Some Guy's Blog

Mail

I have a good GMail system that I love. I used it to sort through approximately 5,000 e-mails from over two years into a pile of less than 30. Two wrenches are in those gears right now. All my workstation time is on Mac OS X now (yes!) and the new FireFox 3 betas are already the best browser there, in my opinion. But curses! my Better GMail extension is not yet available! Second wrench—I have to learn to get back to my starred messages (a.k.a. action items). Take it to the next level.

Church

I joined a church, the UUCC. I think we’ll have more on that as it develops, but it’s one of the elements in our Charlotte life that Megan and I have already come to value very deeply.

Music

Megan made fun of me for calling a recent playlist “a mix tape,” because clearly it’s not getting anywhere near a cassette player. We don’t even own a cassette player (although I still have a few of my “KTRU”http://www.ktru.org/ shows on tape—the dream lives on!).

I simultaneously acknowledge that she is right, and rue the woeful downgrade in the coolness of sharing personal music. A “playlist”? Really? A “mix” doesn’t even sound any better! Do I have to send people the MP3’s or do I make a real CD? Are they going to download these tracks? Yuck. Much less cool.

Also, was having a Walkman ever cool? I mean, people working out had them, and that was obviously cool. But what about everyone else?

Music

On an related note, it blows my mind that having an iTunes library comprised largely of a network file share is such a problem. I don’t want to keep 160GB of music on my hard drive. HELLO!

Music, one more time (hit me!)

We didn’t go to a concert in Charleston, SC on Saturday night because my leg hurt so badly. We ended up having a low-key weekend with plenty of relaxation thrown in, as well as a haircut.

Money

Megan and I are also having budget talks. It takes a long time to go from “we have no real way of tracking or planning for expenditures” to “we know what expenses we incur each month, and are planning to spend in ways that more closely match our values in the future.” We are getting very close, but it’s been a journey filled of discoveries and new understandings. I highly recommend it to everyone.

Eight Steps: “

[Technorati tags: Cartoons, Chickens, Life, Death, How-to, Instructions]”

(Via Savage Chickens.)

Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone: “

This is awesome, only because it’s so rare to see sanity in these matters:

Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn’t strike me as that daring, either. Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, ‘Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.’

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating—for us and for them.

“

(Via jwz.)

For those who don’t know anything about my problems with my leg (and back), it’s been causing me a great deal of pain in the last year. When the pain began in April or May of 2007, it wasn’t bad at first. Nothing really happened to make it start hurting, I just noticed that it did one day. It wouldn’t bother me all the time, just every once in awhile. I thought “if it’s still bothering me like this in June, I’ll go to the doctor.”

It was still bothering me at the end of June, I went to the walk-in clinic, and they gave me some muscle relaxers and told me to keep taking Aleve. That helped for a couple weeks, but didn’t stop the pain. I figured the next stage there was getting a referral, and I wasn’t sure it was that serious. I went to a chiropractor, and he seemed like a quack. He had signed pictures of him with Whitesnake and Frank Stallone. Didn’t seem like the right atmosphere to me.

After that, Megan and I took our Europe trip. I made it through without too much trouble and had a great time. I did have to miss one evening in Nimes, but overall I don’t remember it causing me that much trouble on the trip. Three days after we got back, my former employer laid off pretty much everyone without equity in the company. It was totally unexpected. I suddenly had to think of my leg being ruled a pre-existing condition at any job I’d ever have in the future, in addition to the stress of traveling the country to find a new job with my wedding and my ten year high school reunion in the weeks to come.

I found a great job with relative quickness, but the insurance was scheduled to start 30 days after the first day of my first full month of employment. November. As it turned out, there was some administrative difficulty getting my plan in order, since I was working in North Carolina and living in Virginia. By the time I had proof of insurance (not presenting as self-pay), it was mid-November from then, the first referral appointment was late November.

