Oh yes - I also made it to yoga this morning at 7AM for the second time.

"Jake, who gives a shit?"

Me, it's my blog. Look, I've been having difficulty getting out of bed my entire life, so getting up earlier and actually doing something like yoga is big news around here. Fine, go watch the George Carlin video.

George Carlin's "Seven Words"

I found George Carlin's "Seven Words" hilarious at moments. Yes, this is what I'm doing at work while I sip my frappuccino... which spellcheck doesn't like no matter what I do to it. I'm also enjoying my new CSS style for embedded YouTube videos - the grey border with the lighter thin border, like a TV. You know, for kids.

What's that? You think my reference to the CSS style only belongs on my new tech blog?

When Life Doesn't Even Give You Lemons

Whenever I start thinking I can't do something due to circumstance, I'll think of this guy:

The first song is Joe Croce's "Rapid Roy".

Jake the Early Bird

To my amazement, this morning I attended a 7AM yoga class. Unprecedented. Getting out of bed in the morning is the most difficult and painful thing I do all day. But I'm going to become a morning person. Last night I joined a gym, and I'm going to visit this gym in the mornings before work, and do gym-like things like yoga classes and weight lifting. I was inspired in part by the picture of Mario Lopez with his shirt off on the cover of People magazine, which I saw this weekend in Duane Reade. I thought "Wow - I want to look like that!" I'm going to be buff - firm, round muscles, lean cut abs. I used to be quite buff actually. I've let everything soften over the last few years, starting I think with the cancer I had about 7 years ago. I stopped doing a number of things then, like theater. Well, one thing at a time - let's become a morning gym person, and then with my panty-melting triceps I'll conquer the art world.

So I managed to be irresistible and magnetic for a week straight, but it's breaking down and I'm starting to feel more the way my poodle Sonia must have felt right after her surgery, when she was whining uncontrollably and trying to find a comfortable position on the floor of the car. Sonia, what a trooper. I loved her so much. Furry, emotionally sensitive companions lacking Broca's areas are such a comfort.

Facebook Tutorial, Part 3

And Part 3 of the Facebook application tutorial is online at IBM Developerworks, where you'll develop the specific application functionality. Not much else to say on that - if you're a tech nerd go read it. Enjoy.

Facebook Tutorial Part 2

I just noticed that Part 2 of my Facebook application tutorial is on IBM Developerworks this week. This part of the tutorial tackles using Java and PHP within the same application, including use of the Spring framework, Spring MVC, creating a connection-pooled JNDI data source in IBM Websphere, and a few hand-rolled PHP classes that let you structure your PHP and Java code similarly, including a poor man's version of Spring property injection using PHP "magic methods". In the end you'll have the Java and PHP halves of the application communicating with the same IBM DB2 database and using the same MVC pattern. This finishes the groundwork for Part 3, in which you'll use all this infrastructure to develop the meat of the Facebook application. Enjoy.

Obama: can form whole paragraphs

The world at large is impressed with Obama's ability to speak coherently:

Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said Obama's win "has sent out a lot of positive signals around the world."

"He has a very appealing persona - elegant, fluent, strings lots of sentences together into paragraphs," Cox said. "But in terms of (his) actual policies towards the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, China, Europe - actually, we don't know."

Truthout.org: World Welcomes Obama Win

It's true that constructing entire paragraphs from sentences is one of life's many challenges, but I couldn't tell if this professor was being sarcastic or not.

For some reason I find this hilarious

This is the last sentence of the Reuter's article on Obama's presidential nomination:

An Obama aide said he called Clinton after their speeches, congratulated her on her South Dakota victory and asked her to call him back.

Reuters, Obama makes history with nomination

You can always count on the last sentence of a news article to drop some sort of whammy or punchline that the editors and sponsors will overlook in their rush to edit the content.