Some Guy's Blog

The blog has finally found its final home: http://blog.jimvanfleet.com/ The site may have some momentary outages in the coming weeks as TextDrive puts out fires, but hopefully I’m not the one causing them! In general, though, it should be available from now on!

Apologies for being too tied up to get a review out this week. I had a good excuse, I promise. In exchange, I’ll mention what I’m listening to these days. Iron And Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days ‘Passing Afternoon’ is an absolutely gorgeous song. Kudos to Megan’s friend Marta for making the recommendation that broke [...]

I’ve accepted an offer to work at Alterthought in Richmond, VA about 300 yards from where I previously worked. I’ll be working on Java web development, as usual. I was really excited to hear that they use the same major frameworks and IDE as I do (WebWork , Spring, Hibernate, and Eclipse respectively.) That means [...]

It’s amazing how music has the power to inspire, to transcend physical and temporal boundaries, to conjure memories of times long ago, to bare souls, and entice listeners to bare their own. Billie Holliday’s Lady In Satin is a one-of-a-kind record and perhaps her consummate work. When Ray Ellis, the orchestra director, was asked how [...]

I decided to put my resume online, so I won’t lose it in the future.

The good news is that I’ve been offered a full-time position at the company I’ve been working for since Christmas. The bad news is that the salary they’ve offered represents a serious paycut (about 20%) of what they’re currently paying me as a contractor. The benefits are good (perhaps very good), but I just don’t [...]

CompUSA (!!) has a 40 hour TiVo unit for free when you sign up for a one-year membership. You hear people talk about TiVo all the time, but I am telling you, something like TiVo will change the way we all watch television. TiVo has my strongest possible recommendation if you ever watch any TV. [...]

It just struck me that I had a great experience with a product, and didn’t let anyone know. I have four cats now, and when they decide to pee on the sofa, that’s not a happy day. I was very worried about having our living room smelling like cat urine. I ordered a cleaning solution [...]

(Originally written on July 26) I’m going to start with this one because I’ve been in a pretty crappy mood for the past 24 hours or so. I completely forgot about an important meeting yesterday, and mysterious bugs in Rails are keeping me from sharing my project with the team. Thus, like this album on [...]

Paul Kedrosky is a venture capitalist who recently spotted the the Strangest SEC Filing Ever If you follow politics at all, you should read it.