Tag / Java

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Travelling The 50 States – California

Over my 47 years, I’ve done my fair share of travelling across these United States.  I thought it would be an interesting experiment go look back at those trips to each of the 31 states I have visited (62% isn’t bad, is it?) and see if, and when, I may be returning.  Working in alphabetical order, we start today with the 31st state to be added to the Union: California.

State: California
Joined the Union: 1850
Visits: 11

With eleven visits between 1998 and 2019, the Golden State is the state I have visited the most, outside of those I have lived in and/or attended college.

My first visit was in 1998 to attend Comic Con International in San Diego.  I went early, spending the entire week and enjoying some pre-Con time checking out the sights, including the San Diego Zoo.

I returned the following year for Labor Day weekend, but this time up to the San Francisco Bay area, to visit my old friend Scott, who had moved out there after graduating to work at AMD.  What I remember from that trip is my first Giants/Phillies tilt at the former Candlestick Park, my first trip to the toilet that at the time was called Network Associates Coliseum, and a car trip over the Golden Gate Bridge.

I returned to San Diego for Comic Con in 2000 and 2003.  I don’t remember much of the 2000 trip, but the 2003 trip included my one visit to the former Jack Murphy Stadium to see the Padres face the Diamondbacks.  At the Con, I managed to see many of the stars (or, at least, bit players) from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Smallville, and Tru Calling.

With the Cubs coming off their first division title since 1989 and a new stadium opening in San Diego, my friend Pete and I planned a trip for the Cubs mid-May road trip.  We attended all three games at PETCO Park, which the Cubs swept, while also taking in the local sights and the ambience of the Elephant and Castle bar in our hotel. Continue reading →

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3 Years Ago

On February 13, 2009, an inside joke turned into this website, thanks to a lunch time trip to White Castle the day before.  The true story behind the meaning of the Learning Turkey name has not yet been told on this site.  Today, on the three year anniversary, is the day to tell said story.

It all begins in 2007, with a little program called HTS.  The goal: take a legacy mainframe application and rewrite it for a server environment.  The challenge: do it with a team made up of resouces who know the mainframe and not necessarily new-fangled technologies like Oracle or Java.  To help with the transition, it was decided to put together a website to store helpful documents where people could start to get up to speed.  This website was called the Community of Learning!  Now, someone had to be put in charge of maintaining and populating the Community of Learning.  Enter Dennis Watts.

Dennis had joined the team a few years earlier and, what he lacked in talent, he made up for with bad ideas.  While most of those ideas had been discarded (the Employee of the Month parade), he was allowed to run wild with the Community of Learning.  Within weeks, there were signs posted around the floor touting the Community of Learning, featuring an old picture of John Belushi from Animal House and a changing narrative structure.  These signs managed to outlast both the program and Dennis, and were the topic of conversation on the fateful lunch trip to White Castle on 2/12/09.

Somehow, the old Community of Learning came up on the drive out to White Castle, which led to someone commenting that Dennis was a “turkey.”  Eventually, this became Dennis the Learning Turkey, and the next day became the genesis of this website and its original premise.