Lagging on getting photos up to Flickr, lots to post. Will get my act together soon.
Avoidance
Today is a day just not meant for someone like me. I’m not at all into professional sports, football especially. I usually take today as a time to get out and take advantage of the absence of people everywhere, but this year it’s a little different, mostly because I’ve got a baby around and partly because there’s just not that much to do on a Sunday in the suburbs.
Coffeehouses aren’t much of a refuge for the non-sports minded, and there aren’t that many good ones around here anyway—I’m hoping I find a decent one that’s close by one of these days now that I mention it. The bars out here are mostly sports bars or would have some kind of television playing the game, and the clubs out here are, well, you get the idea. So my avoidance of the Superbowl has evolved into simply finding something to do rather than doing something different out of protest. Tonight’s something will be this.
Rails 3 info site launched
Rails 3 information site launched yesterday. Good amounts of info on Rails 3, upgrades, features, etc.
Visit the site
The need to be
This past month has been really interesting. I’ve taken on a couple new projects, mostly personal, and have been continuing to develop my skills as a developer, writer, blogger and designer. Sounds like a lot, right? Really, everything all ties together and will hopefully prove to be very interesting one completed, possibly launching in the next couple months. While all this is great, it isn’t paying the bills. I’ll be out of work for a full year at the end of this month and I’m starting to feel a little disconnected and concerned about getting back into the fold.
I’ve had some new interesting things come up lately, one would be very interesting and close to home with the gym located in-between. I like the person I’d be working with seems like a good guy, although he gives me beard envy. I’m reminded on a daily basis how important stability is as well as the need to be strong. I typically take things at a slower pace than most when it comes to change—partly because I’m overly logical about it, as in “how will this affect me in three years” and partly because I’ve still got a bit of the lazy teenager hanging around whispering in my ear from time to time.
I am indeed hard on myself when it comes to certain things career-wise, mostly those to do with applying things I’ve learned. For example, I can program better than some of the people I’ve met who do it for a living, yet I’m not confident enough in my skills to present myself as a true developer. I think it’s probably a shield I keep up to protect myself, also that I truly think that never having a good mentor has hurt me professionally. I know I’ve got a lot more to give as a professional designer but my portfolio of work doesn’t show a particularly polished set of skills, or one thing I do particularly well. The same goes for my development portfolio; however, that portfolio is much younger than the design one and there’s a bit of wiggle room.
Sure, I’m still young and there’s some time to get things going and nurture the sleeping beast within, but I need to be. I need to be a provider. I need to be a father. I need to be a husband. And I think doing those things will make everything easier, however, right now I need to be eating something because I be hungry.
Rails 3 beta release
“There’s plenty to get excited about here. A few of the headliner features are:”
• Brand new router with an emphasis on RESTful declarations
• New Action Mailer API modelled after Action Controller (now without the agonizing pain of sending multipart messages!)
• New Active Record chainable query language built on top of relational algebra
• Unobtrusive JavaScript helpers with drivers for Prototype, jQuery, and more coming (end of inline JS)
• Explicit dependency management with Bundler
Full details
The brain is busy
I’ve got a bit going on right now. Just moved all of my sites (and set up some new ones) to a new server that I configured from the ground up. I’m pretty satisfied with the system, although I’m running a little lean on RAM. Will probably need a bigger slice in the near future, especially once I get back in to Rails development. We’ll see how much it makes sense after some things are built and I do some optimization tricks.
Keeping myself busy around the house lately too. Finally put up the top-of-stairs gate so the baby gorilla doesn’t suddenly go barreling down them and flatten himself. Have other projects to get to but that’s just simply part of owning a house I suppose.
No new music has passed by me in awhile, could use some new discoveries. Last.fm has helped, iTunes genius mixes have reminded me how much I need to organize (and throw away) some of the crap in my library, and the giant pile in the closet has led me to rediscovery but nothing new. Movies haven’t been too mind-blowing lately either, extremely disappointed in Zombieland. Not funny and it should have been. Did discover Ink on Netflix though, highly recommended. Tracked down the rest of the director’s films but haven’t watched them yet, curious to see how they hold up.
Back to work, giving someone a needed facelift.
So…
There were a few posts that got lost in my (relatively) pain-free server move. Just a bunch of stuff about me not knowing what I’m doing with Ruby on Rails even though I took a course on it in grad school. I suppose that I’ll be writing about it later since I’ve got a few projects lined up for myself that use Rails but for now, three missing posts. I think that there was something in there about Charlie and Christmas presents too, but who the hell’s even reading this crap anyway?
One step at a time
Officially began the first steps to a new project today, it followed me home from the store the other day and I think I’ll keep it. Not sure what to name it though. I will be posting about more here in case you’re interested, but probably not for a little bit.
Also, something very sad happened today, Brad Graham passed away. I only knew of him via his online presence but he seemed to have touched the lives of many people. Part of someone’s passing always seems to be the stories that they’ve left behind, hopefully I’ve still a lot of stories left to tell and we can all just laugh our collective asses off in the end. Cheers, Brad. I’m sad to have never broken bread with you.
Bring the noise
I’ve never made it a point to have new year’s resolutions, they just seem kinda arbitrary at best. I always thought that if there’s something in my life that I felt needed changing then why not start at anytime. The problem being is that I never usually got around to starting or organizing how I might even start (which is actually my biggest challenge for the future) and attempts to change came in a somewhat piecemeal fashion. I’m positive that the changes I’ve set out for myself are realistic and the goals I’ve set for myself are as well. There hasn’t been anything that I’ve set out to do in the past that was difficult when I just went ahead and did it. Of course there are bumps along the way but that’s part of the learning process and I came out better for it.
This year will bring a lot of interesting things. Charlie will turn one-year-old, my wife and I will be together for ten years, and I’ve plenty of opportunities laid out for myself that just need starting—first being organization. Not just cleaning up messy files on my computer or papers off my desk, fully committed organization with serious strategy, the kind with schedules. If I don’t start it now, well, I just won’t start it. I’m interested to see how well I can manage it cause I’ve always enjoyed solving problems in a non-math kinda way. (unmath?)
Happy new year everyone, may it be filled with happiness.
Geeking out
I’m a technology collector. I save nearly every piece of computer equipment I ever buy, whether I can use it or not. It does come in handy from time to time. I’ve reused pieces of old computers to fix new ones and saved a bunch of money in the process. Right now, I may be at my geekiest concerning my setup. Not only do I have one windows server managing my PCs but I’ve converted an old mac to OS X server, which is very cool. It’s got a lot of out of the box features and runs really well on old hardware. I’ve upgraded my network to include a managed switch, which I’ve had lying around since college and just now got around to setting up. I’ve noticed a definite improvement in network throughput since setting that up. I was working with an older Linksys gigabit switch that I hung onto cause it looked nice on top of our server. However, once one of the ports died it was time to move on.
I’ve got plans for some old equipment, too. A lot of it has to do with me setting up a test environment to work with so I’m not stuck with lousy upload times to my production server. I’m gonna need to start making more money though, all these computers on all the time is having a noticeable effect on my electric bill.