Testing the Flickr to Blogger Feature

Most Interesting, a set on Flickr.

I haven't blogged in a while so I thought I'd get started again and there is no better way then to use something easy. :)

I just stumbled onto a setting within Flickr that allows me to connect my Blogger account. Once connected, I can blog about a photo, or set of photos, by pressing a button within Flickr. I don't know what the blog post will look like or if it will include images, but I'll soon find out.

The 'Most Interesting' set of photos is an automatically generated set based on Flickr's secret formula for determining which of my photos are the most interesting. I think the formula includes things like titles, tags, views, favorites, and comments, but not sure what else.

Take a look.

Making Connections while Disconnected

I can't help but feel a bit disconnected while traveling in Europe. While I can get Internet at the hotel, I don't dare activate Data Roaming on the iPhone which really restricts things. I've been used to sending/receiving text messages, using the Facebook app, creating Tweets with Twitterific, and surfing the web the moment an idea popped into my head.
One of those technologies I miss the most is Twitter. I'm still not a heavy tweeter and I haven't quite figured out what the right balance between substance and crap is but I'm really excited about Twitter's speed and reach. I'll explain what I mean with a story that happened to me this week. Before I left for this trip to Europe, I rented a couple of movies from iTunes to watch on the long flights over and back. One of those movies was a documentary called "Welcome to Macintosh." I watched most of it on my flight from Germany to Belgium and then finished the movie in my hotel room. I really enjoyed this documentary so at 4:32 in the afternoon, I used Twitter to recommend the book to all my Mac friends. At 7:32 that same evening, the director of the movie, Rob Baca, thanked me for the recommendation and wished me safe travels. I don't know of any other way outside Twitter that this would have happened so quickly.

Elf Yourself

WebSphere Rocks!

Taken at the Rational Software Developer Conference.

Stupid Collections: Conference Badges

I'm not sure why I started saving my name badges from the developer conferences I've attended. Early on, I started pinning them onto a cork board in my office but the badges quickly took over the entire board so now they are destined for a drawer in my desk. It is overwhelming to look back at all the conferences... and all the travel associated with each. With the latest addition of the EclipseCon 2008 badge, I now have 60 conference badges from 1999 to date.



That's 9 JavaOne badges, 4 from EclipseCon and one EclipseWorld, 7 from the BEA dev2dev days and 2 from BEA World, 3 from the Sun TechDays, plus JavaPolis, Jazoon, IBM Rational Conference, Oracle OpenWorld, LinuxWorld, Zend PHP Conference, MySQL Conference.. and many, many more.

Everyone is a Java User!

I was on my way out the door when my son asked where I was going. I told him I was going to my Java User Group meeting and he said, "Ooo, Can I go?". This was not the typical teenage reaction I would have expected and then he followed up with "I'm a Java User". He was waving his cell phone and has seen the Java logo pop up over and over again when playing some games on the phone. He has also played his fair share of Java applet based games. He thought I was going to a meeting where I would get to see all the cool new Java games before everyone else. I started wondering why there wasn't a group like that.... or maybe there is? :)

I'm sitting in my Java user group meeting right now, listening to Burr Sutter from JBoss who is talking about Open Source SOA and how it can help with application integration. He paints a rather compelling picture and is very entertaining and easy to listen to. Much of his talk centered around the JBoss ESB

He said he is sending the slides but I found them online here.

The Funniest Blog Cartoon Ever!

I found this cartoon at http://www.gapingvoid.com and thought it was funny enough to blog about it.