The Kitchen Sink Weblog: Tales from Sun's internet facing edge

We've all seen the election maps published by the major media. Here's some maps that take the population densities into account.

Check out this site . It's a journal of a woman's motorcycle ride through the dead zone of Chernobyl. Click on the chapter links at the bottom of the page to read through it.

The black Russian humour adds to the writing, but the photographs of a moment frozen in time speak for themselves.

kathy

Kind of scary. Are we on the path to living in 10x12 cubicles like the ones shown in the beginning of the movie "The Fifth Element"? Stay And Stay And Stay What Extended StayAmerica tells us about our lives

A few weeks ago I browsed through blogs.sun.com, and saw a number of cute stories about people's kids. Little kids, ones that need strollers, put their foot in their mouth (awww, how cute..).

So what is up with this baby boom? No less than 12 couples I know personally, either just had or are having babies. I've been to five baby showers this year. The checkers at Costco must be wondering why I keep showing up with armfuls of baby clothes.

Being the contrarian I am, I'm not having a kid as a 30ish-40ish woman. Nope, no more strollers for me. Just nice uninterrupted sleep. My contribution to the propagation of the human species happenned in my 20s. I guess I'm just an impatient person.

It's almost scary how the marketeers have zeroed in on my son. He just graduated from high school, and we've gotten six!! credit card offers for him. We have gotten several catalogs geared towards the furnishing of his hypothetical dorm room (actually some of it is kind of cool). And let's not forget the military, they are recruiting kids to "be all you can be". When they are 18, your kid no longer needs your permission to join up.

My son is reasonably computer saavy and aware of the privacy issues. So he adopted a alias online. Problem is that he didn't do a very good job of it and so we get two of everything (except the credit card offers), one with his name and one for Mike Rotch ... get it, Mi KRotch, ha ha. Ok, so it is only funny to a 16 year old boy.

Makes you wonder, how much more sophisticated the marketeers will be, when the current baby crop reaches 18. Just think about it. The schools, which surely will continue to be underfunded, will sell information about the students to corporations. Little Jimmy will be categorized on his strengths (not good at math, but very good at art), and activities (likes basketball, let's send him an ad for Nikes). Heck they aren't going to wait until he's 18. Kids are sophisticated consumers in their own right.. right now.

As Scott once said, you have no privacy, get over it .... Seems like he is right.

- Kathy

For the break I visited Padre Island.

Padre Island is on the Texas Gulf Coast near Corpus Christi. Note strategic placement of camera shot to avoid marring picture with oil rigs.

If you get tired of the beach, there are canals and lakes. If you are into boating and fishing this is the place for you. It is Texas so it is hot and humid, but not as bad as it is inland.

It's a slow place with it's own pace. But change is coming. Real eatate has appreciated 15-20% just in the last year partially on the promise of a new deep water channel that is being dug allowing easier access to the sea. Lots of upscale condos being built.

Locals are talking about a McDonalds that is planned for the main drag... just wait, next it will be Starbucks.

It took me a while to shake the languid calm out of my soul. But an afternoon talking about upgrading all our java.sun.com web servers to 6.1 in three data centers seems to have done it. Welcome back.

Kathy

P.S. I'll edit this with pictures when I get a chance, I have to crop them down first

Among the many things I do here at Sun -- insert yet-to-be written bio weblog here --, I'm helping a team with a demo for JavaOne. It's a cool concept. Think of a portal on your desktop and you have the idea. The tool basically aggregates and pulls content from various webservices so you have all your favorite web information at your fingertips. I haven't checked yet, but the team was going to add blogs.sun.com to the RSS reader. Another "channel" is going to be content from bugdatabase on bugs.sun.com.

We recently launched bugdatabase (late May). The similiar look and feel (and the fact that we kept the same login servlet) to bugparade which lived on our EOL'ed site http://developer.java.sun.com hides the fundamental changes we did. bugparade was a lot of scripts that replicated the content up to a production server, now we have a dynamic database driven app, with a yet un-announced webservice. We are going to change the webservice APIs for reasons too long to get into here, but we hope to be done with that in September -- insert usual caveat about schedules here --, then can we tell everyone about it.

Anyway I'm disgressing, back to the demo. It's a Swing application so will be at the Swing and Java 2D pods in the Java Pavillion. The engineers who wrote it will be at the pods at 11AM and 3PM on Mon, Tue, Wed.

More about the demo will be coming.

I've been breaking things all day. I wrote up a nice weblog saying what I do and why I decided to blog and posted and got exceptions galore. I've also broken cogix today (a web survey tool). So since I am persistent, I'll try once more to post this. And I will be back with a longer one...