Europe Travelblog  -

+ 3 - 0 | § ¶Sheffield Sojourn

Last weekend, we took a long weekend to visit friends in Sheffield, England.  Our hosts normally live in St. Louis, but they are near the end of a year-long temporary assignment in Sheffield through Boeing.  When they became expats, they extended an invitation to friends to visit.  Since we had been expats ourselves in Germany and knew how much we enjoyed visitors, we decided to go visit and see a part of England we hadn't seen before.

Sheffield is a city in transition.  Even though it's the fourth largest city in England, it's practically unknown in America.  It's probably best known here as the home of the down-on-their-luck workers in The Full Monty.  The poor economic situation of the movie was realistic, because the city had lost much of its industrial economic base in the 80s and 90s.  However, there's been a lot of government and business investment since, and the city's economy is picking up and diversifying. (more)

+ 1 - 3 | § ¶Writing Music in Java: Two Approaches

As part of my employer's Java News Brief series, I have written an article on Writing Music in Java: Two Approaches.  In the article, I discuss using JFugue and abc4j to write, listen to, and manipulate music in Java using notations that can be read by both humans and computers.

Previously, I have written articles in the series on Units and Measures with JScience, an Intro to JGoodies Forms, and an Intro to JGoodies Validation.

Check it out!