Lawrence McAlpin

We have a photo gallery up of our last cruise. One of the best things about the cruise was that we got to see a lot of difference places. The drawback, of course, is that we don't stay any one place for long. It was nice, though, because we ended up not liking the place we thought we would (Progreso) and we ended up falling in love with Roatan, which we never would have thought to visit before.



Beth and I went snorkeling in Roatan, which was fun. The reef there was beautiful, and it came right up to the beach. Unfortunately, we didn't try snuba diving there. We did try that for the first time in Cozumel, and we enjoyed it, but we would have had a much better underwater adventure if we had done that in Roatan. If only we had known!

One of my favorite drinks to order in Mexico is the Michelada. Its popularity seems to be increasing here in the States as, recently, Miller and Bud have introduced "chelada-inspired" drinks such as Miller Chill and Budweiser Chelada, both of which are terrible.

A proper Michelada is a beer cocktail made with dashes of Worcestershire sauce, Maggi sauce (or soy sauce), some salt, and hot sauce, mixed with the juice from several key limes. Put this mixture in a glass, add ice, then slowly pour your beer in. A European (or Mexican) style lager is said to work best, because American style beers tend to finish sweet. Recently, I have been making my Micheladas using the Vienna Lager I made with my Mister Beer kit. Muy delicioso!

Unfortunately, I can never find a Mexican restaurant in the States that makes the Michelada the way I've had them in Mexico. Often, in American Mexican restaurants, they add Clamato or tomato juice to the mix. I've ordered Micheladas throughout Cozumel and the Yucatan (Progreso and Merida) and never had it with tomato juice, so I guess this is a regional difference in Mexico.

The tomato juice ruins it for me; a Michelada without the tomato juice is much lighter and crisper. Once you add the tomato juice, the bold flavors tend to overwhelm the beer. But taste is subjective, so to each their own. As long as the local O'Malias keeps fresh key limes in stock, I can make it the way I like it, and dream of a day when I have a chance to return to sunny Mexico (but only the parts of Mexico that make the Michelada the way I like it.)

Beth and I have returned from our first cruise. We travelled on the Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas which sails out of Galveston, Texas. Our friends Michael and Kristen picked us up and joined us for our weeklong adventure.

The ports we stopped at were Roatan, Hondurus; Cozumel, Mexico; and Progreso, Mexico. There was plenty to do at the various ports of call. Beth and I went snorkeling and kayaking in Roatan. The reef there comes almost right up to the shore and its absolutely beautiful. We went snuba diving in Cozumel (we should have done that in Roatan - you can see things much more clearly when snuba diving.) Progreso was somewhat of a disappointment, with a filthy beach and a lunch interrupted by an uninvited guest: the famous Mexican cockroach. I'll post more about those in detail later.

Overall, the trip was nice. The boat was huge and there was a lot to do on board. We saw some comedians, and a show tune performer, as well as the master illusionists known (collectively) as Laraf. There was a Carnival-style parade at the end of the tour that ended the vacation with a bang.

Most of the time, however, we laid out around the pool area and enjoyed the various pools and hot tubs and the libations from the pool-side bar. The bar staff were very friendly and surprisingly good at remembering people (and what they drink) despite the thousands of guests they interact with daily.

Almost everyone on the boat were very friendly. The only real disappointment of the trip was that some of the guest relations staff were incredibly rude. Apparently, some of them snoozed through hospitality school. Not all of them gave us bad service, though, and it didn't detract too much from our vacation.

The staterooms, as one might expect are relatively small. They do have to cram as many people on to the boat as possible to make a profit. As one of the comedians pointed out, if we dropped a washcloth we'd have wall to wall carpeting. But the balcony gave us fabulous and convenient views of the ocean. The bed was very comfortable, and Beth slept soundly without once waking up because I rolled over. Our room attendant left us cute animals made out of towels to come home to every night after dinner.

The food was good; it was one buffet after another, and there was no shortage of it. They even had midnight buffets with roasted pigs and taco bars. Our favorite food actually came from a Texas Chili cook-off contest they had on the pool deck. But the table service dining was also really great, mostly consisting of your standards like shrimp cocktails, fried chicken, sirloins and fillets with various sauces, and pasta dishes, but also including some more interesting fare such as samosas. We did feel there could have been a wider variety of cuisines represented, so I guess the only bad part about the meals is that they have to play it too safe (after all, it has to appeal to thousands of guests onboard.)

All in all, it was an enjoyable vacation. We will most likely try another cruise line besides Royal Caribbean next time, to see if the food (and guest relations staff) are better, but if you have a chance to go on a Royal Caribbean cruise yourself, I would recommend doing so. You won't regret it!

Anyway, now we have to head back to the daily grind of working.

