Reading Bob Balaban and John Head's recent posts on Java got me back on track with my Java learning. (had a couple of vacations):) I headed on over to JavaRanch and browsed the beginner's forum for learning ideas. (Great Java forum's here) I found some useful advice on a couple books. One I've already worked through before is Head First Java by Kathy Sierra. I like this book but was hoping for another recommendation and I came up with Thinking In Java by Bruce Eckel. Checked out my fellow Domino blogger, Duffbert, for a nice review. My local library had it and I've begun reading. It's a large book at 1,400 pages but you eat an elephant one bite at a time. It begins with OOO explanation and I really liked his explanation of hidden elements of objects. There are class creators and client programmers. The class creators hide parts of their classes that are the tender insides of an object. This way the creators of the class can change this as they wish and not mess up the client programmers who are using the class. Nice explanation and very clear. I hope the rest of the book is as enlightning.

It's a Piece of Crap. He can't be serious. His site is horrible. I just got an email about fall tour dates which is cool but can't somebody do something with this great artists site. Fans deserve better. He's so meticulous and stingy with his archive releases yet this is the image to the public. It's difficult to navigate. There's no news or any idea what's going on. There's no community input or even album list I can find. How about a store?
Dude, get with the program.

I loved AC/DC's last release, Stiff Upper Lip. I've been anticipating their next release hoping someone wouldn't die before it came to pass. Their website's redesigned and they have a preview of the new single playing, Rockin' Roll Train. Sounds like the same ol' straight in your face Rock to me. Love it! Keep it up boys! No Apologies!

Had an error message in LEI that was tough to figure out till I found an entry in Notes.net. (I know it's not called that anymore but I like that name better. Actually the post was in the Integration Forum.)
The error was "Invalid character value for cast specification. SQLErrorInfo: 22018
Source: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server"
Problem is that gives me no indication which field is causing the error. I have about 60 fields in this replication and had started sifting through all of them. Andre Guirard to the rescue! Here was his post. His last sentence about a possible date issue pinpointed my issue. I had one date field and I knew which document. Sure enough, the date had a year of '0208'.
Love the Notes forums! Thanks Andre!