Practice guitar daily

Even if it's 15 minutes, I need to have structured practice that has a purpose. This month will be scale practice across all modes. And along the same guitar lines, I have a sub goal of changing my strings. It's probably been way over a year. I've been dancing so much, I haven't been playing music. I'm not getting any younger so I better get back at it.

Goals

It's been far too long since i've thought about what goals I have for the upcoming year, so my first goal of the year is to update my blog with a goal, daily. One of the reasons I have a blog is to remind myself about the things I go through and to express my thoughts in a way that allows myself to see progress that I have made. For example, almost 2 years ago, I was an emotional mess and I had that documented in my blog. It's good to see how my blog posts evolved from a constant whine to more positive and uplifting posts. So there. Goal 1: Write down a goal daily.

Options in the stock market and poker

I'm currently listening to a money management course about playing options and it is almost exactly the same as bankroll management in poker. It talks about losing streaks and how the chances of having 5 losing trades in a row, which is basically the same thing as in poker. You WILL run bad at some point. The thing you want to keep in mind is that you want to keep yourself from going bust. The same idea applies to trading options. The similarities go on and on. If you are a winning poker player and can emotionally handle the swings, you might want to take a look into playing options. A lot of the things you have learned in poker can be immediately applied to options. Think about it.

It's been a long while

It's time to bring back the blog, even if for keeping track of things I'd like to remember. Hopefully I'll be able to update it often. In any event, It's time to stop dreaming again and start back to my doing!

Hi. Bye. part II

On this time last year, this is what I wrote:

When you're dreaming with a broken heart, the waking up is the hardest part.

You roll out of bed and down on your knees
and for a moment you can hardly breathe.

Wondering was she really here.
Is she standing in my room.

No she's not cuz she's gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.

John Mayer, Dreaming with a Broken Heart.

Well, I was prepared for it to happen this time around, which I guess is the silver lining. The last time she disappeared on me, I was crushed. More than I ever knew I could be. This time, I'm saddened that she's not in my life again, but am happy that life is still going on as usual.

I'm gonna miss her just as much this time around, especially after having one amazing night with her, but it isn't going to do what it did to me last time. Too bad this night was all just a matter of perspective. Her and I never could get on the same page, which is a damn shame because the times we were, we were one hell of a couple. Those times were few and far between though and we couldn't communicate worth shit, so I can only hope she finds someone that she can get on the same page with.

As for me, I'll be looking for a woman that can bring out that same emotion I had while with her. But this time have it reciprocated. It was nice to know I could still feel that deeply for someone. For a while I thought I had gone completely cold. Thankfully, I have not. There is someone out there for me and while I patiently wait for her to come (back?) into my life, I'm gonna keep doing what I do.

Never thought my story would come true, but it kind of did. She left as quickly as she came, just like I thought she would. But this time, it took just a bit longer for me to get over her than the guy in my story did and I'm not terribly sure how unfair she thought it was for her to just leave. All I know is that it's time to move forward and believe that if she wanted to be with me, she would have stayed or she'd make it known. C'est la vie.

FairUseCommander

So I have these encoded windows media files that I legally acquired (no, it's not porn) that I could only watch on my windows virtual machine. I wanted to be able to watch the videos at anytime from my mac so I went about trying to figure out how to remove the DRM when I came across FairUseCommander. It makes it pretty simple to remove drm from a batch of files. I've found it very helpful, but I'm running on a brand new xp install in a virtual machine with windows media viewer 9.00.00.4508. I know I read that there are some caveats with the different methods of drm removal so I kept my system pretty fresh. Out of all the different drm removal suggestions, FairUseCommander is the easiest to use.

IBM Rad + Websphere deployment issue

I recently ran into an issue when I would deploy an ear to a WebsShere App Server (WAS) and would receive this error :


AppDeploymentException: [null] java.lang.ClassCastException: org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.commonarchivecore.internal.impl.ArchiveImpl


I generated the EAR using Rational Application Developer (RAD) by simply selecting File > Export and selecting EAR under Java EE.

When I deployed the ear to my local test WAS, it deployed fine, but I received the error when it was deployed to a non test server. It turned out that the ear did not have the deployment descriptor in it and while it was fine for the test server, it is required for the actual server.

To resolve the problem you select the context menu of the ear by right clicking the project and selecting Java EE > Generate WebSphere Bindings Deployment Descriptor. It creates the application XML in the project and everything should deploy correctly.