I'm a software developer living in Midtown, Atlanta. I wrote the MetaForum software in 2004. More recently I've been doing Ruby on Rails development for a startup named Vitrue. I also maintain the Forum Atlanta messageboard. Feel free to stop by and say hello!
CalpicoI don’t even know why I bother pouring a glass of cool, refreshing Calpico from the jug into a glass. The glass ends up completely empty by the time I get back to the couch/desk/wherever I was sitting. What I need is an IV bag on wheels like in hospitals that can pump a continuous flow of this sweet, delicious nectar straight into my fucking blood stream.
Yeah, its japanese ok. And yeah, its a milky white color, and maybe it even does have a bit of condensed milk product in it. So what the hell do you care? You’ve never even tried it. It’s citrusy and not too sweet and tastes like Taylor Swift’s tears and I have to drive 45 minutes to the Farmers Market to buy it. If the Calpico in my fridge could some how find gainful employment in a lucrative career with 401k matching, I’d marry it and spend the rest of my life with it and be perfectly happy with the tax breaks and there’s nothing you can do about it except be jealous. just sayin’It’s 2010. Last year saw the rise of the phrase ‘just sayin’ and by golly I hereby propose it is high time we do away with it. It’s spreading and infecting our language, with no value! It doesn’t really mean anything. People are just throwing it around at the end of almost any sentence, thinking all of a sudden what they said was clever or witty. What really infuriates me is that etymologically, it just doesn’t make any sense. Without quite realizing it, I think we all know exactly what its usage and meaning really are. People are putting “just sayin” at the end of potentially offensive sentences in some vain effort to throw off any responsibility for what they just said. Its cheap, its a cop out, and its got to stop. It’s like people want to disagree with someone but don’t have the balls to actually stand by what they say. Example. “Your shoes are ugly as hell. Just sayin.” I fully understand what the phrase means, and why people attach it to the end of the sentence. I just don’t understand why THOSE two words have come to have that meaning. Just sayin? Just sayin WHAT? How in the world did “just sayin” come to mean “whatever I just said, was probably somewhat offensive, but don’t be offended towards me, as I hereby absolve myself from any responsibility for the words that just came out of my own mouth”. Its idiotic. If you want to be a dick to someone’s face, just do it. Tell them their shoes are ugly, and face the repercussions. Or at a bare minimum, fall back on a phrase that actually uses words that have to do with the meaning you’re going for, such as “Not to be rude, but” (I’m going to be rude anyway). Or even Talledega Night’s “With all due respect” phrasing at least approaches directly the idea that you’re about to say something disrespectful. “Just sayin” on the other hand, is a vapid, pointless, weasly crap-sandwich of a phrase that people seriously gotta stop using. Just cause it grinds my gears, put it to rest along with the rest of the last decade. Atlanta Half MarathonSo yeah, I ran the Atlanta 13.1 mile Half Marathon on Thanksgiving.
My advice to anyone thinking of running something like this for the first time: DON’T FREAKING DO IT
I got a blood blister the size of Fulton County covering my entire left foot. I did something to my hip while trying to pour some gatorade on my face and twisted that all out of whack. Then the combination of those two things apparently made me run with such an awkward stride that all my weight was smacking down on my right arch — 6 days later I still can’t walk without limping. Oh but I got a freaking medal that says “Finisher”, awesome. Guess I’ll stick around for a bitA couple weeks ago I closed on a place in Plaza Midtown. Yay for owning property, I suppose if this was the 1800’s, now I’d finally be able to vote! Penthouse 20th floor of the building, 14′ ceilings, granite/stainless/hardwoods, floor to ceiling windows, etc. Only a few years old. I still really don’t relish the idea of paying 4.8% interest on hundreds of thousands of dollars… but I imagine the bottom of the worst real estate crash in my lifetime is probably the best time to buy, plus the tax credit, plus interest rates are at an all time low. I’m still getting moved in, but I like it.
The view is probably my favorite part.
