Just got back from our 10 day vacation in Hawaii (Oahu and Kauai). Snorkeling there was so good it was unbelievable. Check out the short video below. I took the video using my “underwater” camera and the sound of “darth vader breath” is my own from the snorkel mask. 
I love to visit New England in the fall. At the first whim of winter, the entire forest explodes into bright red / yellow / orange. Last glory from the fleeting summer before the first snow turns them all white! The scenery is breath-taking no matter whether you are viewing from the air, along the highway, on a back road, or even just in front of a single tree. Well, I got to experience all these view points during my trip to Boston last week.
Despite the bad weather and horrendous flight delays, the magnificent view made the trip all the worthwhile. Click on the follow pictures to enter the photo album.
I gave a 2-hour talk on JBoss Seam in the New England Java User’s Group last Thursday. Although the talk was at the same night as a crucial game for Red Sox, it still managed to attract 250+ people — making it one of largest JUG meetings I have ever attended! I had a great time there, and learned first hand about how Java developers in the Boston area are using JBoss Seam to solve real world problems. For those who are interested, the presentation itself can be found here:
Slides for the JBoss Seam presentation in NEJUG, Oct 18th 2007
I enjoyed a “re-union” with my Red Hat colleagues in the Boston area: Shelly McGowan, Chantal Yang, Bill Burke, Kurt Stam, and Rajesh Rajasekaran. Thank you guys for making the meeting a success! In addition, I’d also like to thank Mark Johnson (the president of the NEJUG), Heather Fox (publicist at Prentice Hall), and Shaun Connolly (my sponsor at Red Hat) for organizing everything!
Finally, a couple of references to things I mentioned in the meeting:
It took me a while to figure out the cartoons on Sun’s “CommunityOne” T-shirt …
The front of the T-shirt says: O-pen-sew-(hor)se: Open Source
The back of the T-shirt says: Comb-ewe-knit-e-one: CommunityOne (Thanks David for the correction, see comments. I am bad at math 
)
I stayed in the W Hotel for this year’s JavaOne conference. It is a very nice hotel with the best location for JavaOne — I can go back to my room after a session, change, and catch the next session in time. The room is tiny for its $400 / night price tag — it can barely hold two people chatting with each other. But hey, this is San Francisco real estate.
What I found most amusing about the room is that it has a small box mounted on the wall facing the bed. At the first glance, it looked like a video camera. Why would a hotel install a video camera to spy on guests? So, I decided to climb up the desk and have a better look. It turns out to be more high tech than I thought!
It is actually an IR / heat sensor capable of detecting people in the room. If it detects no one in the room, it automatically adjusts the A/C to save energy and notifies the housekeeping staff that it is okay to come into the room now. That is pretty neat. I guess each housekeeper would also have a handhold device to query for this information as they go from room to room? That would be excellent use case for a Java end-to-end application.
Now I think of it, maybe such sensors have been installed in many hotels I stayed in the past. But this time I stayed in the tiny W hotel room for week — so I had a better chance to actually notice it.
Some pictures from our weekend trip to Dallas:
Sculpture with the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank in the background
Window washers
Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Ancient and Modern
Nasher Sculpture Garden
Inside the Cathedral
Photos from our last trip to Colorado. Enjoy! (Click on the image below to go to the album)
We are back from Maui! This is my 4th (or maybe 5th?) trip to Hawaii and it never gets tired. Check out our photos here:
http://www.jjcafe.net/photography/trips/Maui_2006/index.html
We also made a day-to-day photo journal on top of Google’s satellite images of Hawaii. Just click on a day and all the places we visited on that day are marked on the map. Click on the markers to see the photo / video clip. It is fun!
http://www.jjcafe.net/photography/maps/maui06.php
