<p><img src="http://www.braino.org/blog/images/packingcenter.jpg" height="240" width="160" align="right" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="" title="" longdesc="" />My brother and I joined a group from church to volunteer at the Charlotte processing center of <a href="http://www.samaritanspurse.org/index.asp?section=Operation+Christmas+Child">Operation Christmas Child</a>. As we drove up we saw cars everywhere. There had to be more than 300 cars in the parking lot  and parked along the road leading to the center. Hundreds of people were working inside the warehouse. Considering that it was the first night there for at least half of the people in the building, the smoothness with which everything went was amazing. They had a good system for quickly training the volunteers.</p>

<p>I worked on the taping line. Just fun, I pretended to manage it and made sure that the boxes flowed smoothly. I would guess that I touched more that 1,200 shoeboxs in the two hours I was working. Just for posterity&#8217;s sake, for anyone who happens to working on the taping line in the future, here is what I learned.</p>

<ul>
    <li>Keep the middle space clear of boxes. When passing boxes down the line to be taped, push them into the space between adjacent tape machines, keeping the center clear. When someone is done taping a box they can set it down in the center, and slide it straight down to the packers.</li>
    <li>Don&#8217;t drop the shoebox horizontally down past the cuter when you have wrapped the tape around it. If you do, the tape will spring back and tangle up. Drop it down at a little bit of an angle, and the tape stays laid out, ready for the next box.</li>
    <li>The front two people taping need to keep their eyes open and pass untaped boxes down to the others if needed.</li>
</ul>

<p>Working there was a blast. I&#8217;ll want to do it again.</p>

I updated my old post about Pompeii with photos. For some odd reason, random people just keep visiting that page. Their visits give me a sense of responsibility to have more content then just a few quiped lines written late at night.

<p><img src="http://www.braino.org/blog/images/ldibooth2003.jpg" height="240" width="320" align="" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Our LDI Booth" title="" longdesc="" /><br />

(Our family business’s booth at LDI.)

<p>Fun things I did:</p>
<ul>
    <li>Learned how to use a <a href="http://www.flyingpig.com/products/hog3/">Wholehog III</a>. (Thanks <a href="http://www.highend.com/">HighEnd</a> for bringing four of them for people to play on, and thanks Tristan for the help.)</li>
    <li>Played with a well designed Palm based lighting board, the <a href="http://www.interactive-online.com/figment/">Figment</a>.</li>
    <li>Saw an good peice of software, <a href="http://projectmaker.com/features.html">ProjectMaker</a>, designed in FileMaker by a production company for internal use and now being sold. I was very impressed with FileMaker&#8217;s capabilities, and resolved to try <a href="http://www.filemaker.com/">FileMaker</a> out when I got back.</li>
    <li>Admired the <a href="http://www.pathwayconnect.com/pathport.html">Pathport</a> ethernet to DMX interface. If I ever build a Mac based ligthing board, this looks to be a good way to get DMX out.</li>
</ul>

<p>It&#8217;s great to be able to talk face to face at the tradeshow with people you have dealt with over the phone. People can talk to the people that actualy design the products, instead of having them buired behind sales wall. Ideas can flow both ways. Person to person relationships are a excellent foundation for both selling and buy. I can see why even with the high cost of attending or exhibiting at the convention, people still come from around the world.</p>

After arriving in at 4am after a bit of a grueling drive, we are finaly at the show. Ten minutes left till the crowds come in. Across one asie from us people are posing for photos with their booth, while to the other side, techs are last minute taking apart a intelingent light with their pocket leathermans.

Our booth looks really good. Having the booth framed in with truss allows us to light it well, so rather than the typical dark booth, ours feels very open.

I am posting from my phone. Photos will probably have to wait until I return.

I’m off to the LDI Show in Orlando. Entertainment lighting is a world I grew up in.For three days this week I’ll be doing the fun parts of working at a lighting company - walking a tradeshow and playing with $40,000 gagets or standing my Dad’s company’s booth talking about small peices of metal.

I’ve picked up a trail of Colonel John Boyd. His ideas on military victory sound good, but finding the his real thoughts on the web is tough work, hidden as it is behind a cloud of journalists who don’t know what they are talking about, and lauding friends who tell you how important his ideas are without telling you what they were. Here are the best of the links I have been able to find.

The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot - A Fast Company article, my orignal introduction to Boyd’s ideas.

The Essential Boyd - One of the best overviews I have found. Written by a man who went on to write, The Mind of War (Amazon), a book covering Boyd’s ideas.

The Fighter Pilot - A short article on the life of Boyd, written by the man who wrote an apparently over idolizing book on Boyd’s life, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Amazon).

Genghis John - A freind’s biography of him.

Tribute to Boyd - A contractor’s remembrance of Boyd’s involvement with fighters.

ParaPundit on Boyd - Collection of random snippets and links.

D-N-I.net - Site by some of Boyd’s associates. The PDF presentations available for download are Boyd’s only real writings available.

The newly announced Macromedia Flex looks interesting. I ilke their concept of data binding and services.

I am learning Jakarta Struts.

( My usual plan of attack when learning a new programing language, is to buy a few books by intelligent authors. I read the books cover to cover to get the big picture, and to try to find the “Clue” or “Way” of the language. Then I do a tiny goofy project to actualy get code written down, going back over the book to find out the specific ways concepts are implimented. Finaly, I do a small real world app. )

Up until the past two weeks, I had had little experince with Java. From the intoductory books I had read, I belived that the way of Java was to break everything down into business related objects and avoid the use of getters and setters. I regarded Java as a verbose, brittle way of programing that was horribly unsuited to web coding.

About half way through my first read through of Struts in Action, I came across a sentance that ran something like this, “It is generaly agreed that the best way to build multi layered applications is to only pass primitives, (Numbers, Strings, Collections) accross layers.” I was quite staggered - this was totaly against everything I thought good Java programing stood for.

Now I am learning “real” web programing Java. Other than the mass of classes created, it is very similar my MVC PHP coding I am already doing.

Part of the Way of Programing Struts is to use Beans. Beans are nothing more than classes with get and set methods on every attirbute. This makes the class open, and eliminates the need for other classes to know what they are dealing with. If you are a filling station, and the Bean that drove up has a setFuelLevel() method, then you can fill it up. It does not matter if that particular object subclasses MotorizedVehicle or not. For all you care it could be a GasCan. Beans are nothing more than a way of doing Duck Typing in Java.

Struts solves many of the little ickies in web programing - forms, messages, control flow. Time will tell if Struts is worth the verbosity that comes with using Java.

Now I’m building my tiny goof-off application - it’s a way based control panel to command the mythical rodents that live under the Center and chew on network cables.

I found a good set of free flags.

Steven Garrity talks about seeing things in real life that you have already expirenced digitaly. Once in Williamsburg, I was walking down the shops part of the historic area, and turned my head to the side. A brick dead end alley was before my eyes with a black metal ladder bolted to one wall giving access to the roof. I imedatily felt pulled to dash to it, climb up, and lay belly down on the roof to await the enemy. Too much America’s Army.

I have also understood dog’s learning in terms of Baysain spam filters - speaking of which, somebody needs to train a dog to recognize spam.