So yeah. Guess I won’t be moving for a while … which is fine with me. Hate moving. Limiting a Flex TileList component’s number of selected itemsIf you want to set a maximum number of selected items in an ActionScript TileList component, there isn’t any straightforward way to do it built in. Strangely. First, catch the itemClick event in your tile list. <mx:TileList id="foo" ... itemClick="checkMax(event)" /> Then in checkMax, the basic idea is to compare the current count of selected items; if its too long, unselect the most recently selected item. In this example I wanted to limit it to a max of 20 selected items. private function checkMax(e:Event):void {
if (foo.selectedItems.length > 20) {
var x:int = foo.selectedIndices.indexOf(e.currentTarget.selectedIndex); var tmpArray:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection(foo.selectedIndices); tmpArray.removeItemAt(x); foo.selectedIndices = tmpArray.toArray(); } } Since the Array class doesn’t have the removeItemAt method, we have to create a temporary ArrayCollection object first as a copy of the selectedIndices of our TileList. Remove the most recently selected item, then save it back to the TileList. Thanks Micah for helping to figure this out. TokyoDave and I went to Tokyo a few weeks ago. It was really a lot of fun, I highly recommend everyone to go visit.
It was basically the same plane flight that I took last year when I went to Shanghai. Though this time I guess I was awake when we were going over some cooler scenery. Arriving at the Narita airport, I had about a 3 hour wait until Dave’s plane would arrive. The airport had this cool open air observation deck from which to watch the planes land and take off. Even with an airport for as important of a city as Tokyo, it still didn’t seem to have near the volume of traffic as ATL.
After an hour long bus ride into tokyo, we finally arrived at our hotel in the Shinjuku area. Considering everything I had read about how extraordinarily expensve everything in Tokyo was, we got an extremely nice hotel right in the biggest hub of the city for not that much money.
The view out our hotel window.
The Yamanote line of the Tokyo subway went in a giant loop around the entire city, which was convenient for us. An all day pass was $7, which took us practically everywhere we wanted to go.
The first full day we had, we visited Oeno, which was the older, more historic part of tokyo that had not modernized itself as much as the other parts.
Here, for some reason, was a japanese teenager leading a group of tourist kids in some kind of lesson in karate or tai chi or something.
Next we visited a Shrine, which reminded me almost exactly of what they were like in Shanghai. Not so much about reverence, tranquility, or spirituality anymore. More just places to sell trinkets and flowers and get people to buy donations in exchange for good fortunes. I wish we had had time to visit some of the lesser visited shrines far outside the city.
I did not feel out of place at all.
When I got back, several people asked me the question “Tokyo? What is there to do there?” The immediate answer was “too much”. In terms of just general “tourist attractions”, there was far far too much to see and do in only 5 days. The real answer, for me at least, was simply to walk around the city and just see it for what it really was. I didn’t go there so much to experience any specific thing or attraction, but just to experience as big of a picture of what Tokyo is, whatever that may be. This part of it I found the most interesting.
Back onto the subway we went, on to the next major hub.
Having never been to New York City, I can’t honestly comment on what Times Square is like. But I swear I saw pockets of intersections flick by the windows of the train that dwarfed Times Square, let alone the major ones we went to see on purpose.
Now onto the food. Every single meal we had there was simply delicious. From the $4 bowl of meat and rice at Yoshinoya to our $100 meals of sushi and kobe beef, everything was just so good. At no point did I taste or smell anything that was even mediocre, let alone bad. And, one major distinction between Shanghai, was that Tokyo was much more diverse than I expected. In addition to what I would call normal japanese food, they had lamb gyro wrap carts, they had indian curry places, they had italian and pizza places, and of course american fast food restaurants. We ate entirely japanese while there though. Our first real lunch was at any nondescript conveyor-style sushi place that we ran across. I’m sure to the Japanese, this was pure crap fast food, nothing special at all. Yet it still blew away anything I’ve ever had in the united states.
After walking around all day, I just randomly decided to walk into a skyscraper, and there happened to be a hotel at the top of it, so we just happened to ride the elevator to the top, and it just so happened to be an extremely expensive hotel with incredible views, so we felt obligated to sit down (oh darn) and relax and have a drink. This icecube was hand chipped into a ball as we waited.
And then the views from the top.
Ah, density!
Then, dusk in Shinjuku, and finally home to the hotel to rest.
Good times, with good friends.
–
The next morning we woke early to get to the Tsukiji Fish Markets, the most famous of fish markets in the world.
