This is how I roll!    Hanging with my entourage at Sharkbite; Turtle Cove Yacht Club.

In the bar/grill, Sharkbite, which is on the water in Turtle Cove, they have a cool paper-machee Shark. It’s no surprise that it’s made out of money; things aren’t exactly thrifty on the islands.

Here’s our crew: Front: Stefany, Jamie, Katrina / Back: Andrew, Myself, Adam, Jeff

Sunset on the Carribean. This was from dinner Thursday at The Orchid.

During the afternoon, Jeff, Stef, Jamie and I explored around and bought some things at local gift shops. One of the main areas for shops is called the Saltmill (above). Within and next to it are the main bars, all walking distance from our resort, the Sands at Grace Bay.

I got a kick out of this sign. Note their “best happy” [hour] on the island.

Well today Jamie and I had our bagel and cream cheese breakfast and lounged on the beach. I went snorkeling for a while and then just soaked up a little sun; my pale skin can only handle so much. No plans for the rest of the day and tomorrow Andrew’s going to take us around the islands on his boat. We head to Miami on Monday and return to Montana late Wednesday.

We have managed to unwind and enjoy ourselves here in Turks & Caicos.  We don’t plan much, aside from the scuba diving day trip, and just hang out and enjoy some great food (not common on the islands; great chefs here) and sun.  Some more people are arriving today and we have a group getting together this evening for some nightlife.

Here are some photos on the beach and of scuba diving.  Jamie took it easy w/ a spa day and Jeff, Stefany and I did the day scuba trip.  Enjoy the photos.  I also have video of the scuba as my digital camera has an underwater case so I snapped some good footage.  I’ll piece it together when I get home and upload a cool video.

King of the castle.  Grace Bay Beach - Provo - Turks & Caicos Islands

Me, Jeff and Stefany on the boat headed out to West Caicos and the reef where we’d be diving.

Jeff and I posing for the camera.

Ahhhh, look at the lovebirds. 

Reef scenery - pretty as a postcard and the camera doesn’t capture all the color.

Beautiful colors.  Ashamedly, I’m not sure if these are sea sponges or sea cucumbers.  We did swim with a variety of fish and I got pretty close to a huge barracuda and snapped a photo.  Some others in our party saw some dolphins but we missed them.  We made two dives during the day and they were both great, but not as much wildlife as I’ve seen on some of my other dives in other places.  Egypt was the best, the Great Barrier Reef (Australia) so far in that regards but I think it all matters day by day.

Enjoy my photos and I may post more later either here in Turks or later in Miami/South Beach.

Jamie and I met with Jeff and Stefany to visit our friend Andrew and enjoy Turks & Caicos Islands. He lives/works on Providenciales, the main inhabited island. Jamie and I stayed at a resort while Jeff and Stefany stayed with Andrew in his swank condo in Turtle Cove. I’m off for a day of scuba but here are a few photos so far. Enjoy!

Flying over you can see the transformation to the turquoise water. It has some of the most beautiful beaches and water we’ve seen. Our resort is on Grace Bay Beach and there are resorts and residences along its 12 mile stretch.

Sunset from our room overlooking the Caribbean and pool area.

Jamie walking out to pool area and Hemingway’s to meet with Jeff and Stefany.

Hanging out at Hemingways, a great restaurant w/ killer Grouper Fish Tacos. Myself, Stefany and Jamie (photo credit Jeff).

Jamie, Katrina, Andrew and Jeff at Andrew’s place on Turtle Cove.

Jamie and Stefany with sun setting behind looking over Turtle Cove - Providenciales, Turks & Caicos Islands.

Jamie strutting her stuff at “Club Andrew”. His place is pretty awesome and we hung out with a variety of new friends our first night; more than half them had English or Australian accents so I felt like I was back in London again.

Well that’s our trip so far. I have to get to the lobby for the scuba folks to pick me up and will be taking my underwater camera case/digital camera so hopefully snap some good shots I’ll share. Enjoy!

I am posting a solution to an issue I’ve seen thousands trying to fix while scouring forums online.  It seems that a “random” error and lost connection was occuring with various versions of MySQL database and people using IBatis database ORM framework.  We too faced the same dilemma and spent countless hours, database upgrades, config param changes, etc. trying to get it fixed.

The error that seemed to be random we discovered happened every time a certain insert query was called.  After further testing we could repeat the error and analyzed the java and SQL syntax.  We had used the <select key> tag to nest a select query within the insert query to return the id of the inserted record.  That was the cause of this mysterious error, not a connection timeout or pooling issue.  We removed the select key tag and instead made a second call to our DAO to retrieve the latest record id after the insert and everything worked.

I hope this helps others solve the issue that literally took weeks to discover.  Embarassingly it seemed random and the error logs displayed the following which did not imply a code error but instead a configuration error and lost connection to the database:

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guy walks into a bar with jumper cables around his neck and asks for a beer. bartender says sure as long as you dont start nothin!

:)

Happy Easter and make sure you “don’t start nothin’, okay!”

Mike

My friends, Sumit and Ana’s baby girl, Ashyana, during her first trip to India.

:-)  Too cute.  Ana and Ash in India - Sumit is bachelor for a month!