3 posts tagged “party”

Things have gotten extremely busy (comparatively) these past few weeks thanks to a new project/demo we're putting together for a Chinese company. This is all good but I've been less motivated to spend my day in an office due to the incredibly fine weather as of late.

Most of the difficultly, project-wise, has been finalizing requirements. So, you build what you think you need but then expect some of that work to be wasted.

Anthony, a young Momoist who've we've met in Japan, San Jose, Vegas, but never in Seattle, came by our house on Friday. We watched/sampled a bunch of J-Pop concert videos as well as Evangelion 1.11, on Blu Ray. Dinner was nabe, not really appropriate for the warm weather but almost always good. Plus we had moon cakes. (Moon cakes are kind of like Christmas cookies that you do like them once in a while but wouldn't want to eat them all year long.)

Bedtime was around 3AM for me, so Hitomi and I spent most of Saturday morning in bed. Worked on my Chinese project at home: Not sure why I felt compelled to spend the day hacking. Maybe because of the weather. Didn't want to cook, though we had tons of leftovers, so went out to Malay Satay Hut.

Sunday was Tim's birthday. I rented a bunch of movies. Tim, mom and I watched one. Alone on the Pacific was about the first single-handed sailor from Japan, Horie Ken'ichi. Movie probably exaggerated and changed the order of events of his 94 day sail, although I'm sure there were numerous challenges. (Note: Ruriko Asaoka is incredibly sexy. Would not leave Japan with a sister like that!) Then I spent the evening hacking away at JBoss deployment configuration.

Monday I spent dealing with more configuration issues. JEE is like that.

Tuesday (and until Friday) I went into work, either the whole day or part of the day.

I went out two a couple of movies. First was 9 (3D animation). Animation-wise, and aesthetically, it was quite well done. However, it lacked pacing or something like it, since it was mostly scene after scene of crazy rescues and fights. Too much action and you stop caring. I was with Ian, and he suggested the movie, so walking out of the theater, I wasn't too sure if I should say anything bad about it. (It's easy to complain and that ruins the fun for people who enjoyed the movie.) But still, there were really good aspects.

By the way, I'm not big on celebrity voice acting for animation. Sure, it sells tickets, but well-known celebrities aren't necessarily qualified for voice acting. And rather than the celebrity sounding like the character, the character tends to be changed to fit with the voice actor. And celebrities are often famous because of how they look not because of their acting skill.

Eureka Seven (anime) was much more entertaining. There was a one-time screening on Thursday at Pacific Place, though it was unfortunately sparsely attended. The story was really too intricate and complicated for its own good. (Anime can either be inextricable or overly dense, it seems.) Fortunately, the character interactions were good and animation and action was high quality. The dub actors were good but the writing wasn't agreeing with my ears. Dub translation scripts often add extra words, so dialog often seems unnaturally wordy.

I managed to get out for a swim September 22nd. Water's been getting colder but, hey, mid-eighties temperatures should not be squandered.

Friday I left work early and shopped Uwajimaya. We had Sanma Hiraki, a fall-appropriate fish. If I stopped eating animal meat I'd probably switch to eating fish like this. These guys are really oily, which you'd think would appeal to Americans, but there's just something about oily fish which Americans don't like I guess. Plus, Hitomi made a bunch of interesting side dishes.

I watched two movies that night, since they were due Saturday. First was The Warlords, which was an interesting take on history but seemed to drag on. Spoiler: Everyone dies. Then I saw a classic movie, The Great Escape, which was a lot more entertaining but since it's based on a real event, it was sad at the end. Spoiler: Almost everyone dies. So I get to bed really late.

And then there's this hike the next day. It was a Sakura-con guest relations hike, plus a couple of friends of friends. It was just a short trip to Baring, then Barclay Lake and back again. We manage to start a fire out of embers left over from a fire pit. It kept us warm. I can't say the mountain (Baring) impressed as much as the glaciers on Rainer from Paradise but it was less than half the drive and a much easier hike.

I went to Ian's birthday party in the evening. Since Ian is poor, people were asked to bring their own food, though he did have some chicken, rice, and sauce but maybe enough for about 5-6 people. (About 15+ came.) I got him a massage gift certificate, since he walks around like a crippled old man with bad posture, and maybe a massage might help some. (Exercise would help him, but he's not too into anything intense enough to make much difference.) I pick on him some but he has lots of nice *other* friends, okay? And his mom's a yoga instructor, so it's not as if he couldn't do yoga for free.

Sunday (today): Slept in, or tried to. We have an obnoxious (old?) cat who doesn't let us sleep in on Sundays it seems. Left a little late for a football game. To this fan, football's much more interesting than baseball. I tried explaining the game to Hitomi but she got busy with crocheting and ignored the second half. Nintendo had a suite for this game, which included free food and drinks. It must have cost about $200 per person, times about 20 or so. Seahawks lost, of course, but I enjoyed the game.

We biked back: Beautiful weather again.

I haven't had a big birthday party in many years. But it felt good to have one yesterday.

