and prefers to spend his free moments playing with Beyblades or his new Nintendo 3DS. He started 3rd grade this year and has excellent math and reading skills, even though he's the youngest in his class. As he grows older, he's starting to like the same things I do, particularly fishing, skiing and golfing.

Last weekend, we threw a birthday party for Jack at Julie's house. He invited some of his close friends from school and had a Beyblade tournament. Fun was had by all and you couldn't wipe the smile off his face when he went home.

This fall, Jack will be playing lacrosse again and might even pass up his sister in height. He sure is a handsome kid. Happy Birthday Jack!

Related: Jack's 5th, 4th, 3rd and 1st birthdays.

2011 - A Year in Review

2012-01-11T09:45:20-07:00

2010 was an awesome year, but 2011 rocked the house! At the end of last year, I kept my goals simple:

In 2011, I plan on doing two main things: keep rockin' it with Trish and finishing The Bus. Everything else is gravy.

As predicted, it was a spectacular year, but I only accomplished 50% of my goals. That is, Trish and I had a great time skiing (especially in Utah), moving in together, traveling the world and getting engaged in Versailles. I even satisfied some 5-year goals: building a sauna in my basement and getting a ski shack in the mountains.

However, I didn't get much done with The Bus. Or rather, the guys at MotorWorks Restorations didn't drain me for all I'm worth in 2011. We did make good progress with estimating the final cost and obtaining many hard-to-find parts though. I now have a Porsche 911 Engine (1983 3.0L 6 cylinder), a Porsche 901 5 speed transmission, Porsche "Turbo Twist" wheels and a Custom Air Ride Front Beam from Franklin's VW Works. The thing that slowed our progress the most was the custom beam, as it took almost 6 months from order to delivery. When it arrived in September, I decided to put things on hold. I didn't want to get my bus back in the midst of winter and not be able to drive it.

In January, I started working at Overstock.com and flew out to Salt Lake City the first two weeks to ramp up. In setting up my development environment, I discovered some inefficiencies and wrote about how I fixed them in Making Code Generation Smarter with Maven. I also discovered that JRebel slowed my build process down by almost 50% and stopped using it as part of my daily process. Now I simply run in debug mode or use fancy frameworks that allow instant reload.

At the end of the month, I skied Alta for the first time on a blue bird day. That night, I flew back to Denver, had a gorgeous lunch ride in 70°F weather on Friday afternoon, then picked up my lovely girlfriend, Trish, and drove to Crested Butte for a weekend of skiing with James Ward and friends. It was my first time visiting Crested Butte and I can see why people call it Paradise.

As of February 1st, Trish and I both had 17 ski days. As I'm writing this, we're both up to 14 for this season and very proud to say Abbie and Jack each have 10. Both kids are shredding like I've always dreamed they would.

My parents (both retired) came to visit for the month of February and helped me start building a sauna in my basement. This was something I've wanted to do for years, so it was a lot of fun getting things started. While we didn't finish construction, we did get the plumbing/electrical done, stove installed and walls framed. We also had a fun night with Chef Navarro and Friends.

The rest of my posts in February were purely technical. I wrote about how I implemented extensionless URLs with Tapestry, Spring MVC, Struts 2 and JSF. Then I started delving into security-related topics, largely motivated by a new feature I was working on at Overstock. When I wrote about Implementing Ajax Authentication using jQuery, Spring Security and HTTPS, I explained what I was trying to accomplish.

The feature hasn't been released yet, but basically boils down to allowing users to login without leaving a page. For example, if they want to leave a review on a product, they would click a link, be prompted to login, enter their credentials, then continue to leave their review. The login prompt and subsequent review would likely be implemented using a lightbox. While lightboxes are often seen in webapps these days because they look good, it's also possible Lightbox UIs provide a poor user experience.

I was able to get everything working, posted a demo and wrote about upcoming conferences in Las Vegas and Kraków. In that article, I described a new talk I was going to create: Webapp Security: Develop. Penetrate. Protect. Relax. I ended the month with a post on how to fix XSS in JSP 2.

On February 25th, I experienced The Greatest Snow on Earth with thigh-deep powder and face shots on every run.

That night, we saw Hot Buttered Rum and woke up early for 27" of fresh powder at Alta. The picture of Trish free-heeling at Alta is one of my favorites of the year.

In early March, we experienced a suite night at the Avs game, then I kept it technical and upgraded this blog to Apache Roller 5.0, RC4. I upgraded AppFuse to JSF 2, wrote about JSR 303 and web framework support and added search to AppFuse using Compass. When writing about JSF 2, I mentioned replacing Ajax4JSF with RichFaces. 9 months later, it seems like PrimeFaces has more momentum, so I may try that instead.

For St. Patrick's Day, we flew to Vegas for TSSJS and had a blast. Not only did my talks go well, but we had a bunch of friends in town and had much success gambling the nights away.

After delivering my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk, I had a very interesting conversation with James Strachan. He recommended I take a look at CoffeeScript and Jade. A couple months later, when I was thinking of talks for Devoxx, I added these to my list of technologies to learn and submitted a talk about HTML5 with Play Scala, CoffeeScript and Jade.

That Friday, we returned to Denver, got a good night's sleep then headed on a hut trip in Colorado's High Country. The name of the hut was Peter Estin Hut and it was a bit of a hike to get to. My friend, Joe, set my expectations correctly when he warned me it'd be a 5 hour death march. It took us 4 hours, 30 minutes and we skied up 2200 vertical feet of switchbacks.

Trish and I started off April with a bang by moving in together, then embarking on a whirlwind trip of two opening days with a stopover in Kraków. We flew Business Class from Chicago to Munich (releasing AppFuse 2.1 just before departing) and were very impressed with Kraków's Old Town upon arrival.

On that trip, I especially enjoyed meeting Trish's brother for the first time and watching the Red Sox win their first game of the year.

After returning, I realized I lost a lot of data in my Roller 5 upgrade and wrote about what happened and how I recovered it. Then we bid farewell to the 2010-2011 ski season and got ready for mountain bike season.

For next year, I think I'll keep my goal at 30 days. If everything works out as planned, we'll have a place in the mountains this fall and it'll be a bit easier to hit the slopes without sitting in traffic. For now, I'm pumped about the beginning of mountain bike season.

May arrived and Trish and I started looking for a place in the mountains. We found an very cool cabin, but later decided it was too nice and we'd rather have a condo. I finished The Basement Sauna Project and wrote about Java Web Application Security: Java EE 6, Spring Security and Apache Shiro.

On May 21st, we again visited Winter Park and Fraser to look at condos, then drove back to Denver for U2 at Mile High Stadium. I'm not a big fan of U2, but this was quite possibly the best concert I've ever been to. The experience of 70,000+ fans, all screaming, doing the wave, and loving life was epic. We decided that night that we liked one of the condos more than the rest and put in an offer the following week. The kids headed off to Florida for a month with their Mom and we drove to Utah for Desert Rocks and mountain biking in Moab.

I Upgraded to Roller 5.0 in June and showed how to add a Facebook Like button. Next, I transcribed a couple more Java Web Application Security articles: programmatic login APIs and penetrating with Zed Attack Proxy.

The kids returned to us just before the annual Father's Day Camping Trip. We drove to Lake Granby and stayed at Stillwater Campground for the weekend.

From my Father's Day post:

I really enjoyed spending so much time with my family this weekend. The good news is we get to do it again when I meet them at The Cabin in Montana next week. In the meantime, Trish and I are off to Jazoon for a few days of fun in Switzerland.

A few days later, we were in Zurich for the first time, enjoying our accommodations and marveling at Switzerland's excellent transportation system. I experienced an interesting situation while speaking, but quickly forgot when we visited Rhine Falls, celebrated our anniversary at Gruelich and played in the Swiss Alps.

We arrived back in Denver at 6pm on Sunday, June 26th and I flew to Montana at 8am the next morning. I worked from The Cabin that week and wrote a book review for Agile Hiring.

I think Sean [Landis] does a great job in showing how you can apply agile principles (people over process, tracking tools, failing fast, continuous improvement, constant feedback) to improve your hiring process. As a person that interviews often, I think it also gives great insights into how companies interview and what they're looking for. I've often thought that being honest about my skills and what I'm looking for is a good tactic and this book seems to confirm that.

That weekend, it was the "90s Reunion" for the Seeley Swan High School, which I attended my freshman and sophomore year of high school. There were several highlights of the trip, but one of my favorites was our float in the Swan Valley Parade. Abbie came up with the idea (Happy Birthday America) and we decorated an old trailer with streamers, balloons and a birthday cake to celebrate. Abbie made up a song and sang it throughout the entire parade (with a portable microphone and amp).

I went swimming with my iPhone 4 that Sunday and Trish and her Dad showed up a few hours later. On the 4th, we had a blast celebrating the holiday with mine and my parents' old friends. The next day, we adventured to Glacier National Park, where Trish shot an awesome sunrise at Lake McDonald. She also captured a beautiful picture of The Cabin at sunset that week.

In between vacationing in Montana and writing about it, I wrote some technical posts:

We returned to Denver in mid-July and shipped the kids off to Florida just before my annual Birthday Golf Debacle. We teed off at Wellshire Golf Course and had one of the most well-behaved rounds in a few years. The next weekend, we closed on our "Ski Shack" in Fraser and I penned Another Dream Realized: Mountain Views. Trish's October Sunset photo is one of my favorite glimpses of our view.

Next, I blogged about How do you get started in programming? and we headed to the airport a few hours later for a whirlwind trip from Oregon to Cape Cod. That was a wonderful trip and it took me almost a month to write about it. We flew into Portland and spent the weekend hiking in Silver Falls and drinking good beer at the Oregon Brewers Festival and Edgefield. We stayed with my good friends Clint and Autumn (married in Costa Rica in 2008), who had their first child only a few weeks after our visit (August 26th).

We had an awful early flight out of Portland to Boston that Sunday. On Monday afternoon, we picked up Abbie and Jack from the Boston airport. They flew up from West Palm Beach on their first unaccompanied minors flight. We drove them to Cape Cod and settled into Trish's parents house near the water. The rest of the week, we had a blast with our friends Chris and Julie and the entire McGinity clan.

We spent the rest of August going to concerts at Red Rocks, beer festivals in Winter Park, mountain biking, hiking, taking the kids to the Ski Shack and playing with Crazy Sagan. In my only August post, I talked a lot about the Broncos, Hawaii, Devoxx and leaving Overstock.

That pretty much catches you up-to-date with the goings on in my life. As you can tell, it's been a great summer so far. I'm really looking forward to the fall too. Broncos season, a trip to Hawaii, learning new technologies, talking about them at Devoxx and a new gig.
...
Tomorrow is Jack's birthday. I gotta run ... it's time to go buy a bike, play a little golf, hit the pool and go to the BBQ before tonight's CD Release Party.

We watched proudly as Jack turned 7 the next day and loved his excitement when he got his first mountain bike.

September started with mountain breezes and fishing at Lake Granby. Lots of friends, family and delicious food make for a heckuva 3-day weekend. Jack was the only one to catch a fish and you couldn't wipe the smile off his face for the rest of the day.

