My Life Blog

Suzanne has been making fun of me for not blogging after posing the question: does anyone read this anymore? In that post, I believe I alluded to writing a bit more. And then promptly I disappeared for several months. What can I say? Guilty as charged.

So what’s new?

I’m still going it on my own work-wise. My tiny one-person LLC is doing fine as in November, I landed a contract with the world’s search engine company of choice. I can’t really say what I’m doing and for whom within that company due to non-disclosure legalities, but I can say that I’m working with a talented group of folks in a skillset that I’ve adopted in the past couple of years.

I can also say that I’m enjoying a telecommuting existence whereby my commute only involves walking up a flight of stairs. I manage my own time and live a VPN-connected existence. The obvious downsides are few daily interpersonal interactions and life in a bandwidth-constrained environment. The upsides are pretty obvious, the work is interesting, bozo-free, and I’m nicely paid for my contributions. I’m hoping the arrangement lasts for a long time.

I’ve also recently released a side-project of mine. I’ve been a fan of SportsRadio 1310, The Ticket, a local sports talk radio show for a long time. It was the first of its kind when it started in 1994 and it provides a combination of sports talk and really just guy talk in general. After all these years, the on-air staff are nearly family. Their site absolutely sucks, so I thought I would create a sort of unofficial fan site to extend their brand elegantly into the web world. Who knows if it will catch on, but you can take a look at my creation at Ticketheads.com. When you go there, just know that the site is meant to appeal to men between the ages of 25 and 54. As such, the content is calibrated to that type of audience.

Otherwise, Suzanne and I are doing well and are looking forward to our next planned trip to Hawaii. This time, we are splitting our time between Maui and our beloved Kauai. There are still many months between now and our trip, so it will be a while before we can tell you how cool Maui is. Let us hope that I blog before then.

…I’ve been upgrading my site. If you are reading this within a feed reader, you’ll notice absolutely nothing. However, if you’d like to click on over to my site, you’ll see a few new things.

To begin with, I discarded my Typepad blog in favor of a self-hosted blog using Wordpress. I’ve also separated out my life ramblings into its own blog. The thought process there is that friends and family probably care more about this content than the content I might offer up that is more work-related. So that implies that I have a work blog and a life blog. Hopefully, I’m not over-exposed!

I’m hoping to eventually get my resume up, but for now its a placeholder. Its not so much that I want you all to know what my qualifications are, its more that I want to be more publicly accountable for managing my accomplishments. Said another way, I’ve been considering my recent accomplishments and feel like they aren’t in keeping with my standards, so I am hoping that my online resume will be a constant reminder of what I want to achieve professionally.

For those of you that we always send Flickr links to, well, those days are over. I’ve added a photo gallery to the site to make it pretty seamless. Of course, you can still go to Flickr, but you have less reason to now. The gallery is pretty cool; there is a sets page and if you care to drill down into a set, you can see thumbnail pictures of the set’s pictures. If you want to view the larger version of the picture, just click on the thumbnail. Lastly, you can also find photos by tag.

As I mentioned, most of the technology is Wordpress and a few plugins for Wordpress that I was able to install. Other parts of the site are served up from a Ruby on Rails application. The astute reader will note that there is not much for a Rails app to really do. You would be right. However, I’m setting myself up for future features.

If you are curious about the picture in the masthead, that was taken in Kauai (of course) from the lanai of the house we stay in on the North side. I chose this picture because it has a terrarium like feel to it which I think is quite funky. Unfortunately, the photo quality leaves a lot to be desired.

I hope you find the site more appealing!

I’ve been wanting to improve my in-car iPod experience, so I’ve been doing some research into the in-dash head unit offerings.  I had budgeted enough for the unit to be among the top of the line for any brand that I would choose.  As such, my decision would be based mostly on the iPod integration as most head units would probably be pretty comparable for the core features.

