Yep, it's been a while without anything meaningful. I've had a few things that I've though "I need to blog about that!" but never have. So here is a list of utterly random things that may or may not make any difference to you:

• We now have two foster children. The whole foster process is quite lenghthy and, really, it's not easy. As soon as you think things are getting better boom something happens and you feel like you are starting from scratch. I could go on and on and on about this but
• I looked at my blog a few weeks ago and noted that my Diigo feed was making it look like a spam blog. Sorry about that -- I shut it off. If you still want to see my bookmarks [goto Diigo][]and do an RSS subscription there. Or join up and be my "friend". It's actually a pretty cool service.
• Trying to add JMS Replication into Ehcache is a hard, difficult feat. At first you may thing that [reading Ehcache's documentation][]may give you the answer but, alas, it wrong. Wrong! Pure wrong! It took lots of logging and looking at the source to figure out what was happening. [Look at my StackOverlow post and answer for the play-by-play configuration.][]
• We knew that the time was coming to get a new van. Last year the air conditioning quit working and we weren't ready to spend the $800 to fix it just then. Our plan was to get it fixed this spring, have it last the summer, and get something this fall. And then the cruise stopped working and the horn didn't work. This past week, Gina called me at work and said that the speedometer didn't work and the coolant light was on. I took it in and got an estimate to fix all the things wrong were $3500. Then I drove it a little bit and noticed that it wouldn't shift out of first gear! $5000 for a new transmission!! So $8500 to fix a nine-year old van? No way!! So Gina and I went van shopping yesterday and got a [2004 Honda Odyssey.][] We had a new Civic just before Leah was born and loved it! But we didn't think we were going to be able to get another Honda for a while. Even used Odyssey's are hard to come by, but the local Honda dealership (literly down the street) had a few. Between the market now and, well, our desparation to have a new-for-us van, we got it done. They even took our old van -- and, yes, I drove it there in first gear.
• [Jupiter][] is a really good code-review tool. It's built into Eclipse, so you can make comments, submit the comments via source control, and the rest of the team and see them and fix them. This makes reviewin code with an offshore team much less painful.
• I promise to blog more often -- maybe just little blips, but I will do it. I'm sure both of my readers will appreciate it.

[Look at my StackOverlow post and answer for the play-by-play