I described my Digital Diet and wrote my first article related to my Devoxx talk: Integrating Scalate and Jade with Play 1.2.3. The 2nd weekend in September, we enjoyed a September Sports Weekend, going to two Rockies games and the Monday night Broncos Opener before heading to Kauai. While the Broncos didn't win that game, Trish's shot of Brett, Joe and I sums up many-a-game this season.

As expected, Kauai blew our minds. We saw several spectacular sunsets, did some Stand Up Paddling (it's harder than it looks), played golf, took a doorless helicopter ride and kayaked along the Na Pali coast.

We never got bored of the view from our room.

Upon our return, I tried to make CoffeeScript work with Scalate and integrated HTML5 Boilerplate with Play.

October was a quiet month on this blog. I only wrote two articles, one about increasing my developer happiness and another about developing with HTML5, CoffeeScript and Twitter's Bootstrap. Watching the Broncos in October was painful at first, buy many rejoiced when Tebow started against Miami (10/23) and we had the amazing comeback to win. We went to the next game against the Lions and were quickly shown they had a long ways to go. We dressed up as the Scary Family for Halloween and had a ball.

I made up for October's lack of writing by writing 9 articles in November. I started with complaints about Play Scala's Anorm and PostgreSQL, then celebrated Abbie's 9th Birthday with a Magic Show.

The next week, I wrote about my new MacBook Pro and iMac and more Scalate goodness for Play. At this point, I was scrambling to finish up my Play More! application for Devoxx and worked a lot of late nights. That weekend, I used PhoneGap to turn my webapp into a native app and finished everything in the nick of time. We flew to Paris that Monday, took the train to Antwerp on Tuesday and settled in for a memorable week of interesting talks.

That Saturday, we took the train back to Paris and checked into our hotel for a few days of romance. I proposed to Trish at Versailles on Sunday at sunset and we rolled around in our joy for a few days before we told any of our friends.

We flew back to the US the Wednesday before Christmas and spent the weekend in Boston with Trish's family. For full details of that trip, see Our Engaging Trip to Paris and Antwerp.

To end the year, I kept it light and only spun up one blog post in December: What have I been working on at Taleo? A week after writing that post, we moved to the Ski Shack for 3 weeks and enjoyed a wonderful holiday break with many visitors.

Yes, 2011 was a spectacular year. We traveled to four different countries, did a lot of camping and mountain biking and accomplished 2/3 of my 5 year goals (basement sauna and mountain views). I wrote a lot of technical blog posts in the 2nd half of the year; most inspired my extracurricular activities. I plan to continue that this year as I learn more about HTML5, Play Framework, Scala and CoffeeScript. At the end of last year's Year in Review, I wrote:

In 2011, I plan on doing two main things: keep rockin' it with Trish and finishing The Bus.

I think I can safely say I kept it rockin' with Trish - we're living together, engaged and still amazed we found one another. As for The Bus, I think MotorWorks Restorations and I are in a good position to make a final push and finish the sucker. My hope is to have it done by May so I can start driving it and taking it to VW Shows. In the meantime, Trish has started working on McGinity Photo full-time and loving it. We have trips planned to Stockholm (for Jfokus), Madrid (for Spring I/O) and Paris (for Devoxx Paris).

Last weekend, we witnessed one of the greatest playoff games ever when the Broncos beat the Steelers. I think the picture of Trish celebrating the final touchdown pretty much sums up 2011.

I look forward to all the skiing, celebrating, camping, traveling and bus rides in 2012. It's gonna be a fantastic year.

Our Engaging Trip to Paris and Antwerp

2011-12-04T16:02:34-07:00

If you're a technologist, you should attend the Devoxx conference at least once in your life. It's one of the finest conferences on the planet. If you're a fan of Belgian beer, you owe it to yourself to visit Belgium to savor a taste. If you're a romantic, Paris is a recommended destination. Since I'm a technologist, love Belgian beer and consider myself a romantic, I went for the trifecta a couple weeks ago on what's becoming an annual trek to Devoxx. When Trish and I traveled to Devoxx last year, we flew to Amsterdam and took the train to Antwerp. This year, we decided to fly to Paris and take the train.

Much like last year, we witnessed another Broncos over Chiefs victory the Sunday before we left. That night, I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning finishing my Devoxx presentation. We left Denver around noon and met up with James Ward at the Red Carpet Club in Chicago. While sipping cocktails and catching up, I wrote a blog post about how PhoneGap rescued me a couple days earlier.

We slept soundly on the flight over, thanks to little sleep the night before. After arriving in Paris, we took the train to the the Notre Dame de Paris and had some breakfast nearby.

We were planning on exploring throughout the day, but quickly realized that hauling our bags around was no fun and headed to Gare du Nord to catch a Thalys train to Brussels. We gasped at the cost of two first-class tickets, but soon forgot when we settled into our seats with free wi-fi, Belgian beers and power. After talking a local train to Antwerp, we finished our 21-hour journey by checking into the Hilton Antwerp in the city center. We were warmly welcomed with excellent Belgian beers on ice in our room and celebrated with a delicious meal at De Godevaart.

On Wednesday, I headed to Devoxx and attended a couple of great talks: Play 2.0, A web framework for a new era and PhoneGap for Hybrid App Development. As you can imagine, both talks were extremely interesting for me since I'd been using Play for several months and was recently saved by PhoneGap. Play 2.0 Beta was announced just before the Play talk and my blog post about the Play 2.0 session was picked up by Hacker News and the hits rolled in.

That afternoon, I headed back to my hotel with James Ward and met up with Trish for a couple beers. We spent a few hours in our hotel lobby updating presentations, editing videos, editing photos and getting ready for our talks on Thursday. That evening, we enjoyed a scrumptious dinner in the dungeon-like Pelgrom and conversations with Kevin Nilson, Sadek Drobi, Guillaume Bort and David Geary. I was pleased to find out from Sadek and Guillaume that Play 2.0 will include many fast website best practices, including concatenation, minification and gzipping of static assets. We retired early to get a good night's sleep before my talk on Thursday.

On Thursday, both Trish and I journeyed to Devoxx to watch James Ward talk about how to deploy Java, Play Framework, and Scala apps on Heroku. My talk was an hour later and I gulped as I stood up front and watched the (very large) auditorium fill up with Devoxxians. Since I'd never rehearsed my talk or timed it, I was a bit nervous. Luckily, it ended up being one of my best-timed performances and there was even time for Q and A at the end. You can imagine the smile on my face as AC/DC's Thunderstruck blasted through the speakers during my video demo. After my talk finished, it was great to see all the positive feedback on Twitter and enjoy an "Atlas Beer" while watching Java Posse Live.

That evening, we had dinner with the Java Posse crew and James Ward before heading to the Devoxx Party @ Noxx.

Yes, we had an awesome time at Devoxx. I was pleased with the positive response from my talk and learned a bunch from the few talks I attended. Thanks to Stephan for inviting me and organizing one of the best conferences I've ever attended. For our last night in Antwerp, we dined at Huis De Colvenier and especially enjoyed our aperitif in the 19th-century wine cellar.

Paris and Beyond
This brings us to my favorite part of this story. I was pretty stressed leading up to our departure to Devoxx because I had so many deadlines. I had a deadline with my current client to finish up some features before I left, I had to finish my Devoxx presentation (and app developed for the talk) and I had a secret deadline to finish my proposal to Trish. That's right, I was planning on proposing marriage to my dream girl. I mean, we were going to the diamond capital of the world (Antwerp) and one of Earth's most romantic cities (Paris). It seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask her to marry me. We did some ring shopping before we left Denver, but she didn't realize I had purchased one before we left.

We're both big music fans, so I decided months earlier that I would propose with lines from songs we both liked. Of course, I waited until the last minute to compose my prose, but I did finish it before we left for Europe. However, with all the Devoxx shenanigans, I didn't have time to memorize my proposal. Instead, I recorded it using the "Voice Memos" on my iPhone. I did this in the wee hours of the morning on Friday, while I was watching the Broncos game on the internet.

Saturday afternoon, we traveled to Paris via Thalys and checked into our hotel around sunset. When we stepped outside an hour later, I remember saying to Trish, "the Eiffel Tower looks pretty small, I thought it'd be bigger". After walking for a bit, it turned from small to big to huge. My plan that night was to propose on the tower. As Trish snapped pictures along our walk, I was taking out the piece of paper I had the proposal printed on and trying to memorize it. As you can imagine, I had to to this stealthily and by the time we reached the Eiffel Tower, I had enough memorized to propose. We arrived around midnight and were disappointed to find it was closed. This terminated my proposal plans for that night, but we still enjoyed the sparkling tower lights and took several pictures.

The next day, Sunday, we traveled to the Château de Versailles. This was a recommendation from my good friend Eric, who had recently traveled to Paris with his wife, Heather. In fact, I owe a lot to Eric. He recommended we extend our trip to Paris (he'd traveled there disgruntled about not doing a beach vacation, then fell in love with the city) and suggested a number of great locations to visit. He also recommended proposing in the Gardens of Versailles, a very romantic location according to him. I had this in the back of my mind as we did an audio tour through the Palace of Versailles. As we ventured out into the Orangerie, I started hatching a plan to get Trish down to the gardens and try to rent bikes. We both love biking and the outdoors, so I figured it'd be a nice way to spend our memorable moment. As we strolled closer and I didn't see bikes to rent, I spotted the Grand Canal and noticed they had row boats.

When we first arrived at the boat dock, there was a long line, but it magically disappeared moments later. We stepped into the boat, rowed to the center of the canal and paused for a bit to take in the beautiful day and the setting sun. Trish asked me to row to a better spot so she could photograph the sunset, but instead I said "here, listen to this" and handed her my headphones. I pressed play and watched her face light up as she heard my voice in her ears. 90 seconds later, I asked "Trish McGinity, will you marry me?" She responded with, "Of course!"

The rest of our trip in Paris was quite romantic and fun. We decided to wait until we got back to The States before telling anyone we were engaged. This meant we had three days of just us, Paris and some of the most beautiful art in the world. We explored the Louvre for 5-hours on Monday, marveling at the low-rider on display near the entrance and all the famous paintings.

We imbibed in $40 martinis at The Hemingway Bar and scarfed down some delicious pizza at Gambino's. We had breakfast at Angelina's, toured La Sainte-Chapelle, hiked up Arc de Triomphe and wandered through the shopping districts Champs-Élysées and Faubourg St-Honoré. Yes, we fell in love with Paris and can't wait to return for Devoxx France in April.

We departed Paris on the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving and arrived in Boston that evening. We spent the next three days with Trish's family and our good friends, Chris, Julie, Lili and Wes. We did a 5K Turkey Trot on Thursday morning, followed by football watching and eating succulent turkey while basking in everyone's joy for us. We smiled, giggled, laughed, guffawed, smiled some more and had an all-around great time the rest of the weekend.

We returned home on Sunday evening, departing Boston's Logan airport only minutes after the Broncos kicked a field goal in overtime to beat the Chargers. Our flight was delayed just long enough (3 hours) that we got to watch almost the whole game. It was the perfect ending to a phenomenal trip.