A secondary, but much less important, feature I was interested in was bluetooth integration with my phone.  This would allow hands-free phone usage and would make life much safer.  I don’t make many cell phone calls period, so this is a very minor interest in the scheme of things.  Its mostly the cool factor that has my interest.

So I began my research online and eventually used a combination of several websites to identify a few models that I was interested in.  User reviews are very useful, but in many cases, I found that the iPod integration varied depending upon the model that was in use.  To be more specific, many systems have their own integration component and so I was reading reviews on them.  But what I really wanted to know was what was the experience with the combination of my chosen head unit and the integration unit.  The experience apparently varies wildly.

But still, I had a couple of models in mind and set out to test drive them at the retail stores.  In no particular order, I went to Best Buy, Tweeter, Fry’s and Car Toys.  In every case, I found that the store was unable or unwilling to demo either the iPod or the Bluetooth integration.  In most cases, I found that I knew more than the salesperson. 

The sad fact is that the retail stores have higher prices because they are having to offset the price of inventory, shelving, and sales support.  But in the end, they provided less information than the online stores.  My ability to test drive was the same in either case - not possible.  I was very disappointed. 

As a last gasp, I tried keying in my model numbers and the word "iPod" and perhaps a few other terms in hopes of finding someone’s blog who had the combination that I was interested in.  I found a few interesting points, but nothing positive enough to allow me to make my purchase.  In fact, if anything, I read on one person’s blog that it is important to be able to plug your own iPod into the demo to ensure that the performance is as fast as you expect it to be.  Apparently, its quite common for stores to demo on an iPod that has only a few songs.  In doing so, they mask performance issues and user experience issues.

So the bottom line is that I will do nothing for now.  The technology and sales support are not to the point where I can comfortably make this purchase.  If you’ve stumbled across this blog entry in the midst of a similar search, I hope that I’ve saved you some money or at least made you aware of your likely experience in doing your due diligence.  Feel free to comment if you have useful insight into this kind of purchase.

I’ve been working more with Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework lately, but one thing I’ve missed is a nice integrated environment.  Coming from Java where I use Intellij, well, I guess I’m used to having a nice development environment with loads of features.

The Rails core development team prefers Textmate for some reason.  I have a registered version of Textmate, but I’ve never really liked it.  It seems too minimal to me.  But of course, those 37Signals guys seem to think the appeal of minimal persists in every facet of life.  Here’s hoping their women are not disappointed in them, if you know what I mean. 

But seriously, its nice when you can have more than color syntax highlighting in your environment.  Now to be honest, I haven’t fully explored all the edges of Textmate, so it may well be capable of many things that I wish for.  However, I can say that I haven’t fully explored Intellij’s edges and yet its features and capabilities are somehow more evident.

So when I revisited RadRails recently, I was pleasantly surprised to feel as if I was in a cozy, yet more featured environment.  Maybe the two packages can do the same things, but RadRails makes its features more evident to me. 

Its funny how the smallest features are important.  In Textmate, the command (if there is one) to indent and unindent a block of text was not as I expected.  In RadRails, I was able to select a block of text and push it around as one with TAB and SHIFT-TAB.  Of course, that’s just like Intellij, so it felt familiar.  In Textmate, the same command destroyed my block. 

I guess I’m not in that minimalist camp…at least not with IDEs.  Like many things in life, size matters.  I like a "bloated" IDE full of features, so give me RadRails over Textmate.  Damn, I’m so uncool.

Last night I posted a listing on eBay for the Nokia N90 phone which I do not wish to keep.  Since the posting last night at 10:30pm or so, I’ve now received four questions all seeking to purchase the phone.  However, in all cases, they are from out of the country and do not wish to go through the auction process.

Now of course, I smell a scam.  Here’s an example "question":

Hello Seller,am peter carew and i
would like to buy your phone for my dad who has just been posted to the
United Nation Headquarters in Nigeria.i’m willing to pay for $650.00
including shipping cost.let me have your paypal info so that i ca make
the payment straight away.reply expected.

