There was a recent article I read online about how working working over 40 hours a week makes you less productive. http://www.inc.com/margaret-heffernan/the-truth-about-sleep-and- productivity.html I'm really really skeptical about over-reaching claims that say you shouldn't work over 40 hours a week or you should spend 8 hours sleeping. While I think sleeping is important and can be debili[...]

There is currently a bug in the current stable release of MDB2 (2.4.1) that breaks transaction support with MySQL databases. It seems to occur anytime the server cababilities are checked twice (This basically means that it occurs when creating multiple connections to the database). After running into this bug I took a dive into the code for MDB2 and found that was caused by the use of a stat[...]

This week I've been working on setting up several web service for a project I'm working on for work. Because we are creating these web services from scratch we had to start by creating a WSDL file to describe the web service and it's functions. WSDL is a type of xml document that describes the inputs and outputs from a web service. This can be done using a number of ways but in my case I'm u[...]

On Monday this week I went on a one day business trip to Osaka. I met with some coworkers at the head office and talked about my next project at work. Though it was pretty short it was a good experience for me. I took the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. It was my first time taking the bullet train so I was pretty excited. You don't think it's so fast at first but once you get to full speed[...]

So I've been in Japan 2 weeks already. I only started work Monday last week so I spend the first week buying things and setting up the apartment with Reiko. I had to buy a bed and furniture, and get a cell phone and stuff. This past weekend Reiko and I went to Yoyogi park again. While I'm not yet used to Japan, the folks at work seem cool and there are English speakers here so I don't think [...]

My Certificate of Eligibility came in the mail today. When immigrating to Japan this document certifies that you meet the requirements to get a Visa in Japan. So it makes getting a Visa much easier. So I'll be taking this to the Japanese embassy soon. I read the Visa shouldn't take too long to get but I'm still not sure when I'll be leaving since I haven't heard any info about my apartment.

So I've been home at my parent's house for the last couple weeks. I sold my car right after I finished work so I lost my ability to have transportation in Virginia. It was a pretty uneventful move though my parent's house is veritable temporary housing for family members. My cousin Persie lived with my parent's for a year following the unfortunate death of my aunt (My parents were her guardia[...]

Well, it's my last day of work at Datatel. While it's had it's wrinkles I have a hard time saying anything bad about the place. It's been a positive experience overall, but not one that I can settle into at this point in my life. I'll miss working with my coworkers and working for people in higher education, but it's time to move on and I'll enjoy a short time off. After work we are going bo[...]

Today we had a "wake" for Dave our business analyst at work. He's moving to another job at the same company but since he's leaving our team he's "dead to us" so we had a living wake for him. 'Course it wasn't anything like a wake,, we went out to eat lunch and then played pool. It was a lot of fun and I hope Dave has fun at his new job though I don't think the new guy will be as cool as he is[...]

When I started at my company I quickly began working on a large Java project. I worked on the project for about a year (with a small amount of development resources) but it was ultimately cancelled. Around that time my team was broken up and development that my team did was split among other teams. Because I was an intern for Accounts Receivable about 3 years ago since last fall I was put ba[...]