To see more pictures from this adventure, see Trish's fantastic photos and mine on Flickr.

Happy 9th Birthday Abbie!

2011-11-05T18:05:58-06:00

Today we celebrated Abbie's 9th Birthday. It's hard to believe how grown up she is, but easy to love her. We had a blast celebrating with lots of her classmates and even had a magician thanks to a hookup from Greg Ostravich. Julie got her a super cute outfit for the party and smiles were shared throughout the afternoon.

Last year on Abbie's birthday is when Trish met Abbie and Jack for the first time. It's been a year and we're all still having a blast and living life to its fullest. We'll be celebrating our Kids met Trish Anniversary at the DU Hockey game tonight. A great day celebrating with great people ... I couldn't be happier.

To see Abbie on her birthday through the years, checkout my past Happy Birthday posts: #1, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7 and #8.

Mahalo Kauai

2011-09-26T10:19:54-06:00

I've heard great things about Hawaii for most of my life. My Dad was stationed at Barbers Point when he was in the Navy. His sister, my Aunt Mary, was born there. My sister and I sent my parents to Hawaii for their 30th Wedding Anniversary. You can imagine my excitement when Trish sent me an email on January 25th:

It's only 40,000 miles for both of us to fly to Kauai!! I picked the week after Labor Day just for fun :)

My response:

WAHOOOOOO! BOOK IT!!

She booked it that night. For $10.

We left for Kuaui the morning after the disappointing Broncos home opener and a fun sports weekend with Abbie and Jack. Our trip started out great, sneaking into the Red Carpet Club for free at LAX and getting a slew of free drinks from a super-cool flight attendant (Anthony) on our flight from LAX to Kauai.

After landing and marveling at the open-air airport, we picked up our rental Jeep and drove to the north side of the island. A friend recommended we stay at the St. Regis Princeville Resort and we were very impressed when we checked into our room overlooking Hanalei Bay.

The next morning, we vowed to do nothing but relax by the pool. We enjoyed a scrumptious breakfast at the Mekana Terrace, complete with Bloody Mary's. We had to have Bloody's since the St. Regis in NYC claims to have invented them. We spent the rest of the day napping, swimming, sunbathing, snorkeling and sipping on Mai Tai's.

After enjoying a beautiful sunset ...

... we visited the concierge to book some activities for the rest of our trip. We wanted to take things up a notch and enjoy all the cool stuff Kuai had to offer. So we arranged for Stand Up Paddling and the Mailani Dinner Shown on Thursday, golf on Friday, a doorless helicopter ride on Saturday and a kayak trip along the Na Pali coast on Sunday.

We woke up Thursday refreshed and ready to go. Our view out the window was exceptional.

After a delicious room service breakfast in our room, we wandered down to the beach to meet our SUP guide. He warned us that girls were generally better than guys at SUP and we proceeded to prove him correct. Trish never got her hair wet and I had to abandon ship several times.

That afternoon, we headed to the The Kalalau Trail for a hike. Our SUP guide recommended it and said it was "so easy, your grandma could do it". His Grandma must be a lot younger than most, because the trail was not easy, but we certainly enjoyed the challenge.

We were rewarded with some spectular views at Kalalau Beach.

We made it back to the hotel just in time for the dinner show and another marvelous Hanalei sunset.

At the dinner show, we sat with honeymooners from Houston that worked at NASA. Since they both spoke Russian, we had fun discussing Russia, our trips there and how we learned the language. The dinner show was great and they featured quite a few of the top Hula dancers in Hawaii.

The next morning, we grabbed Huevos Rancheros in Princeville and headed to the Makai Golf Club for a one-of-a-kind experience. Not only did they let us bring our full-stocked cooler on the course, but they rented us some fantastic Callaway clubs. We golfed for hours with no one in front, and no one trailing behind.

Trish's photo of the Bougainvillia on the back nine is one of my favorites.

We enjoyed some Blue Hawaii's at the St. Regis afterward, in a cabana that's normally reserved for $1000/day. We snuck in and even got the honeymooner's discount from a hometown waiter.

On Saturday, I booked a tour at the Ahonui Botanical Gardens. The gardens where amazing, built by Bill and Lucinda Robertson. They converted a jungle of 8 acres into an elaborate garden with trees, flowers and plants from around the world. Since you can grow almost anything on The Garden Isle, they planted many exotic fruit trees that we had the pleasure of snacking on throughout our 3-hour tour. About halfway through, Lucinda treated us to an adventure in making and tasting delicious chocolates.

We rushed from the garden tour to the helicopter ride on the other side of the island. The concierge had booked us with Jack Harter Helicopters, because they were the only ones that flew without doors (for better pictures). As soon as we lifted off, I knew it was going to be an experience of a lifetime. We flew over the Waimea Canyon, along the Na Pali Coast, over Hanalei Bay and back into the mountains to the wettest place on earth. It felt like an amusement park ride combined with an IMAX movie. Our pilot was a Hawaii native that knew the whole island and gave us an excellent tour of its features. I cannot recommend this tour enough if you're ever in Kauai.

The next morning, we had to get up early for our kayak trip. We had a wakeup call at 4:30, breakfast via room service arrived at 5 and we were packed and checked out of the hotel at 5:30. We arrived at Na Pali Kayak at 6 and quickly realized we had our work cut out for us. Both Trish and I expected the kayak trip to be like paddling across a lake and didn't know we were in for the Everest of kayaking - a 17-mile journey that would take most of the day.

We borrowed some sea-sickness medication, bought some water from our hosts and got ready for a good challenge. Unfortunately, we couldn't take Trish's camera, and the waterproof camera she bought took mediocre pictures. However, we did get to see two schools of dolphins (one even jumped into the air for us) and a couple turtles along the way. Having to paddle in unison turned out to be great couples therapy too.

We enjoyed lunch on a beach along the coast around 1, took a nap and hopped back in the boats for the last 5 miles. We pulled out around 4 and were on the road by 5 for the 2.5 hour drive back to Hanalei Bay. It was country dark when we arrived. We hopped in the Jeep and drove an hour back across the island to stay at the Sheraton Kauai (the St. Regis was full) for our last night.

At the Sheraton, we had one of their best rooms and enjoyed awesome views and a final relaxing day before heading home.

The Tunnel of Trees on the way to the airport was one last reminder of how beautiful Kauai is.

Mahalo Kauai. You are one of the most breathtaking places I have ever been too. Your views, your waves, your rainbows - all spectacular. Trish and I will be back, you've made an impression on us that will last forever.

If you'd like to see many of the places we visited in a movie, check out Soul Surfer. It takes place in Hanalei Bay and we recognized many of the locations while watching it. For more pictures, see my Shareholders Meeting in Kauai or Trish's magnificent photos.

Oregon, Cape Cod and Fun in Winter Park

2011-08-27T13:50:52-06:00

I'm proud to say it's been almost a month since my last blog entry. This can only mean one thing → I've been having too much fun to blog. The good news is I finally found time to write about our recent adventures, so grab yourself a tasty beverage and read on.

Within hours of my last blog post, Trish and I hopped on a plane to visit my good friends, Clint and Autumn, in Oregon. We flew into Portland and spent the weekend hiking in Silver Falls and drinking good beer at the Oregon Brewers Festival and Edgefield. Edgefield is one my favorite places on Earth, encapsulating a farm/resort environment with 27 different features. The features range from a soaking pool to a winery to a pool hall to scotch tasting in a shack next to a garden.

The weekend was especially fun since Autumn was pregnant and it was two weeks before the due date of their first child. Broderick Jordan Wilburn Foster was born yesterday and I hear the whole family is doing well.

Trish and I spent the night at Edgefield on Saturday and caught an early flight from Portland to Boston the next morning. Her brother (also named Matt) lives near Boston and we drove our rental Volvo convertible (to fit in with the New Englanders) to his house Sunday night. On the Hertz Bus from the airport met Nigel Parry, a professional photographer. Not just anybody, but someone that's shot pictures of some very famous people. Trish is also a photographer, so they had a long conversation and it inspired her to resign from her sales job last week. Actually, it wasn't that meeting, she's been wanting to be a famous photographer since she was in high school. Now that dream shall happen. She's awesome.

On Monday afternoon, we picked up Abbie and Jack from the Boston airport. They flew up from West Palm Beach on their first unaccompanied minors flight. We drove them to Cape Cod and settled into Trish's parents house near the water. The rest of the week, we had a blast with our friends Chris and Julie and the entire McGinity clan. We boated, grilled, flew down the water slides, played miniature golf and toured Martha's Vineyard. We had a pool party, played some pool and sang our hearts out at karaoke. Trish's brother's kids are the same age as mine, so you couldn't wipe the smiles off our kids' faces, especially when we had the tunes cranked with the top down on the convertible.

For more pictures of this super-fun trip, see Summer Fun in Oregon and Cape Cod part 1 and 2.

After returning from Boston, we had a week without kids and lived it to the fullest with a John Butler Trio concert at Red Rocks and the Winter Park Beer Festival. Trish's friend Joanna and my good friend, "The Professor" joined us for a weekend of mountain biking and sweet mountain views. We even got to hang out with James Ward and his wife Jenny at the beer festival. Sunday, we hiked up the beautiful Columbine Lake Trail. Trish's dog, Sagan (named after Carl) chased sticks and was his crazy self as usual.

We drove back Monday morning to be there for the kids first day of school. They sure start early these days don't they?

I rode my bike 168 miles to and from work throughout the following week. The next weekend, we took the kids up to the Ski Shack for their first time. I hired a guy to make queen-size bunk beds for them, so they had a blast in their new roomy beds. On Saturday, we had a garage sale since the previous owners left a bunch of beds and couches and we didn't need all that furniture. The turnout was great and we got to hang out with Jodi and James, Suzie, and The Lamonts. All of these folks are old friends that just happened to be in the mountains for the weekend. One of Trish's best friends, Chris, has a place less than a mile from us and we had a blast with her on Saturday night. Thanks for the fun memories Chris!

On Sunday, we took the kids the Winter Park Base Area where they have Disneyland in the Mountains as I like to call it. An alpine slide, miniature golf, a maze, a climbing wall and a Chili Cook-Off to keep Daddy happy. We met our good friend Suzie there and had a lot of fun with Chris, Brice and their crazy kids. Enjoying an Avery White Rascal at the Cheeky Monk's happy hour was the perfect way to end the day.

Sunday night, we were graced with the presence of a beautiful sunset.

I've decided to leave Overstock because I'm a die-hard Broncos fan and I can't work for a company that supports the Raiders during football season. There's a good chance I'll be back after the season, just in time for The Greatest Snow on Earth.

This weekend, my parents are meeting us in Winter Park for Labor Day weekend. We plan on fishing, hiking, smiling and enjoying each other's company a whole lot. Tomorrow is Jack's birthday. I gotta run ... it's time to go buy a bike, play a little golf, hit the pool and go to the BBQ before tonight's CD Release Party.

