headed to knoxville for the weekend.  It’s like salmon swimming upstream, except we’re not salmon and the water is made of UT fans

This is what happens when your irrational beliefs in a higher power have sway over your real behaviors and actions

I’m starving, have nothing to eat, and can’t leave the building because I’m the only one here.  Isn’t this illegal, some how?

I ‘m sure that $4m payout is really making this one tough to swallow, but after losing for the 7th year in a row to fucking UGA…

Chan “Can’t Win” Gailey’s finally been fired.  He’s a classy guy, thanks for getting us Calvin for a couple years,  but christ we gotta get some shaking up going on around here.

Cajun @ RMPC. Nothing can beat it, don’t even try.

I have been up since 3:30 am.  It is now 4:50.  No idea why, just woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.  This completely unsatisfactory.

I was trying to think if it was something I ate.  No caffeine last night, no sugar.  I believe we had some shrimp & garlic cream pasta, and a glass of red wine.

I know whats going to happen.  I’ll be wide awake all through the early morning here, then 7:00 will roll around (when I normally wake up) and sleep will hit me like a ton of bricks.

It’s that time of year when Vegans try to convince themselves that tofu-based faux meat is as tasty as a real turkey

Why exactly do people do this? Especially I’m referring to alumni from the school who come back at 25, 30, 40, 50, 60+ yrs of age to tailgate.

Is it because they love football that much?

Or, is it, if only in a symbolic way, they do get to “come back” for a night, for a saturday afternoon. See all the old faces and all the old places and bring back memories of the college years?

Or, is it just to be around good friends, eat good food, drink good alcohol and have a good excuse to party?

Is it just tradition, that people have been doing it so long, they couldn’t fathom not doing it?

For me, its a little of all of the above. Its a chance to tell old stories about what we were like back in our “crazy” college days, and for a while just escape the monotonous drone of our daily lives, forget our cubicles and our mortgages and our credit card debt, and just enjoy an afternoon in the sunshine relaxing.

To all the tailgaters, I salute you. Here’s to hoping your deep fried turkeys, grilled chicken wings and cups of whiskey bring a bit of warmth to your heart this saturday, as we bring about a close to the 2007 regular NCAA football season.

Go Tech! But go on MARTA. Oh… and To Hell With Georgia, may the surface of a thousand suns burn the flesh from your bones, your children forever be scorned by their peers, and your lives be desolate wastelands of fear, insecurity, and regret.

If you strap ice-packs to the outside of a turkey before cooking, it results in taking the breast meat longer to cook than the dark. This gives us juicy, perfectly cooked white meat along with the dark, instead being dried out. Plus if you use a blow torch at the end to darken and crisp up the outside, you’ll have a perfect turkey.

Bringing science to the dinner table, bitches
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/24/dining/24SCIE.html

As part of our “two week projects” series, Romels and I recently ported the quoting technology from MetaForum into a Wordpress Plugin, and named it ClickQuote.

Coincidentally, this just so happens to be a wordpress blog, running that very plugin.

Basically ClickQuote just lets you quote what other people have said in previous comments or posts by simply clicking the paragraph you want to quote. Just hover over any paragraph (while on the comments page) and you’ll see what I mean.  Go there now and try it

Oh bloody hell. I’ve got Numa Numa stuck in my head.  Hallo? Salut! sunt eu, un haiduc.  Curse you, virulent internet memes.

I just made myself a gin martini.  Despite that its in a plastic cup, I’m wearing jeans and a hoodie, and I’m alone… it still just got classy as hell up in here.

Looking on the 12th & Midtown construction project, and the rest of midtown. This was taken 12 minutes ago.

And I don’t know how this happened, but I swear two days ago all the leaves were green. I get to work today and its like a giant Leaf Monster went and vomited all over the ground after eating a bunch of pumpking pie.

Everything certainly has the appearance of being fall, finally. But for some reason it just doesn’t “feel” like it yet. Thanksgiving is exactly a week away, which seems preposterous. Maybe the lack of classes, and the final exams and projects that go along with them, is whats doing it. Here in my windowless cubicle I have little awareness of the changes going on outside.

the wonderful thing about saving money by buying bulk at costco is that you always end up spending 3 times as much money

My zen like state of computing peace is being disturbed
by the fucked up way wordpress stores dates.

ATLANTA — Bowing his head outside the Georgia Capitol on Tuesday, Gov. Sonny Perdue cut a newly repentant figure as he publicly prayed for rain to end the region’s historic drought.”Oh father, we acknowledge our wastefulness,” Perdue said. “But we’re doing better. And I thought it was time to acknowledge that to the creator, the provider of water and land, and to tell him that we will do better.”Hundreds of Georgians — ministers and lawmakers, landscapers and office workers — gathered in downtown Atlanta for the prayer vigil. Some held bibles and crucifixes. Many swayed and linked arms as a choir sang “What a Mighty God We Serve” and “Amazing Grace.”As Perdue described it, “We have come together, very simply, for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm.”