And then we got to have breakfast at the most famous of sushi restaurants, which happened to be located right at the fish market itself. Literally, the worlds freshest sushi. Words cannot express how good it was.
Traveling on to the manmade island of Odaiba. The oddities of japanese culture did not escape us.
Then Dave takes a moment to ponder exactly what freedom means to him.
I hope it meant that that statue could come to life and defend us, because when we walked around the corner, we saw this:
Yeah its just an 80 foot tall lifesize Gundam Robot, complete with articulating head, laser beam eyes and smoke that shot from his mouth. What the hell??
Next we got to see a somewhat smaller, though more advanced, robot. In real life, no less. It was pretty cool.
He (she?) ran around, waved at us, played a little soccer.
This was all inside the Tokyo National Science of Emerging Technology And Innovation. I think it existed for no other reason than for them to say “Wow look at all this cool shit we have.”
Then we got a chance to visit the Imperial Palace, but it was actually quite closed off to visitors. The guard at the gate said you could request a private appointment but had to do it 2 days in advance. You couldn’t even really see the palace from any good vantage point, but you did get a nice view of the Ginza skyline.
That night we decided to “go out” and see what the nightlife was like.
We took a taxi to an area known as Roppingi, where there were lots of bars and nightclubs. We went to one called “911 Black” I think. Needless to say, “douchebag” is spoken universally the world round, it seems. The club was hot, crowded, smoky, loud, the drinks were expensive and took forever to get, you couldn’t move around … basically just like any club in any city in the world. They were, however, playing nothing but american rap and dance hits, especially some Michael Jackson. Looking back, I think I wish we would have sought out maybe a kareoke bar. Once out on the street again though, it was back to having a good time. You could buy ice cold beers in the convenience stores and then just walk around with them, which we did.
Having sufficiently worked up some late night hunger, we stopped at yet another sushi restaurant. The great part about this was that the combination of hunger, intoxication, and frustration with not being able to speak a word of japanese came to a head . Instead of pointing and gesturing at pictures and just making pre paleolithic gruntings and mumblings, I just announced exactly what I wanted. “6 otoro nigiri, no wasabi, hai!!.” Turns I don’t speak japanese, but I do speak sushi. He understood every word.
– The next morning we woke up absolutely starving. We stopped in the first place we passed - Yoshinoya. Apparently quite popular in Japan, they even have a couple in NY and Chicago. This was quite my favorite meal of the trip if you don’t count any of the sushi. It was some kind of pork that I later realized was extremely thin, marinated, pork belly. Otherwise known as BACON. I could have eaten 5 bowls of it.
The itinerary for the day mostly revolved around the area known as Shibuya. Shibuya was probably my favorite spot in the whole city that we saw. It was full of shopping, and people, just like anywhere else, but the roads twisted and led into intimate boulevards lined with shops and pubs and department stores. Something about it was just a little bit softer, calmer, and more welcoming than the unrelentingly garish and harsh lights and noises of Roppingi the night before. It almost had a suburban atmosphere coursing through its very urban veins. It was also home to the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world. We sat in a two story starbucks and watched it for probably 30 minutes. Here is the before view…
And then the during.
It’s like a flash mob every 2 minutes. Spots like this peppered the whole city.
For our final evening, we decided to class it up.
We went into the skyscraper part of Shinjuku, and dined on Sushi and Kobe Beef on the 53rd floor of the Tokyo Opera City Tower.
The view for our meal.
A recurring theme during our trip for that day was actually to follow along the scenes in the movie Lost in Translation. For those not familiar with the film, Bill Murray is an aging movie star who is in Tokyo to film some commercials for a brand of whiskey, Suntory Whiskey. The restaurant had a shockingly inexpensive 750ml bottle of it for 1,450Y.
It was definitely flowing by the time we got around to taking these pictures, but it was a fun time, especially once we got the non-english speaking japanese waitress to help us out.
Next up we visited the top floor of the New York Bar in the Park Hyatt Tokyo, which is where they filmed most of the movie.
There was a pretty hefty cover just to even sit down at a table. “Fuck it, we’re on vacation”, I said. I ended up saying that phrase a lot during this trip, which really, you shouldn’t really be saying when you’ve been drinking a bit. The Macallan 25yr.