A Sweet Trip to Switzerland for Jazoon 2011

2011-06-28T12:52:33-06:00

I've always enjoyed speaking at conferences, especially those in exotic locations. Earlier this year, I saw Jazoon's call for papers and thought, "I've never been to Switzerland, sounds fun!" I proceeded to submit a talk, got accepted and booked a trip with my girlfriend, Trish. We left Denver last Tuesday and arrived in Zürich on Wednesday around noon. After settling into our awesome accommodations at Hotel Opera, we journeyed to the conference location, which was held at a movie theater.

We were quickly impressed when we learned the conference had reserved a theater for an evening showing of The Hangover 2. We grabbed some drinks from the bar and settled in for a couple hours of giggling and barely staying awake from jetlag.

Zürich quickly made an impression on us the first day. We experienced its excellent transportation system (trains, trams, buses and boats) and saw a number of fancy cars (a Bently, a Lamborghini and a Ferrari). Prices were high, but the food was excellent.

On Thursday, we woke up and Trish realized she'd left her expensive Nikon lenses on our flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam. This realization hit her hard and she scrambled to try and find them by contacting the airlines. I rushed off to the conference to catch Frank Kim's What Every Developer Should Know About Application Security. This was a great session and I especially enjoyed that he selected Apache Roller as the application to hack. After that, I attended Ed Burns' Hyperproductive JSF and published my notes.

Then I met Trish for lunch at the conference and we went to the room for my talk. We had some technical difficulties to start (my brand-new Mini-DVI connector was bad) and I started about 10 minutes late. During this mad scramble to fix things, I started having some stomach issues, but ignored them thinking I could make it through my 50 minute talk. As I was doing demos and sweating profusely, I realized I couldn't make it and ran out of the room with 10 minutes left. The whole experience shook me up a bit. It was definitely not my best performance, but it could've been a lot worse.

Friday, we tried to sleep off our jet lag and woke up in the early afternoon. Trish had three places she wanted to visit and we managed to see them all in the same day. We climbed the tower at Grossmünster, rode the train to Rhine Falls and celebrated our anniversary at Gruelich, the highest-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor. We arrived at Guelich around 10pm and were very happy when they agreed to serve us. We did the 4-course meal and had the Sommelier choose our wines. It wasn't cheap, but definitely worth the experience.

After dinner, we took the 8 Tram back to our hotel. However, it somehow turned into the 9 and we ended up on the opposite side of the lake. This turned out to be a nice diversion as we had a nice walk around the lake with some nice swans and lights on the water.

Saturday, we woke up early for a big day of travel to the Swiss Alps. We enjoyed a scrumptious breakfast at the hotel and headed for the central train station. My good friend, Fernand, recommended we visit Grindelwald, while one of Trish's best friends thought we'd love the quaintness of Gimmelwald. We gulped at the price (500 USD) of the train ticket to both locations, but were impressed that you could buy all the tickets we needed (including the bus and trolley ride) at one place. We both quickly forgot the cost as we passed through the beautiful town of Interlaken and arrived in Grindelwald. An hour later we were hiking through Gletscherschlucht (Glacier Gorge) and marveling at the craftsmanship of the trail.

After enjoying a beer on a patio with a view, we boarded the train for Gimmelwald. A transfer, bus ride and cable car ride later, we were standing in the picturesque town, marveling that it had a lower elevation than Denver and perplexed that everyone seemed to be American. We strolled around, took a number of cool photos and had a scrumptious dinner at the Pension Gimmelwald.

On our train ride home, we missed our connection in Interlaken. This was no surprise as we regularly encountered very short layovers between trains. The Swiss are incredibly efficient and our brief stop in a store (that had a line at the cashier) was enough to miss the next train. The hour layover turned into a nice opportunity to stroll around town and snap a few last pictures. I especially like the sunset below, taken around 9:30 at night.

Trish and I both were super-impressed with Zürich, the friendliness of the Swiss and especially the Swiss Alps. Yes, it was definitely expensive, but everything was top notch and beautiful. There's a very good chance we'll visit again. Thanks to the Jazoon Organizers for having us and providing us the opportunity to explore their gorgeous country.

Two Opening Days with a Stopover in Kraków

2011-04-14T09:40:47-06:00

Opening Day is a special event in Denver. The night before, it feels like the whole city is alive in anticipation of the big event. On Opening Day, it's typically a gorgeous spring day and serves as a great kickoff to baseball season. This year, we decided to take things up a notch and hit two opening days instead of one. The dates just happened to line up so we could go to the Rockies Home Opener on April 1st, fly to Kraków for the 33rd Degree Conference and make it back to Boston for the Red Sox Home Opener. Since Trish's brother lives near Boston, and I have good friends there, it sounded like the perfect vacation. To make a crazy vacation schedule even crazier, Trish and I moved in together the day before it all started. With moving and trying to finish my basement sauna before we left, we've definitely had a hectic few weeks.

After attending the Rockies Home Opener and having a great time with friends, we got to bed early and woke up on Saturday for our flight to Kraków. It was a 2 o'clock flight, so we got lots of sleep and then proceeded to thoroughly enjoy our flight when we upgraded to Business Class from Chicago to Munich. Business Class is the way to travel internationally. We arrived just after noon on Sunday and spent the afternoon exploring Kraków's Old Town and trying to stay awake. The weather was beautiful and it seemed like it might've been the warmest day of the year.

On Monday, we spent more time in the center of Kraków, wandering through the Main Market Square, Wawel Castle and the very cool Dragon's Den. We had lunch outside, again enjoying the great weather and some local beers. We were surprised to find that kamikaze shots are served in groups of four, rather than just one like it's done in the US. That evening, we enjoyed an excellent Italian dinner at Aqua e Wino.

On Tuesday, we headed to Aushwitz. This was a very sobering experience, but I'm glad we did it. It made me wonder if this type of thing could happen again, only to realize that it has. That evening, we sipped on martinis at the Metropolitan.

On Wednesday, I delivered my talk on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks. You can download the PDF or view the presentation on Slideshare if you're interested. The conference itself had a spectacular schedule and speaker lineup, so I was a little disappointed I didn't attend any sessions. We did make it to the ZeroTurnaround Party that night and had a lot of fun talking to Grzegorz, Martijn and Anton.

We woke up Thursday and headed to the airport for our flight back to the US. We landed in Boston at 6:30 pm and headed to my friend Chris's house in Concord. You might remember Chris from my first game at Fenway Park. Friday, we joined other friends, hopped on the train and headed to Yawkey Way for a beer before the game. Our seats were in the bleachers, but we had a fantastic time watching the Red Sox win their first game of the year.

We went to another game on Saturday with Trish's brother and a friend of his. We then proceeded to spend a relaxing Lazy Sunday with his family before flying back Monday morning.

Thanks to all our friends who participated in the opening day festivities as well as to Grzegorz Duda for inviting me to speak at 33rd Degree. We had a blast!

If you'd like to see more pictures from this adventure, please see Two Opening Days with a Stopover in Kraków on Flickr.

17" MacBook Pro Stolen from Living Room

2010-02-03T09:45:52-07:00

Almost 3 years ago, I bought a 17" MacBook Pro. This laptop served me well for several years, mostly as a home computer. A few months after I bought it, I started working at LinkedIn and got a brand new laptop as part of my first day on the job. After working with LinkedIn's 15" for almost 2 years, I grew to love the form factor and purchased another one almost a year ago. I found the 17" was too big for planes and the 15" fits me perfectly.

Fast forward to last night.

I attended the first half of the Ignite talks at DOSUG and left around 7. When I arrived home, I suspected something might be out of whack when my front door was unlocked. Julie had come over to pick up Abbie's dance shoes around 6, so I figured she must've forgot to lock the door on her way out. When I got inside and saw my coat closet open, I justified it by thinking she grabbed one of the kids coats out of the closet and forgot to close the door. When I walked into my living room and saw my space heater's remote in the middle of the floor, busted open with batteries out, it clicked that a stranger was in my house. The first thing that jumped into my head was "Where's my laptop?" As I looked at the bare mini-desk in my living room, I realized it had been stolen.

I called Julie and asked her if she left the front door open. She said no, but when she arrived at my house (and came through the back), the garage's light was on and my back door was wide open. I asked her if she saw the busted remote on the floor or if the closet door was open. She said no. Putting all the pieces together, it appears that the burglar was actually hiding in my closet when Julie came into my house. Naturally, she's a little a freaked out by this, but she also saved the day by scaring off perpetrator before they took anything else.

This isn't a new trend for me and this incident is mostly my fault. I left my backdoor unlocked. Two years ago, my truck's stereo was stolen and there's a good chance I left the doors unlocked (and didn't turn on the alarm). Last year, my bike was stolen and the lock was still there, indicating I missed the frame when locking it up. So getting robbed in the first part of every year seems somewhat par for the course.

With my truck's stereo, it worked out well because the rig needed a new stereo. My bike last year? There wasn't any silver lining to that incident, so I made myself earn a new one. With this laptop incident, there is a silver lining in that I've been thinking about getting a 27" iMac for a home computer. Other options include a Mac Pro for my office (and use my laptop for traveling/home use) or a Mac Mini for home and hook it up to my TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

The home iMac seems like the best option, but I'd also be interested to hear what others recommend. Of course, I'll be keeping my doors locked from now on.

Happy Birthday Jack!

2009-08-28T15:12:45-06:00

Five years ago today, Jack was born. I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it feels like it's been ages since he was a baby.

We were renting the house next door (while ours was being remodeled), I was just finishing up a contract with Open Logic (when it was just Rod and Eric) and Julie's contractions had begun. I finished my last hours with perfect timing (around 4:00). Julie was sitting at the kitchen table negotiating with a guy about some house-related stuff (our General Contractor had died and Julie took over 8 months pregnant). She told the guy she "had to go" because she was in labor and off to the hospital we went. The good news is it was only a few blocks away, so we made it there in short order. Our friend Tonya drove us.

Miraculously, Julie was able to "hold Jack in" until her sister flew in from San Diego. He was born just after midnight.

A few days later, my good friend Ryan called me out of the blue (hadn't talk to the guy in years). He asked me what I was up to and I told him I was a father for the 2nd time and just had a baby boy at Porter Hospital. He said, "No way - I just had a baby girl 2 days ago!" Turns out, his daughter Sophie was born 2 days after Jack, only a couple doors down. We'd left the hospital only a few hours before they arrived.

This weekend will be filled with multiple birthday parties, happy kids, and lots of good memories. I love this time of year.

Happy birthday Jack!

My Summer Vacation in Montana

2009-08-01T11:38:40-06:00

As an adult, I've often reflected upon my childhood and one of my favorite times of the year: Summer Vacation. The feeling that fills your mind and body on that last hour of school before summer break is simply awesome. I don't know when I began longing for that feeling again, but I'm pleased to say I enjoyed it again this year. I took an entire month off from "working" and enjoyed a proper summer vacation at my family's cabin in Montana.

My plan to take a month off began formulating years ago when we'd drive to the cabin for the 4th and only spend a few days before driving back. The trip was never long enough.

