Update on my dad

A quick update on my dad. After having a stroke on January 31, 2008, and a good family friend passing away a few days later, I'm happy to say that my dad has come home. After being in the hospital for about three weeks and catching the virus that caused the hospital to be locked down (meaning that he had no visitors for 10 days right after Bill K passed away), he was discharged because the virus had another breakout. Last weekend was a little scary, his blood sugar levels were way up, and his blood pressure was too high. My mom tried to reach a doctor but no one was available (the Canadian health care system for you). My folks finally got to a doctor on Wednesday and it turns out that he had the wrong prescription for his diabetes. Once the prescription was straightened out, he started to feel better. It will take several weeks for him to really feel the full impact of the medication but I can hear it in his voice already. He is starting to do much better. One more good thing, he can talk like his old self, fortunately the stroke only affected his balance which he is working on correcting. To everyone that contacted me, thank you very much for your thoughts, concerns, and comments. Dad - its great to have you back home, I love you very much!

Eclipse Tip

Are you tired of seeing all Java files in your Eclipse project showing this icon: Would you like to know if a Java file is an enum, an Interface, or maybe an annotation? Just turn on the Java Type Indicator preference and your class icons will change from this: to this: . For detailed instructions on how to turn this preference on, check out this Eclipse help page.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone

Since I'm caught up on the latest Java Posse episode, I thought I'd listen to the radio on my way into work today. It turns out my local NPR station just started it's fall membership drive. After about five minutes of listening, one of the local sponsor's (a car dealership) joked about programming everyone's car radios to always tune to an NPR station. Laughing, I decided to switch stations, well guess what? Every station I turned to was NPR. No kidding, it was so bizarre that I had to call my wife to tell her. When I turned the radio back on, it was on another station. Then when I went back to NPR, all stations played NPR. I'm not sure what was going on but it seems that my radio only wants NPR ;-)

Goodbye consulting, hello Overstock.com

It would have been much better if I'd posted this month's ago but I've been so busy with work and the UJUG (Utah Java User Group) that I haven't had much time to blog. I'm hopping this will change from today onward. So my first bit of news is that after being a consultant for most of the last eight years or so I've finally decided to take a full-time job with Overstock.com. I actually started back in April of this year, so I've been there for a while now. I must say that I'm having more fun at Overstock.com than I've had in years. That is part of the reason I haven't been blogging, my day job is so satisfying that when I get home I don't need to challenge myself with something interesting, I get to do interesting stuff all day long. I'm hoping to start blogging a little more often (like more than every two months) and talk a little bit about what we are doing, from a technology standpoint that is. On another note, I just finished an article on JPA for TheServerSide.com. I think it will be posted on Tuesday of next week (Sept. 18th). If you are interested in looking at the source, you can check out the project page here.