After years (I kid...) of taunting us with promises of a collection of his earliest funnies, my brother has finally released the Multiplex e-Book Volume 1. And it has new, never-before-seen funnies! And its free! What can be better than that?

If you aren't familiar with Multiplex, its a humorous web-based comic about various people who work in and around a Multiplex theater. Check it out here: http://www.multiplexcomic.com/

I've uploaded a few more "The Lost Mind" songs to the "My Music" page.

• Ascension


• Enigmatic


• Untitled

It never ceases to astound me how many developers don't know how to get a stack dump of a running Java process. It couldn't be simpler. On UNIX systems, you send a QUIT signal to the running process (kill -3 pid or kill -QUIT pid). The process that receives the SIGQUIT signal does not stop running; it simply dumps its current stack trace to standard output and continues processing normally. On Windows systems, you use Ctrl+Break in the DOS window the Java process is running in. If your process isn't running in a window (such as a service or a child process running inside an IDE), you will have to use a third-party program to send the Ctrl+Break, such as SendSignal.

What do you do with this stack trace? Well, its most useful when your process is hanging for some reason, which is a problem you're likely to face at some point or another if you work with highly concurrent systems.

Recently, we faced an issue where our application wasn't processing some of the messages it was receiving. All of our servers were processing messages, but one of them was partially hung. We have two server instances in each of three clusters in the business tier of our application, so we quickly set out to figure out which server instance was the culprit. Once we fingered some suspects, we got stack dumps for each server instance to figure out what they were doing. With stack traces in hand, we quickly determined which server was holding us up; there was a deadlock in log4j code that was causing several threads to hang. It took only a few seconds to find, and just a few more to fix and verify. Problem solved. I can't imagine how one would diagnose an issue like that without a stack trace. Life would be much harder, that's for sure.

Asking potential job candidates how to get a stack dump of a running program has quickly become one of my favorite interview questions.

A friend of mine made a program, called Kuler Creator, that creates generative art pieces based on Adobe Kuler color themes found by searching on a user-supplied tag. Its a pretty neat program that can give some pretty nice looking results.

We just bought a new TV. Its a Samsung LNT4665F 46" 1080p LCD HDTV. We ordered it via Amazon. Little did I know what a debacle that would be. We were plagued with shipping gremlins like you wouldn't believe...

I'm hesitant to recommend ordering the TV through Amazon because they use Eagle Global Logistics to ship it and our experience with their service wasn't that great. Amazon won't use anyone else. EGL messed my order up somehow because it didn't show up at all in their tracking system. I ordered the TV on the 12th, and Amazon claims it was picked up and shipped on the 13th via 5-day shipping. The 24th was the original estimated arrival date, and it came and went... and no TV. So I had to call EGL and ask where it was, and they acted like it didn't exist. They had NO record of the shipment. So I had to call Amazon to ask them to find out why EGL didn't think it existed. And then finally I got a working tracking number and the TV moved from where it had been... in Cincinnati. It finally gets moved and gets to Indianapolis the next day according to the tracking info online. I get a new estimated delivery date of October 2. And that passed and I heard nothing from EGL. So I had to call them, and it turns out it had been in the factory for about a week but nobody bothered to tell the Scheduling Department to put it on a truck for me.

The TV finally got here yesterday... at least the lady I spoke with in the Scheduling Department was prompt and professional, and the man who actually delivered the TV was as well.

This TV would have cost about $600 more at the Best Buy here in town, so I suppose I can't complain too much, but still. That was a lot of shipping gremlin hassle.

But my troubles weren't over yet... Wouldn't you know it? As soon as we turned it on, we received an error message. The text 'T-TULPAUS0-1034 (00:03) 46(AMW)-INT' appeared in red text that overlayed everything, blinking incessantly. The text meant nothing to me. And, as luck would have it, after an hour with the tech support, it became apparent that it meant nothing to them either. After I patiently explained to the level one tech support script reader that it was most definitely the TV and not one of my other devices because none of my other devices were plugged in they finally moved me up to level two tech support. The level two lady didn't even bother reading a script and moved me up to level three. What fun. Finally, they revealed the magic combination of button pushing that would reset the TV.

In case you are reading this because you have this problem, these are the instructions I was given for resetting my TV:

Hit the menu button on the top of the TV. It has to be the button on top of the TV, not on the remote control. A blue panel should appear with a lot of options. Ignore it. Hit the down volume control a few times until the volume bar appears. It doesn't matter what volume you set it to, just that the bar the shows the current volume shows up onscreen. Now hold the menu button down again. After about five seconds you should see a small box at the bottom of the screen. It will say something like "Shop" or "Dynamic." Either way, when it appears, let go. If it says "Shop", repeat these instructions a second time. When it says "Dynamic," your TV is set the way it should be.