I started talking about spending all of July at The Cabin a couple years ago, but never committed to it. My opportunity finally came last December when Julie asked me if she could take the kids to Florida for 3 weeks for Christmas. I quickly realized that, as a kid, 3 weeks in Florida was an awesome opportunity and agreed to give up my time with them. However, I also realized I could get some negotiating power from the agreement and said "only if I can take them to the cabin for 3 weeks next summer".

For regular readers, you know the rest of the story. My Dad flew to Denver for Father's Day Weekend, stayed the following week and then we embarked on our journey to Montana on Monday, June 29th. The first week was great and we had tons of fun during the rest of July. Here's a list of some highlights:

Running a 5K while Abbie and Jack ran the 1 mile "fun run" with my Mom. It was Abbie's first race and she got 1st place with a time of 11:05.
Hiking to Holland Falls.
Picking Huckleberries.
Greeting my sister after she rode her motorcycle for 13 hours in the rain.
Spending my birthday at Big Sky Waterslides, something I used to do every year for my birthday.
Golfing with my family in Columbia Falls.
Building a set of bunkbeds for the kids.
Rides on "Rocket" (4 wheeler) with the kids, especially when Jack would say "go as fast as Rocket can go".
Golfing with my good friend Owen in Seeley Lake.
Prepping and pouring the floor on the New Cabin.
Fishing with my Dad in "Joe's Jungle" and installing a new window in the cabin afterward.
Teaching Abbie and Jack how to shoot a gun (a .22 pistol) for the first time.
Getting my next gig.
Traveling to Idaho for Clint and Autumn's Wedding Reception (they got married last December in Costa Rica).
Seeing Abbie get all googly-eyed over an older boy in Idaho.
Staying up to watch the sunrise in Idaho.
Milling D Logs for the kids' Treehouse.
Making it from The Cabin to Denver in 13 hours with only one speeding ticket.

More than anything, it was great to spend so much time with my parents and children. The Cabin is a very special place to me and I'm proud I can take my city-slicker kids to let them experience the outdoors and live like I did growing up. In the city, they always have an adult nearby and are never left on their own for long. They wear helmets when they ride their bikes in the alley, even though they have training wheels on and couldn't fall over if they tried.

In Montana, the rules all change.

In Montana, the adults worked on the New Cabin and the kids were left to occupy themselves. Their imaginations ran wild and they played with each other for hours every day. They made me see and remember one of my favorite things about childhood - infinite possibilities. As I kid, I was a dreamer and used to think that anything was possible in the world (flying, teleporting, you name it). I'm happy to see that Abbie and Jack believe that anything is possible too.

A week ago, I returned to Denver after driving almost 4000 miles in 30 days. I feel refreshed after so much time off. I've got my goals and ambitions in line for the rest of the year and I'm looking forward to writing more, smiling more and doing great things for my new client. Over the next several months, I'll continue to work with GWT and even have plans to talk at The Rich Web Experience in December. When I travel for work, I'll be in Boston and Cupertino. Hopefully I'll see some of you along the way.

As usual, you can see all my pictures from the past few weeks in my Montana 2009: Weeks 2-4 set on Flickr.

Jason and Holly's Wedding was a blast!

2009-04-21T09:53:54-06:00

This past weekend, I experienced an incredible 4 days in West Palm Beach, Florida. When Julie and I got married there in April 2000, we had so much fun that we always wanted to do it again. We had a lot of good friends and family fly in for the wedding. If you've ever experienced a beach holiday with many good friends, you'll know what I'm talking about. Julie is Holly's sister and Jason (her new husband) is one of my fraternity brothers. That means I knew both sides of the wedding party and it very much resembled the reunion we always wanted.

I flew down on Thursday morning after a little bit of oversleeping. Because I flew into Orlando, I had to rent a car and drive 2 hours to West Palm. This wasn't so bad since I got hooked up with a convertible and it was a beautiful 80°F on the drive. That night, I picked up Abbie and Jack from "Grammy's" house and they spent the night with me in my hotel.

The next morning, we woke up and headed to Sailfish for a ride on a friend's boat. After a couple hours on the intercostal, we played in the pool, enjoyed the sun and started getting ready for the Rehearsal Dinner.

During the Rehearsal Dinner, a friend (Navarro) and I were bartenders while Abbie was in charge of making sure everyone's drinks were full. Below are some of my favorite pictures from Friday night.

After the rehearsal dinner, the party crowd headed to Rum Bar and had lots of laughs and played many games of "hook". On the wedding day (Saturday), we took another boat ride, hung out on the beach and enjoyed a beautiful ceremony on the beach.

The rest of the night was spent dancing and enjoying everyone's company. The party didn't end that night though. Sunday, Holly and Julie's mom had a brunch at her house where we all laid by the pool, played with the kids and sipped on many cold drinks. At sunset, we walked down to the beach so Mr. and Mrs. Harris could get some sand from their ceremony location.

It was a spectacular weekend with lots of good friends and a ton of great memories. Congratulations Jason and Holly!

For more pictures, see Flickr or Facebook.

Jack's Mohawk

2008-11-12T23:21:08-07:00

Last weekend, we celebrated Abbie's birthday with friends and family at Julie's house. My parents and I had a great time, but left a bit early so I could take them to their first DU Hockey game. Towards the end of the game, I received the following text message from Jack's soon-to-be Uncle Jason.

Jack wants a mohawk? Is that OK?

My response:

Absolutely! Please take pictures.

Below are pictures from what ensued shortly after.

Jack looks pretty darn cute with his new haircut and he's received nothing but compliments from everyone. Personally, I dig it.

Awesome Birthday Present: A Kegerator

2008-08-05T21:01:20-06:00

I'm proud to say I have the best parents in the world. For my birthday this year, they bought me a kegerator. It was delivered last week, but I didn't get a chance to put it together until this weekend. I've never had so much fun putting together an appliance.

Since it's summer and I'm in Colorado, I decided to get a keg of Sunshine Wheat to start things off. So far, there's issues with 1) too much head and 2) it's not quite cold enough. I think the first can be fixed by playing with the CO2 tank and settings. The 2nd might only be fixable by moving it inside. If you have a kegerator and have advice on how to fix these issues, please let me know.

Why did your parents buy you a kegerator?

There's actually a good reason for this. A few years ago, Julie and I made an agreement that I could buy a kegerator when I paid off the last of my student loans. While Julie and I aren't a couple anymore, it still seemed like a good idea. I paid off my last student loan in June. However, it wasn't my loan, it was my Mom's. When I was applying for colleges way back in the early nineties, my parents said I could go to DU, but only if I paid for it.

My Mom took out quite a few loans over the years to help with tuition, and I finally paid them all off. When I was with my parents over the 4th, I joked that they should buy me a kegerator since I was paying off their loans. Lo and behold, my subliminal messages worked and I ended up with a tap at my house. I couldn't be happier.

Update: Speaking of birthdays, this is the first post I've had to start the 7th year of this blog. My first post was on August 1, 2002.

Update 2 on Friday: I haven't had a beer from the kegerator since Sunday. This evening I poured a fresh one and I'm happy to report the head and temperature issues seem to be fixed.

Raible Road Trip #12 Vacation Report

2008-07-07T18:32:43-06:00

I'm happy to report that the kids and I made it home safely last night after a heckuva Road Trip. We were gone for a total of 8 days and we drove for 4 of those. Here's some stats from Snow White:

43 Hours
2248.3 Miles
150.9 Gallons of Gas
14.9 AVG MPG
52 AVG MPH

Of course, these stats include day-to-day driving while in Montana.

Driving to Montana
We left early on Saturday morning, waking up at 4:30 and were on the road around 5. This was brutal considering I went to bed 4 hours earlier the night before. My Dad and I took turns driving and tried to listen to an audiobook (Spook Country) along the way. However, whenever one person wasn't driving, they fell asleep so the whole idea somewhat failed.

We arrived in Yellowstone around 5PM and checked into our campground. The ranger told me there were 5 grizzlies in the campsite and that we should pack up our food and put small pets in cars for the night. Of course, I couldn't wait to tell this to Abbie, who is always scared that bears will attack us when camping. I finally calmed her fears by telling her I wrestled a bear once when I was a kid and won pretty easily. After setting up camp, Abbie took a swim in the "freezing cold" Yellowstone Lake and we ate dinner and climbed into our tent shortly after.

On Sunday, we woke up and made it out of our campsite by 7:30. We drove to Old Faithful, enjoyed an eruption and proceeded to have a nice breakfast at The Old Faithful Inn. After checking out some more geysers, we made it out of the park around 11. We stopped briefly in Bozeman to see an old friend, hit Clearwater Junction and Lucky's (for huckleberry milkshakes) around 6, and made it to The Cabin just before dark.

At The Cabin
The few days we spent at The Cabin and in the Swan Valley were a lot of fun. I got to drive the family Excavator with both kids on my lap. Jack was operating the bucket while Abbie was operating the swivel of the cab. I took my mountain bike, so I got to ride some old trails I used to ride all the time as a kid. Not only were there beautiful views on the trails, but I also got to experience quite a wreck that sent me head-first into some rocks and bushes. It was the first time I've wrecked in a while where I thought to myself "that was fast and hard enough to break some bones". Luckily, all I received were a number of scratches and bruises.

On Thursday, we took my sister to the train station in Whitefish. We left early enough for my dad and I to get in some golfing at Meadow Lake Golf Course and the kids to hit Big Sky Waterslides. Apparently, they didn't have a height requirement because they were able to go on all the slides.

On the 4th, we finished Abbie's Princess float in the early morning, took a quick sauna and headed down to the Swan Valley Parade. We'd been talking about the parade and Abbie's float for several weeks, so I was kinda nervous that I might mess it up. Not only did everything go great, but there were several hundred folks that clapped when we drove by and commented on what a beautiful princess Abbie was.

After the parade and drinking some good ol' Busch Light from the "Beer Garden", we headed to Holland Lake for a swim and canoeing. We drove back home in time to play a game of horseshoes and get the fireworks setup for the evening. We had a good fireworks show (with yours truly in charge) and enjoyed lots of laughs with old friends.

The Drive Home
As usual, the drive home was the longest portion of the trip. The first day, we left the cabin around 11 and pulled into Billings around 5. The kids (and dog) did pretty good as we only needed to stop once. The shorter first day turned out to be a good idea since the kids like hotels so much. Yesterday, we left Billings around 9:30 and cruised along mightily until we hit the Colorado border. There, traffic came to a standstill and we suffered through stop-and-go the rest of the way home. After 9 hours, we pulled into my driveway, exhausted.

I don't believe we'll be driving next year. The Road Trip to The Cabin is something that should only be done every couple years. Snow White continues to be an awesome car. We towed a sawmill (on a trailer) to The Cabin and didn't even feel the load. With DVD screens in the back of both front-seats, it was an excellent road-trip vehicle for the kids. Also, it's smooth suspension made for an enjoyable experience for everyone (we drove Julie's Honda Odyssey one year and Abbie kept getting sick from the DVD screen bouncing). The more I drive it (esp. skiing, camping and on road trips), the happier I am with the purchase.

