I've just spent the day reviewing sessions submitted for this years JavaOne conference. Thankfully I don't have to review every session, in fact there are so many that I only get to review sessions from people who's name starts with one of two letters and for one track. I'm not revealing the exact details, so nobody can either try to bribe me to get their session in (very unlikely) or complain to me when their session doesn't get accepted (more likely).

As ever, we're trying really hard to address the feedback we get from people about the level of technical content, the skills of the presenters and so on. This is always a bit of a juggling act since until you actually see the presentation it's very difficult to judge what it will really be like. Also, what might be the perfect session for one person is not for someone else (remember, you can't please all the people all the time).

If anyone wants my advice on what makes a good submission here's a few things I'd recommend based on the last few hours of looking through sessions that ranged from the exceptional to the down-right bizarre. (I'm not giving specifics, but there were a couple of sessions that reminded me of a quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "I think I speak for everyone here when I say, huh?").

• Title needs to be catchy, but is not the most important part of the submission.
• If there is a section for abstract and separate section for presentation summary, fill them both in and make them different.
• Give sufficient detail without being too verbose, which is obviously like saying cut a piece of string to the right length. Let's just say that a single sentence is too short and presentation summary that takes ten minutes to read is too long.
• If you're submitting a session for a Java conference, you'll really should mention the word Java at least once in your submission (or at the very least something connected to Java like JVM).
• Think about what would make you want to go to a session if you were reading the abstract, give it an interesting angle that will attract an audience. This will also work with reviewers.

Best of luck to anyone who's submitted a session.

I have to say I really like the people at Blueyonder who are my ISP. When I first got broadband the only option I had was BTs ADSL at 512Kb/sec. This was a major improvement over dialup, but the fact that the ADSL modem only worked on Windows, which needed to be frequently rebooted (with a new call to DHCP and almost without fail a new IP address) was far from ideal. When I moved house we got digital cable TV and shortly thereafter switched to a cable modem supplied by Telewest Broadband running at 1Mb/sec. Since this provides an ethernet connection the connection is not dependent on a stable Windows platform (not sure anything or anyone should depend on that) and can be hooked up to the router for simple shared access and firewall protection.

Not only is the connection rock-solid in terms of reliability (I can only remember a couple of brief outages in the last four years), the nice people at Blueyonder keep turning up the speed at no extra cost. Last year they bumped it up to 1.5Mb/sec and then at the start of the year it went up to 2Mb/sec. Downloading music from iTunes is a breeze.

Despite being a geek, I'm still amazed at the fact I can be sitting at home logged on via VPN to a machine in the west coast of the US and the response is almost instantaneous. As Arthur C. Clarke said in Profiles of The Future, way back in 1961: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There's definitely some magic in there somewhere.

There was a very interesting piece on the BBC morning news yesterday about how Collins, one of the main compilers of dictionaries here in the UK for nearly two hundred years, had set up a new website. This site is intended to make the collection of words in common use easier, since anyone can submit a word they think is valid. Editors at Collins will verify the usage of a word, based on certain criteria (like, has anyone other than the person submitting the word ever used it). Assuming that the word passes the criteria it gets added to the next revision of the dictionary.

There were some interesting examples, many of which can be found here. Bimble, for instance, the definition of which is "Brit (Slang): a wander to pass the time, or to shirk responsibilities", is something I've used for many years since I do seem to do a lot of bimbling. Doofah, which is any small kind of gadget, especially a remote control is also something I'm familiar with, as in "there's too many doofahs in this house". One I hadn't heard of which was highlighted in the report, but interestingly isn't in the dictionary is spoota, an acronym for "something pulled out of thin air"; i.e. a convincing explanation for something with no basis in fact. A key requirement for being a Technology Evangelist is the ability to spoota without missing a beat.

Etymology (the study of the origin and development of words) has always interested me since our language is always evolving and the usage of words goes in and out of fashion just as much as anything else. For example, when I went to Canada for Christmas and stayed with my girlfriends family her three teenage nephews used English in such a way as to make me feel a) old, and b) completely out of touch with popular culture. Almost everything was referred to as "brutal" (I would agree that that was a good description of the weather, but not necessarily applicable to a shot made whilst playing pool). Anything that was deemed good was "sick", which seems somewhat counter intuitive, but is a great example of the way words evolve to have different meanings in different contexts.

Of course, it's not just human languages that evolve in this way; a quick look at the new features in J2SE 5 shows the addition of seven new language features that introduce new syntax and semantics. Thankfully, these changes don't occur at the same pace as in English and are carefully thought out before inclusion.