Treehugger: Now We Know Why They are Called Airbuses: "Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal"
This week I am the Topic Master. The theme for the meeting is "Limericks". I wanted to have Table Topics be a "mock round-table" discussion on some current event. What to do?
Fortunately, the radio quiz show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" has a weekly Listener Limerick. When stealing, steal from the best:
My legs find this flight quite demanding
I'm upright through take off and landing
Please don't step on my feet
and these budget non-seats
They save space by just leaving us standing
For Table Topics, the first person will express an opinion on the proposal to put standing room only "seats" on airplanes. The subsequent people will refute or support the previous argument. Sounds fun.
prefuse | interactive information visualization: "A Java-based toolkit for building interactive information visualization applications.
Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes."
Super-Charge JSF AJAX Data Fetch @ JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL: "Mabon offers a convenient way to hook in a specially designed lifecycle that's ideal for AJAX-enabled components that have to fetch data directly from a backing bean, without the overhead of a full JSF lifecycle. It also provides a Mabon protocol - mabon:/ - used to reference the backing bean and a JavaScript convenience function used to send the target URL and any arguments needed and then get data asynchronously from the managed bean."
A quote from a previous post on
Johnny Lingo:
When those you respect think you can, you think you can
Surround yourself with believe in you and your abilities. I need some good stories of people who did this.
Speech Project:: Smile
I am giving a motivational speech in a few weeks. I am going to focus on a positive attitidue and in particular the power of the smile.
The worth of an individual
What is the worth of a single human being? What are you worth, in American dollars? Take a moment and write down the answer.
The answer depends on how you look at it:
- $4.50 - Taking the body and extracting all the elements and selling them on the open market
- $1,500.00 - Current value of a slave
- $600,00.00 - Life Insurance
- $1,921,400 - Lifetime earnings: $739 per week X 52 Weeek per year X 50 years working (ages 20 - 70)
- $45,000,000-Selling all the bone marrow, skin, vital organs, etc. Illegal, immoral and impossible to realize, interesting none the less.
- $47,000,000,000 - Bill Gates
Why is Bill Gates worth more than $1,000 times the sum of his parts? The real value of an individual is not in his composition, or even in his organs. The real worth of an individual is his influence on others.
Additional ideas on proper attitude:Proper attitude promotes successWe have all heard the saying that “attitude determines altitude”. I want to use that idea, but modified slighty, as part of my presentation.
The idea I want to present is that “proper attitude promotes success“.
The importance of supportWhen those you respect think you can, you think you can
Addtional ideas on the power of smiling:The importance of smilingA true, sincere smile has a very powerful affect on others. It sends a message of acceptance and warmth, of love and gratitude.
Smily/Frowny poem and image
Speech Project: Technical Overview of JavaOne
This year I will be attending JavaOne in San Francisco. JavaOne is the yearly software conference devoted to the programmer language and platform known as Java. Its 4 days of as much software and geeks as you can stand. Actually, its both fun and informative, well worth going, especially if your employer will spring for it.
A group of us are going to the conference. After we get back, we will be putting on an overview of what we found interesting for the other developers in the company. This posting will serve as an anchor point for all the information I gather both before and during the conference.
My
current schedule focuses on portlet development using JSR-168, Spring framework and what looks like its up and coming.
