Field Notes

Schools skip life skills. Heinlein's wisdom applies: know how to do real things.

New tires, lighter rims, 18-inch wheels - performance and style rolled into one upgrade.

Cable modem rebooting randomly? Comcast can't fix it. You might be stuck troubleshooting forever.

2008 brings Seam, Flex, and uncertainty. What tech excites you?

Reflections on a satisfying New Year with friends, homemade French toast, and optimism for what 2008 might bring.

Spark::red specializes in ATG hosting with response times measured in days, not months.

Load balance with redundancy, monitoring, and failover - 13 steps to bulletproof uptime.

The Seattle Motorcycle Show had the bikes but missed the wow factor - though 5 inches of weekend snow made for better stories.

Block wireless leeches? Get creative - upside-down internet redirects everything.

Use fuser to identify which process owns that unexpected port immediately.

A vacation in Vegas turned magical: upgraded flights, killer hotel deals, an unforgettable Crazy Horse Paris show, and desert adventures.

10MinuteMail's memory leak solved - porn was the unlikely culprit filling the inbox.

Seam 2.0 CR3 and JBoss 4.2.2 upgrades deliver faster email processing under load.

Getting Quartz scheduling to work with Seam proved tricky - here's what I learned navigating sparse docs and setup gotchas.

Attempting Parkour at UW alongside experienced practitioners taught me the sport is exhilarating - and punishing on day two.

Halloween security work at an industrial warehouse venue proved surprisingly rewarding, juggling event safety with unexpected responsibility.

California wildfire photos from family capture the raw power and devastation of nature's uncontrolled fury.

The essential pattern for safely updating ATG orders: lock management, transactions, and synchronization explained by an ATG architect.