At that time, I went to the doctor and got a referral to a physical therapist. I did feel some improvement after some of the sessions, but not all of them. I went to four sessions before heading to Des Moines to spend the Christmas holiday with my parents. Because of weather and the precarious nature of travel, Megan and I ended up driving a couple hours to Raleigh to make a flight to make up for the one that got cancelled from Richmond. That just kicked off a comedy of errors for Northwest, who I honestly intend never to fly with again. (I hear people say that for effect, when an agent tries to get them to gate check their bag, but I mean it.) A few days later, one evening I was laying on my back, on the floor, in the worst physical pain that I’ve ever experienced. For those of you who do not know what nerve pain is live, I hope that you never experience it. I went to a doctor in Des Moines the next morning and was prescribed a steroid series, which helped until I got back to Richmond.

I didn’t book any more visits with the physical therapist. Our plans called for a move to Charlotte early in 2008, and I suspected that I would find some treatment there. I am seeing a chiropractor in Charlotte and that has relieved the pain considerably, but it’s still a long journey to being pain-free. I’m told there are no guarantees. It bothered me a little more than normal this week, but I’m hoping to be able to help out around the house tomorrow. Sometimes I can’t, even when I would like to. Lame. Literally!

As I write this, with the late evening games of Round 1 yet to conclude, I stand tied for first in my bracket competition. Come on, buckets, I could use the spare dough! I am officially worried by the Clemson Tigers at this second, however. A Tiger beats a Wildcat every time, though, so I am sure they’ll pull through. I don’t care how feisty that Wildcat is.

I’m happy to see the UT men’s basketball team put together a good season, and I thought the game against Memphis was a classic. I hope to see them do well, even though I picked them to get upset early. That way I at least get something to be happy about either way.

The Fans of the ACC 2008 season is about to get underway. It seems that there’s always something rocky during the off-season, and I’m considering having this be my last year as commissioner so that I can just enjoy playing for a change, but who knows.

I like the way my team looks—but I did last year as well and finished 8th out of ten! I drafted horribly and made some terrible trades. I tried to learn from my mistakes and put together a better off-season this time. You can check out my team if you like.

I may not have football, but it’s a good looking spring right now.

I saw Built To Spill at the Neighborhood Theater here in Charlotte earlier this month. I almost didn’t go because I felt a little low energy, but I couldn’t be happier that I did. It was an excellent introduction to live music here in Charlotte. They closed their set with Carry The Zero, a song that I named one of my favorite mix CD’s after—ten years ago! Unreal.

Also interesting was the discovery that rock and roll is still alive—and it looks like my dad! I can’t find any pictures of what Doug Martsch is looking like these days, but he’s not going to be on TRL anytime soon. I bought a cigarette off a beggar for 75 cents. I’m not sure whether to feel depressed or whether I was actually showing him the way up and out of poverty.

Last night, Megan and I went to see Greg Brown at the McGlohon Theater. An old friend got me into Greg Brown more than ten years ago. I saw him in Knoxville’s Laurel Theater ages ago. This show was a lot more bluesy, but he was still personable and so relaxed. He broke a string, and retuned the guitar and finished the song with more aplomb than some other musicians do a whole solo.

I was amazed at how intimate the venue was. Incredible. Megan got very distracted at some of our fellow concertgoers—you must learn to tune them out, grasshopper! We took the light rail into uptown to try that out. It will be worth it for ballgames, but overall I thought the most impressive part of the light rail was getting a fuller view of Charlotte itself. There is definitely a lot to like about this city. I’m feeling very at home.

I’d like to introduce you to Blanket, a library designed to make automated, remote backup easier. I’ve had to set up automated backup before, and I wrote this package to make it more enjoyable for myself and others. I was also experimenting with a lot of new technologies and techniques, which makes it even more rewarding that the end product ending being a preliminary success.

An introduction to Blanket is available at the excellent GitHub. There’s also the blanket project on RubyForge which means that I also have my first Gem in the wild.

Install it, kick it around, and if you like what you see, take a look at the development road map and see if you’d like to get involved. I have some GitHub invites if you need them, so please contact me if that’s an issue.

I have been working at TradeKing since the beginning of September, and the site that I (and others) have been working on will be launched to the public tomorrow.

It’s a great site, and I am very happy with my change in brokerage, regardless of my employment status. If you are a stockholder, consider transferring your assets to TradeKing. You can’t beat the price, and the customer support is top-notch. You also get to play around and shoot me nasty messages if you find any bugs in the community site. What could be better than that?