I almost — almost — sat down without looking at a menu and said “May I have a glass of your most expensive scotch please.” In this case, I am extremely glad I didn’t.
That 52 year Macallan… yeah it was 67,000Y. Which is about $700USD. For 1 single fluid oz. I was on vacation but I wasn’t that far on vacation. Never the less, it was a very classy evening indeed.
Then a taxi drive back through Shinjuku to the hotel…
Then to sleep. – Last day there, had to get up early to catch the bus back to the airport. One last look out the room. A bit quieter, now.
The strangest dichotomy existed between the fact that the roads and sidewalks were sparkling clean, free of litter of any kind… and the horrendously frustrating fact that there existed *no* public trash cans. Plenty of vending machines, but there just simply did not exist trashcans on the streets like there are in america. It’s impossible to understand what thats like until you’ve been carrying around 3 empty bottles with you all day because you can’t find a trash can anywhere. And yet, no trash. No dirt. No smog, no grime. No homeless, for that matter. Not a single pan handler, crackhead, beggar, or bum was seen the entire trip. We walked fearless down the tiniest of alley ways late at night with our pockets loaded with cash and didn’t think twice about it. This is, as we read on Wikipedia, quite the norm. The people themselves were so incredibly polite, almost to the point of absurdity. Receiving your receipt and change from a cashier involved both hands, cupped together and a deep bow, with constant “ohayu guzaimasu” and “domo arigato”. There is a cultural mentality shared there that no matter your state in society, no matter your income or your socioeconomic position, you take extreme, concentrated pride in what you do and how you do it. Regardless if you are working at McDonalds or at the Gucci store. It was a repeating pattern that enveloped their entire way of being, and it showed in almost every aspect of their culture. The biggest “culture shock” was really the people themselves, and their eagerness to help you despite the almost absolute barrier of language. Almost every single place I’ve visited for a vacation yet, I was 100% ready to get on the plane and come back home by the end of it. At some point, enough is enough, and you just want to be home. This was the one time it was different. If I could, I would have stayed another month, maybe two, maybe 6. I wanted to develop a routine there, and a favorite coffee shop, and come to learn the best late night noodle joints on my own. The mystifying, confusing, uncomprehendingly baffling subway system seemed understandable now, to the point that I almost stopped carrying a map around with me by the last day. The different names for the different hubs of the city now had meaning and recognition. And even our tiny little hotel room felt something like what I’d call home. I’ll be going back. Not just to finally climb the summit of Mt Fuji (which thunderstorms prevented us from doing this time), but to visit the other 80% of the city we didn’t get to — and even better, to revisit the parts we did. Peachtree Road Race 2009I got the chance, finally, to run the Peachtree Road race this year for the first time. I’ve wanted to do it for probably the last 10 years, but never managed to get my hands on an AJC newspaper and send in the registration. This year, they did registration online, so I managed to grab a spot. A big thanks goes out to Philip and Catherine Manavi for swapping my ~80,000 time group number with a ~30,000 one! It was really a lot of fun, and the run itself wasn’t even all that bad. The weather was great, the event was organized extremely well considering the 55,000 people running it, and my friends were even nice enough to meet me at the finish line on a saturday at 9:00 am
Then we went up to buckhead to watch the fireworks from the top of the Hannon Hill parking deck. Great view!
We humans have gone too far as a civilization.Time to pull the plug, folks. This just isn’t gonna work out anymore.
