fnokd!

If you’ve spent time around a child as he’s developed language, you’ll notice how he starts with a string of similar statements:

• I saw a dog
• I saw a cat
• I saw a bee
• I saw another dog
• I saw Don Henley

After a while, that can get a tad annoying, and you become grateful when they discover conjuctions.

• I saw two dogs, a cat, a bee, and Don Henley.

Many web2.0 dealios these days (ahem, Spock) take the “listen to me talk” approach.

• Jim joined NewThingr!, and thinks you should, too.
• John joined NewThingr! and thinks you should, too.
• Larry joined NewThingr! and thinks you should, too.
• Don Henley joined NewThingr! and thinks you should, too.

Everyone wants to be viral, but annoyance doesn’t help the case. What’s the solution? Be stateful.

When Jim, John, Larry and Don join your service, still offer to let their contacts know about it. But the use-case is “let my friends know about it”, not “send my friends an email, right now, telling them I just joined, right now”.

At the end of the day, gather up everyone who wanted to let me know about NewThingr!, mix in a conjuction, and send me a single email.

• Jim, John, Larry and Don Henley joined NewThingr!

Now I can be gently reminded about NewThingr! at most once-a-day. Plus, you get a chance to show me, in a powerful way, that 4 of my friends all signed up today. I’m thinking “wow, 4 of my friends signed up for NewThingr!” instead of “wow, I’m glad those emails from NewThingr! stopped for a while”.

Conjunctions don’t stop once you get someone to sign up, either. Allow and encourage me to tell you about all of my email addresses. Not so I can get more email, but so I can get less. Some people know me as Codehaus Bob, some as Shovelpunks Bob, others as JBoss Bob. If your service realizes I’m all of them (a big “and”), then you can prevent duplicate notifications and inviting-an-existing-member. LinkedIn does a great job on that front.

Behold the power of “and”.

I’ve been noticing lately, it seems that “heirloom” is popping up everywhere.

There are heirloom vegetables, of course. The tasty varieties of tomatoes your grandparents grew up on, instead of the red/orange globes that taste like nothing.

Then I noticed a store selling “heirloom sewing supplies”.

Some dictionary defines “heirloom” as

A valued possession passed down in a family through succeeding generations.

I read that, and I’m glad to see a resurgence of heirloominess. We surely go through “retro” ages, but that’s more about fashion than values. Retro pants, retro hair, retro music.

Vintage seems like a half-way point between “retro” and “heirloom”. Maybe.  Or maybe “vintage” is just “retro” with a longer time-horizon.  The 1960s are retro.  The 1920s are vintage.

But “heirloom” points to a valued possession (or craft) that has been kept up with through the generations, like a spoken history.  Something we’ve reflected upon and decide it’s worthwhile to keep alive.  Retro/vintage is more about looking back and cherry-picking something to bring back to life, if just for a little while.

“Ye Olde” on the other hand, is just kitsch.  Anyone who owns a Ye Olde Ice Cream Shoppe needs to be locked in Ye Olde Town Stocks for a fortnight.

As my summer winds down, Lance and I are proud to launch Food Jaunt, a directory of local-food providers with reviews, ratings, and maps. Plus, we point out locavore news as we see it.

For my non-American readers, the US has a tendency to eat food that was grown at least 4 timezones away, and many times from the opposite hemisphere. That’s a long way for fruit to fly.

Food Jaunt aims to support the locavore/100-mile-diet movement. Plus, it was just fun to build.

I imagine word has gotten around some already, but I’m on sabbatical from my gig at JBoss/Red Hat.

I stepped down from my role at JBoss.org because I found that I wasn’t very good at it. I gave the idea of “management” the ol’ college try and have decided it just doesn’t really fit me. I think I’m still an engineer at heart.

At any rate, to clear my head, spend some time with the family, and pick up some more development chops, I bumped off on this leave-of-absence.

I’m spending a lot of time in my garden and planning an off-the-grid homestead/farm in Virginia.

But I’m no Luddite.

So I’m also pitching in on this local startup some friends have created, called Greenthumbr.

It’s a consumer-oriented social-network (yes, another one) for gardeners, farmers, homesteaders, or other organic/eco/green thinkers and doers.

Closed-source, written in Ruby. A nice change from being management in a Java-centric environment.

So, I’m taking the summer off, ignoring the whole open-source/enterprise world for a while, and broadening my horizons.

We’ll see where September finds me. Until then, you can find me in my garden.

It’s summer, which means no school for the kid. Which means I now have relatively cheap day-labor available for yard-work.

I am a capitalist, so I intend to pay my son for the work he does.

Growing up, mom got me a physical paper ledger, where I’d record the $15 I made mowing the lawn, or the $20 I took out to buy gas. Mom was the bank.

With Noah, we’ve started the same thing. And then came Zefty.

It’s a really nice, really simple site to allow Mom (or Dad) be the bank, and provide online-banking to their children. No, really, it’s actually useful.

As parents, you can login, setup an account, give it an initial balance. You can schedule recurring deposits (weekly or monthly allowance), or you can manage deposits manually ($15 for mowing the lawn).

