No Longer Blue

As Ralph blogged yesterday, if you're feeling blue, it's high time to register against recession at Eclipse Summit Europe. Of course I stopped feeling blue a while back, and today I'm eagerly packing my bags. So though my German Ram is feeling proudly and happily blue, I'm feeling excited to be headed for Ludswigburg Germany followed by Paris France.


I'll be doing some sightseeing tomorrow with Ralph and Lynn Gayowski, one of the goddesses of organization at the foundation. I'll be packing Larry along for this trip too. We even bought a second camera so that neither of us need be without. Like Eclipse's software and processes, they keep making those darned things better! My new camera, a Canon SD990 is 14.7 mega pixels, allowing for yet more post-shutter reprocessing to achieve that simulated professional look. I'm sure that castle we're planning to see tomorrow will be more photogenic than my tank.


There are few things more disturbing than listening to yourself talk; try it sometime. I was reminded of that in my DZone interview with James Sugrue that was published yesterday. I didn't realize that I say "yeah" and "sort of" quite so much. I'm really going to have to improve my diction. I also spent time on a podcast for my "stupid modeling" talk, so if you're going to miss my talk at ESE or MD Day, you'll get a chance to hear it later. It's clear that there's nothing like having a bright light shine on you to bring out surprising details.


Speaking of which, I also seem to have developed a bit of a bad attitude this week when it comes to the planning around Galileo. I've had a recurrence of that feeling of "rules, too many rules" that I blogged about a while back. It's as if two parts of me are in mortal conflict. One part says, be helpful, do all the nice things that people want you to do to help the community be cohesive. The other part says, hey, they don't just want me to do it, they require me to do it. Unfortunately I have a hard time with being coerced, so the second part is sounding loud and shrill. I have a deep seated need to to have control, i.e., that I get to make all the choices about how best to spend my time and about what's best for my project. While I'm more than willing to give a little, or even a lot, I don't like it when people seem to want to take more than I choose to give. If, for example, I were to go out to weed the garden, and as I went out, I was told I should specifically weed that patch over there, I'd probably weed a different patch or decide that today was not the day for weeding after all. I wonder how many other people suffer from this type of shortcoming?