I thought about joining a while ago for the group health insurance plan, but they dropped that. So I did not join.

This is absolutely true.

For today's interview, the role had no J2EE component to it at all. But the resume said "expert", so I have to ask the question. I need to know if we're being lied to.

Just to be clear, I don't think that I have seen an actual EJB in probably a decade. But when someone puts "expert" on his or her resume, then I need to ask about it.

I do a lot of technical interviewing, and that is the whole point of a technical interview, to verify that you actually do possess the skills that you have claimed to possess.

It's not because you're black. It's because you're interviewing. I could tell so many stories of wild resume claims, you'd laugh.

Here's one from today, for an interviewee who was an "expert in J2EE".

Q: What are some different types of EJBs and how do they differ from one another?
A: [uncomfortable silence].
Q: Sorry, let's back up a bit. Tell me about your role in your last project that used J2EE.
A: Uhh, I think I made a JSP once in college before I left to go work at a startup.

As you might expect, his resume got filed away in the recycling bin.

I used to use firefox, but when they fired an executive for an ancient political contribution, I decided I couldn't use a browser made by that company. So now I use Chrome.

For the record, I don't even agree with the executive's cause that he contributed to. But firing an executive for making a political contribution is dangerous ground, so I can't support that.

This is almost certainly wrong, by the way.

Have you ever watched draft combine footage? Those linebackers do 20 or even 30 reps of 225 lbs like it's nothing. Some linemen have a one rep max of 500 or 600 lbs. 400 lbs is common.

I don't know what the average man and woman can bench, but NFL linemen are insanely strong. One could easily pick me up and throw me across the room like a ragdoll. I could not do the same with my wife. I could pick her up and put her over my shoulder or something, but there is just no comparison to an NFL lineman.

I understand well that men are stronger than women on average. No dispute there. I just think that a lot of people don't realize just how insanely strong NFL linemen are. This is a huge part of why football is so dangerous.

Oh, a human definitely needs to be there for maintenance. You can't automate fixing up a screwup in the automation.

I just see no reason why maintenance windows have to be done at 1am. In today's world of redundancy and failover, there is just no reason for it. Every upgrade my team has done for as long as I can remember has been at 10am local time because we don't allow downtimes anyway. Why work at 1am?

Then stop using Oracle if you can't afford RAC/GoldenGate/TAF/whatever. Use what you can afford in order to architect a proper redundant system. Running a database on a single instance is malpractice in 2014.

Even our network upgrades we do in the middle of the workday. After all testing is done, we just take a whole datacenter down and upgrade it. Once it's back online, we do the next datacenter until it's all done.

There's really no reason in 2014 to do 1am maintenance.

I agree with this, but who does maintenance at 1am anymore? What's the point in it? Users are worldwide, and 1am in the US prime business hours in Asia, so why bother patching/upgrading in the middle of the night?

I haven't done a late-night maintenance in at least a decade. It's all about rolling upgrades. Any problems? Rollback. Need to upgrade infrastructure? Take the entire datacenter offline and serve from your other datacenters. Every single upgrade I've done for as long as I can remember has been at 10am, which is the earliest I can get my lazy-ass junior devs to stumble into the office.

OP needs a process upgrade.

Jewish immigrants after WWII came here because they had nowhere else to go, not because they wanted the hassle of moving to a country on the other side of the world where they didn't speak the language, didn't know anybody, etc. Their homes had been taken when they were transferred to death camps, and very few countries were willing to take them in. They seem to have turned out OK, though.

And less cooking liquid vs. non-pressurized applications since very little steam is lost once the cooker as achieved pressure. Once the desired pressure is reached, you turn the burner onto its lowest setting while the food cooks.

There are a few other things that add to pressure cooking's efficiency. This is from a person who uses a pressure cooker (me), not an expert in heat transfer nor any other discipline of physics.

1. Most pressure cooker applications other than soup are steaming applications, and since the pressure cooker traps the steam in, you don't use nearly as much liquid as you would in traditional cooking. Less liquid = less energy to heat it up.
2. Less loss of heat through the top. After a pressure cooker reaches the desired pressure, you actually turn the burner down to its lowest setting (or whatever the lowest setting is on your stove to maintain pressure--on my stove, it's the lowest).

That's all I can think of for now, but I will say that a pressure cooker is a neat cooking tool. Especially if you live in a hot climate, like I do. Most of my summer cooking is on the grill, naturally, but I use the pressure cooker a bit, too, and it doesn't heat my house up too badly.

That's just not true. I bought my pressure cooker after the Boston Marathon bombings, and nobody gave me a second look. Anyway, modern pressure cookers have multiple safety mechanisms so they don't go boom like your grandma's pressure cooker did.

I'd use jruby over grails. You get to code in ruby but run on the JVM. Best of both worlds.

Easier to find ruby developers than grails developers.

I agree that server code is moving toward being an API for a client-side presentation layer, but it's hard for me to recommend a specific JS framework at this point if OP wants the thing to stand the test of time. Angular is certainly the flavor of the month, but jquery was the next big thing not too long ago.

I also see some of my clients moving to Jade templates. It's in a bit of a state of flux.