OpenSearch

At work we use several Atlassian products, including JIRA and Confluence. We recently upgraded to the latest version of both, and when that happened I noticed Chome starting to behave a little differently. One day I was typing in https://jira (the path to our internal instance), and all of a sudden Chrome's URL bar changed, and I had a search directly of JIRA. Typing in

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New Job

So I promised to some that there would be some big news on Thursday, so here it is. Some people had to find this out first (mainly my boss) before I could post it publically. A few have known about this for a while, so thank you for holding your tongues. This post should only be visible to some, and I have tried to set

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The Big Announcement

So I promised to some that there would be some big news on Thursday, so here it is. Some people had to find this out first (mainly my boss) before I could post it publicly. A few have known about this for a while, so thank you for holding your tongues. This post should only be visible to some, and I have tried to set

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Weddings

Well, our last wedding before our child’s birth is over with (we do have one in 1 month, but that would put the baby at 43 weeks). It was actually tamer and more, oh, meaningful, dignified, reverent? There was very little drinking compared to previous weddings, the guests all had fun, stress levels were low, and everything went off without any issues (except maybe a

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Back Home

Well, we are back from our trip to Jackson, MS. We were down there for the wedding of our friends Shaun and Mary Frances. It was a beautiful ceremony and reception, and we got some great pictures, despite a few roadblocks. The trip down was fairly uneventful. We stayed with Summer’s parents Thursday night to get a head start on Friday morning. We managed to

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Teaching

I had an interesting reminder today that I still have a pleonast account, and that sometimes completely strangers will occasionally read what I say here (hello to new readers Tom, Doug, and Eli). So, here I am, back for a quick installment. Tonight was an interesting night at our mid-week study. The teachers for the “junior” class were out, so one of our elders suggested

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Cloth Diaper Cost Study

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a study of how much we spent on cloth diapers since Silas was born. I threw in some research on the costs of disposable diapers, to make sure that so far we have saved money. By my accounting, we will actually break even in February or March, and see significant benefits with future children. The

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Google GSON and Thread Safety

At work we are using gson to do some soft serialization between some applications. Our production application started to throw some errors this afternoon, and after looking into the problem it would appear that gson has a static reference to SimpleDateFormat (or, more correctly, a static member that was constructed with DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance(), which returns a SimpleDateFormat).  You can see the problem here, line 58. A

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No New Theft

Ecc 1:9-14: What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things

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Cutting Back

I will post a little bit of what I posted to Summer’s blog. I am hoping that we can all help each other out and find ways to cut back in ‘tough economic times’. Cutting Back Another key to getting us back on track was to find ways to trim back. One of our frustrations is that every time we saw a ‘top 5 ways

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Money Makeover

(imported from an old blog) For those of you who are friends with my wife on pleo, who is a gold member, she is about to post something privately that I wrote. It is about our reasoning behind switching to the process that Dave Ramsey calls the “Total Money Makeover”. Several have scoffed at the idea, and I figured some explaining might show others that

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woman in black long sleeve shirt sitting having interview

Interview Tips

For the last three years, I have been my team’s representative to all job interviews. CARFAX is still doing quite well in this tough economy, and we are currently interviewing interns for the coming summer. I believe we even have a few full time positions open as well. One thing I have observed in all of these interviews, however, is how unprepared many of the

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Silas James is Here

Hopefully you have been keeping up with my wife’s blog (she has a much larger following than I). Our son, Silas James Watt, was born on Tuesday at 7:56 am. He was born 9lbs, at 22.75 inches long. The Lord has blessed us with a healthy boy, and mom and child are both doing well. Thank you everyone for your prayers. We will post updates

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