First Post! Woo hoo! :-)

Hey, give me a break, will ya? I had to start the darn thing somehow!

Welcome to my new humble home on the web.

My name is PJ Cabrera a.k.a. Dread Pirate PJ. My college friends and I are great fans of The Princess Bride, so the nickname has nothing to do with pirating per se. But I’m a bit melodramatic, so I like to use it. You may contact me by email at pjcabrera AT pobox DOT com, on MSN Messenger as dreadpiratepj AT hotmail DOT com, AIM as DreadPiratePJ, Jabber and GoogleTalk as dreadpiratepj AT gmail DOT com. Only the pjcabrera AT pobox DOT com email address is checked regularly, so simply, don’t send email messages to the hotmail or gmail accounts.

I am a developer with over eight years of experience, developing software for internal and external use of Fortune 1000 companies. The bulk of my experience has been with Java Enterprise Edition, but I am not very particular about which tools I use for my work – other than not using those that are total crap.

I am an advocate of open source solutions for development where warranted. I am equally comfortable with GUI and web development in Java, Python, PHP, or Ruby. I could even use C# for .Net development. But if so, I am going to be advocating deploying on Linux with Mono instead of on Windows with .Net Framework. I have an allergic reaction to Perl, I have a high sensitivity to bullshit, and I can tolerate Lisp if given enough advance warning.

This weblog is about my life, my hobbies, my friends, my likes, and my dislikes, in no particular order or subject distribution. The entries are going to be about shows or movies I’ve seen, places I’ve visited, food I’ve eaten, and whether I liked or disliked those things. It’s also going to be about tech and gadgets, software and hardware development, open source and free culture, indie music, internet video, and other personal media.

And if I get a cat, I might even post pictures every Friday.

So there you go. That’s what this is all about.

And that’s it for my first post. Have a good day!