What's a Birthday Without a Party in your Birthday Suit?

My birthday was nice. I left work early, got a nice massage at Ummelina had a great dinner at Shallots, and went home with a 35mm camera as a gift. The camera was just what I needed since folks from work have been asking me to take pictures of The Inauguration - Part II.

The massage and foot rub were the most interesting part since I've never had one before and was unaware of how much nakedness is involved. I kept thinking I'd pop a boner during one of the rubs and get kicked out of the spa. Thankfully, that didn't happen and my dignity was safe. :)

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Google and Weblogs

There was a recent rumor that Google would remove weblogs from its index which lead some to wonder how Google could tell blogs from regular sites. Well, besides blacklisting the major hosting sites it just occured to me how they could learn which sites were blogs after discovering that Technorati started recognizing my K5 diary as a blog only after I decided to write some code to ping weblogs.com on a whim.

It seems anyone who watches the changes.xml file on weblogs.com can keep an eye on various weblogs all over the world in realtime. I'm sure if Google ever wanted to filter weblogs they'd leverage this central nature of weblogs.com

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Eminem at it Again

I wonder if there's any pop star Eminem hasn't had beef with. From Fred Durst to Moby and Christina Aguilera to Will Smith there seems to always be some pop star who's gotten on the wrong side of Eminem. The most recent addition to Eminem's list of pop star enemies is Mariah Carey. Supposedly they had a fling and she left him some freaky-deaky phone messages which he now threatens to release on his next album. That's just too rich. That should be a warning to you folks out there in TV Land to watch what you say when leaving a message or voice mail for a significant other because you never know what that person could do once you break up. This goes double for pictures.

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XML XML XML

There are a number of blog posts out ther about XML I want to respond to but don't have the time right now. This is a place holder to remind me to respond to the following interesting posts about XML and object oriented programming

1. Doug Purdy: The Slashdot Problem ( part 1, part 2, part 3)
2. Harry Pierson: XML Is Not Just a Deserialized Object Graph
3. Justin Rudd: How Do You Pass XML between layers/tiers? ( part 1, part 2)
4. Ted Neward: Effective Enterprise Java (Persistence): Use a "hierarchical-first" approach to model in documents

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Applied XML DevCon

Chris Sells has announced the accepted speakers for the Applied XML Developers Conference 2003 West conference. Neither of my abstracts was accepted but looking at the speaker line up this isn't surprising. The current title of the page says it all Web Services DevCon. 75% of the talks are either about XML Web Services or are lacking an abstract but the speaker is a known XML Web Services proponent. The rest are a pretty eclectic mix, one talk on Schematron and another SVG.

I'll try and check it out although the heavy slant towards XML Web Services makes me wonder if there'll be anything of interest to me. [Yes, I realize I'll be speaking about XML Web Services at TechEd 2003. Don't let the contradiction worry your pretty lil' head].

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Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.