Sometimes it pays to be persistent. I’d called QANTAS earlier in the week to request a seat with extra leg room because I’m very tall and have problems with my knees that makes it difficult to sit cramped up for long periods. I was told the best they could do was a back seat and they weren’t even sure if that had extra leg room. I asked again at checkin if there was a seat with extra leg room available and gave my pitiful story – the girl at the checkin counter was very nice and called downstairs to see if they could free up an emergency isle seat for me and they managed to find one.

So I was invited into GMail today, particularly good timing considering I’m about to leave for JavaOne tomorrow and while I’m away I’ll also be moving house meaning that my home mail server will be going offline. I figure this way I can just redirect all my email to my gmail account for the couple of weeks I’m away and see how it goes. If I like it I’ll keep my mail redirecting over to Google, if not I’ll switch back.

I’ve been browsing through the list of sessions for JavaOne. There’s 411 events listed. How the heck am I going to find time to read the abstracts of each of those let alone actually make a decision as to which I want to go to… Once I’ve gotten that far the schedule conflicts will bite….

Apparently there’s a JavaOne Blogger Meetup on Monday. I’ll definitely do my best to get there. I’ve still got no idea where I’m staying or how hard it will be to get home again after having a few beers but I’m up for the challenge. Besides, their drinking advice is superb: And remember, Atlassian … doesn’t recommend any Australian alcohol starting with ‘F’ and ending with ‘osters'.

I just discovered that every email that passes through procmail is logged (I’d forgotten I’d set it up like that). A quick analysis of the log shows that 62.8% (5473 out of 8655 emails) of my email is moved to the spam folder by procmail (after being identified by spamassassin). There are a few extras that wind up in my inbox but no more than one or two emails a week and I’ve only come across about 5 false positives since I set up spamassassin (most of which are QANTAS’s flight detail emails).

So apparently I’m off to Java One. The details are all very sketchy at the moment but apparently the flights involved will be something like: Depart Brisbane on Friday 26th June, to Auckland, then Los Angeles (I think) then “SFO” (can you tell I have no idea about where I’m going yet?). Should arrive at the final destination on Friday 26th June (apparently just before I left). Stay somewhere, do something of which the only certainty is going to the Moscone centre while the conference is on, probably get arrested trying to sneak into WWDC which is also on at the Moscone centre and watching the 4th of July fireworks from somewhere.

Rich Bowen talks about his camping trip and it reminded me of something my Father and I used to do a fair bit of – spider spotting. In Australia we have a huge range of different spiders and they are literally everywhere – much more common than most people would be comfortable with. Most of these spiders are really small so you don’t see them in the light of day but during the night spiders are much easier to spot because of their brilliant blue eye-shine.

Every time I see someone talking about the wonders of GPG I think to myself, “I should probably at least have a GPG key” and then I promptly forget about the whole deal. When Bertrand mentioned he was getting into it I went through the same thought process but this time, because of the exceptionally convenient link to an exceptionally conveniently packaged OS X version of GPG, I actually got around to doing something about it.

Joshua Marinacci has started writing a new XHTML renderer in Java. He’s done a pretty impressive job at getting started but I get the impression that he has no idea what he’s in for. At the moment the rendering is pretty good but the speed is absolutely awful. While you shouldn’t ever optimize too early, it’s certainly possible to optimize too late and HTML rendering is one of those areas where you suffer death by a thousand cuts.

Java.Net is having conversations about removing stuff from the standard Java libraries because they’re getting too big. The comment below really stuck out at me: Combine that with a program to remove redundant functionality (by declaring it deprecated so it gets killed 2 releases later) and you have a powerful tool to get people to stop using old stuff like Vector and StringTokenizer.” Vector and StringTokenizer aren’t “old stuff” – they’re extremely useful classes with a specific purpose.

While browsing a collection of stupid pranks (most of which aren’t at all funny) I stumbled across some really great responses to a “10 year old school kid” (who in fact was the prankster) writing in to ask all 100 US senators what their favorite joke was as part of a school project. I think it’s fantastic to see that a number of them replied, but one that really stood out was this one from Senator Jon Corzine from New Jersey.

You are a unique and beautiful snowflake – just like everyone else.