| Okay, so this is my first entry for 2001... Okay, so on this date -- January 8th -- in 2000 I was posting my eighth entry of the year. Life has been busy.... I've been busy.... For example, our Christmas tree did not come down until yesterday! In addition to the usual hectic pace of life at home and work, this first week of the new year (century, millenium) was especially busy as our family size increased by one. A friend of our children moved in with us this past week. This was not a surprise as we had been discussing this possibility for several weeks, but the decision to make this move and putting it into effect came on Wednesday. Hmmm, I do not know what to call her.... since I use pseudonymns for my daughter and younger son (at their request) but not for my wife nor my older son nor for his fiancee.... how about Laura? Yeah, why not... so if at anytime I should happen to mention somebody in our house who is named Laura, you'll know I mean the female college freshman who has just joined our household. Of course she's been hanging out with my kids and spending time in our house for just about the entire time I've been maintaining this website and I don't every recall having mentioned her before... just things like "Jennifer and her friends went to the mall" or something like that. I'm writing this from the ninth floor of a Radisson Hotel in Cambridge, Mass.... I'm attending a course (Server Side Programming Using VisualAge for Java) which I hope will make my life a little easier in working with WebSphere. I'm beginning to have a decent architectural knowledge of WebSphere and its underlying technologies (servlets and Java Server Pages and Enterprise Java Beans, etc.) but I am less comfortable with using the VisualAge IDE in the actual practice of building these things. (I thought that today's class was very useful; I hope that the rest of the week will be as good.) I considered (very briefly) commuting to Boston but thoughts of spending hours each day trapped in Boston's infamous traffic gridlock dissuaded me from that. The course is in Cambridge which would mean not just driving to Boston but also driving through much of Boston. I then thought of commuting by rail... but commuter rail does not come as far as my area... I would have to drive into Massachusetts (or into Providence... no thanks)... I don't live very far from an Amtrak station but their trains are just too infrequent... 4:53 a.m. is just way too early to catch a train... but the next one doesn't come until 8:55! Well... that's it... not only do I wait until eight days into the new year, I only post a short entry.... (By the way, I haven't been a complete slacker online... please notice that I have done some work on my webpage... changed my index page a little bit and built a new calendar structure to hold 2001 entries.) |