Portrait image orientation in Mac OS X, and how to fix itThis took me quite a while to google around and find this, so maybe it will help someone else out. Any time I take a picture with my digital camera and transfer it to my Mac, every app within OSX is reading the EXIF orientation information and automatically orientating portrait-style pictures. What this means is that when you turned your camera sideways to take a picture, OSX knows that and shows the picture to you in portrait mode, so it looks oriented correctly to you. It does this in photoshop, preview, Finder, everything I’ve found at least. The problem with this is that the picture *isn’t* actually oriented that way, so when you go to upload your pictures to the web, or put them on a disk, or email them to a friend, they’re going to be sideways. If you don’t feel like writing a shell script to cycle through your images and read their EXIF data, then use transjpg or imagemagick to rotate the pictures and then wipe the exif orientation info, then just do the following. Assuming you’re multi-selecting a batch of photos and then using Preview to scroll through and look at them, whenever you get to a portrait oriented picture (look at the thumbnail), go to Tools -> Rotate Right. Then go to Tools -> Rotate Left. Its confusing, I know. You’ll start with the picture looking correct to you, then you need to rotate it one direction and then rotate it back, to the way it was. Then close Preview, and it will ask you if you want to save the images. Say yes. What this actually did was do an image transformation to rotate the data itself, then wipe the EXIF orientation info, but you’d never know that just by looking at it. But, once you upload the image anywhere it will always be oriented correctly. First World Problems!Some people on this fine planet of ours are pretty well fucked from the get go. For the sake of brevity lets just pass on by those poor saps born without a face or an extra arm or something. There’s kids in africa born into abject poverty who don’t live past 2. There’s kids in India who grow up wallowing in filth. Make it to your teens in singapore and you get sold as a sex slave. Or in china, where you get to spend your life in a factory stapling together Nikes. People living in mud huts, or catching malaria, or getting aids, or living in the desert, all sorts of just awful crap can befall people living in under developed countries. In fact, and lets be honest here, pretty much the huge MAJORITY of people living in 3rd world places really don’t have much of a chance to make an outstanding life for themselves, at least compared to a middle class person living in a westernized country. So lately I’ve just found it kind of amusing the kinds of petty things people complain about. I think we all do it throughout the day without even noticing it. It’s actually pretty funny, so I’m going to start keeping a log of the good ones I hear. After each quote we come across on this blog post, just imagine a group of rambunctious 6 year olds throwing their hands in the air and giving their best bwaa-bwwaahhh faces and in sing-songy voices going “Uh - Oh ! First Woooorld Proooooblems! ” These are all actual quotes from friends or family that I’ve heard recently — names were changed to protect the innocent though.
Whats harder for a startup: Hackers learning to run the business side, or Suits learning how to code?In determining what makes a bootstrapped startup fail versus one that succeeds, I often think about what really are the critical points that make or break the project. At least, in regards to the “web2.0″ model where you just write some SaaS website that ends up getting a bajillion users and you drive off in your Maserati. This all probably in no way applies to a startup thats say, trying to build reusable rocket ships. You know, those funny startups that actually aim to make a physical product. From my perspective, there are three major components that all have to be in line for success to occur:
Now in all honesty, those first two always seemed to me to be inconsequential. Hell, #1 practically isn’t even a requirement, considering all the awful, horrible products I’ve seen advertised on tv for $20 german rags, and they certainly seem to be making a profit. Ideas, it seems, are rather a dime a dozen. Everyone has a great startup idea, and in reality 1000 people before them thought up the same thing anyway. Great ideas are great, but great ideas do not a startup make. Now the technical aspect of it, I’ve always kind of taken for granted as well. At least in the circles I run in, everyone is technical. The only cost to coding the website is simply the time it takes to code it — the technical difficulty of these things is rarely above trivial. In fact its always been a generally assumed truth that the reason there are so many web startups is because the barriers to entry for making a web startup are so shockingly low. Anyone can whip out a text editor, check out extended-bort and add some CSS styles. Its much harder to say… boostrap a startup that makes a new kind of microchip processor, or a new kind of windshield wiper. To me, the coding of a startup’s site is the least of my worries. The business part, especially the sales, is the part I’ve always known I’d need help with. I just don’t have that skill set, I don’t have the connections