In every case, they want my full name and PayPal information.  Of course, I won’t give them either, but what are they likely to do with this information?  While I can sense the scam, I cannot figure it out.  Anyone have any ideas?

UPDATE:  I have done subsequent research on this and found this blog entry which spelled it out for me.  Its doubtful that I would have fallen for these, but its all good to know.  I have posted an addendum to my listing advising would-be scammers to move on.  We’ll see if that helps.  Between the time I originally posted this and this update, I have received another such message.  I had no idea how rampant this was!

For those who don’t know what the term means, check out the definition at Wikipedia.  But even as you read the definition, realize that the term doesn’t quite describe what’s going on here.

Here’s the story.  When Suzanne and I were in Kauai, we were reminded again that the word "wahine" meant a Polynesian woman or a lady surfer.  Somewhere along the line, I was playing with word combinations and came up with Teeny Wahine.  We thought it was so catchy that we considered using the cool name alone to spin off some form of business.  Young women’s surf apparel came to mind first.

So because I’m forever the dreamer, I did some research on the domain name and found that teenywahine.com was taken.  But the website was not very impressive and in fact the website name does not even match the domain name.  So I researched teeny-wahine.com instead.

I had registered the domain name after looking up the availability of a trademark on the name.  To my surprise, I found that it had been abandoned.  Or so I thought.  Suzanne had a friend research the trademark and we subsequently found out that it was owned by a company called Wahine, Inc. who produce a defunct magazine.  There is no website for the company or the magazine.

Her friend’s research also revealed that the Quicksilver division of the Roxy apparel company was interested in the trademark.  If you go to the website, you’ll surmise that they are into surf wear as well.  So it appears we had the right idea, but were a little too late.

So in the end, all we have is the domain name.  If you’ve already visited it, you’ll see that I’ve utilized Yahoo’s simple web page wizard to put up a for sale sign.  So we are cybersquatting for now, but we had much bigger designs.  So there you go.

I have an "old" 20GB iPod which no longer holds its charge for very long.  I had pretty much retired it in favor of a new 60GB iPod.  It had previously made its way to work with me every day, but since it only remained charged for an hour or so, it soon lost its appeal.

At the same time, I’ve been wanting to get access to all my music in my car.  I have a six CD changer, but I rarely change out the CDs.  For whatever reason, I never think about it and its inconvenient to find a CD that I want.

So I combined these two scenarios by buying a cigarette lighter power source and a cassette tape interface for the old iPod.  Now the old iPod travels in the car with all my music and its charge capacity is not a factor since it has a constant power source.  Sweet.

I think its only a matter of time before CD changers go away completely.  And even iPods probably have a limited life span in that environment.  It seems like some sort of wireless solution must be around the corner.  As in, I’ll have my own channel out in the ether of the Internet and my car (or my home equipment) will be able to access it.

In the words of Kip, "I love technology."

For the non-techies, SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is used by websites to encrypt data when needed.

I could probably have titled the post a bit better, but couldn’t figure out how to make it concise.  My real question is: why are new web sites no longer bothering to encrypt your sensitive data?  I’ve noticed many new sites that don’t bother to encrypt your sign-up and sign-in data.  The problem with this is that anyone snooping Internet data can intercept that data.

Many of these sites don’t have sensitive data other than the sign-up information, but sometimes people use the same log-in credentials over and over.  I will not say if I am guilty of this.   But for those who are, if your credentials are intercepted on one of these sites, then they can be tried on other popular sites — like email sites.

I think this is a by-product of how easy it is starting to be to build and host a web site.  So my point to this post is that you should be mindful of who you give your credentials to.  If you are lazy, have one set of credentials for the secure sites and have another set of credentials for untrusted sites.  That way you can survive an interception.

For web site developers, consider coughing up the money for an SSL certificate and make the necessary programming changes if you wish to be considered in the trusted category.

Just a few scattershooting notes from the Studio, that I didn’t include in my previous post.