I don’t even know what to say about this. I kind of thought shouting at the clouds to get them to rain kind of went out of general practice with the indians.

I sure hope it rains anyway. 10 day forecast calls for nothing above a 10% chance. Oh those pesky meteorologists, always predicting macro climate trends accurately.

As with high fat content foods as well as free market expansion, moderation is always a good thing.

Saturday night someone finally got around to informing me that Startup Weekend - Atlanta had started and was actually halfway done. I’d heard a bit about it before and thought it would be fun to join up with, but I guess I’m not on the mailing list. After the fun of barcamp I think I would have enjoyed it just for the learning experience and to network a bit. What they’ve come up with is something called “Skribit” which is, as far as I can tell, a glorified way for blog readers to give feedback to blog authors about what they think should be written about.

Which kind of seems counter intuitive to me. If I knew what I wanted someone to blog about, why wouldn’t I just go read about it somewhere else? If I want a steak for dinner, I’m not going to go to a pizza place and then suggest they grill me up a ribeye.

I won’t hate on it too much though, as its clearly not really meant to make them all millionaires. But the idea of a group of 50 or 60 people locking themselves up for a long weekend and coming out with a full fledged, legally recognized, equity-shared startup is just freaking awesome. The “skribbit” idea itself is rather lame IMO, but the event itself is just a really really cool idea. Of course, I also thought Twitter and Scribd were really stupid ideas too so shows how much I know.

One of the major contributors to the weekend posted about it. I don’t know who this guy is at all, but I sure feel sorry for whoever was on the UI and design team, he fuckin layed into them pretty hilariously.

One of the major frustration points of the whole weekend was that some of the groups didn’t understand their roles and responsibilities. We had a 10-person “usability and graphics” team whose responsibility, I had assumed, was to create a logo and site design and deliver it to us so that we could insert it on to the site. While the logo got done, and looks great, as of mid-day Sunday, they were still drawing interfaces on paper. There was no appreciable difference between the mockups that the dev team had done on Friday Night and the mockups that the usability team were still goofing with on Sunday afternoon. They eventually delivered a design for the home page, but it consisted of a JPG that still needed to be converted into HTML/CSS. There was simply no way to get their design into the site before launch.

I LOLIRL’d a bit, I admit.

Last weekend, having to endure the hell that is my Uhaul Storage Unit, I finally got my trusty old walmart-purchased road bike back home. She’d had her front tire stolen by a crackhead off of my porch, and sat dusty and abandoned in that 8′ steel cage of death for about a year and a half. I took it to Intown Bikes over on Monroe. I usually have glowing praise for Intown, and still do, don’t get me wrong its a great place. Especially the owner of it, he is just the nicest guy. But it was expensive like you wouldn’t believe. Considering the entire bike only cost $97 to begin with, it was kind of shocking to learn that a new wheel and a tuneup was going to run me $175.

Anyway, I suppose its worth it. As best I can tell, here are all the good things about it.

• I get to work faster, and defiantly get home faster. It’s about a 1.4 mile ride each way, and those 21 gears sure help with the couple hills that there are.
• Its good exercise. If I come home for lunch too, we’re talking over 5 miles of riding a day.
• Bums no longer bother me. Even if I’m not moving and waiting for a light to change, I still don’t get bothered. Maybe subconsciously they are ingrained to the fact that its pointless to try and ask for money from someone on a bicycle. The fact that I’m just standing there apparently escapes them. Oh well, no one ever accused bums of being observant and deductive.
• It’s kind of fun. Especially on the hill leading from my building, I can really get it up to a pretty good clip. Its nice to hear the wind whistling through the handle bars, and it acts as a nice little noise cancellation effect as well.
• Saves gas like you wouldn’t believe. 350hp in a 6spd, trying to make your way through 11 street lights and unrelenting stop and go traffic does not make for good MPG ratings. On the fillups that I didn’t ever get on the interstate I think I was lucky to break 12 or 13 mpg. Plus it cuts down on the wear and tear.

In fact in a lot of ways I almost feel like work is closer now. I just hop on my bike and go. No going round and round the 5 floors of parking deck, no waiting on lights or passing cars.

Trying to convince lauren to get one too so we could bike around like retards. However, it would be rather remiss of me to not point out the negatives as well.

• Its cold! When it gets down to the mid 30’s, that wind is not kind. However, considering its exercise, I don’t get too cold.
• I get hot! If I really push it and try to make a good time, I arrive to work somewhat disheveled and sweaty. A 5 minute breather to relax outside though and I’m fine.
• It’s probably going to result in my death.