Now it works like a charm. The technology gremlins appear to have moved on.

As for the TV itself, its wonderful! Well, now that its not blinking its firmware version on top of everything I watch... The image is crisp and my Blu-Ray movies look amazing.

Anyone else have any shipping drama stories worth telling?




Edit: Added more detailed instructions for resetting the TV since I noticed some Google searches that appeared to be related to this issue. It has been a few months since I bought the TV and my TV has been working wonderfully with absolutely no problems since then.

Lots of brave people took to the streets to take a stand against the military junta that took over their country, demanding democracy. We should all stand with them and support them in their peaceful revolution.

Burger King has a website that will turn your photos into Simpsons characters. So if you ever wondered what you would look like on the Simpsons, this is your chance! This is me:

Of the beer I brewed. Quite literally. I drank them all. They were very good, especially after they lagered a bit in the fridge. Now I've got a new batch (this one is a pale ale) that has finished fermenting in the Mr. Beer keg and has been transferred to my bottles.

Don't worry, Mom, I won't take after Dad.

Looks like Apple is fighting the iPhone hackers hard. It seems as if they intend on releasing a future firmware upgrade that will brick iPhones running third-party applications or that were unlocked.

Can someone explain why Apple has such a problem with third-party applications? It doesn't really reduce their potential market, as few people would rather run shoddy software created by droopy-eyed basement bedroom hackers over properly developed (and tested) software from a major company like Apple. And I don't see how the risk of us running MAME on it (the horrors) puts them at any greater legal risk than Microsoft is with Windows...

Sony also fights rough, as they have been in a constant cat-and-mouse game with hackers on its PSP platform. Interestingly enough, despite being considered by many as being "evil," Sony has not yet, to my knowledge, intentionally bricked anyones PSP because they hacked it. Still, I only run orthodox Sony-approved software on mine just in case.

Alpine Brewz has just bottled its first batch of beer. I have 15 bottles of Weizenbier that is currently in the process of carbonating. It should take another week before its ready, maybe two.

The Mister Beer kit is surprisingly easy to use, I just may be able to convince myself to make a habit out of this. But I am getting ahead of myself. I haven't even tasted the finished product yet!

Finally, I got around to starting to brew the Mr. Beer kit Beth got me as a gift Christmas. I'll get to bottle it next week. Hopefully, it all went well.

We had a lot of fun on the island, but I got a hankering for the cuisine of a different set of islands. There are a lot of Filipinos in Hawaii, so we figured there would be great Filipino food to be found. Apparently, on Oahu, this is the case: you can't walk a block in Honolulu without tripping over a great Filipino restaurant. Or so we're told. But we were on Kuaui, and we discovered that there were only two restaurants to choose from.

One of them was easier to find on the map than the other. So, at first we tried to go to Mama Lucy's Kitchen in Lihue. I'm told their food is great, but our encounter there didn't go so well. Note to resterauteurs: if you allow your extended family to camp out in the dining room, please tell them not to stare at the clientele. Thanks. And, yes, I'm Filipino. Which may be what they were trying to figure out. But its still rude. Don't gawk and point. Just whisper and glance sideways. Thanks!

Like many of the more working-class restaurants in Hawaii, they offer you a selection of entrees, and you are charged by the number of entrees you pick. Its not unlike many Chinese fast food restaurants, where they have food in a buffet style counter. Unfortunately for us, none of the items were labeled. I didn't see anything immediately recognizable as a Filipino standard, so I asked the sullen young girl behind the counter: "could you tell me what the entrees are?" Maybe there was a misunderstanding, but she actually responded: "just look at them" and walked into the back room and left us there.

Um.... no thanks.

So, we left and called the Kawayan, which is the other Filipino restaurant in the island. The lady that was running the place was incredibly friendly. The restaurant is located in the heart of an industrial area, and apparently even locals get lost trying to find it. She was patient with us on the phone and gave us very good directions. When we got there, I immediately recognized the chicken adobo in the buffet. I asked them what the other dishes were (a lot of dishes can look alike) and she went through the list and let us know what each entree was. They had oxtail kare-kare on the menu as well. There were also a few Thai dishes. Beth and I ordered the adobo and the oxtail soup as well as some lumpia and took a seat.

It took a bit of effort to find the place, but it was well worth it. The food was amazing and you get a LOT for your money. By this point, we had eaten quite a few meals at the resort, where meal prices are incredibly overpriced. It was quite a relief to pay just $6 for a delicious, well prepared meal and come out STUFFED. It was also nice to have a taste of the Filipino standards I enjoyed growing up; I don't get much of a chance to do so in Indiana.

The Kawayan is located on 1543 Haleukana St and their number is (808) 245-8823. I highly recommend it if you visit Kuaui.