I spent Friday and the weekend at NFJS in Seattle. Like last year GenoLogics decided to send most of the development team down for the conference. It was good times with the team and a lot of good speakers.

However, I thought the conference last year was better for me. It just didn't seem like there was that much new stuff this year. Last year we had Java 5, Ajax and Ruby on Rails -- all pretty new at the time. This year I was already familiar with all that, so I didn't have that many things to take away. The talks on Spring/Hibernate/SOA were also not very interesting since I'm already familiar with those technologies.

The talks that I enjoyed the most were two on JavaScipt (since I didn't know very much about the language) and the talk about the Java memory model. It's nice to talk about things at a detailed level and really get into it.

I also went to talks on Tapestry and JSF. I'm not a web guy, so this is always quite interesting. JSF didn't impress me at all, it seemed clunky and complicated. Tapestry on the other hand had a clean seperation of HTML and code. I'm still not sure if I was that impressed with either though.

Finally, it's funny that there wasn't a single talk on Ruby this year. Was it just a fad afterall?

My roommate is just updating his blog while I'm relaxing on the couch. That got me thinking ... wow maybe I should update my blog too -- but nothing's been happening! Anyway, he just said "If you're in a good mood, it just always seems like stuff's been happening.". So, I guess I must be in a bad mood today?!

Also, it's totally awesome to have a laptop so I can relax on the couch while surfing the web.

I finally stopped being lazy and upgraded to the latest version of Drupal for my website. That meant going from 4.5.x to 4.7.3 -- luckily it was a very painless process. Drupal's database upgrade functionality is excellent.

Other than that, not too much is new. I've taken up outdoor rock climbing after doing a course on it this summer. Climbing outdoors is a lot more fun than indoors. I've also taken a sailing course this summer, so hopefully I will get lots of chances to crew on a boat over winter. A colleague of mine has a boat, so I will try and tag along with them. It's been a good summer with me trying out lots of things I had been putting on the back burner.

Work has been busy as usual and I've been travelling to Germany a lot to support the pilot project we have underway. It's been a little too much travelling and tech support kind of work and not enough coding for me. Hopefully that will change in the fall and I will have more time to focus on building out professional services and working on some cool projects.

The upside of travelling for work is that it's easy to get in some holidays over in Europe. This year I went a little further and spent almost two weeks in Egypt. It was an awesome trip. I travelled with a friend of mine and got to see a lot of the country. My favorite part was camping overnight in the desert. It was an amazing feeling to be out in the middle of nowhere with amazing scenery, stars, sunset, sunrise, etc. Of course I also went to see the pyramids and all that good stuff. I can highly recommend it.

This year I'm presenting a poster at HUPO together with my colleague Mei. Really all the credit should go to Mei for doing the work on the poster!! We're submitting it together with the University of Pittsburgh. I'm working with them to integrate Proteus into their lab so that they can fully automate their analysis processes. It's a nice little project with a little bit of custom coding and I hope to do more of this kind of stuff with professional services in the future.

That's it for now.