In which I gush about Google Maps

Even though the vernacular has acquired the word "mapquest" for use as a verb, I'd long since stopped using Mapquest in favor of Yahoo! Maps. The server response time was better, and there were fewer ads.

Now they're out of my life, too. Google Maps is now in beta, and it's slicker and easier to use than Yahoo! Maps ever was. All the usual features are there: multiple locations, driving directions, but they've also made it into a really slick draggable web interface, so you can navigate around town without clicking arrow buttons and without any page reloading and an astonishly fast response time. Of course, being Google, they also integrated it into their other services, so you can do local searches too: "hotels near 19401" or "golf". Check it out.

In which music is deconstructed

The missus and I recently got Audio Adrenaline's Underdog CD. Fantastic work. Not only are all the songs good, which until now I could only say about Paul Simon's Graceland CD album, but they're conspicuously well-produced and arranged. Good auditory feng shui. Not quite sure what it is; it's not something I've noticed on other music.

I'm a little embarrassed to say this, being an amateur musician, but I think the emperor has no clothes when it comes to classical symphonies. A symphony, as Wikipedia defines it at the moment, is "an extended piece of music usually for orchestra and comprising several movements." Now each movement, in theory, is supposed to complement the others thematically, forming this fuzzy oozing gestalt of musicality that makes learned concert-goers ooh and aah with delight. They all have different tempos and sometimes are even in different keys, and they go by such imaginative names as "Adagio," "Presto," and "Largo." But with the single exception of Beethoven's Sixth, I've yet to hear a symphony that didn't sound like the composer just threw together four unrelated pieces of music that he happened to have written but couldn't find an outlet for yet. Choose a big piece from Column A, a slow piece for Column B, something quirky and light from column C, and another big piece to finish it off. And take the last note from the last movement and play it over and over again in varying lengths for about 5 bars.

Same thing goes for Sousa marches. They're all the same: Intro, First Strain, Second Strain, Dogfight (or Breakstrain, for those with more couth than I), Trio. And you can keep stacking melodies on top of these ad infinitum and it'll sound perfectly natural. In fact, the Canadian Brass did just that on one of their albums, creating this 8 minute long Sousa march that sampled all the most famous ones he did.

OK, rant over. I'll work over 12-bar blues some other time.

In which I find a new toy

For those of you with GMail accounts (and if you want one, please let me know--don't know if it's quite out of beta yet, but my allowed invitation count just skyrocketed from 6 to 50), my meanderings through my RSS stack this morning discovered a link to a utility that allows you to map a Windows drive letter to your GMail account, thereby letting you use your free 1GB of space as a remote hard drive. You can drag files to the drive letter in Explorer, and an email is quietly sent to your account with the file attached.

Very slick.

In which I pun merrily

If I were to form a band, I would call it A Bad Situation.

We would put out a few albums, and then we'd sell a compilation album, which will be called The Best of A Bad Situation.

And while doing this, we'd film it and also sell a documentary which we'd call Making The Best of A Bad Situation.

In which an email is sent

I'm blogging via email. It's cool.

In which BEA smells coffee

BEA to join Eclipse open source tools foundation: "BEA Systems has confirmed its plans to join the Eclipse Foundation open source tools consortium."

Well. Could it be that they've finally realized that nobody likes developing in WebLogic Workshop? The article isn't promising on that front, but you never can tell. Eclipse rocks so much and Workshop is so lame that if you put them both next to each other, they'll both explode.

I used to like Workshop. Wrote a review on theserverside about it. That was back in version 7. Then in 8.1 they got all these high-falootin' ideas about making Workshop a real full-blown IDE rather than just a glue tool for assembling web services. They raised the bar themselves and then jumped right under it. Lousy editor, very slow startup, and you have to have the server running to get anything done. It's worse than NetBeans used to be.

In which I register for a conference

I'm going to be at the No Fluff Just Stuff conference in Philly this year. I love these things. If you're at all interested in Java technology and have $600 and a free weekend, check one out when they come by. I always learn lots of cool stuff that I'd otherwise be too lazy to figure out for myself.

My seminars of choice for this year:

• Creating Polished Swing Applications
• Making the Most of XML
• Assimilating the HiveMind (don't ask)
  
• Advanced Version Control with CVS
• Herding Racehorses and Racing Sheep (again, don't ask)
  
• Spring Overview
• Effective Enterprise Java: Security
• Designing and Developing Pluggable Application Architectures
• Software Metrics and the Great Pyramid of Giza
• Case Study: Persistence Techniques in Java
• A Pragmatic Look at Agile Architecture

It'll be great. You tend to gravitate towards the seminars that are currently interesting professionally, so since I'm now a web developer at large rather than a web developer by trade, I can safely ignore the J2EE seminars now.

In which I take a cheap shot at Michael Jackson

One of the more notable things about Michael Jackson's Thriller video, besides Vincent Price, is that it reflects a time when the dancing zombies were scarier than Jackson himself.

In which I wax egocentric about myself

It's the law. No blog may contain more than one post except in the case that the first post is a vain introductory rambling about the author.

Hi.

Name's Jim. I'm a Texas expatriate currently living in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia. I'm married to the most wonderful woman in the world. I'm a Christian (ex-Catholic, actually, though apropos of nothing).

I work for a middleware testing company. I mostly do Java development.

I'm interested in many things.