Shins. And other things that hurt when hit

This mornings drill: 1) getting choked up against a wall (my partner: a 6'2" construction foreman, married, and had a habbit of making sound effects during our sparring), 2) Defending against getting tackled around the legs by flattening yourself on their backs. 3) Blocking getting "smacked around the clock" -- come at them at 12 o'clock, 10 o'clock, etc, all the way until you are going for their groin.

My partner decided that instead of swatting, he would kick at my groin. So I did the same. And he can block pretty hard.

Be berry berry quiet, I am hunting a cell phone.

I am on the relatively Tantalus-ian task of upgrading my cell phone. My Motorola v60 has stopped reliably charging. I don't think it is the battery, but the connection between the charger and the phone -- two tiny copper connectors are the difference between phone death and life.

Criteria for the new phone:
1) I want a PDA or PDA-lite functionality.
2) I don't want an ear-bud only phone.
3) I would like to be able to sych with my mac. Not a firm requirement.
4) I would like a thumbpad. (I am no good with a stylus).
5) I would like to be able to play video clips. (This takes my DVD hacking to the next level).
6) I would like bluetooth.

So the short list of phones that fits sorta into these categories:
Hitachi G1000
Samsung SPH-i700
Sony Ericsson P800
Handspring Treo 600
Motorola v600

I like the Hitachi, Sony and the Treo 600 the best, but only the Sony has bluetooth. The sony has the best size, but no thumbpad. The 810 looks cool, but who knows when that is going to come. It isn't likely that it will ship soon since the 800 isn't even common around here.

Oh well. I guess I will keep waiting.

Java 1, Colin 0

So, I have been working on my personal pet project for a few weeks now, and decided (after a fair bit of consulting with friends and co-workers) on which language to tie it to a database. I picked JSPs. It seemed like a good choice -- something I could grow into, but with new libraries like JSTL I could manage the learning curve.

bzzz!

To make a really boring story condense into one paragraph, the installers worked fine, but I could never understand how to initiate a database connection. And there in lies the small opening that I realized that Java was the wrong language for me: as I started digging to find out what was involved, I started having to learn more and more. First there was the JSTL libraries, then there was JDBC, which then lead me into JNDI. Argh! All I wanted to do was open a database connection! But since this is Java, it is all about objects, so the preferred method is to abstract out the actual database and give it a name (JNDI) and then make all of your database calls through a platform-agnostic layer (JDBC) which makes so much sense from an application standpoint but it means a crapload of setup for just a return of tables in a query.

So I have thrown in the towel.

And started down the path of PHP.

I returned one of the two JSP books that I had bought (I had written my name on the other one in my fervor to lay claim to Java as my technology of choice) and bought a few books on PHP. The downside is that I don't really have anyone I can go to for help, but that didn't seem to make that much of a difference on this project.

(Technical books always seem to get me in the same place: the first 80 pages is a breeze. Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it, knew that already, blah blah. And then, there is a section of about 4 pages that just whizzes right past me. No matter how much re-reading or going back a over the basic chapters contains the Rosetta stone for me to decipher it. The authors talk with such glib ease: "And now just establish a database connection with the following code" not bothering to really go into the detail that I need to figure out how to troubleshoot when it goes so horribly awry. Sigh. I feel so retarded, that my brain can't make that transition between the abstract beginning chapters and those critical steps when you actually try to make the technology work.)