Wednesday November 02, 2005

Wow, it's been three days since I've blogged. Busy, busy, busy. I flew to Chicago yesterday, and back today for an internal meeting. I was with a group of folks I hadn't really met before. When folks work together for a long time, it shows. The comaraderie was apparent. I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of alchol, nor comment on any effects it may or may not have had during dinner. Ironically, we ate at the Italian Village, which is the restaurant where my father proposed to my mother back in the 50's.

You can tell folks who travel a lot. They know the system. The guy sitting next to me seemed to mirror my (non-bowel) movements. We put on our headphones at the same time, both plugged in to iPods. My Bose noise cancelling headphones kicked butt. Couldn't hear a thing, including the "Please turn off all electronic devices" coming over the intercom during the approach. I got a verbal tongue lashing from the flight attendant, which was the very kind of noise I was hoping to cancel. Yeah, like Bose headphones and an iPod can affect electrical instrumentation. If it does, I may consider driving next time. One of the things that popped up on the iPod was Iron Maiden's "Flight of Icarus". One can never fly too close to the Sun.

After the first round of (non-alcoholic)drinks, we both opened up our laptops at the exact same time. Solaris came to the boot prompt at roughly the same time Windows "resumed". Of course, he was typing away when NetBeans was still loading. Solaris needs a bit more work before laptop support is tier one. Some things are just worth the wait, including suspend and resume. Love my Solaris. Unfortunately, my battery was sucked dry long before his was. Part of the problem is that my laptop use soft interrupts to control screen brightness, which has a major impact on battery life. Of course, he was typing on Microsoft Word while I was compiling in NetBeans 5.0. That may have had something to do with it as well :) After that, I read up on JMS.

On the way back, I was (gasp) running windows. 2 hours & 15 minutes of battery life, which probably surpasses my longest windows session in a decade. OK, except for the 8 hours of partial attention while downloading useful bits during the meeting. Why? I am working with the Java Integration Suite (JIS), and the development tool requires Windows. Me-thinks Sun will be addressing that. I hope so, anyway. I feel vulnerable. Sigh. One thing I am learning about JIS is that it reduces the amount of coding I have to do by leaps and bounds. Me-thinks I'll be blogging on JIS a bit more. After my 2+ hours of battery, more reading up on JMS. My flying partner read the on-board magazines, which is where we parted our synchronization ways.

If anyone has Solaris life-extending battery tips, pass them on.