Hello, again, all! As my last update post may have led you to believe, I have indeed been monstrously busy over the past several months. It happens to the best of us.

Recently, however, I’ve managed to carve out enough time to do something that I’ve wanted to do for several years. The website that you are now reading not only has a snappy new domain but also the same software runs a site for my main domain at jimvanfleet.com. This is the first time that software of any kind has run my main domain, so, for a geek like me, that’s pretty neat.

My belief is that this setup will allow me to lay out my thoughts and interests with structure (which blogs don’t really do) while still using the blog format (which is the best for keeping people up to date and retaining interest). I’m getting to a point in my professional life where I expect to have to spend more time blogging to have the success that I’d like. What a world, huh?

So welcome! I know this is the first that you’ve heard from me in awhile, but I catch a flight to Iowa later today. IOWA!

Ezra’s Merb presentation was useful for someone like me with no exposure to the framework, but could have been sexier. Where’s our 10 minute blog app?

Adhearsion looks like it might make VOIP accessible to me, which is a pretty ridiculous notion. If you’re thinking VOIP and Ruby, think Adhearsion. I know the speaker is probably frustrated that his demo didn’t come off at the end, but that was going to be incredible if he pulled it off.

I’ve heard Bruce Tate speak a number of times, but it’s clear to me that getting out of the Java sphere has actually been good for his psyche. He speaks with a lot more passion now and asks interesting questions. He’s not the only one asking them, but I think it’s pretty likely that some of my fellow attendees could really get something out of reflecting on his talk.

Our social schedule led to missing the games development talk. Ooops!

The lightning round was relatively informative, and I preferred it to what I saw during the security talk at RailsConf.

The birds of a feather session that I attended about using Rails for social good included discussion of a mailing list that I hope ends up happening.

The presenters on the second day after that all did a great job. Ken Ault gave a great talk about the Rails ecosystem and how the interrelations were important for Smalltalk and what Ruby can learn. Smalltalk got a lot of “face-time” this weekend.

Jared Richardson gave a really illuminating talk on the interrelationship between C and Ruby.

Both talks I’m going to watch again at some point, and I think that’s one of the highest compliments I can pay.

Marcel Molina wrapped up with a talk on beauty which really wasn’t to my tastes, although clearly many people in the crowd responded well to it.

Overall, I think the organizers and the presenters did an incredible job of getting a lineup of interesting speakers and topics together in a place, delivering a great value, and bringing it off almost without a hitch. Awesome job, and I give my compliments to everyone involved.

I’ve been using OS X on my new MacBook Pro for some time now, and I’m elated with it. I have used OS X before, at Rice. At that time, it was the only computer that I could do everything I would ever need to do from. I’m over that, this time around. I needed to be able to do even more, and OS X did not let me down. I have had to pay a lot for software this time around, but we’ll get into that in a later post.

What I Run

Web Browsing (and del.icio.us) posting

Camino and dashLicious are my preferred combo here, although I do run Firefox right now for GMail. I may try out BonEcho, but my computer hasn’t shied under the load so far, so running two browsers is OK by me. Camino delivers a Firefox level of browsing quality almost always, and pairs perfectly with dashLicious, which is kind enough to be browser agnostic.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is the majordomo for OS X. “Albert, open my newsreader!”, “Albert, send this file over IM to my friend Jeremy!” Quicksilver has most of its functionality tied to Apple software, but plugins are available.

Flickr Uploadr

I use Flickr for my photosharing needs, and you can view the bigfleet photostream to check it out yourself. The tools are so much better than uploading directly using the web interface, it’s kind of a joke that I ever used the web in the first place.

If you use Flickr, this tool is a must download.

Google Notifier and GMail Macros

The whole reason that I run two browsers is that the combination of GreaseMonkey and GMail Macros is so powerful. The real inspiration for this post is that I have finally reached an empty inbox on GMail after clearing out nearly 2600 unread messages. You can fly through tagging, archiving, and deleting messages with barely any time at all. It really facilitates the sort of session that is advocated in Getting Things Done.