Children can login and calculate how long it’d take to save for some item, or they can print checks to be redeemed by the parents to make a withdrawal.

Being a true capitalist and having a son who likes to wantonly and intentionally destroy things, I was glad to find Zefty supports negative balances and debt. And it doesn’t allow a child to bounce a check he can’t cover with funds in his account.

All in all, Zefty is small, but seems to perfectly fit the bill for a parent of an 11 year old.

Today, I took the wife on a lunch date to the newly opened restaurant Nine Mile in Asheville. I’d give a link, but their web designer is apparently slack. The restaurant is run by Aaron, husband of my web-designer friend June.

The atmosphere was excellent, mellow with some reggae music. We got an excellent seat by the window. “Nine Mile” is a tribute to Bob Marley, and the Caribbean atmosphere translates well without being at all campy. There’s no faux palm huts to be found anywhere. Instead, the walls are adorned with rich abstract art, and a portrait of Marley. There’s a lot of Jerk sauce on the menu, plenty of pasta, vegan-friendly dinners and desserts (provided by Butterbugs).

Rebecca got the Nigril Nights, a tangy pasta dish with the finest rare tuna we’ve seen in a long time. You could taste the freshness and the fantastic flavor of the fish. I got One Foundation which included nicely grilled and sliced chicken over noodles with a creamy sauce. It was augmented by pineapple and peppers.

The portions were generous, the staff super-friendly, and the atmosphere lovely, looking out the windows at the old houses of Montford.

Plus, I got to wash it all down with Cheerwine. Cheerwine!

Overall, I highly recommend Nine Mile, and not just because June’s a buddy.

It’s located at 233 Montford Avenue in Asheville.  Super convenient if you’re in Montford for the Music & Arts Festival.

Francois, the guy who leads up the support group for JBoss, let us know that his excellent team is expanding even further. If you’ve got the chops to support customers, write tutorials, and maybe even fix some bugs, JBoss is looking for you.

Two different jobs are available.

There’s the SEG position:

Our JBoss Expertise Team consists of J2EE/JEE architects who deliver Developer-to-Developer Assistance as well as Production Technical Support. This team is the connection point between Customers and R&D. As such, you will be in contact with our customers’ top developers and architects. You will also assist our front line Support Engineers when dealing with complex issues. Last but not least, your daily contacts with our R&D team will allow you to work with some of the best J2EE/JEE developers in the world.

You will also be expected to prepare sample code and write technical tutorials. Therefore, excellent Java coding skills are required. In addition to writing original code, the position requires the ability to read and understand JBoss middleware code. You should also be able to fix bugs and submit features to the JBoss code base if time and interest allow.

And the Senior TSE position:

You will experience every day how we do support differently, by working hand-in-hand with our team of Middleware Support Experts as well as with R&D and Engineering. This day-to-day cooperation will offer a great opportunity to learn beyond regular training. Primary responsibilities will include providing Production Technical Support as well as Developer-to-Developer Assistance for the JBoss and MetaMatrix products.

This position offers the opportunity to support enterprise Java applications delivering middleware solutions to customers of all sizes. It is a very fast paced position offering nearly endless learning and growth opportunities.

If this sounds like a good opportunity for you, head over to the Red Hat careers page. This is a chance to see many of the JBoss enterprise middleware projects used by a variety of customers in a stunning array of configurations and deployments.

Note: The careers page does not yet have a listing for these openings.  They should be posted by Monday, so that gives you time to brush up your resume and make it sparkle.

Gavin King recently gave a talk down in Canberra, Australia. The kindly folks from Red Hat down there organized some filming. Many thanks to our upside-down friends with the Queen Mother on their money.

Gavin provides an exceptionally nice walk-through behind not just how Web Beans works, but why it works the way it does. He provides comparison to AOP features, and even demonstrates the recursive nature of Web Beans functionality being used to define Web Beans functionality. Meta-annotations are cool. Meta-meta-annotations are even cooler.

We’ve broken the talk into 3 easy-to-digest chunks:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Tonight, the fine folks on the JBoss.org team managed to reach a significant milestone. In fact, JBoss.org is now actually hosted at http://jboss.org/. Imagine that! We’d been satisfied living at http://labs.jboss.com/ for quite a while, so this is a nice change.

Additionally, http://wiki.jboss.org/ has been moved off the old Nukes wiki and onto a more modern wiki. Along with being merged with the wiki that used to live at http://labs.jboss.com/wiki. Like many organizations, we’d ended up with too many. We probably still have too many. But now we have one fewer. You can thank Tomek for that.

Probably the coolest bit of tonight’s update is the new feeds subsystem created by Adam. You can check it out, and notice that you can now submit a blog for inclusion in our aggregator. Project leads have more control over their project’s aggregator, and we’re archiving everything we touch, now.

Today is the day to make sure you’ve filed your GSoC application if you’re a student hoping to participate in this year’s Google Summer of Code.

We’ve got our ideas page up still, or feel free to invent some great project of your own related to JBoss. We’re open to new ideas.