One of my enduring technical heroes is Robert C. Martin. Mr. Martin is one of the lucky few in the technology world who are instantly recognizable by either their initials or their first names. Robert C. Martin is known as "Uncle Bob". I was fortunate to be able to meet Uncle Bob in the Chicago area at a one day free seminar given by ObjectMentor, back in 2001. At the end of the day, I asked if I could have my picture taken with him and he was very kind and generous and immediately said yes and even insisted that we be standing in front of their "Star Trek" wall.

Thank you Uncle Bob for your kindness to a young and star-struck fan. I continue to read your writings and still aspire to your level of software craftsmanship.

I was an early adopter of Palm mobile devices. Yet, like most technology, they had their day in the sun and then were cast into the shade of the next generation of mobile organizers and then smart phones came along and made pretty much everything else obsolete.

This morning, I noticed this charger lying around and actually stopped to take a look at it, thinking I could swipe it for an at work USB charger. It was a charger for my last Palm device. I'm pretty sure that I no longer have the device, so the charger is off to the circular file. If you look carefully at the picture, you'll notice the proprietary connector. I'm so glad that the days of proprietary chargers are on the way out. Apple are one of the few holdouts, but even they are moving towards USB-C for their laptop charging technology.

An all-time classic cover song. After listening to even just a few Van Halen albums, it's hard not to realize that Dave Lee Roth is a bit of a Jazzer and loves those old classic tunes.

Some amusing videos from the Scrum training I have been attending this week.

I Want To Run An Agile Project (Part 1)

TL;DR - Technically no, but practically yes.

I'll start by examining why Java is not a monoculture.

Java is interesting, in that it is both a programming language and a runtime environment. When Java first burst upon the scene, it was promoted as a general-purpose cross-platform programming language. It was not the first language to make such a claim, but it was the first to live up to most of its hype. I was a very early adopter of Java and remember the joy of writing code on a Windows PC and then having my tester run that exact same code on their Apple Mac. I'd used scripting languages that could do that, but never anything that needed compiling. I was hooked.