Musings of a Trained Monkey

While contemplating gifts for the family this year an idea for a gag gift hit me, purchase some particularly horrible song for someone on iTunes. Don’t be thoughtless and track down some dreck that would never be listened to by the prospective recipient. Instead be devious and think of a song that would get stuck in someone’s head. A catchy pop song that is now out of date is fun, or a singer they will hate, and bonus points for bad holiday songs.
Simply ‘Gift This Music’ on iTunes to let your friends and loved ones know how much you care/or don’t care :-)

Prospective Torture Top Ten (skewing mostly 80’s here)

• Xanadu – Olivia Newton-John
• Final Countdown – Europe
• Christmas Eve: Sarajevo – Trans-Siberian Orchestra
• Life In a Northern Town – Dream Academy
• Don’t Cha – Pussycat Dolls
• Walk the Dinosaur – Was
• Crush On You – The Jets
• Me So Horny – 2 Live Crew
• Chipmunk Song – Alvin & The Chipmunks
• Christmas In Hollis – RUN-DMC

Sadly not available for iTunes gift bombing!

• Party All the Time – Eddie Murphy
• Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time – Paul McCartney
• Jingle Bells – Singing Dogs (only as part of an album on iTunes, for shame!)
• Sleigh Ride – C3PO and R2-D2 <- That’s not a typo

What songs do you not want for X-Mas?

I have resisted posting anything about the Spring Experience 2006 until now. Mostly because postings on my blog have been Ruby-centric or me-centric, but let’s break the embargo for a post or two.

The opening keynote by Rod Johnson was a loser. He started out by checking his bank balance and then doing a UK patent search to demonstrate that some websites in the world use Spring under the covers! Duh!

While Rod was dumbing it down for those in attendance, a table at the back of the room featuring some of the conference speakers as well as a baby, began to reminisce about other conferences they’ve gotten money for and such. They were loud enough it was hard to hear the keynote. This was especially rude because the speakers are only there to present because people like me (well my company) paid money for them to be there. Glad you guys enjoy being around each other, but take it out in the hall next time with the baby if you want to be loud.

Also I think some limited mockery of Domain Driven Design is called for. People need to stop making up ?DD acronyms. I’m all for having a software methodology and following its doctrines when they make sense, but you just know some idiot somewhere is going to post about how This JEE Web 2.0 website , is now brought to you in 3D!.

The Spring guys seem to have bitten into this D³ stuff hook, line, and sinker. Martin Fowler blessed the book with his own brand of stink so it must be good right? There was a dedicated D³ track available at the conference on the topic. I can’t figure out why there wasn’t enough Spring content to fill out that track as well. It was the Spring Experience after all!

Anyway there was some good content presented, Matt Raible did a great job writing it up for the Java faithful. I’ll leave my non-mocking commentary on the conference some other time.

Google Maps of course rock. On a whim when searching for directions from the Fort Lauderdale Airport to the Spring Experience conference venue, I just put in the airport's short name (FLL) and Google Maps took it from there!

I just love it when something works in a way that is even better than I expected.