The consensus development platform in the class seemed to be Mac OS X using the Textmate editor and using MySQL as the underlying database.  I believe this matches that of the core Rails team.  I noticed few Windows folks and the few that I did notice seemed to have a few problems.  I had none on my "preferred" platform.

As far as demographics go, we have 3 women out of our close to 50 attendees.  All attendees were caucasian.  At least, I think so.  I was somewhat surprised to see no Asian Indian presence at all.  My organization at work is dominated by Asian Indians, so I always feel like that’s representative of the development community.  Perhaps not.  One additional note, the mean age was probably between 32 and 35, but I have no empirical evidence to support that.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give props to my buddy Mike.  After making it to my hotel, my every transportation need was taken care of.  That includes an extraordinarily kind trip back to the airport which began at 6:15am on a Sunday.  As someone who values sleep, I consider that a profound demonstration of friendship.

Over and above the rides, it was just fun to spend time with an old friend.  Or shall I say a seasoned friend from several years ago.  Its amazing how you can go 7-8 years without spending significant time with someone and you begin again as if no time had passed. 

And finally, I had an instance of cry-laugh on the last day.  You know what that is, right?  A funny image popped into my head and I tried to describe it probably five different times.  But before I could get more than one or two words out, I would start laughing.  And finally, my eyes started to tear up.  Its funny to watch someone go through this and Mike even started laughing without knowing what I was even laughing about.  Those moments are priceless.  Unfortunately, I had the giggles the rest of the day and that’s not necessarily good when you sit in the second row of a class.

This past week I traveled to Denver to attend the Denver edition of the Rails Studio. 

First off, a tip for those who ever travel to Denver.  Research carefully your transportation options from the Denver airport to wherever you are staying.  In my case, I didn’t.  My airfare was $281.  My one-way cab fare to the hotel was $100.  Obviously, that’s just completely wrong.  The problem is that the airport is over 30 miles outside of Denver.

And now to the Studio itself.  I should start by saying that I have read Dave Thomas’ book in its entirety as well as much of the Wiki documentation on Rails.  I’ve even coded and deployed the smallest of applications.  I’m not sure if that makes me moderately skilled or what, but I can say that I’m familiar with most of the Rails concepts.

In considering attending the Studio, I informally used the following thought process: the book costs $30 dollars or so and the Studio costs $1000+.  As such, the Studio must provide a superset of the content already provided by the book.  Its basically simple math, I guess.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.  In my view, the Studio taught a subset of the book with few exceptions.  So I must say up front that I was pretty disappointed in the Studio.

On the positive  side, Dave Thomas and Mike Clark prepared a very nice set of course materials and generally worked through them efficiently.  There were a few live coding difficulties, but thats to be expected.  In addition, it ran very smoothly from a logistics and facilities perspective.  The networking opportunities were good as well…I went out to dinner with a 8 of the 50 attendees over two nights. 

But in the end, I did not come away with anything that I had not already learned from the book.  Well, I take that back, database migrations were not covered in the book and that was new.  However, that’s hardly worth the differential in price.  I keep wondering if I had unrealistic expectations.  Was it wrong to assume that the author of the book would simply represent the book contents for a price that was 35 times more?  I was so sure that new stuff would be taught.

So for anyone reading this who has an interest in Rails and is considering training, my advice would be to read the book and any online documentation for now.  Of course, if you need to have your hand held through such an introduction then the Studio is perfect for that.  I just wouldn’t expect to receive any advanced instruction just yet.

As for Rails itself, I’m fairly enthusiastic about it.  Anything that I write independently from my day job will surely be done in Rails.  It just makes sense since I have no initial integration needs or legacy issues.  As for its applicability within my company, I’m not sure.  We’re such a Java shop that it will be hard to successfully champion Rails.  But since we are interested in rapid prototyping, I’m pretty sure I can work it in under that pretense.  And who knows, maybe in prototyping it will be recognized that some of our simpler apps should just be done in Rails.