Crazy

As of last Monday, I have travelled to the Dark Side. I am taking a 4 week class on Java. (Not the coffee) The class starts at 12pm and gets out at 4pm, but we can leave earlier if we finish the day’s project. I think I got a pretty good deal on it. The class only costs $20 and it covers one semester of AP Java in 2 weeks, then the last 2 weeks we focus on game development. To top that off, the class is taught by the college’s computer science professor, so we get a knowledgable instructor that can answer our questions.

So far, I haven’t learned to much. I have learned a few things I could have picked up from a Google search in less than five minutes, but that’s about it so far. It is nice to be attending the class with a friend though. My neighbor was the one who found out about this program and the one I’m taking it with.

These last few weeks have not been all good though. My grandfather Prince “Tex” Moon passed away Father’s Day night. They tried to administer an I.V. at the nursing home, but couldn’t get it done properly, so they shipped him to a hospital. Shortly after they arrived they told us to get down there. Not too long after, he passed away when his breathing stopped.

Apparently, he had some kind of infection (high white blood cell count) and was extremely dehydrated. It is amazing what the human body can withstand though. On the paper they gave us that lists the problems he had, he had 21 medical issues, including Parkinson’s Disease, pneumonia, and Insomnia. So, tomorrow I’ll be heading to his funeral.

Since I’ve been slacking on posting for a few days, I would just like to get a thought out that came up a few days ago on TechCrunch, in one of the largest flame wars I have seen on their site. This battle was mainly between the TechCrunch users, Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield, and Zooomr’s Kris Tate in this post. If you read the comments, you see an interesting thing that really hasn’t come up in “Web 2.0″ yet. Should user’s data be open to everyone, including competitors or should it be locked away?

Most people agree that Web 2.0 includes openness of data via API’s and other various methods, but not once do you hear about where the line should be drawn when running a business based on these ideas. I personally think it would be a better world if all of this data was open to competitors, as long as they do not damage, edit, steal, or delete any of my data, but this is a hard thing to trust random people on the internet to do. If a site can move your data over to their’s and then delete it on competitor FooBar Inc…what’s stopping them?