Happy New Year!

Greetings from Tokyo, I'm leaving for my flight in just a few minutes. It's been a great trip, I'll be posting pics and videos in the coming days. Have a great New Year!

FINALLY!
My soccer team (The Crew) won our first game today. I play goal keeper and for once, I saved the game at the last minute instead of losing it. A guy from the other team took a shot from my right that was heading right into the left side of the net, I leapt into the air only to get the tip of my finger on the ball. Luckily, that was just enough to push the ball out of bounds, and keep the score 3-2 in our favor. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but its nice to win once in a while. I think the 10-0 thrashing we took last week gave me some good practice in goal.
Afterwards a few of the guys and I went to George and Dragon to celebrate, unfortunately they were having their x-mas party so they kicked us out after an hour. Oh well, we still had a few good beers!

So its 1:30 am and I can't sleep again. So I start googling for some old friends of mine from back in Michigan, and I happen to find Marc Christy's band FourDeep. I think the CD is a couple years old, but worth a listen none-the-less. I remember watching Marc start out on the guitar and seeing him progress over the years and look at him now. So I figured I'd post to his guestbook and afterwards flipped through and found a couple of posts from others that I went to high school with, Emily Derthik and Brendan Phelan. Brendan had a hilarious reference to "Tula" a nickname that I gave to Ryan Ulferts after I tricked him into saying that the playmate Tula (who was formerly a man) was hot. One of those stupid 8th grade prepubescent things that I guess just sorta stuck, its pretty funny to see that I have left an indelible mark on this world (in one way or another).

Ok, well its been a year since I started this thing, so I figured what better time to pick it up again.

I'm finally done with college, I got a big raise at work and I'm going to Japan next week for the holidays. I've totally changed the way I code, I have now embraced the TDD method whole-heartedly and there is no looking back. Now I feel much more confident when I refactor my code, because I know I can always rerun the unit tests and know for 100% certainty (ok fine, 99.99) if the changes have affected the code in other places. Its pretty nifty really.

Last month I put together an event at work which the entire IT department attended. Bob Martin was the speaker and he blew everyone away. Apollo has a lot of practices that are very thick in red tape, and I really think that Bob has opened some peoples eyes, at least for the moment. I also had a chance to have sushi with Bob the night before, and let me tell ya, the guy is awesome. Well, ok, its 1:27 am, so and I do have a lot of shit to do tomorrow, so I better go sleep now.