or the rollodex of magical leads that will buy a license. I don’t reallly even know how B2B sales pitches work, how to get the ball rolling. My marketing, accounting, and hiring knowledge is limited to twitter, quickbooks, and monster.com. So from my perspective, the business end of it certainly represents the biggest hurdle. However I realized today, that for someone from the opposite side of it, the technical coding of the site is now a high barrier to entry. They have to raise capital in order to hire programmers and be able to pay them to see the fruition of the project. At that point can you even consider it bootstrapping? It turns out, of course, that both requirements are equally critical to the success of the startup. With no technical competency, your business people have no product to sell. With no sales people, your fantastic product will sit there with no clients. Stalemate. The question then, is whats easier: for the technical person bootstrapping their own website to learn the business aspects? Or is it easier for an MBA grad, with zero technical background, to be able to pick up a book and suddenly be able to have the ability to write a scalable, full stack web application, along with all the SA hats one has to wear to even get the thing running…. and then throw on some creative abilities as well for CSS and logo design. You can guess which side I’m throwing my bets on. The technical bootstrapper will at least be able to get his product into creation before needing any serious VC backing. And probably even through grassroots marketing get some customers via word of mouth, twitter, blogs, hell just emailing out around to people. The technical bootstrapper may not be very good at executing the business side but at least they can take a stab at it and hopefully get some revenue coming in, learn the ropes a bit, and then be in a good position to either hire a sales/business person, or take VC funding and hire a sales/business person. Maybe I’m dead wrong here. If you’re a budding CEO of a 1-person startup with a great idea, maybe you’ll easily be able to go out and find a team of developers who know what they’re doing to build your idea for you, and get paid in stock options to boot. Maybe it will be an awesome website that will hockey stick its way into revenues within 90 days and get that 1% share of that $6b market you know about. I just don’t see it. With no technical competency to bootstrap yourself with, you’re stuck unless you give up the bootstrapping idea and go get funding of some sort to be able to pay out salaries and wrangle up some nerds. Suddenly, making a web based startup doesn’t sound like it has low barriers to entry, at all. Unable to uninstall capistrano even though its listed as installed? Here’s how to fix thatAt some point my installation of capistrano here in OSX got corrupted or something. Either way, whenever I would try to run `cap deploy`, on a project that everyone else could deploy just fine, I’d get an error message like this: Brians-Laptop-2:railsapp brian$ cap deploy /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:636:in `report_activate_error': RubyGem version error: capistrano(2.5.5 not = 1.4.2) (Gem::LoadError) Which was weird for a couple reasons. One, the capistrano gem that was frozen into the rails project was specified to be 2.5.3. Capistrano 2.5.5 (which this was saying I had activated) should have run just fine that way. But then second, where was this 1.4.2 mention coming from? Nothing in the project talked about capistrano 1.4.2. So, taking a look at my installed gems, it gets even more fun. Brians-Laptop-2:railsapp brian$ gem list | grep capistrano capistrano (2.5.5) Well, lets just uninstall that sucker. ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError) Unknown gem capistrano >= 0 Wooo fun. Gem list says I have it, gem uninstall says I don’t. Anyway, finally figured out that at some point capistrano had been installed to my home directory. Something like ~/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano/blahblahblah. Thats the one it was somehow using. So, delete/move that .gem directory. Then if you actually look at the stack trace from the original `cap deploy` command, you’ll also notice something similar: from /Users/brian/.caprc:1:in `load' Well I don’t know wtf this .caprc file is doing in my home directory either, but get rid of that too. Finally, there, I was able to `sudo gem install capistrano` and correctly install capistrano ( 2.5.5 ) to its correct location. From that point, cap deploys should work just fine. Hope this helps anyone else googling around for the same arcane set of keywords I was. I don’t know your status, I can’t hear you sigh. I’d dare to find out, but its not in the API. 395 days ago How to make Flex and Rails maintain your Facebooker SessionThis might possibly be a firefox specific issue. If you’ve ever been building a Flex-based Facebook application and are using Ruby on Rails on the backend, you may have come across this problem. When your Facebook application first loads your SWF from the Rails server, its actually being proxied through Facebook. Which means the first request has all your vital fb_sig data, as well as your facebooker session object through which all your API calls are going to be made. The fun part is that any subsequent Flex -> Rails calls that are made asynchronously are going to get a brand new rails session, for some reason. And that session is not going to have any of the facebook specific connection information, which means its basically like you’re not on facebook at all. So the way to fix this is to just go ahead and pass your originally created session ID into the FlashVars that get loaded along with the SWF on the first page load. In our main controller’s action that is loading the SWF we already have it setup to pass some flash vars along, so I just added one more:
Then don’t forget to pass those vars along to your fb:swf tag:
Now in your flex app, whenever you do any kind of call back to your Rails server, make sure to tack that session ID onto the request parameters. The default way to access it would be something like
But your Flex environment problably has accessors to the flash vars differently. One last note, is that if you want that session ID to actually be recognized on the Rails side and used instead of creating a new session, you need to attach it to your request as a named parameter called “_session_id”. Note the leading underscore. Of course if you’re like us, your session key is actually renamed to be “_{RAILS_APP}_SESSION_ID”, which means you need to pass that along to your flex app in the flash vars as well, otherwise it won’t get recognized. There’s probably a reason why the sessions aren’t getting maintained by default, but hell if I know what it is. Turn up those headphones yall, its about to dropSomeone needs to get Timbaland and T.I. to make a new single based on this:
Anyone got their phone number? Actually I think Young Jeezy would do a remarkable rendition of it. How to give Java developers a bad reputationWow, this is just unfathomably hard to read. Some guy finds it imperative to rewrite the bugzilla project in java, wants the bugzilla developers to help him with it, and can’t understand why its the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas. Disclaimer: I don’t know WTF I’m doing… but I decided to do this anyway. It can’t be that hard, I said. Those old japanese guys can do it, I said. It’s horrendously expensive in the restaurants, I said. So, yesterday I drove up to Buford Hwy & 285 and went to some international farmers market that was so secret and mysterious that they don’t even have a name for it, or a sign indicating its an actual place of business. It’s just a beige, faceless building. You walk in, though, and its a conglomeration of various regions of the world’s fresh produce and food stuffs. It smells like they mixed fresh ground maize with goat tripe and doused in teryaki sauce. I went to the back where they have a huge fresh fish market and picked up 1 pound each of sashimi grade fresh salmon and sashimi grade tuna. A couple ripe avocados and a shaker full of that crazy delicious bonito + sesame seed + seaweed + MSG concoction that makes sushi oh so good rounded out my cart. I came home, and noticed the only rice I had was some white italian style rice. Oh well. Its just rice, it can’t be that different. I cooked it up extra sticky, then laid it out in a flat layer to sit in the freezer for a bit and get nice and cold. Molded it up into the correct size, then got out my sharpest knife and went to work on the salmon and tuna and avocado. The result: Click for full size. I’m serious. Its worth the click. Do it.
Yeah, I had to use a measuring cup for the soy sauce since I don’t have any of those little dishes. And yeah, I found out right at the wrong time that I do not own any chopsticks. So I ate with my hands. Mattered not. It was so. fucking. delicious. And I used maybe 1/10th of the fish! It was 10x, no, 100x better than any schlep old man Ru San peddles out during his weekend lunch buffets. The salmon was so creamy and coated my mouth with that delicious umami taste that you only get with super fresh sushi. Time to go cut up some sashimi and just stuff myself. This is like the cookie monster falling into a cookie factory, or Robin Williams stumbling across the DEA’s cocaine locker. If you like electronic music in any capacity, click this linkhttp://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ It, quite literally, visually and audibly maps out to excruciating detail all the branches, genres, sub genres, sub-sub genres and various outshoots of pretty much all electronic music. The great part is it has tons and tons of samples for every single granular genre. I’ve always liked some kinds of electronic music, and hated others, but never really knew labels for them outside of “jungle” vs “house”. The above site has really helped me nail down the specific sub genres that I’ve always loved, and just never knew the names for. Its crazy how much there is, it’s probably gonna take me 2 hours to go through the entire list. Plus you get to listen to cool music the whole time. Well, some of it isn’t cool. But thats what makes it interesting, to so define in such fine detail what kind of music you specifically do and do not like. How to install the Shoulda rails testing frameworkSo you’ve decided to start using Shoulda instead of Rspec or Test::Unit in your latest rails project? There’s one step you might not think to do, which strangely is absent in any of the Shoulda documentation. After you `sudo gem install thoughtbot-shoulda` … Don’t forget to put require ’shoulda’ at the top of