Antarctica Service Medal

Not too much technical content tonight. I spent most of the afternoon trying to get OSGi working from a Java Webstart application without much luck. It may be something that I revisit down the road, but for the time being distributing a zip with a set of shell scripts should work. As part of the process, I also learned how to sign a Jar file, which will be useful in an upcoming project.

This morning I pushed out the first update to the Grails app I have in production. Just before performing the actual update, I remembered to double check that my production DataSource was set to 'update' instead of 'create' or 'create-drop' the database. It was lucky I checked because it was set to 'create' from when I was wrangling with MySQL. I had already made a dump of the database, so I wouldn't have lost any data, but I was glad that I checked.

On the non-technical front, I received an Antarctica Service Medal in the mail for the time I spent in Antarctica:


I probably won't have too many occasions to actually wear it, but the medal is a nice memento of my time down there.

And the countdown has begun: 9 days until I'm in the Bahamas for my wedding and honeymoon. Pretty crazy!

On the road again

Today marks the beginning of my 3 month traveling tour. The North American portion is making stops in Phoenix, Lincoln, Minneapolis, and the always lovely LAX. The abroad portion includes stops in New Zealand and Antactica, my home during October, November, and half of December. If you need to get a hold of me before the 29th, email and cell phone are your best bet. After the 29th, email or snail mail. This blog should receive regular attention, so if you're just interested in what I'm up to, check back. Cheers.