For more photos from the trip, please see Raible Road Trip #12 on Flickr.

An afternoon in Rocky Mountain National Park

2008-05-17T23:30:34-06:00

Today was one of those days I hope I do more often as a single parent. Ever since ski season ended, I've had a hard time entertaining the kids on weekends. I don't have them every weekend - Julie and I each get them a week at a time. However, for the past couple times I've had them, our weekends have been rather lame. We've still done stuff, but it's usually only a couple hours at a time. The last time I had them we went to Bass Pro Shops, got them some fishing gear and headed out to a local lake. However, once their lines got tangled and they started frolicking in the mud (while I tried to untangle them), I felt like my mission failed.

I don't know what was so special about today, but I think it was simply getting out of the city and into the hills. This morning we had breakfast with Julie, headed to REI for a new tent and then drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park to look at some animals and take a hike. We stopped in Estes Park for some ice cream and playground action and then headed into the park to gaze at some Elk and hike along a small creek. Evidence is contained in the pictures below and in a set on Flickr.

We bought the tent this morning because we were planning on camping with the Colorado Bus Club before Volkswagens On The Green (VWOTG) tomorrow. However, Abbie's cold started to get pretty bad this afternoon, so we decided to camp in the backyard instead.

Tomorrow should be a lot of fun. The forecast is 86°F and the VWOTG show is always inspiring.

An Irish Pub moves into the Neighborhood

2008-03-22T09:25:43-06:00

In August 2006, I described how happy I was to be living in the DU Neighborhood and how we had so many good restaurants around. Today, I discovered there's a new Irish Pub that opened this week. While I don't live in the same house that I did in August 2006, I still live close by, a mere 5 blocks from Julie's house. While the old location was excellent, with Sushi, Indian and Liquor on the same block - my new location is 6 blocks from the Light Rail and a 1/2 block from the Elementary School Abbie and Jack will attend next year. DU is 5 blocks away - which is great for hockey games and gym memberships.

Why am I rambling on like this? I don't know, I just wanted to write down how much I like this neighborhood. With Spring starting yesterday, a beautiful day today and DU beating North Dakota last night - life is very good.

Today's agenda: skiing with the kids at Copper. WCHA Championship tonight.

Jack's got a bead stuck in his nose!

2008-02-28T23:41:34-07:00

This morning around 9:45 AM, I got a call from Jack's Teacher. She said, "Jack's got a bead stuck in his nose!" I heard a screaming kid in the background, so the first thing I asked was - "Is that Jack?" She said yes, and I was out the door a few seconds later.

Several minutes later, I arrived at his school and picked him up to take him to the Emergency Room. His teacher handed me the bead you see in the picture on the right. This was a replica of the one he jammed into his nose. I figured the ER was the best place to go considering all I saw was blood when I looked in his nostril.

10 minutes later we were in the ER and within a half hour we were talking to a nurse. Julie arrived just as the doctor walked up to talk to Jack. The first thing he suggested was that Julie hold one nostril and give him a CPR-type breath/blow into his mouth. She tipped his head back, plugged the free nostril and "pop!" - it came right out!

I wish I'd known that trick early this morning. How cool would it have been to walk into Jack's class, grab him by the head and blow that sucker out like I knew what I was doing? The good news is now you have this knowledge and you can be the hero in your kid's class someday.

Upgrading AppFuse to Spring 2.5

2007-11-07T08:27:20-07:00

Last night, I spent a few minutes upgrading AppFuse to Spring 2.5 RC1. According to InfoQ, Spring 2.5 is a drop-in upgrade for Spring 2.0. However, if you're using Maven, it's not quite that easy. The good news is it is easy, you just need to change your pom.xml a bit. The steps I used to upgrade AppFuse are listed below:

Add a repository for Spring's milestone releases:

<repository>
    <id>spring-milestone</id>
    <url>http://s3.amazonaws.com/maven.springframework.org/milestone</url>
</repository>

Change artifactId of "spring-mock" to be "spring-test".
Change version to be 2.5-rc1.

At this point, if you're using "spring" as your artifactId (instead of the smaller fine-grained dependencies), you'll likely get the following error in a Spring MVC application:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
org/springframework/web/servlet/handler/AbstractUrlHandlerMapping

This happens because Spring MVC is no longer included in the uber spring.jar. You'll need to add a dependency on "spring-webmvc" to solve this problem. Unfortunately, this JAR is dependent on the fine-grained modules, so you may have to modify your pom.xml to depend on the fine-grained modules - or exclude them all from spring-webmvc.

The good news is Spring has excluded all the invalid commons-logging dependencies for you so you don't have to anymore.

After getting all the dependencies straightened out - I ran the integration tests:

org.springframework.beans.NotReadablePropertyException: Invalid property 
'fileUpload' of bean class [org.appfuse.webapp.controller.FileUpload]: Bean 
property 'fileUpload' is not readable or has an invalid getter method: Does the 
return type of the getter match the parameter type of the setter?

Looking at uploadForm.jsp, I'm guessing the problem happens because of the following code:

<spring:bind path="fileUpload.file">
<input type="file" name="file" id="file" class="file medium" value="<c:out value="${status.value}"/>"/>
</spring:bind>

Confirmed - changing the "path" attribute to "file" fixes the problem. I also found out that setting the "value" on an <input type="file"> doesn't work, so wrapping the field with <spring:bind> doesn't make a whole lot of sense anyway.

To conclude, it doesn't look like the first release candidate of Spring 2.5 is exactly a drop-in upgrade for Spring 2.0, but it's pretty darn close. I'm sure by the time it's released, it will be. I'd encourage you to try 2.5 in your Spring-dependent projects to see if you find any issues.

Update: I was successfully able to migrate AppFuse from using the uber JAR to fine-grained JARs. However, I ran into a couple issues in the process. The first is that even though I'm including spring-aop in the appfuse-service module, it's not pulled in for the web frameworks (which depend on appfuse-service). Explicitly declaring spring-aop as a dependency for the appfuse-web module fixes this. Secondly, I had to modify my Acegi Security exclusions so it wouldn't include dependencies that no longer exist in 2.5.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.acegisecurity</groupId>
    <artifactId>acegi-security-tiger</artifactId>
    <version>${acegi.version}</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-dao</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-jdbc</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-remoting</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-support</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

Happy Halloween!

2007-10-31T22:10:09-06:00

Abbie and Jack had great Halloween costumes this year. Abbie was Little Bo Peep (she even had a lost sheep) and Jack was Edward the Train. I emphasize Edward because everyone kept calling him "Thomas" and he kept getting mad and telling folks "I'm Edward, not Thomas!".

Julie's sister, Holly, made Jack's awesome costume. The best part about it was she made the back of it into his candy-holder so whenever folks would hand him candy, he'd spin around and look over his shoulder while they dropped it in. Today we found out the candy was actually coal - he said he needed a lot more to keep Edward chugging along.

Halloween was a blast this year: great costumes, two nights of trick-or-treating, and a parade/party at the kids' school today. Good stuff all around.

One deadline down, 4 to go!

2007-08-28T21:33:08-06:00

This past weekend marked a big accomplishment for me. I moved into my new place in early August and I've scrambling ever since to make it a home. The biggest thing I've been doing is painting. When I originally decided I wanted to buy the place, it looked really clean inside. However, after the previous owners moved out and took all their pictures down, the walls were pretty nasty looking. I was hoping to do a bit of touch up, but ended up doing a helluva lot more. The first week, I painted the living room and Abbie's room (pink) with the help of many friends. Julie's an expert painter and was able to knock out Abbie's room in only a few hours. The living room (with vaulted ceilings) took severals friends and I quite a few nights. Sure there was a lot of beer involved, but we were still painting the whole time.

The next couple weeks, I spent painting my office and its adjoining bathroom. What a pain in the ass. The office was bright yellow and the bathroom was dark green. Since both have high ceilings, I had to paint those too. For some reason, I chose a mostly white color and went to town. It felt like it took forever, but I finished last Tuesday. It took 4 coats to cover up the yellow and 5 to cover up the green - but it looks sooo much better.

Last weekend was a major deadline for me. I've been working almost every night to get my new place in a condition where I don't feel like I have to work on it - where I'm totally moved in. Sure I still have a lot to do in the garage (and I still need to move my tools to work on the bus), but it finally feels like a home. My deadline was largely motivated by Jack's birthday party here last weekend. I was literally working up until the minute the party started. The worst part was shoveling and hauling 20 tubs of rotten apples out of my backyard.

I have the biggest apple tree I've ever seen and it drops apples like they're going out of style. I counted them in a 24-hour period last weekend and there was 100 new apples! I thought it was cool when I first moved in, but now it seems like a lot of work. However, it's such a good shade tree, it'd be a shame to do anything to it. Below are some pics of the new place.

So what are my 4 other deadlines? I have a project due for my client, AppFuse 2 needs to be released, I need to deliver training materials for a class in October and I have to turn in my Software Summit Presentations. All are due on September 1st (this weekend). Yikes - I'd better get to work!

The First Day of School

2007-08-28T21:03:46-06:00

Today was Abbie and Jack's first day at their new school and boy were they excited. With new lunchboxes and backpacks, what's their not to be excited about? They're both in preschool as Abbie is a bit young for kindergarten (she turns 5 in November). She did take a test for kindergarten and got in, but Julie decided it'd be best to try her in preschool first since her spot disappears as soon as she turns it down. I had a great morning today driving them there (it's about a mile away) and hung out for a while afterwards. Seems like a fun school - made me miss the old days of being a kid.

I went to a K-8 that only had 60 students. You think that's bad - a good friend of mine spent his entire elementary years in a 1-room schoolhouse! There were only 8 kids in his school. The Local School Directory lists that school at 6 students this year. Mine looks quite a bit smaller than 25 years ago - now sitting at 33.

They sure do grow up fast.

Jack broke his foot

2007-08-17T07:49:41-06:00

The scene looks innocent enough - a 2-year old boy and his 4-year old big sister having some fun playing together. They're in the 4-year old's room, being awfully quiet. The sister comes up with a great idea - they clear some toys off the book/toy shelf (which is built into the wall) and use it as a launch pad to get to the bed. A blood-curdling scream shakes the foundation of the house 3 minutes later.

I don't know how many successful jumps they made, but Jack didn't quite make the bed on one of his jumps. Julie called me yesterday to tell me he'd gotten hurt and couldn't walk. Neither Abbie or he could recall how he'd gotten hurt. He laid on the couch for a few hours before Julie decided to take him to the emergency room. It was a good thing she did - x-rays verified he'd broken his foot.

It's not a bad break, but it's a small fracture on a growth bone, so he's going to have to have surgery on it. I've been out of town this week, so I didn't get a chance to witness all the fun. After the x-rays, apparently Julie was able to pry the story out of both kids.

I'm pretty impressed that my little boy broke his first bone before he was 3. He must be a Raible.

One 30" monitor or two 23" monitors?

2007-08-10T11:42:24-06:00

As part of Julie and I's divorce settlement, I let her keep my 23" Cinema Display along with its attached Windows PC. Since I like having a Windows PC available, I managed to buy the same machine on eBay for $250. However, now I'm in the market for a new monitor.