All in all, totally worth it.

*edit* - Took me 8 minutes today.  Normal evening commute?  20, 25 minutes on a bad day.

Considering we live less than 2 blocks from what is consistently touted as *the* best sushi place in atlanta, I suppose its about time we got around to going to it. Despite Atlanta being landlocked, I’ve read of several people say that MF Sushi Bar provided them with the best sushi they’d ever had.

Yeah, ok. We’ll have to see about that. Of course considering my entire sushi life experience is restrained to Ru Sans (which apparently is the McDonalds of sushi places), maybe it technically will be the best sushi I’ve ever had, if by nothing other than default.

(some time goes by …)

Well, I’m back.

Crappy cell phone picture and all.  So it was a pretty classy joint, waitress woman put my own napkin on my own lap for me and crap like that.  I had a rainbow roll and Lauren had a typhoon roll or something.

Was it better than Ru Sans, in terms of taste?  Well, in a word, yes.  Its hard to describe, but the fish itself just had a quality to it that made it creamier almost.  Like it melted in your mouth, whereas at Ru Sans it might be described as “tougher” some how.  Was it the best sushi I’ve ever had in my life?  Have to go with yes obviously on this one as well, but beating out Ru Sans as its only competitor probably wasn’t that hard.

On a scale of 0 to 5 with 0 being a filet-o-fish from mcdonalds and a 5 being the best food i’ve ever eaten in my life… I put Ru Sans at around a 3.18(still pretty fucking delicious) and MF Sushi Bar at a 4.391.

And it wasn’t that expensive.  I had two 8-peice rolls, lauren had a roll and some nigiri, we got some edamame as an appetizer, a couple heinekins and a $10 glass of wine, and the total was still only $70 for the two of us.  Minus the drinks and you’re actually approaching what I’d reasonably spend at Ru Sans anyway.

Next up I want to try this place called “Fune” that is in the Spire building on peachtree.  Its supposed to have this huge long conveyor belt that wraps around the restaurant and thats what your order comes out on.

Anyway.  MF Sushi Fingers, good, yes.  Go.

I love articles like these; Stumbled across this one on the SkyScraperPage forums.

Why Atlanta, Why?

There’s a reason the metro area continues to be one of the leading cities in the United States. Here’s a refresher course on why you – and your customers – continue to do business here.
There was a plan. And among those who were forward-thinking enough to see the vision realized that, at some point, those “Rust Belt” companies would want to pull up their roots and head South. And not just anywhere in the South, but a location that would serve as a strategic cultural and economic hub to the United States and beyond.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the cities of Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta were positioning themselves to be that hub. While Birmingham was advertising itself as a leading financial center, Atlanta was jockeying itself as a thriving transportation hub – defined by expanding road and rail systems and a burgeoning airport. Their respective economic fates would eventually be played out during one of the most volatile times in our country’s history – a time when racial tensions would explode beyond the realm of consciousness.

The Civil Rights Movement changed everything. While city leaders such as Mayor William Berry Hartsfield and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were guiding Atlanta through racial unrest and overseeing the peaceful integration of its city’s schools, Birmingham was mired in civil unrest from the top of the state’s political chain down to its streets. Defined by highly publicized race riots, school protests and emphatic political declarations on the need for segregation, Birmingham began to distance itself from its vision as the South’s social and business epicenter.
It was Atlanta, with its credo as “A city too busy to hate,” that rose to the forefront. For businesses – and people – looking to head South, Atlanta showed that white and black leaders could work together to embrace and extend cultural diversity.

Fate had made its choice. That handy work from four to five decades ago can be seen in the Atlanta of today, a city that truly epitomizes the economic and cultural diversity that both cities had pioneered. Atlanta is spread out over 28 counties in north-central Georgia; the metro area is home to more than 4.9 million people (2005 statistics), some 470,000 of who live in the city itself. The attraction of this “suburb city,” as it is sometimes referred to, combines the advantages seen in smaller communities with an array of assets, including world-class education institutions, major corporate headquarters and one of the world’s leading airports.

Atlanta’s success lies in its diverse economic and culture structure and adaptability to change. Take the recession of 2000-2001 that pummeled some of the city’s key industries, including information technology and construction. “The area’s well-rounded economy enabled it to take full advantage of the current, broad-based recovery,” says Hans J. Gant, senior vice president of economic development division for the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. “Atlanta has adapted and continues to evolve into a diverse business and culture center. It has all the ingredients that companies need – people, airport, low cost of living, etc. – when they are considering doing business or relocating here.”

For a refresher course, Atlanta is the ninth largest U.S. population center and one of the fastest growing areas in the country; ranked second in job generation; first in air passenger traffic; third in Fortune 500 headquarters; fifth in Fortune 500 companies; and fifth for software development. And the list goes on and on.

