//ToDo: Sohj's blog name here

Wow, what the hell? I look away for one second and I've already missed two posts? That's not a great start to the year... The Android class I'm teaching is  off to a great start though. So far we're 3 lessons in and have covered quite a bit. So far we've added new activities, created some helper classes, connected to a web service and pulled down data, as well as authenticated, created some settings we can save and load, set up a SQLite database, stored records to it, pulled them out, and then turned them into objects for us to see on the screen. We've adjusted the colors and properties of the items at run time and even created and utilized BroadcastReceivers, Services, and more. I'm impressed with what the class has absorbed so far, and what I've learned by preparing the class. I'm really enjoying it and the more Android development I do, the more I learn it's capable of, and the more I like doing it. In fact, our project for the hackathon I a...

5 days into the new year and my first post of the year. If all goes according to plan, there should be at least 51 additional posts following by this time next year. Hopefully there will be a few more, but I'm learning to keep my goals modest. And speaking of goals, I am now officially 1/3rd through the "Newbie" workout on +LynxFit . I know I've spoken of LynxFit and the work  +Noble Ackerson  and the team at Byte An Atom (no G+ page?) have been doing, and I'm sure you're tired of it by now, so I'll make an effort to only mention it again at milestone markers. This marker being 10 consecutive days of exercise. That is by far a record for me. Up until this point I had kept to a workout routine for  perhaps 3-4 sessions, maybe a week or two before I had to miss a session for one reason or another and once that happened it was a never ending flood of "I can just make up this session tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, etc." With this workou...

A few weeks back  +Noble Ackerson  recommended a book that sounded interesting, but I didn't really want to spend the money on it at the time. That book was "The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg". Well, I received some Play Store gift card over the last few weeks due to being awesome at work and decided to pick it up. I haven't quite finished it yet, but I can without a doubt say that it will make you look at things in an entirely different way. You'll begin to recognize all the habits that you have and even the habits that your company has. The things that we do every day without knowing and without even questioning. It's astounding. One of the key aspects of the book though is that if you know and understand a habit, you can change it. I've started to utilize what the book details about habits to accomplish a few things that I've realized I want to do. First, I plan on utilizing the habit forming routines to get to the point that I exercise every ...

So, I'm a few posts behind. I hope you'll all forgive me for taking some time off to spend with family and friends throughout the holiday season. After my last post on the way down to South Carolina to visit my parents, brother, and as many friends as I could, I have been quite busy. First, I brought my mom back up to Maryland with us to visit for a couple weeks following Thanksgiving. We had a good time and she very much enjoyed her stay. The trip to Union Station so she could catch her train taking her back was a little sad, but surprisingly Union Station is a seriously awesome Metro/Amtrak/Marc station. It felt very much like a mall or a large airport. There were three levels with food, shopping, souvenir shops, and more. It was quite something else. Not to mention it was decked out in lights for the holidays so it looked even more amazing. So, to catch everyone up on what's been going on, what is going on, and what will be going on: Since the last post, I am now g...

I finally decided to take the plunge and attempt to replace my phone with something new. I've said before that I'm not just looking for a spec bump or performance increase in my new phone, I'm looking for something that gives me some better usability and fits my usage scenarios better. With that said, let me go over what I'm looking for again. Currently I have a nexus 4 running CyanogenMod 10.2 and I'm running off the $30 plan from T-mobile that includes 5gb of data and 100 minutes of talk. I'm also using a Google Voice number (I don't even know my real phone number). This setup works fairly well for me now, but I realize that there are several aspects of my setup that can be refined to give me a better overall utilization of my devices. I rarely talk on my phone, instead utilizing Hangouts when I'm at home via the PC to make my phone calls and not taking any calls while I'm at work. I primarily use my phone as a Bluetooth access point for Glass...

A somewhat slow week, so this post will be a bit shorter than the rest. So this week, yesterday in fact, Google deemed me worthy to receive a custom URL for my Google+ page (http://plus.google.com/+JoshWilson-sohjsolwin in case you're curious). I was not allowed to reserve a simple +JoshWilson like I would have preferred, simply due to it being too common of a name. I was instead forced to append some characters to the end to make it unique. I am not too happy with the result. Being able to select something like /+SohjSolwin would have been preferred to the naming scheme I had to abide by, but in the end, I still got my custom URL and it's still easier to remember and write out than the long number i was assigned before. Now, on to the #SecretSanta. This year, I will be participating in the #GPlusSanta #SecretSanta gift exchange on Google Plus. It's this really awesome thing where you put together an Amazon Wishlist, send it in to the GPlusSanta, and someone may pick yo...

So, I owe you two posts, and I'll deliver on those shortly. It's been a busy couple of weeks, so I'll break these up as they would have been had I wrote them on the original days they were scheduled for. Now, let us begin. I attended a hackathon last weekend at the Microsoft Offices in Chevy Chase. Myself and a team of 5 others (mostly co-workers) set out to create something to help prevent fraud and catch bad actors. We had access to Dun and Bradstreet's enormous dataset on near anything you would ever want to know about a business, including its financial information, how many computers they have, competitors, branches, offices, suits, liens, anything. It was a pretty amazing dataset. We decided to work on creating a graph to help visibly see how many degrees of separation existed between a seemingly reputable company and a potentially fraudulent one. It was a fun two days, filled with caffeine, code, and cold pizza. Our end product was, I thought, pretty good, bu...