whatever test classes you write, otherwise you’ll get “undefined method `should`” all over the place. There, I saved you 4 hours. Sennheiser CX300 Earbuds ReviewSince I started my new job back in april, I was first having a 30 minute walk. Now that I’ve moved to my new place I still have a 15 to 20 minute marta ride. So either way, I’ve been listening to my mp3 player everyday on the way, whereas before I really rarely used it. I used to have a pair of Nike behind-the-head headphones. The earbuds on those were hard plastic and hurt my ears, really a waste of money. Then I picked up a pair of Koss or Joss or something earbuds on amazon that were really cheap. While owning them, I thought they were fine — though I did think the sound was a little muted and kind of sounded closed off. Well those broke after about a month or so, and I decided to step it up and get a pair of Sennheiser CX-300B Earbuds, as the reviews for those were a lot better. Compared to my previous earbuds these are amazing. The sound clarity is hands down better, the bass response is much stronger and the highs are crisp and clear. Plus they feel really solid in my ears, and came with three different sized silicon plugs for different sized ears. I can jog in them and they never come out, they’re great. Only downside is that the cord itself is a little on the short side. I haven’t encountered an actual problem yet with using them and they wouldn’t reach, but I would if they were any shorter at all. Just don’t expect to sit on your couch and plug them into a reciever on the other side of the room. Plus, they work on iPhones/iPods straight out of the box, don’t need an adapter or anything. I paid $38 for them last month… and for some reason they are selling for $19 now. What the hell! Click here to get them on Amazon… Sennheiser CX300-B Earbuds (Black) From the end of the tunnelI don’t think anyone ever actually walks all the way down to the end of this platform. It was kind of eerie.
What a dreary day
I put on my shoes to trudge out in it, as Hobbes the Cat lay curled in the blankets, Veterans Day ParadeNot quite the turnout one would suspect. Or maybe it is, considering its a dreary tuesday morning.
I feel like I should be eating a walnut & caramel covered apple or something. The singularity has been breachedI always said, when someone finally figures out how to make buying music easier than stealing it, thats when people would stop stealing it. Back in the day you had to drive to a store and buy an actual CD, un wrap it, ugh, what a pain. Napster was 100x easier than that. But then they shut down Napster, and Kazaa got filled up with malware, and IRC was *always* a pain. So for a long time there I didn’t download anything at all. But then Bittorrent came along made things bearable. A solid check mark goes for getting whole albums at a time … but then you had to get whole albums at a time. So last night I was wading through google trying to do mp3 searches of open directories and it was just getting me no where. It seems spammers and squatters have setup camp on that whole methodology. Then on hype machine, I happened to notice there was indeed a button for “Buy now on amazon”. It was only $0.99. I figured, F it, its worth $0.99 and amazon is DRM free. One click later, and here comes the download. So I guess they finally did it. Buying music is easier and more convenient than stealing it. Congratulations music industry, you’re figuring things out. Slowly. Whoa.We just had a firedrill here in 101 Marietta, and after walking down all 17 flights of stairs, we were funneled outside. And just who happens to be standing there, speaking on his cell phone? You guessed it, freaking Al Sharpton.
Yeah, WTF is what I said too. How freaking random can you get. Well that went fast30 Days of Bootcamp sure did seem to fly by. But, I made it, and had perfect attendance. Our group started out with 45 (or was it 60?) people, and by today, the last day, we were down to like 16. All in all it was a really great experience. It was incredibly hard, but totally worth it. I ran varsity cross country in highschool, and it seems since then I haven’t been in any kind of group environment like that, until bootcamp. The instructors were great, the workouts were dynamic and challenging and everyone was really cool. I think in all I’ve lost about 8 pounds. In 4 weeks I think thats actually bordering on unhealthy, but I ate almost perfectly clean the whole month with no cheating, so combined with the intense workouts every single day, I’m not surprised. I’m definitely going to go back. They have 3-month passes that can be used any time over the next year. I’m going to try a month or so on my own though, and see if I can take what I’ve learned and continue the same regimine on my own. I seriously doubt it, but we’ll see. Makes sense to meLauren: Do you know why my monitor makes a weird noise when certain images are displayed? Brian Culler: Probably an improperly de-compiled DLL buffer overflow thats causing polymorphic packet separation across the distributed NAND gate interface, resulting in a frequency phase discordance pattern. Lauren: how can it be fixed? Brian Culler: Probably just need to regenerate the SSH keypath instance tokens and remount the eth0 virtual hertz sync daemon. Lauren: you’re just making up words! Brian Culler: Those are real words. |