Hitomi and I worked hard to put on the event. And everyone all helped out in their own way, which felt better in some ways than getting any number of presents. Thanks to Kevin & Stacey for setting up the grill. Carlos and others for manning it. My parents for bringing a table. And others who helped transport those with no cars, or load things, or unload things. (And to a few people who tossed in some dollars for pizza, which was appreciated--$50 for two pizzas!?)

Having it at the house would have made it easier. Cutting down the number of guests would have made it easier. Not having to transport kayaks would have been easier. And telling everyone to go home at 5PM would have been probably a good idea...

It was interesting how many people knew each other. Or had shared interests. Hiroaki, who I didn't know so well, might be coming with us on a few hikes. Or maybe Trent and Kristen would go with us on a kayaking trip?

A lot of people took to kayaking fairly well, even though it was their first time. Unfortunately, a few people got pretty wet. I should have brought some towels. Also, a lot of people got their feet wet and I should have said to bring sandals. Matthew's Beach is much better than Magnuson Park for kayak launching. But there's not a whole lot of interesting destinations nearby. Saint Edwards is just across the lake but a little far for a beginner's paddle.

Somehow, I had a chance to get out there for a long paddle. It was really the only time I had to relax during the whole day. I don't really relax so well when there's a lot of people around. Still, even out paddling, I paddled pretty hard; I'm noticeably sore today.

The after party went on until about 12PM. Many of us played Magic. Ian, who was taciturn the whole day, got a chance to show off his cards, which I think he was happy about.

Next year, who knows?

I was introduced to JBoss at m-Qube, when several developers selected it to build the applications that made up the m-Qube initial offerings. Once I got over the initial discomfort of understanding this new system (from Tomcat I had used almost exclusively at Openwave), I fell in love with the elegant JMX microkernel and the powerful built-in features which I had previously had to write myself or bring in with third-party software. I later started building additional components and -- most importantly -- identified or fixed many bugs in the product. Soon after a few patches, I was able to get access to the source code and make modifications myself. Although I didn't find Adrian Brock or other JBoss developers to be very welcoming of my contributions, my code got to get in.

The system built on top of JBoss at m-Qube eventually attracted several buyers. Last year, the company was bought for $250 million in cash. Without JBoss, and the fact it was open source (free software) and open for me to add critical features, I'm not sure we could have easily built the software that we had. Perhaps if we were on top of a proprietary system our market valuation would have been less? It's hard to say. Sometimes the features, such as the messaging system, were buggy causing outages. There were problems in upgrades to newer versions that caused random start-up class-loading hell, some bugs that got me up in the middle of the night on the phone with our operations team. But proprietary software is not necessarily less buggy, and if it is, you rely on your vendor for help and cannot often fix the problem yourself. That puts you in a powerless situation many times.

Last year, I quit m-Qube after acquisition by Verisign. I was ready to move on from my four years. I was actually looking at JBoss as a potential employer and had interviewed with them, to join with the JBoss Messaging team. I turned them down, because they offered less salary than m-Qube was paying. It also seemed likely I would be working hard or harder than I was at m-Qube, which was pretty hard and tiring, and Autodesk was attractive for being (likely) less stressful.

One of the downsides with Autodesk was I would be "forced" to work with BEA WebLogic. This is not entirely bad, as Weblogic is arguably the best proprietary application server. However, it was immediately evident that Weblogic was missing many useful (perhaps key) features that JBoss provided back in 2002. And as part of the next release of a system, I'm considering JBoss Microkernel integrated with Weblogic as a way to gain some of the features I miss.

Autodesk has been very kind in allowing me to go to JavaOne. Typically, when a largish company is doing well, they allow their developers to go to trade conferences. I don't know to what end, though I'm learning a bit of this and that. It's unlikely that many things will be adopted by the fairly conservative division. If anything, I understand my position as a Java "expert" a bit better.

I'm also here to have a good -- though educational -- time. From the JBoss.org website, there was a party scheduled for tonight, which simply required a registration form to be completed. I was generally curious as to the content (Who goes to these events? What sort of food or music do they have?) as well as I wanted to meet some of the developers I usually interact with only on-line. Now, I don't really have "friends" I continually interact, mostly people who from time to time send me messages. But I wanted to put a face to these people.

I met a few non-JBoss developers from Holland. Some JBoss people were kind enough to approach us. I met some old guard JBoss developers. I also met a developer from Singapore working on some distributed processing software built on top of JBoss. I ran into the JBoss recruiter who was interested in finding "top level" Java developers. I talked about my reasons for turning down JBoss (stated above). And despite any body's outward interest, I rambled on about some of the software I worked on, on top of JBoss. I ate some food and drank free beer. The party started winding down around 8:30PM.

I wish the JBoss team a lot of luck. I hope that, if for some reason, I get fired from Autodesk or can't find work elsewhere, I can work with the JBoss team. And I'm sure if I moved to Fiji they'd let me work there, and that sure would be convenient.