I don't remember much, certainly not much that's coherent, from last night's REM sessions. And by the time I'd climbed the gravity well that shields me from full consciousness in the mornings most of what I did remember was in tatters.

But I do remember it involved someone getting married the day after. The bride was having doubts and, naturally, had fallen head over heels in love with me. At some point a friend from primary school (Shaun) was test driving his new submersible jeep in the flood waters that, conveniently, had just risen up beside us. As I recall he went into intricate detail about how not to overstrain the engine when driving fully submerged, and how he'd cut it out once or twice already.

Cue the alien space invasion, of all things, and the attempts by two of us to change the course of the future (apparently we'd been there once and didn't like what we saw) by shooting one of ourselves in the leg (I don't remember which of us, or what the other did). All this actually meant was that when he was teleported into position for his battle his combat exoskeleton was warped to fit his crippled leg.

The last thing I remember was a rousing speech I gave, interrupting a play at my old high school, urging the audience into a battle frenzy (following which they raced out into their fighters and launched themselves into orbit).

What would the world do without me?

Rox really seems to have started to take off recently. I don't know if there's a good reason for this but I decided to fire up Google Analytics and take a closer look. The results were interesting.

The first thing I noticed was that in the past 2 months 7 out of the 10 most common keyword searches resulting in hits on the Rox home page included the name rox. This suggests to me that people are now searching for Rox by name. That's pretty cool.

One of the more notable search phrases that popped out was "java xml rpc simplest possible server". I plugged this into Google and was both amused and pleased to see Rox's home page come up as the second result.

France seems to have popped out recently as a source of hits. Until recently the US and China have been dominating my hits, but I've received a number of referrals from what appears to be a french University and visitors from France have basically wiped China off the board.

All in all, pretty cool.

The author of the javafaq.nu website contacted me to ask if he could publish my NIO tutorial and related code samples on his site for others to use. I'm not sure how long before it will actually show up.

Very cool.

On an unrelated Rox note, I'm playing with new functionality that will automatically map CGI-style GET requests onto XML-RPC method handlers. This makes it possible to expose two APIs (CGI and XML-RPC) backed by the same handler implementation(s). And you benefit from Rox's dynamic proxying magic: Rox will convert CGI string values into the appropriate type(s) (be they ints, Integers, Lists or arrays).

Some interesting ideas here. Given the chance, would you like to live for 1,000 years?

Few things provoke a road-rage-like state in me more effectively than the driver in front of me nonchalantly tossing crap out of their window. It's disgusting.

To the woman driving her blue Puegeot 206 in front of me today, tossing pistachio shells out her window at every red light: you are a pig.

How would you like it if passing pedestrians chose to dump their rubbish in through your open car window?

Fan mail!

I do believe you are my new favorite person, James Greenfield of Cape
Town, South Africa (I'm not stalking you; it's here: http://rox-
xmlrpc.sourceforge.net/author.html).

I'm trying to add some very simple, XML-RPC capability to a humble
project of mine, and, well, have you _tried_ using Axis, JAX-WS,
whatnot? Pain and misery.

Thanks for Rox. I need to test it out a bit more, but the fact that I
can do "hello, world" so easily makes my heart sing.

-Rob
Colorado, USA

Absolutely uncalled for dream last night. Completely bizarre. The central event seems to be me kissing Britney Spears. Now, don't get any ideas, I have no idea where that came from. None whatsoever. Honest. No, really.

The scene seems to have been some sort of sporting event, with me coordinating the photographers (who were using SanDisk MicroDrives with some sort of built in camera). In a further twist, just post the "event" I seem to have wandered in on three guys ransacking her bungalow(?), killed them all execution style (shot to the head, point blank range).

This upset Spencer, who was there with Ben and Horner (we seemed to have been staying together), because it delayed things and he was worried we wouldn't make our next destination (I seem to recall it being a long drive or something). At some point Horner was running behind me urging me to walk, not run, past the Police cars that had arrived on the scene (so I didn't arouse suspicion).

Miss Johnson appeared briefly, but basically just to disapprove.

And I never did get Britney's number. That was a joke (well no, it wasn't, the dream did end with me asking for it and I didn't get it, but that's not to say I'm crushed).

Sheesh.

Saturday saw Claire and I juggling two weddings, both of close friends. Rory and Tarrin (Rory pictured left) and Jackie and Pat (no decent photos, they were too far away).

I was going to post a picture of the married couples but I didn't manage to take any decent pictures. These will have to do.

Rory's wedding was a kind of reunion. Horner and his soon to be overlord (legally speaking) are back in town after an extended stay in the US. They swear it's for good but are working hard to figure out how to make that happen. It's good to have them back in town.

Taylor (on the right) was also down. He's been working in Joburg for the past few years and has gone from single to married and a father in a breathtakingly short period of time (his daughter (Rachel) was born last November 13th).

Mark and Sarah are planning their wedding for April, leaving a few stragglers (aka free souls) in their wake, and thereafter things quieten down on the marriage front.