“Atlanta has adapted and continues to evolve into a diverse business and culture center. It has all the ingredients that companies need – people, airport, low cost of living, etc. – when they are considering doing business or relocating here.”
Hans J. Gant, Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

Don’t listen to people like Paul Graham who say that being anywhere other than the bay area is a death sentence for a startup.  Isn’t it convenient that he just so happens to run a startup camp in the same place, and obviously then would want to convince as much talent to relocate there?  Especially with web startups, physical geographic location is becoming more and more irrelevant.  I know of one such company that has 7 employees, none of whom live in the same state as any of the others.  They have weekly conference calls and the rest of their (highly lucrative) business operations are run online.

And lets not forget one other key element - cost of living.  For all the things the ATL can offer, living here is ridiculously cheap.  A studio on Peachtree can run as low as $550 a month — what will that get you in San Francisco?  A packet of ramen, maybe?

This has been bugging me the past couple of days.  I’m trying to build a subscriptions mechanism into MF that will send out email notifications upon new replies to a thread you subscribe to.

The current logic flow goes something like this:  You subscribe to a thread.  There is a bit flag on your subscription called “notify”, which is true or false.  When you first subscribe, its set to true.

So, then some time later, someone else comes along and posts in that thread.  It goes through and gets a list of all the subscribers for that thread, who also have notify=true, and emails them saying a new post has been made.  Then it sets all those people to have notify=false.

Only until they return to the thread, does notify get set to true again — this would protect against you getting 200 emails if the thread took off and had a bunch of posts.

The problem is, you come back to the thread, your notify gets set to true again… but now you’re just sitting there reading the thread.  Now if someone posts, even while you’re reading it, you’re going to get an email.  This is an undesired behavior — you’re well aware that there is a new post, because of the fact its all live.  So then if you get in a conversation with someone, its going to constantly be cycling back between notify being true, someone posting, notify getting set as false, you get emailed, but you’re reading it, so the update ping will set  notify back to true.  So if you have a conversation with someone in a thread in which you are subscribed, you’re going to get an email for every response they made, even though you’re sitting there reading it.

There’s no way for me to tell when you closed your dang browser and went away, so as to set notify back to true.  This is confusing and I hate problems like these.

Found a good tip today. Say you have a has_many relationship between two types of objects. For example, lets just use “posts”, and “comments”. A post has_many comments, so it would make sense that if you destroy a post, its comments would get destroyed as well. Up to now I’ve just been doing it manually:

for comment in Post.find(:id).comments
  comment.destroy
end
Post.find(:id).destroy

But a wonderful shortcut for this is just to add a “destroy” dependency to the Post::has_many declaration, like so:

has_many :comments, :dependent => :destroy

Now when you destroy a post, its comments get destroyed along with it automagically.

Lauren downloaded that new radiohead album online and paid them £3 for it. It’s radiohead through and through of course, but I like it. I’m glad their little experiment worked out for them. I read somewhere else that they actually averaged about $8 per download.

It would seem, then, that consumers don’t mind giving up their money in exchange for music — what they mind is the RIAA getting any of it. Perhaps in as much the same way that they say free food always tastes better, sitting here listening to it on a cool sunday night, music sounds better knowing that the artist who made it got every bit of that $8.50 you paid them for it.

You heard it here first. Mayonnaise, you’re on your way out. You can’t even compete. What is mayonnaise, anyway? Just like vegetable oil and .. raw eggs? Mixed together? Oh yeah that sounds delicious.

Avocado, on the other hand, is natural. Comes from the earth, not some factory in Pittsburg. Lately on all my sandwiches I’ve just been taking half an avocado, mashing it up in its own convenient half-shell skin and smearing it on bread like its the motherfuckin Jolly Green Giant’s version of Miracle Whip. Its so fresh and crisp and creamy tasting, and really really good for you too.

I think next I’m going to make tuna salad with avocado instead of mayonnaise. Holy crap I think I just fainted from how awesome thats going to be.

Breaking from our usual pattern of getting assaultedly drunk on friday nights at parties, we took it easy last night and I woke up at 7:30 am refreshed and relaxed.  I think I could get used to this.

We went up to the deck for 45 minutes of tennis.  Our fine city, shining and sparkling and towering around us in the clear morning light, served as a the backdrop for our game, its brilliance matched only by my deft manipulation of the racquet.   Plus I just popped open a brand new sleeve of balls.  You can’t fucking top that shit son, don’t even try.

Now just listening to some choice selections from Beirut - The Flying Club Cup and about to get ready to go up an have brunch in midtown at Vickery’s.

I sincerely hope that Google’s Open Social network completely wipes that smug grin off of Zuckerburgers face.  Insolent little prick.  $15 billion for a glorified directory listing, who does he think he is?