question on a nio example (1)

Hi,

This is the tutorial I try to fully understand:
http://rox-xmlrpc.sourceforge.net/niotut/index.html
(I may ask several questions about this tutorial)

I understand the whole sever-side code, but I don't understand the logic client-side.
Firstly, this part :

private SocketChannel initiateConnection() throws IOException {
      // Create a non-blocking socket channel
      SocketChannel socketChannel = SocketChannel.open();
      socketChannel.configureBlocking(false);

      // Kick off connection establishment
      socketChannel
                  .connect(new InetSocketAddress(this.hostAddress, this.port));

      // Queue a channel registration since the caller is not the
      // selecting thread. As part of the registration we'll register
      // an interest in connection events. These are raised when a channel
      // is ready to complete connection establishment.
      synchronized (this.pendingChanges) {
            this.pendingChanges.add(new ChangeRequest(socketChannel,
                        ChangeRequest.REGISTER, SelectionKey.OP_CONNECT));
      }

      return socketChannel;
}

and the paragraph below (not any of these sentences, explain all of them please in a more simple way).

Thanks for the help!