My wife has already posted about it but I wanted to too.  :-)

Have you ever heard of the band called Newsboys?  I started listening to them after I heard "Shine" on TV one time back in the early 90's.  Anyway, I've always liked them and it was pretty neat when we were visiting Fellowship Church that Ed Young mentioned the song called Breakfast.  Then one of the church's bands came out and played it.  It was really cool.

Anyway, long story short.  Saturday night we went to the 6:30 service like normal but when it was time for the music to start Ed walks out on stage.  This wasn't normal but hey, it's Fellowship.  Ed says that he has his favorite band here to lead us in worship...the Newsboys!  Yep, the real deal and it was awesome!!  They played 3-4 songs, Ed came out and spoke, then they closed up with one last song.

One thing I took away from the Newsboys was that they were there to worship and help lead in the worship...not to take center stage.  When their closing song was coming to an end, front man Peter Furler turns the mic around to the crowd and gets us to sing...then the band just casually walks off stage leaving us to worship and finish the song.  It was great!

Bookmark for me.  Visual XPath is a graphical way of generating XPath query results.

Hrm... I'm curious how all this will pan out in the portal world.

Press Release

“...The acquisition of the Plumtree portfolio will make BEA the leading provider of the most open, extensible and standards-based J2EE, .Net and Service-Oriented platform in the industry.”

Wow!  I've not really looked at a decision to "do the quick fix" or to "do the correct fix" like that.  It makes total sense though.  I remember learning early on that the cost of fix grows exponentially the later it is found.  I guess that is saying the same thing but in a different way.  Great post Jeremy.  It's one of the better reads I've had in the last week or so.

I guess the hard part, for me anyway, is that I'm not normally given the time to fix the big picture of the problem.  We fix the issue/bug and move on.  You can see that a whole process or piece needs to be reworked and can see yourself coming back to it again at a later date.  Being proactive is a good start though - do a little at a time when you see it.  Jeremy proceeds to give us a checklist to use as we code to look out for opportunities to pay down some of that debt.  If you use ReSharper, he gives ReSharper shortcuts to speed the process.  These are just additions the reasons why I like ReSharper.

Another stroll down memory lane.  CNET is celebrating its 10th anniversary with some top 10 lists.  This one is Top 10 dot-com flops.  I've used two of them and still think one of them is still a great idea but obviously not a good idea for a business.

eToys.com - Since we have kids, we bought from them more than a few times.  Most stores, even Wal-fart and eBay, can now sell you any toy online at a cheap price.  Our kids are saving their own money now so they want to actually go to the store and spend it.  Good for them, they've earned it!

Webvan.com - Having your groceries delivered to your door.  What's wrong with that other than not making any money?  We used HomeGrocer for 4-5 months and loved it.  We ultimately switched back to the store because it was cheaper and we had always spent time in the grocery store anyway.  I don't know where everyone else lives but I have family that still lives in an area where the local mom and pop grocery store will deliver your groceries and let you run up a tab...and they don't even have a website.

Kozmo.com - “At the height of the dot-com bubble, you could get a candy bar delivered to your door for the price of...a candy bar. Kozmo, an online store and delivery service, promised fast, friendly delivery of almost anything: a DVD rental, a bag of groceries, or just a single pack of gum. It was incredibly convenient and a heck of a bargain. It was also too good to be true. The cost of the small-time deliveries contributed to the demise of this great idea.“

Kozmo.com is still a great service if you ask me.  It might stink as a business model but more than once I've wanted to call a number and tell them I need a Diet Cherry Coke, snickers, and pick up The Spanish Prisoner on their way.  I mean call someone other than my wife.

I've still not seen startup.com but I will set up TiVo to record it for me the next time it's on.

Drive an hour for $300 worth of software?  You betcha.  Last month I went to my first .NET user's group meeting (Dallas).  Tonight I went to my second (North Dallas).  I read on Scott's blog that they where giving away Codesmith 3.0 for everyone that registered and attended.  I work out of the house on Wednesday's so that made my drive about an hour.  Otherwise, from work, it wouldn't have been so bad.  It was worth it either way.  I've read many great things about Codesmith but never tried it.  So I figured it would be good to see it in action and get a free copy at the same time.

The demo was good and right away my brain is thinking of ways to use it....even for just the basic stuff like creating a data access layer (like Rob demo'd).  Point to a table, tell it which Sprocs to generate and it builds them!  The Sprocs have all of the guts (parms, return values, etc..) that you can now tweak to your specifics.  Good stuff!

I've downloaded the 30-day trial and now awaiting my key to be sent.

I am signed up to receive the Plumtree Developer Newsletter every month via e-mail.  This has helped me stay up on things without having to hit their portal too often.

In the July newsletter they announced that they've got RSS feeds for the Developer Center.  Cool beans!  Here is the list they have available.

• Recent Additions to the Developer Center (Every addition made throughout the Plumtree Developer Center)
• Articles (Developer-created Articles)
• Code Samples (Recent Code Samples)
• Documentation (Changes/additions in Developer Documentation)
• New Releases (New Developer Product releases)
• Upcoming Events

IMPORTANT: Your RSS Reader will display a list of items even if you are not logged in to the portal, but you must be logged in to view a selected item.