In June of this year I will have been working at the same company for 12 years. Working for the same company that long these days is almost unheard of but I consider myself fortunate to be 31 years old and almost half way to being pension eligible (yes those things do still exist). Barring any unforseen circumstances, I'll probably be at this company my entire career. But that's a discussion for another day.

A rampant Google search gone wrong found me on the "new" Experts Exchange site. Looks like a complete overhaul of the design. Wow, great - does the content still suck?

I'm not the first to say this, and won't be the last, but I absolutely despise Digg. I see zero value in the system that they have in place. Why do I say that? Take Tony Petruzzi's post about The Smith Project that made it to the front page of the technology page (I'm not honoring them with a link, if you want to read it go find it - no offense Tony :). A simple post like this which was meant to endorse a great project that can further the adoption of CF and 81 moron 'experts' crawl out of the word work to comment on why ColdFusion sucks and how ROR or PHP (GASP) is better and CF will never come close. There is nothing but negativity over there and it bothers me greatly for some reason. Its always an unproductive meaningless debate that goes nowhere. There needs to be a better way to do this. There is certainly value in a user based ranking type system and I'm sure that many sites could not have gotten rapid exposure to a mass audience without Digg but the system in place right now is flawed. Maybe they shouldn't allow comments? Lets find a better way somehow because the concept is brilliant but the discussion is meaningless and is usually not representative of the general public perception of many of the topics discussed.

PS - I'm currently out of office in business meetings all week so the blogging will be a little light. Please forgive me.

I've wasted about 2 hours this morning with Eclipse. I downloaded it a long time ago with the full intention of jumping on the bandwagon of using a full featured open source IDE but had some problems with it that made me decide against using it. It seemed too laggy to me - slow to open files, slow to bring up the code hints, just really slow overall. I ruled out my machine since I'm running it on a 2.6 ghz P4 with a gig of RAM - not a monster, but a more than competent machine in my mind to run something like Eclipse. This morning I decided to give it another shot and I'm not too happy. It has completely crashed twice. The first time I'll blame myself since I tried to create a project with a folder containing about 4 gigs of pictures (my fault). I tried to cancel it and it froze up. No problem...Task Manager - End Task. Restart Ecliplse - workspace in use. OK, reboot. Good...cool...workspace still in use.....huh? OK....create a new workspace...cool...New Project...cool....open a file...right click on something...abort...what? Huh? OK....maybe i'm running a bad version (3.1)...maybe I should upgrade...delete Eclipse...file in use....FORGET IT!

Now granted I'm having a horrible day. I shouldn't have gotten out of bed. Really. Seriously. Unfortunately, I think I'll have to forget about good old Eclipse for another few months until this experience is but a faded memory.

Ironically as I have been typing this post Eclipse has opened itself up twice on my machine. One of the instances of it has the original environment that I tried to set up fully built. OK.....one more chance, but I'm warning you.............

Being from Northern Ohio, we have very little to cheer about in the way of sports. With an Indians team that went from barely missing the playoffs last year to not even above .500 this year, a Cavs team that barely missed the NBA Eastern Conference Finals last season and a Brown's team that will be lucky to win 6-7 games this year it's easy to see why we get excited about college football. That's why this weeks Ohio State-Texas game will likely be the biggest game of the year in Ohio sports (until Ohio State plays in the BCS National Championship game that is). So let the official CF blogoshere debate begin. What's your pick, OSU or Texas (be warned, I will reply with hostile comments to negative feedback!!!)

I just came across an article that stated that the hugely popular MySpace.com is considering publishing an actual print magazine geared towards (and potentially featuring articles about) the users of the site. Am I the only one who thinks MySpace sucks? I'm still in awe over the popularity of this site. Granted, it is an enormous cash cow for News Corp, but the content is just garbage. I hate to get all prophetic, but the day will soon come when a well built Flash/Flex social networking application (like JamJar or Famster) will topple the MySpace empire.

I wasn't going to mention this, BUT, I can't help but feel just a tad bit burned that someone won a plasma TV and an xbox by hacking about 90% of my code. Since I didn't release Genesis under any lisence I guess I really can't say anything, but now that someone has decided to blame ME for copying one of the winners of the Flex Developers Derby, I thought I might mention that my application was released in December, 2005. The Developer Derby wasn't even announced until March, 2006. Oh well - just goes to show that some people would rather let others do all the work for them while they take all of the credit. I won't honor him with a link from here, but you can find his entry here Flex Developers Derby. Compare to my original entry. You be the judge...

After dinner at the local Cracker Barrel this evening, my wife and I came home and started going through some of the things we got for our Baby Shower a few weeks ago. I decided to start putting some of the things together to get them out of the way and ready for when our little girl gets here in a few months. It was at that point that I came to the revelation that pretty much every single thing we received requires batteries. I can't say I wasn't warned - a buddy of mine did make me aware of this. But I guess I didn't really believe him. Let me tell you - every dang thing requires batteries. D's, 9 volts, AA's, AAA's, you name it. And it's not like these things are cheap either. I'm convinced that Duracell and Energizer subsidize some of the manufacturers - it must be a conspiracy, right? Batteries for the Baby Monitors, for the swing, the bouncer, even the portable crib!! I once heard some staggering estimate of how much it costs to raise a child from birth to college - I'm guessing 40% of that figure is purely batteries. OK, I feel a little better after getting that off my chest :)

</rant>

P.S. I can't wait to see what kind of Google Ad's I get after this post!

I've been doing some thinking about 2.0 and the more I think about it, the more questions come up in my mind.

Why haven't we seen more 2.0 sites? Where is Google 2.0, Yahoo 2.0, Amazon 2.0, etc? There is such a vast amount of concepts that are "1.0" that could be done RIA style. Think about it - webmail, portals (though there have been some good ones coming out recently - for example, check out Netvibes), Blogs, search engines, etc, etc, etc...

Which leads me to my next question - Will developers and companies overdo 2.0? Do we NEED Rich blogs, search engines, and whatnot? Does every page have to use Ajax or Flash Remoting style data retrieval. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Huge Fan of not reloading the page, but at what point does it become overkill?

Question 3 - Are users ready for full fledged RIA web app's? Granted, some probably are, but what about those who aren't? Will developers adopt a 1.0/2.0 toggle button on their sites? Some folks are still rolling along at 28.8 dial up. Even if they were ready, there connections most likely aren't!

Question D - What's next? What will 3.0 be about? I'm no prophet, but I see a deeper convergence of PC/TV. The lines will become even further blurred between the TV and the Desktop. I think it's inevitable - as bandwidth gets higher, fiber gets pushed deeper into the neighborhoods and content providers become even hungrier for our hard earned dollars.