So what should I get? One 30" cinema display or two 23" displays?

I'm leaning towards two 23 inchers. Matrox's DualHead2Go seems to provide exactly what I'd need to hook two 23s to a MacBook Pro. Furthermore, I could hook it up to my DVI KVM switch and have dual monitors on both my Mac and my PC. No matter how big the screen is, I always seem to enjoy dual monitors more.

What do you think? Is anyone out there using Matrox's DualHead2Go Digital Edition?

5 Years

2007-08-06T10:00:06-06:00

Doh! It looks like I missed my 5-year blogiversary last week. It's hard to believe it's been 5 years since I started this blog on August 1, 2002. A lot has happened since then: Abbie was born, we moved from Morrison to Denver, Jack was born and Julie built a new house. For those that know me personally, a lot has happened this summer too.

Julie and I are getting a divorce.

Our reason is simple - we're not in love with each other like we expect a married couple should be in love. It's going to be a good move for the both of us and while it might be hard to get through the next several months, we'll both be happier in the long run. We still plan on raising a family together, we'll just be doing it from two separate households and living two separate lives. I bought a house a few weeks ago and moved in last week. This past weekend was my first "Daddy's weekend" and the kids and I had a blast.

I realize that divorce is a sensitive subject and it might not be something that folk's think is appropriate for a blog post. I started this blog in order to document my life's history and this seems like a pretty important thing to document. My life has certainly changed a lot in the past couple months and it's likely to change quite a bit more in the future. I realize I haven't been blogging much lately - now you know why. I don't know if I'll return to actively blogging like I once did, but I think I will.

I've turned off comments for this post - I hope you understand. If you'd like to tell me your story about successfully raising children of divorce, I'd love to hear about it.

Update: It figures - my contact form appears to have been broken for the last month or so. If you used it to send me a message, there's a good chance I didn't receive it. Sorry - it should be fixed now.

Proof that Abbie is growing up fast

2007-05-21T08:31:16-06:00

There's been a couple of significant events in Abbie's (and our) lives in the last couple of weeks. First of all, Julie and the kids spent two weeks down in Florida at the beginning of May. Julie's mom has a pool, so the kids enjoyed swimming in it almost every day. They've both been taking swimming lessons, but they certainly couldn't swim by themselves. Julie taught Abbie to do an underwater breaststroke rather than doggie paddling after the first few days. By the time I arrived (a week after their arrival), Abbie could swim all by herself, underwater. By the end of the week, she could swim from one end of the pool to the other. Pretty impressive I must say.

The 2nd event I learned about on Friday night. Sometime last week, Julie decided to start giving Abbie money to do chores around the house. She can only earn a maximum of $1 per day, but she's super pumped about it and is always asking if she can do stuff. Her room is usually spotless now. With her new found wealth, she needed something to store it in - so Julie bought them piggy banks over the weekend. Who knows how long their enthusiasm will last, but I think it's important to teach them how much things cost and how they can save money to get things they want. When I was a kid, I had a lot of chores and earned something like $5/week. While I didn't like the chores, I loved the allowance. It's good to see inflation hasn't influenced allowances too much.

Off to Florida

2007-05-08T20:02:25-06:00

While I've been trouncing around the globe with my Dad, Julie and the kids have been splashing around Julie's mom's pool in Florida. Tonight I'll be joining them via a Frontier red eye. I'm not looking forward to the flight, but it'll be great to see everyone. Hopefully by this time tomorrow, I'll be sipping on a cold Corona and sitting by the pool. I like the idea of going on vacation a lot better than attending the JavaOne festivities.

Cheers!

The Flight to Amsterdam

2007-04-27T12:40:57-06:00

Tomorrow morning, my dad, Bruce and I will be getting on a Continental flight headed for Amsterdam. We stop in Houston for a couple hours, then it's a 10-hour flight from there. Bruce found a diagram of our plane and it appears to have power outlets. Inspired by this news, I went out and bought an adapter for my MacBook Pro.

Now the question is - where there be enough room for my 17" laptop?

The last flight I was on (to Boston a few weeks ago), there was no room for a laptop. When the guy leaned back in front of me, I ended up with barely enough room to scratch my nose. A 15" laptop wouldn't have solved that problem. Has anyone out there flown internationally in a Boeing 767? We're in economy, so it might be tight, but I would like to get some work done on the flight. I'm willing to take both my MacBooks, but it would suck if I couldn't use either one. On the other hand, it'd be nice if I knew my 17" would work fine and I only had to take one. Thanks for any advice.

Update: The adventure/drama has already begun! My dad forgot his passport in Oregon and we've been on the phone with Fedex and UPS trying to get it here before our flight takes off at 11:20. Fedex was $384 for a "it should get there" delivery. UPS gave us a "guaranteed delivery" for $75 and told us it would get here by 9. Once they gave us the tracking number, they switched it to 10. Those bastards! Oh well, at least I'm on the flight - who knows about my dad.

Saturday @ 7 AM: UPS Tracking shows his passport is in Ontario, Canada (an arrival scan, no departure shown). WTF - the two hour flight from Portland to Denver wasn't short enough?!

Saturday @ 9 AM: Julie has the passport in her hands and is driving out to the airport to give it to my dad. He came with me an hour ago to check in and explain his situation. Looks like he's going to make it!

Happy Anniversary Julie!

2007-04-22T10:50:41-06:00

Julie and I got married seven years ago today. For our wedding, we invited all our friends fly down to West Palm Beach and party it up for a week. Most folks flew down on Wednesday, some showed up Thursday, and all enjoyed the festivities on Saturday. If you happened to be at the wedding, you might want to reminisce with some old pictures. If nothing else, looking at the pictures will show you how much digital picture quality has improved in 7 years.

To celebrate, we went out to a fancy dinner downtown last night. After dinner, we barely slipped into Comedy Works for John Heffron. The show was sold out, but some folks didn't show up so we ended up getting front row seats! We hadn't even heard of John Heffron, but it turned out to be a really funny show.

Thanks Julie for such a fun married life!

New Swing Set

2007-04-21T13:18:28-06:00

Below is what Julie built while I watched Caddy Shack last night (I know, I'm a slacker). Abbie and Jack couldn't be happier right now.

Update on Sunday: Checkout the finished product - it has a climbing wall, slide and fort too boot!

We need to plugin in less, not more

2007-04-18T10:35:52-06:00

From David Van Couvering's Blog:

I just returned from a week in Mexico, a wonderful time with my family where we lived very simply - food, rest, physical fun. No TV, no movies, no cell phones, no computers. Bright sunshine, beautiful beaches, very friendly people wherever we went.

Then I came home to San Francisco and straight to the Web 2.0 Expo. The contrast has been a bit disorienting. I don't think it's a surprise that my one year old son learned to say "Hi" in Mexico - people actually greeted him there and interacted with him. Here in the conference, on the BART train, on the street, we are all in our own world. We are on our laptops, our phones, our iPods.

The keynote talks at the Expo underscored again and again an undeniable trend: there is an ever growing explosion of the use of consumer devices and connecting to the Internet. The vast scales of data and connections we are looking at are almost impossible to imagine. The whole world is "getting connected." And those of us at the Expo are generally very excited, and see lots of opportunities to make money and and to build things that lots and lots of people will use.

But I feel a sadness when I find myself in this environment. I feel like I am losing something. I watch myself "plug in," and I feel like I am actually losing connection. I crave the open sky, the deep stillness and power of the ocean, of the smiles of people who said "Hi" to my son.

David makes some excellent points in this post. I often find that I get tied up in the virtual world of blogs and technology and forget that the real world is the one that really matters. If my computer died tomorrow and I gave it all up to help Julie remodel houses, I don't think I would lose a whole lot. In fact, I think I would be more in touch with reality and would likely strengthen friendships, rather than confuse people when I talk to them about what I do.

A commentor on David's blog says:

I am glad you discovered, or rediscovered, the beauty of simple things. It happens to many people almost every year, after vacations.

This is why I try to take at least 2 months of vacation each year. I've been doing it for around 5 years and I don't plan on changing that anytime soon. Sure, I have lots of opportunities to work my ass off, make a bunch of money and store it away for later. But that's no way to live - I want to enjoy life now and every day going forward. Sure, I'm saving money for my retirement, but I don't see the point in working like mad in hopes it'll payoff someday. Some folks say "do it while your kids are young." I think that's bullshit - there's no excuse for being a bad parent at any time in their lives.

From Vegas to Snow to Boston

2007-04-08T11:40:12-06:00

Our visit to Las Vegas was a lot of fun. Little did we know, some friends we were meeting there were getting engaged on Thursday night. Of course, the girl (Kim) didn't know, but the guy (Mike) had been planning it for quite some time. We had a great time celebrating with them - as well as at the craps and blackjack tables.

I was planning on staying until Saturday, but Julie made me leave with her on Friday night. Her reasoning was because she was up and I was hemorrhaging cash. I didn't like the idea at the time, but loved it once I slid into my own bed late Friday night.

Leaving Vegas's 90°F temperatures and arriving in Denver's 30°F was kind of a bummer, but the 1" of snow yesterday and today is kinda cool. I leave in a few hours for Boston, where it's supposed to be cold all week. I was hoping for a warm and sunny Red Sox game on Thursday, but with a forecasted high of 40°F it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Oh well, bad weather means I'll probably bill and work on AppFuse more, so it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Happy Easter Everyone!

Update: I just went online to check in for my flight tonight and found out that United cancelled my flight due to "crew legalities" - whatever that means. Orbitz booked me on the next available flight, which isn't until tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. Doh!

The good news is I get to spend another night with the wife and kids. Unfortunately, tomorrow is going to be a brutal work day since I won't get on site until 3 in the afternoon.

Vegas, Boston, Amsterdam, Stuttgart, West Palm Beach and Connecticut

2007-04-04T09:49:55-06:00

I have a hectic travel schedule in both April and May. The good news is it consists of trips for both pleasure and business, so hopefully I won't get too tired of planes. Tomorrow, Julie and I are heading to good ol' Las Vegas. A good friend of mine got us a free room at the Bellagio. Most of my trips to Vegas in the past few years have been for TSSS or bachelor parties, so it should be a lot of fun to enjoy it with my wife. Knowing us, we'll only be in our free room for a couple hours.

On Sunday, I'm heading out to Boston for a week on site at my client's. They wanted me to come out this week, but I convinced them that coming out for the Red Sox home opener was a better idea. I don't have tickets to the game Tuesday, but a good friend has tickets for Thursday and I'll probably go to Saturday's game too. If you have extra tickets to Tuesday's game, let's talk. I'd like to organize a tech meetup while I'm out there, but I probably won't have time. I'll be working long hours Monday - Wednesday in hopes of taking Friday off.

After Boston, I'm home for two weeks, then it's off to ApacheCon Europe. I'm leaving Saturday the 28th, staying in Amsterdam until two hours after my talk on Friday and then heading to Stuttgart for the weekend. I fly back from Europe and head down to Florida for a week's vacation with Julie and the kids. Then I'm off to Connecticut for a week to teach a training class on Spring, Hibernate, Maven, Ajax and all the other fun stuff that developers like to learn.

