Sketch of Link from the Zelda games by @jeremydale at @acmecomics on #FCBD.  Also you need to check out his Skyward comic if you haven’t, it’s excellent.

Voltron sketch by Jacob Chabot at @acmecomics on #FCBD.  Jacob drew the 1st issue of Voltron Force so I had to get a Voltron from him.

Sketch of Spongebob by Gregg Schigiel at @acmecomics on #FCBD.  If you haven’t already done so you should check out Gregg’s comics related podcast http://stuffsaidshow.com/

Sketch of Drake Sinclair from “The Sixth Gun”, by Brian Hurtt on #FCBD 2012 at @acmecomics.  It was great getting to talk with Brian and @cullenbunn about their work.

Sketch of Amber Atoms, by Kelly Yates on #FCBD 2012 at @acmecomics.  She is his creator-owned character.

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This weekend I had the privilege of being able to attend the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium over in RTP.  It was a very satisfying program, and it was a good reminder of the amount of innovation that is occurring in the Java space that I often overlook from my day to day tasks.  Some of the highlights I picked up on while I was there.

• Java as a language is stagnant and isn’t likely to have significant changes
• the JVM though will continue to be a platform of choice as other languages will compile to bytecode and run on it
• Functional programming and immutability are the main concepts which are going to open the doors to the concurrency issues which are arising due to multi-cores
• Groovy and Scala are very cool
• Groovy based frameworks have a lot to offer outside of the production environment, Gradle for builds and Spock for testing
• As developers we need to remember that our brain is our most important asset and we need to appropriately care for it
• NoSQL databases are the cool thing right now, but they are just a tool, and not just a replacement for a relational DB.  Most likely they are more useful when you have a distributed problem.
• Sometimes development metrics can be a good thing, but must be identified and communicated appropriately

There was a ton of information that I have attempted to absorb over this weekend and it has helped me identify a lot of new technologies that I just was not aware of or pointed out that I had a misunderstanding associated with them.  I definitely have a couple of different areas I want to research further into now.  I’m definitely re-energized to dive into all this.  Now my challenge is to stay motivated with these and not let the corporate issues slow me down.

It’s really amazing to look back at the history of programming languages to see how the past just becomes the present.  One thing mentioned was that with OO Smalltalk devs like to point out that they had those features 30 years ago, and now with functional programming taking hold the Lisp devs get to say the same thing, only now the number is 50.  

My further experiences with OSX Lion continue to confirm that this update was useless for me. In fact so far my iMac is becoming less useful. I am currently posting this update from my phone. All because I am stuck watching the pinwheel of death. I sat down and attempted to switch users from my wife’s account to mine, and the system has completely frozen. This is not the first time it has completely locked up since the upgrade. The only recourse seems to be a hard shutoff and restart. Also I still have yet to find a working driver for my older laser printer. As a result I continue to believe that you should not upgrade to OSX Lion. Things were great back with Snow Leopard.

According to this article on bleedingcool.com that’s how to do it anyway.  Apparently the idea from the beginning with Cowboys and Aliens was just to make a movie, but noone was interested so in order to drum up interest a graphic novel was created to sell very cheaply, just to get a lot of copies out the door to show that there was interest in a story about Cowboys and Aliens.  It makes even more sense now as to why the movie and the book stray so far from each other.  I enjoyed both, but I do think the book was better.