brew64

Great thread. I've just skimmed it, so sorry if I'm repeating what has already been said. First, I've always liked the idea of rail - either light rail within cities, or interstate rail (which is what the Madison - Milwaukee segment will ultimately be part of). To me, the main benefits are reducing our reliance on foreign oil, reducing congestion, reducing travel times, and being able to read/work instead of driving. However, the more I see the dollar costs and estimated travel times, the more I become skeptical. From this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (the graphic in the story gives travel times), it shows that with the proposed rail line, to go from Minneapolis to Chicago it would take 5:21 hours by rail , by car 6:39 hours, by bus 8 hours, and by plane 1:20 hours. I know that by plane you add maybe an hour with check-in/security, etc. But with rail being only 1:20 hours faster than car, I think most people would drive - especially when more than one person is the same cost by car, but increases from the additional train tickets. Then there is the hurdle of getting around at your destination. I assume the numbers are based on making one stop in each city. If it stopped at say the state fair grounds, Miller Park, Downtown, and MKE (and multiple stops in other cities), then the total travel time is even worse. I think the money would be better spent adding light rail within Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago. This would help solve a problem people have everyday - traffic. I've never thought of travel between Minneapolis and Chicago as a problem that needed to be solved. The current options work fine - want to travel between the two cheap and slow, then drive; if you want to go fast and expensive, then fly. I'm not sure there is room in the middle from a market perspective for rail. It just doesn't save much time compared to car. Just my $.02

Here is a great breakfast place that we enjoyed a few years ago www.eggsnthings.com

If you tinker with Dreamweaver and even develop your own personal website for practice and feel like you want to go the web developer route, consider volunteering. I'm doing volunteer programming (mostly application development, but some web design) for the local school district. I'm doing the at home dad thing right now, so my motivation is to keep my skills up and not have a big gap on my resume if I decide to work again once the kids are in school. The school district even lent me a Thinkpad to use for the work. You could gain web development skills while still on your current job, have a real web site to show off during an interview, have references, and can do most of it from your home. Not to mention helping out a non profit type place. Plus since its volunteer work, if life gets busy and you don't work on it for a month, no big deal - unlike if you were in night school or trying to get experience doing consulting work.

Used to be a software engineer, now I'm a stay at home dad. I like my current work associates better than the previous ones :-)

Congrats - they look great! My wife and I had twin boys 2 years ago. They were born at 30 weeks but did fine and got out of the hospital after 6 weeks. One bit of advice is that for the middle of the night feedings, the rule of "Never wake a sleeping baby" does not apply for twins. When one wakes up, after he is done feeding, wake the other up. You have to try and get them on the same schedule so that you and your wife can get blocks of 2-3 hours sleep. My wife actually managed to eventually breast feed both at the same time to speed things up!

Awhile back I saw "Once Upon a Time in America" in the top 250 of all time on imdb.com. I had never heard of it and checked it out. Its an awesome gangster film with DeNiro and James Woods set in the prohibition era.

Hey Brian, Right now I want to dedicate what little time I have for programming to the Java EE stack. I used to work at IBM, but left to be a full time dad at home. The volunteer work helps keep my skills fresh, and I don't have the time right now to keep up to date with both Java EE and .NET. If the volunteer opportunity with the school district changes, I'll let you know. Keep up the good work with the site. Also, just curious, is there a framework you are using for the message board, or are you starting from scratch?

Ok, I'm doing the volunteer work in Java EE. Its an application that allows teachers to schedule broadcasts in their classroom. I'm working on the entire slice: presentation (JSP/HTML/CSS), business objects in the domain model (POJOs), and persistence for CRUD operations. I don't have any .NET experience. Is there any need for Java EE help for brewerfan.net? Also, besides career reasons, why the move to .NET? I would think that licensing fees would be a big negative for a site like this.

I'm an infrequent poster but long time reader of this site. Just curious, what kind of technology does brewerfan use? Java EE? LAMP stack? .NET? I do some volunteer programming for the local school district, and I might be able to help brewerfan out.