Phew, it's going to be quite the ride over the next month and a half. I'll try to take a camera and post pictures from all my adventures.

A New 17" Powerhouse

2007-03-13T10:20:35-06:00

On my current project, we're using SQL Server as the backend database. To make this work on my MacBook Pro, I have to run Parallels in the background. While this setup works, it does have issues. The main problem is things slow down a fair amount when running two operating systems. Last week (or was it two weeks ago?), Parallels came out with their latest release, which includes a Coherence mode. If you're a Mac user, I highly recommend this software. It basically lets you run Windows and OS X at the same time, all integrated into the same screen, which the same dock and everything. It's really slick the first time you see it in action.

After working in this mode for a few days, I knew it was the perfect programming platform for me. I tend to use Windows and OS X each 50% of the time, so having them both running side-by-side rocks. But as I worked, I thought to myself, "I need more RAM and more real estate". It seems liked a no-brainer: it was time to upgrade to the 17" MacBook Pro - with all the performance goodies I could get. Against Ben's advice, I bought a new 17" MacBook Pro last week. 3 GB RAM and the fastest disk they had (100 GB 7200 RPM version). Sure, it'd be great to have more disk space, but I'm not going to give up speed for space. If this bad boy really is 40% faster than my current MBP, life is going to be very good.

Of course, my real reason for getting a new laptop was because Julie dropped her PowerBook a couple months ago. I was going to spend $1000 to get it fixed, but it didn't seem like a worthwhile investment. Julie's renovating a new house, so with me working from home, it can get contentious for her trying to get some computer time. So she needed a new laptop. She mentioned she wanted to buy a PC laptop. I shrieked when I heard this and knew I had to buck up and get a new one so she could have my MBP that runs Windows. Did this reasoning work with her? No, not at all. However, when she gets a new computer later this evening, I'm willing to bet she'll be pretty pumped.

I'll try to post some performance comparisons this evening after I get it all setup.

Update: It's gonna be a while before I can post any performance comparisons. I got the box setup thanks to Apple's "import from another box" feature. However, I'm wwaaaayyyy behind on a lot of commitments, so I'm scrambling to catch up. With any luck, I'll post something this weekend.

A glorious weekend in Steamboat

2007-03-06T22:26:18-07:00

After 6 feet of snow in 7 days, we couldn't help ourselves and rushed off to spend a few days in Steamboat last weekend. I bought new skis on Thursday and worked all night so I could take Friday off. I knew the skis were for me when I heard their name - Atomic "Sweet Daddies". Friday morning there was 11" of fresh powder, so I tried to convince Julie we should leave right away. She said "No" because I hadn't slept yet and said I should get some rest. 4 hours later, I woke up and Julie was packed and ready to go. We headed out for the 3-hour drive right around noon.

Saturday morning, we woke up to 4 inches of pow pow and left the condo by 8:15. I was skiing with a buddy (Steve) and we were meeting his friend (Jason) at the Gondola for first tracks. Jason showed up 20 minutes late, but that didn't stop us from finding the powder. We headed up Storm Peak, hiked a bit to the good stuff and enjoyed knee-deep powder to start the day. That run alone took almost an hour and I was definitely feeling the Fat Tire I drank the night before. We had a couple more powder runs, a couple fast groomers and it was time for beer thirty at the top of the gondola. Skiing with Jason (a Steamboat local) was exhausting - especially since he'd already skied 6 days in a row! After lunch, I hit the hot tub, took a nap with Jack and then went tubing with the kids. We ended the night with several bottles of wine and Talladega Nights.

Sunday we woke up to no new snow, but the weather was beautiful. It was something like 40°F and the perfect Spring skiing day. Julie and I took the kids over to the "magic carpet" run and had a blast. Abbie needs no help these days, she can do "pizza" and french fries w/o even trying. She does circles (down the hill, up the moving sidewalk) the whole time.

Jack was a whole different story.

He kept yelling at me "Go down" when we'd get to the top. As I'd ski to the bottom, I'd glance over at him and see a grin from ear-to-ear. When I'd get to the bottom, he'd take off. No turning, no pizza - just balls-to-the-wall with a shit-eating grin and lots of giggling. By the time he'd get to me, he'd be going pretty fast. Luckily, I caught him every time - amidst gasps from the Texans who were learning how to ski on the same hill. After 6 or 7 runs, he'd had enough and we headed back for "nap time".

I spent the rest of Sunday afternoon skiing on popcorn snow that was warmed by the Sun all day. It was beautiful skiing weather and I was ready for the ride home at 4:00. Another trip to the hot tub, a couple Sunshine Wheat beers and we drove home to a beautiful orange and pink sunset. What a glorious weekend.

NBA Fans are using AppFuse

2007-02-19T21:11:01-07:00

Did you know that the Utah Jazz and LA Lakers Fan sites are powered by AppFuse? I've had a few beers with Eric (the guy who developed these sites) and he's finally given me permission to post links to both of them.

In addition to these sites, AppFuse also powers the Sacramento River Cats Fan Loyalty Portal. Eric notes:

You might want to mention in your blog that for LA and Utah, if you don't want to create an account you can just click on the demo link on the landing page to see what's inside. But you won't get to enter any of the contests and you'll miss some of the cheerleader pix. There's also a whole admin side for report generation and CMS, but of course that's restricted.

I wonder if Eric has any plans to develop a Denver Nuggets fan site? Julie and I have 4th row tickets to Friday night's game against the Jazz. Should be a fun game for sure. Go Nuggets!

The Last Two Weeks

2007-02-02T17:25:36-07:00

Ever since Virtuas shut down a couple weeks ago, I've been having a blast. Mostly, I've been working on AppFuse, but I've also been spending more time with Julie and the kids. Where I work varies from day-to-day. Some mornings, I'll head to our local Einstein's or the close by Spanky's Roadhouse. Other days, I'll work from home and let the kids harass me all day. I'll admit, there's some days that are frustrating when I'm about to solve a problem and the kids are yanking my fingers off the keyboard. However, there's others where the music is cranked, the kids are dancing in my office, and I just solved a problem that was bugging me for the last 6 hours. There's nothing like having a Woo hoo! after solving a problem you've been wrestling with all morning. It's even better when there's friends around to help you celebrate. My whooping and clapping often leads to games of "horsey", happy kids, and a worn out dad.

In AppFuse news, I finished all the web framework tutorials a couple nights ago. Since the beginning of this year, I've written over 100 pages worth of AppFuse documentation. Wednesday's "the web tutorials are done" was a huge milestone and it feels great to be done with it. We hope to release 2.0 M3 in the next few days.

Yesterday, after getting 8" snow reports from Beaver Creek two days in a row, I suggested to Julie that we "head for the hills" for a day of skiing. She agreed and we left a few hours later. We ended up at Keystone since they have cheap skiing for kids and it's one of the closest ski resorts to Denver. Leaving last night was brutal. It starting snowing around 2pm and we left town around 5:30. We quickly ended up in rush hour traffic and it took us an hour just to get out of town (to the top of Lookout Mountain). Once we hit Idaho Springs, the roads improved and by the time we got to the tunnel the roads were bare and dry.

Coming up here last night turned out to be a good idea. Denver experienced a record low of -18° F this morning. Furthermore, there were wicked winds and west-bound I-70 was closed for 9 hours this morning because a semi blew over and spilled all of its 2000 gallons of unleaded. I watched the story on the news and was quite impressed when I heard the wind was so strong it was blowing windows out of cars.

The skiing at Keystone today was bitter cold (-15 to -25 °F with wind chills), but I made it work. Hot Cider and bump runs are excellent ways to keep warm. Now we're sitting in the condo we rented and waiting for the kids to wake up so we can enjoy FAC at the local bowling alley.

Life is good.

Abbie can ski all by herself!

2007-01-21T11:26:18-07:00

We've had a great ski season so far. I think I've skied more this year than the last 2 years combined. The best part is after a few days in Steamboat for Christmas and another long weekend, Abbie can ski all by herself! I'll admit, she did have a 1/2 day lesson, but I don't think she learned much there. Most of her learning occurred with Julie on the bunny slope. "Pizza" and "French Fries" where the encouraging words of the day.

By the time we left last week, Abbie was able to do the Magic Carpet runs all by herself. For those that don't know, the Magic Carpet is a flat escalator that hauls kids up the mountain. It's smaller than a bunny slope, but challenging for those that've never skied before. Jack is unlikely to ski by himself this year, but he's doing a lot better than the first time I took him. He'll actually stand on his own now instead of doing the "wet noodle" thing when I touch him. Click on the pictures below to see Abbie tearing up the bunny slope.

Abbie and Julie were going to head up to Keystone for some skiing today, but it's dumping right now and they didn't feel like dealing with the nasty roads and traffic. With my new found freedom, I hope to get some good powder days in before I start my next gig.

Broken PowerBook Display

2007-01-16T21:20:53-07:00

This past week, Julie accidentally dropped her PowerBook (my old 17" G4) and broke the display. 1/4 of the screen still works, but the rest looks like a digitally shattered window. There doesn't appear to be any physical damage to the exterior. The laptop is definitely out of warranty, so I'll probably take it down to The Mac Outlet and see if I can get it fixed. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? If so, how much was it to get repaired?

Welcome to 2007

2007-01-01T11:18:16-07:00

Happy New Year everyone! 2007 should be a great year: Julie and I will pass 7 years of marriage, Jack will turn 3 and Abbie will become a 5 year old. In addition to being happy and getting healthier, I hope to learn a lot this year. AppFuse 2.0 will be released, and I hope to develop applications with Grails, GWT, Rails, Seam, Stripes and Wicket. Yeah, it's ambitious - but these frameworks are supposed to be easy to learn, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

Blog stats for 2006: 296 entries and 2,162 comments.

This site's traffic stats for 2006:

Summary by Month
Month	Daily Avg				Monthly Totals
Month	Hits	Files	Pages	Visits	Sites	KBytes	Visits	Pages	Files	Hits
Dec 2006	129383	101863	49424	17703	144059	40968542	548814	1532166	3157773	4010886
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Aug 2006	133216	98078	51304	16271	145529	36195916	504431	1590450	3040439	4129706
Jul 2006	126616	93814	49114	18566	170347	32415477	575552	1522560	2908238	3925100
Jun 2006	154384	109969	61037	20218	227352	38745385	586349	1770089	3189111	4477152
May 2006	171062	124766	57949	20148	308380	45802626	624600	1796441	3867758	5302929
Apr 2006	200886	130644	58481	19425	112399	41898451	582769	1754458	3919326	6026600
Mar 2006	131134	96351	55520	19884	88036	36355169	616424	1721130	2986881	4065183
Feb 2006	117774	82824	48364	17900	82901	27936685	501205	1354196	2319076	3297676
Jan 2006	118002	76042	54453	16566	79240	29385592	513572	1688066	2357312	3658082
Totals						444678401	6676728	19113210	37345035	51313684

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