If you at my last post, you’ll see I was whining a bit about Google Checkout and Google Adwords. Fortunately, that was resolved this week. Google re-opened my Adwords account (yay!, even though I’m not using it right now) which then allowed my credit card to work with Google Checkout. Lesson learned. . .Google’s left hand doesn’t always meet with Google’s right hand in a quick and responsive manner. If you are looking at purchasing some books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf before the end of the year, now is the time to do it.

Ok. . ..ok. . .I missed posting last week. I have a good reason. Honest. Well, at least in my mind, it is. I’ve been working with one of my clients to get another website live, which happened successfully last weekend. I spent a good part of the last couple of weeks creating the go live checklist and going through a couple of dry runs before the actual go live. Of course, everything went without a hitch from my side.

It’s been one of those kinds of weeks. I’ve been working on implementing a LinkedBlockingQueue for a project and things were not working as expected. Unfortunately, I forget the simplest of rules for LBQs: there is a lock on the head and a lock on the tail. I was processing the queue using a Timer in Spring and was calling queue.take(). However, when I would look at the log, I would only see a handful of entries saying the take was happening then it would appear to stop.

I’m waiting in DFW for a connection back to Charlotte. I was in College Station the past couple of days attending a conference put on by my friends Steve and Kerry Beck, the owners of FamilyEbiz. I’ve known Steve and Kerry for the past few years and it was good to hang out with them for a couple of days. If you are wondering how you can start a business on the internet without dealing with all the slimeballs that exist out there, Steve and Kerry are the people that you want to work with.

This week, I dipped my toes into the NoSQL world. Currently, I’m evaluating MongoDB for a project. It’s amazing that people are thinking this is new and revolutionary. I was doing this stuff in the late 80s with PICK, Universe, UniData, Revelation and a number of other “post-relational” databases. Back then, it was all green (or amber) VT100 screens. That, I don’t miss one bit. With Mongo, I can use a native Java client, which is a huge plus.

Fortunately for me, it’s been a very quiet week. We’ve had minimal issues from the client launch last weekend. We’ve found a couple of things to cleanup, but nothing major. It made my trip to Dallas for the weekend a lot more sane not always having to constantly look over my shoulder, or in this case, looking at the Nagios Tactical Overview, to make sure everything was going ok. When I arrived into DFW on Thursday to start the meetings, I was on my way over to the hotel when I saw a black cloudwall.