At the finish line My name is Brian and Sunday I became a triathlete. My journey started ten months ago when I decided to get back into shape after 15 years of being obese and out-of-shape with some yo-yo dieting in the middle. What changed? I'll get to that. This weekend I competed in the first ever Rocketman Florida Triathlon which took place on the grounds of Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. In preparation I lost 50 lbs and 12 inches from my waist. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm a huge space buff. As a kid I wanted to become an astronaut. I went to Space Camp in Titusville when I was 10. Before that, I saw my first shuttle launch at 7 while on vacation. It was the final launch of the Challenger. I've written about that experience . I've seen three other launches since then including John Glenn's famous return to space as well as the final launch that ended the U.S. Shuttle Program. The idea of biking on the restricted grounds ...

I've been slowly going paperless over the past decade. The first step on my journey started in 2000 when I signed up to use a payment service, PayTrust , to receive my incoming bills, scan them, and put them online for me to pay. The next major step was probably when I got a digital camera to replace my traditional film cameras. It might not be considered a "paperless" use case, but it has lead to very little hardcopies over the years as monitors and HDTV with screensavers and AppleTV s have become so beautiful.  Back to the paperless office, my next big step was eFileing my taxes but that didn't come until about 5 years later. Then suddenly about two years ago, I hit a real shift in my desire to go completely paperless when I got my iPad and installed Evernote . digital notes... If you aren't familiar with Evernote its an excellent app, available on all the major desktop and mobile OSes, that makes note-taking and organizing really simple. The killer fe...

So tonight I discovered my hard drive was slowly being choked by some mysterious process writing gigs and gigs to it. So I moved 75GB of files to an external drive only to come back a few hours later and discover my free space was back down to 23 GB. Where did 50 GB of files come from in just a few hours!? Idea #1 Rogue process downloading large files...*cough*iTunes*cough* I had NetUse Traffic Monitor running and it clearly showed that there was definitely not 50 GB of downloads in that time period. Idea #2 Rogue process writing lots of log files In my investigation of what to move to the external drive I used GrandPerspective to get a visualization and catalog of what was on my drive. Thankfully I hadn't closed that window so I could rescan and compare what had changed.  Here's the next head scratcher, it showed only a 4 GB total difference in used space between the two scans. Idea #3 It was something on my wife's side which GrandPerspective couldn't see sin...

Yesterday, I saw a stranger ranting about how my local town doesn't consistently use their call system to notify people of snow delays. He then went on to list at least four other alternative sources he could choose from and was finally "forced" to find out from the local TV station. His rant was amusing because it reminded me of the comic Louis CK's bit about how everything is amazing, yet nobody's happy. It got me thinking that I wish someone had created a landing page that I could link a ranter like this guy to. Something in a similar tone to http://dearrecruiters.com and http://lmgtfy.com . So that's what I did last night, I created http://yourenothappy.com

Today is a significant marker in my life, the first anniversary of the passing of my mother-in-law. Her death was sudden and I was unprepared for it. While shocked and sad, after the week of mourning was over, I expected life to return to normal quickly. In many ways it did, but in retrospect I'm amazed at how much flux there was throughout the following year. In hindsight, I now see how depressed I was for several months after her death. It feels silly to say that, since I'm generally a happy person. The idea of me being depressed for a day let alone a month feels very out of character. But I was and it affected the decisions I made and blurred my focus, both personally and professionally. I've been searching during most of the past twelve months and it took a while to find myself again, as my wife has so patiently endured. My productivity at work took a nose dive for a while, partially because I became extremely disinterested in what I was working on. My disinterest ...

So in my  previous post  I explained how to simplify your logging with Maven and SLF4J. If you haven't read it yet, please do before reading more.  Since then I've discovered an easier and cleaner way to remove the secondary frameworks from your Maven dependency tree. Here's a revised overview of the steps: Decided which logging framework will be your primary, aka who will actually write to your log file. Define the dependency scope of all the secondary frameworks to be ' provided '. Configure your project to depend on drop-in replacements of each secondary framework from SLF4J. Define secondary frameworks as provided Use the dependencyManagement section for this. Its used when you might have a dependency transitively. Add dependency on SLF4J Add the following to your pom.xml Conclusion So now in only 3 steps you can redirect all your logging to your primary logging framework without changing a line of code!