I totally read it on Some Guy’s Blog

I attended a NovaJug meeting last night with Neal Ford talking about Domain Specific Languages and Patrick Peak who spoke about Hibernate.

Domain Specific Languages seem like something I’ll keep my eye on, but are nowhere close to being used in real applications today. I’m intrigued by some of the possibilities, but if, as in our presentation, readability and clarity for the end user are the goals, then, honestly, I’m not sure if it will gain much traction. I might post my reasons why if I get the time, but let’s get serious, no one cares.

Patrick’s talk was slightly more useful to me, since he was able to confirm that my worries with integrating XDoclet with Hibernate.

My main impression is still that I’m closer to being a speaker at one of these meetings than getting much out of them anymore. I was fortunate enough to start my Java career after EJB, I stay abreast of the blogosphere goings on, and most importantly, I use these frameworks myself. (Or at least evaluate them, usually.)

I was sort of surprised to see that Patrick was caught up in an attack on Rails deployment. After meeting the fellow, I find it impossible to believe that he was out to attack Rails, and that you should believe him in his follow-up post

Richmond RING

I am the membership chairman for the Richmond Real Estate Investors Networking Group. It’s a group that has a handful of experienced real-estate investors, willing to share their knowledge. I’ve already learned a lot from the group, and I hope it continues to thrive despite the poor showings from the last two months.

I’m preparing an application to help me manage the membership details. I’m using Ruby on Rails and AJAX to help me keep up with incoming flow of people as they walk in the door. This application I can later expand to be useful for CISV, as well.

Online Creative Real Estate Center

I am the sole member of Online Creative Real Estate Center, LLC. I am preparing this application for use within an advanced real estate investing group here in Richmond. It is my first real serious Rails application, and it has required serious work. I have gotten Trac and Subversion working at TextDrive and that’s really helped me stay organized, as I only get to focus on that application from time to time.

I am also learning the ropes of actually being an investor from these fellows. I may soon be attempting to contact those with delinquent income tax in my county and seeing if they’d like to sell me their house on the cheap. With help from AAA Investors, I can make some money if someone says yes.

The House

The new house is looking great. I really like the color scheme that we’ve ended up with, and you can judge for yourself by viewing my house photos on flickr

There’s still quite a lot of work to do. We will be focusing on the house landscaping soon, and trying to finish up all the elements on the inside. We’ve been working on getting the bushes and trees trimmed up this last week.

The Blog

The blog is obviously righting itself. You can keep track of my progress in the lower right corner, where I let you know what changes might be in store.

Football

It didn’t take long for this college football season to get interesting, with almost every team in the top 10 either losing or having a close call.

My fantasy teams seem to be performing pretty well. Of course, we’re almost done with the afternoon games, so there’s still plenty of football left.

The top 54 album list has been compiled.  I hope to post at least one mini-review a week to get myself into the habit of posting again.  The first one is already in the can, but I hope to have some more ready to go so that I can guarantee to have you one every Friday.

Wish me luck, and I hope you enjoy it!

I’ve tried out ecto, and things were going well until it mysteriously lost its outer window?  I don’t have time to be tracking down bugs in my blog posting client, so I decided to try BlogJet.  I know you may not care, but there it is anyway.

I managed to get two items crossed off my blog to-do list: I got sidebar elements encapsulated (less than one line of code) and then the CSS and images ready.

CSS is one of the weaker parts of my portfolio, but at least I have something I can call my own. As I learn more and more about CSS, I’m sure I can bring my theme up to par.

Ecto has won the desktop blogging client tournament I’ve held by supporting most of the functionality I’d expect from such a client.

I’ll make sure to keep you updated with how it goes.

TextDrive is offering another round of lifetime hosting sales. I participated in the second round (VCII) and couldn’t be more pleased with what I have received thus far, and it’s only been a few months.

TxD is improving very, very quickly, and they have some very visibly intelligent people working for them and affiliated with them. I couldn’t recommend this deal more highly if you are in the market for hosting.

I’m very excited to be working on a new blog engine named typo. For the first time, my blog is written in an language and platform that I can easily alter, so that the entire blog is a vehicle for expression instead of only the articles.

You’ll also notice that I’ve integrated my two blogs together. A later post will explain more about my motivations for this.

If you have been a regular visitor in the past, please read my about RSS page and subcribe to my RSS feed using one of the links on the right.

And stay tuned for new developments! I have many in mind.