TheCapeBlog

The hosting company for A Blog for All Seasons phoned this morning to apologize for its being offline for the last couple of days, something about problems with a legacy server. So, this post is a catch-up.
Yesterday, I was able to set up the infrastructure for a user group meeting within two hours. It reminded me of the lyric from “West Side Story”:
When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way
From your first cigarette to your last dyin’ day!
When you’re a Jet, let ’em do what they can
You’ve got brothers around, you’re a family man!

Continue reading I’ve Got Brothers Around

As a general rule of thumb, during weekdays, if you plan to travel from the Upper Cape to Boston, you need to allocate at least two hours and sometimes closer to three.
This has not been alleviated by the multi billion dollar Big Dig, and it’s not due to the notorious bridges that connect the Cape to the mainland.
Part of the reason for this is the ridiculous lack of cooperation between the public transit authority and common carriers.
A major part is the selfishness of individuals who insist on commuting by private car, especially those with not even a single passenger.
This certainly explains the psychological isolation of being on or from the Cape, the “ews” when you tell people in “Town” where you live.
There has _got_ to be a pony somewhere in this bag of you-know-what, whether it’s rail or even boat service.

James slept over on Saturday night, and we had a nice, low-key visit, ending with a short trip to the Christmas Tree Shop and a stop at the new playground in Falmouth.
I put up Halloween decorations, did laundry and other weekend chores, then a transfer station run with Peter.
Wound up the day at a friend’s house watching the Patriots beat the Cowboys, who embarrassed their talented young quarterback with a lot of dirty play, resulting in penalties totaling 98 yards: a disappointing performance, we expected better from Dallas.

This time of the year, it’s almost a requirement to take at least one site-seeing trip, and today the weather was ideal for a drive.
A friend and I headed out this morning to Padanaram, a coastal village in the town of Dartmouth on the South Coast.
We stopped first at Sid Wainer, a first-rate gourmet food store in New Bedford that offers samples of dishes made from their remarkable selection of produce, meats, cheeses and specialty items.
The little sandwich shop we’d hoped to find in Padanaram was closed for the season, so we opted for a drive through the village and wound our way through South Dartmouth, passing the Lloyd Center for Environmental Studies and Russells Mills, which is a gateway to Horseneck Beach.
We then headed north to Acushnet, where we finally found a ice cream shop that was still open; a Halloween decorations clearance sale; and two farm stands.
Altogether a fine day, and a trip well worth taking again.

Another milestone this year, went to a physical therapist for the first time, to have a look at my right leg.
Her diagnosis is patellar tendonitis, a condition which is treatable with stretching exercises.
She also recommended better shoes, so after trying on almost a dozen pair at the discount outlet today, I bought sneakers that look like old lady lace-up shoes; thus, I can get away with wearing them to work.
I’ve been doing the exercises and definitely feel the effect: yesterday I couldn’t straighten the leg and today I can.
It will make me very happy if this is all that is required to fix this problem. Once you need leg surgery, they might as well take you out behind the barn and shoot you.

…and the Cape makes me feel old.

Since my bad leg precludes yardwork – and anyway, it’s raining – I tackled another long-overdue chore today, updating my MSDN subscription DVDs.
I dropped my subscription almost two years ago, but there’s still a lot of useful software, and this morning, I finally threw out all the deprecated versions.
In the meantime, I’ve been reading about AJAX, REST and JSON, residents of the wonderful world of SOA, and finally loaded the JDK 6, which includes JavaDB, on my laptop yesterday.
Since I don’t have a database front end, I had to execute SQL queries on the command line to test the install, and it brought to mind something I hadn’t thought about for years, running PL/SQL commands in the same way against Oracle 7.x.
Similarly, since I haven’t yet installed NetBeans, I had to test the Java install by writing a couple of test programs in Notepad and compiling and executing them on the command line.
Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh!

I’ve been having trouble with my right leg for several weeks now. It started with the foot and has ended in the knee.
Having nursed it for the last couple of days with ace bandages and a cane, I thought I was over the worst of it until the knee “snapped” again this morning.
My doctor wrote a prescription for physical therapy, but there must be a lot of people with soft tissue problems, because it’s extremely difficult to get an appointment.
Guess that’s what happens when you live in a county with the highest percentage of “seniors” in the state.

RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby.
REST is nothing new, it’s been around for at least five years, but it’s getting a lot of play right now, maybe because some of the big players like Google are deprecating their SOAP services.
For a readable explanation of REST as a web services architecture, see this .ppt presentation at xfront.com by Roger L. Costello and Timothy D. Kehoe: http://www.xfront.com/REST-full.ppt.

The fall cleanup made it to the transfer station today, but it took three trips.
On the last of these, Peter loaded and then unloaded nine boxes of books, about half of the library which I’ve been stupidly transporting all these years. This included a massive set of the Encyclopedia Britannica – Peter says you can buy the digital version now for only $70 – and some outdated computer books.
I was able to either recycle or donate most of it, thanks to a new service that reuses CDs and the old reliable services that recycle books, plastics, paper, metal, glass, cardboard and chipboard.
I’m still nursing my leg, so took the rest of the day pretty easy. Earlier this evening, I cooked a small pork loin, mashed potatoes and homemade applesauce with cranberries and maple syrup, enough for at least three meals.
I picked up the cranberries yesterday at Makepeace’s annual festival, which was a lot of fun and educational as well.
Today was cool and cloudy, a nice contrast to yesterday which was a little too warm for October.