There's never enough time to do all the things you want to do. Since the last big update, I've been constantly on the go, between work and my "during-the-week" residence. I've managed to get a little composing in, but not nearly as much as I'd like. For Memorial Day weekend, I went down to the beach house of the family I'm staying with during the week. Even though it's still under construction, you can really tell that it's going to be a great place to vacation and/or retire. The lot is on a small inlet to the Potomac River (down at Colonial Beach), and is surprisingly undeveloped. The generic "supermarket" was filled with rural folk that some would call rednecks (no doubt, affectionately), and the town is far enough away from I-95 to not be part of a metropolitan area.

Last weekend, I visited my other old roommate who was up for the weekend. Surprisingly, her brother and about five other people I knew from Tech (including my original roommate from '96) now live in an apartment complex just down the street from my house. To make the living arrangements even more incestuous, her boyfriend will be moving there next month, with someone else I knew from band. I finally got around to seeing Lord of the Rings last weekend too. Though on the long side, it did a good balancing job between making a good movie and pandering to the book-fans. The result was an entertaining movie that never quite got too cheesy for its own good. I can definitely see why it won so many art and special effect awards at the Oscars.

This week (after work of course), I saw Insomnia, the new cop-flick by the director of Memento. For a relatively "normal" movie, it was really good, if slower paced. The story was more character-driven than your typical cop movie. The Alaskan scenery was pretty cool as well.

On the computer/work front, I'm learning the JUnit testing framework to perform unit tests on our applications. With the next "code-freeze" coming up, there probably won't be any immediate development concerns, so the focus is cleaning things up and testing. I've been using Eclipse, a free IDE developed by IBM and others, for Java development and really like it. It takes the functionality of VisualAge and gets rid of the ridiculous method-based editing, returning to the classic file-format. If you do any coding or Java development at all, I'd highly recommend trying out a beta copy. A program this good may even get me back on track with my PRIMA project next year.

Speaking of software, I'm downloading Netscape 7.0 Preview. It's gotten pretty positive reviews so far, being billed as the next IE-killer. After the Netscape 6 fiasco and the infection of AOL, it'll be a pleasant surprise if the preview is as fast and useable as all reports indicate.

Last on my writing agenda: I finally got the real CD of my recital from April 2001 and generally it's very good. Not much effort was put into correcting anything -- rather, its selling point is the high sound quality and mixing. The only problem is that the encore march didn't get onto the recording. However, it should be handy to have good recordings of some of my works.

If you have any news to report, or just want to say hello, feel free to e-mail me with the mail icon to the upper right of this news box. Until next time, this is BU signing off.