I just picked up an ‘old’ white macbook (the kind that are now $999 at the stores) for a pretty low price.  This is mostly for business purposes – I need a way to test sites on a Mac, and bugging my wife to use her business one isn’t terribly efficient.  I’ve put off getting [...]

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I was meaning to write this for a while, then Colin Powell made roughly the same observation, though more eloquently than I could.  Basically – “so what if Obama is Muslim?”  Perhaps maybe – just maybe – it might actually do us some good to have a leader who really understands the mentality that we’re [...]

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We’ve got a new Subway by us which I’ve been to once before.  Nice, clean and new.  I popped in the other day and saw a large banner for a $5 Chicken Pizziola.  It looked great, but it comes with pepperoni on it.  I’m not a pepperoni fan, so I asked if they’d make it [...]

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Really fed up with the debate tonight.  Very disappointed in much of the way each candidate basically use every question just to push out their talking points.  It’s like Palin on steroids, and they’re both guilty.  The first question was the worst, I think, and it went downhill from there.
I’d read Dave Ramsey’s plan for [...]

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Having been away from the Detroit area for some time, I got a bit homesick and started searching youtube for some old videos.  Things/people I miss, somewhat inspired by the videos, include:

Bill Bonds
Law office of Sam Bernstein commercials
Ollie Fretter
Highland Appliance
Amyre Makupson
Coney dogs
Towne Club sodas
Better Made chips
Bob-lo Island
Bill Kennedy at the movies
Sir Graves Ghastly
Count Scary (and [...]

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Just watched the first presidential debate.  I could tell McCain was trying to come off ’strong’ and ‘authoritative’ and whatnot, but he ended up simply sounding rude most of the time.  Unfortunately, some of Obama’s “I agree with Senator McCain” comments will be used against him (ask me about this use of your own words [...]

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I have a rather love/hate relationship with software.  I got bit by the bug back in 1982 (might have 1981 – can’t remember now!) with a ZX81 kit (from the UK no less).  Since then I’ve been writing software in a variety of languages: various BASICs, machine code (no, not assembler – straight POKEing HEX [...]

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So much keeps happening, and yet I can’t seem to find any time to write about it!
I got to hear (but not personally meet yet) Andy Hunt, who gave a very thought provoking talk at our local TriJUG the other day.  I’m interested in learning the tech behind his ‘exocortex’ – he uses some external [...]

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So, I have an XP image that I wanted to use Eclipse on.  I grab Eclipse (85 meg download version) and it tells me that it needs a JRE or a JDK.  That’s slightly better than error messages I remember before, but I’ll still ask now – “WHAT THE HELL IS A JDK?”.  It takes [...]

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Someone recently asked how to get a random element from an array.  In PHP it’s pretty straightforward – array_rand($x) – but there’s not (AFAICT) a built-in way in Groovy to do this.  So I wrote a little something which should hopefully demonstrate the power of the metaClass stuff to boot.

ArrayList.metaClass.getRand = { number ->
if(number==0) [...]

Posted in Groovy, Java, Uncategorized 4 Comments »