John Gordon

I always lose my build notification sounds when rebuilding a laptop. Here, for posterity, are some I've been using since my last rebuild. Download the zipped files here.

We had the annual block party last weekend. I put together a little ditty to commemorate it. If you hate piñatas, you'll love this video.

Okay, this is just shameless filler on my blog so it doesn't appear stale. The cute bit's at the end of the video.

Funny thing, but I noticed a few months ago that my site was throwing a syntax error when trying to bring up any page. I wasn't too worried about it, thinking that it was some upgrade Dreamhost had done on my hosting server; I'd have to create a trouble ticket and get it resolved. I was wrong, I'd been hacked!

We did some sledding today to celebrate our neighbour, Luc's, birthday party. Even shot a little video!

A prospective client asked for a code demo and I'm happy to oblige. I put together a simple web application that manages job listings. It's quite simple: list, create, retrieve, update and delete are all supported. the idea is to show:

A) I know what I'm doing
B) I can write Java and .Net software
C) I'm ready for anything. Bring it on

granted, I got a little carried away with that last point.

The code is written in Java 1.5 and the Spring Framework (MVC) 2.5 (complete with 2.5's MVC annotations configuration.)

Well, as you all should know by now, JP Morgan Chase just bought out my employer of 6 1/2 years, Washington Mutual Bank. I, for one, welcome our JP Morgan Overlords. :-)

Attached to this post is the presentation JP Morgan put together outlining their reasoning for the buyout. One highlight is that they are writing down $30 billion in losses from Wamu's portfolio up front. Funny, but didn't the Wamu execs say it would only be $19 billion?