who would believe it, there is snow on mountains

... and me as well. Thanks to my buddy Pepe, I'm off for whole week at Spindleruv Mlyn. Planning to do nothing besides snowboarding, beer, watching movies and digging more into Seam.
I've been playing with Seam for good two months already. After I read JSP and Servlets couple of years ago, tried to play with Struts and ended up in XML hell when trying to put together simple WWW application I gave up. For me the fascinating world of Java was not ready as I wished for and I didn't/couldn't dedicate all my power to understanding the world of J2EE. Times have changed, Seam delivers significant reduction of time needed to create and deploy WWW J2EE based application. Funny is, even it seems to be so simple, I run into things that slow me down every day. How does Facelets works, what is different between "value" and "binding" in JSF world, do I need to understand Hibernate or will I survive with EJB3.0? There are so many still evolving and fascinating technologies that it likely takes a while before I catch up again. But I'm going to, I do believe that really small team can do a lot these days.

Meanwhile I've enjoyed a couple of movies (another topic I'm trying to catch up):

Y tu mamá también (a.k.a Mexická jízda) **** - Easy going, funny and sometimes touching story of two young guys on a trip to hidden beach, together with older (around 30 ;) attractive woman. It is all about sex, friendship and more. Great movie for Sunday evening/morning when you and your partner are too lazy to do anything else but staying in bed.

Syriana - ***** Just watched this one. Story about how it probably is. See dirty oil business behind everything. I would say this is not that much made up. Realistic story slowly exposing of what is corruption, politics and money capable of. Well played, very good one.

The Departed - ***** Another great shot of Martin Scorsese, proving that good movies can still be done. Great storyline with decent music and very well acting stars like Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and also by Leonardo di Caprio. Hands down, I've really enjoyed this one. Two mens in Police, each playing different game found themselves in great danger when someone third appears on scene.