Google Notifier does the job of letting me know when I have new mail. It also lets me know if I have just read a piece of mail (by displaying a “new” entry in the ten newest unread messages list) which is annoying but still worth it.

Handbrake, iSquint and Lostify

Just read this if you have an iPod.

NeoOffice

Even if NeoOffice is slow to start up, you can’t beat free. Maybe the new iWork releases are awesome, though, and they’ll be worth paying for.

SSHKeychain

If you use SSH a lot, you can use SSHKeychain to stop typing your passwords. If you’re like me, that actually makes a big difference.

Adium

Although I really wish that either Adium would work with Quicksilver or Yahoo would work with iChat, since neither of those seems to be imminent, it’s Adium for me. Although I did get laid off, so I’m not really required to use Yahoo! IM anymore, so the iChat door is open again.

CocoaMySQL

MySQL is my favored database, and CocoaMySQL is my favorite interface to it on OS X.

Transmission

For BitTorrent on the Mac, my favorite application is Transmission although BitRocket shows a lot of promise.

Colloquy

IRC is taken care of by Colloquy. It’s the best IRC client that I’ve ever used.

Have fun with this!

The gang will show up in about an hour for us to all head to the Ruby Hoedown. I’m printing resumes, thanks for the reminder, Jeremy! And CVReg is back up, you can ditch the apology. Thanks, Strategy Cafe.

Matt tagged me, and this seems like a decent enough way to catch everyone up with the basics of what’s going on at this extremely busy time in my life.

“list eight habits or facts about yourself, then tag eight more people.”

1. I am not going to finish up writing RailsConf 2007 like I said that I would. I blame my readers for their utter lack of caring. It’s just too far in the rear-view mirror now. Next year, I’ll move more quickly.
2. I left on a trip for Europe on July 16 and returned on July 30. It was an incredible trip, undoubtedly one I will remember for a long time. The trip was with 10 high-school children from King William county where Megan taught this year. I’m certainly going to try to blog about this.
3. The time between RailsConf and Europe was spent primarily on XSLT project with a Flash front-end. That was different.
4. Two days after I came back to work, I was laid off by my employer. It was four days before my ten-year high school reunion, and just over two weeks before The Big Day. I’m interviewing with several places around the country, and having an enjoyable time considering the possibilities. I am looking outside the Richmond area, and if you know of a senior level Ruby/Rails position with some managerial responsibilities, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
5. I attended my ten year high school reunion, and I would describe it as surreal and anticlimactic. I expected to know more of the people who came.
6. I get married in less than ten days.
7. I use Twitter habitually, even though there’s really no point to doing so.
8. I tend to be a very calm person typically, but if I am hungry, that is a dangerous time to irk me.

I’m not going to tag anyone, you can do this if you want.

(Via mattwalters.net: lost ramblings.)

From the “Totally Believable Department”

Iraq war plans are totally useless — otherwise our Determined Enemies might learn something from all the supposedly Top Secret documents just sitting on web servers that anybody can access.

If you want to know when and where the Army Corps of Engineers is building oil-pipeline stuff or security fences around U.S. bases or new torture prisons whatever, it’s all online! You don’t even need a password or anything.

To fuck with the military, Associated Press reporters are constantly downloading this stuff and then telling the Defense Department about the security problems. Then the Army guys scream and yell and demand that the AP reporters delete the secret plans and maps and whatever, but a week later it’s all back on the same computers again, ready for download.

The Pentagon is clearly trying to give this stuff away, but there just aren’t any takers.

Military files left unprotected online [AP/Yahoo]

a/wonkette/full?i=HD4qYA” border=”0”>

Wonkette.)

Jeremy is winning! Who would have guessed?

Dept. Of National Disgrace: Majority of Americans Now UnAmerican; Nation Renamed UnAmerica: “

A shocking new survey proves that the majority of Americans are now, in fact, anti-American. According to the Pew Research people, only 49% of Americans now completely agree with the statement, ‘I am patriotic.’

The percentage of True Patriots hasn’t been so low since 1999, when the nation was wealthy and at peace.

Who Flies the Flag? Not Always Who You Might Think [Pew Research]

a/wonkette/full?i=7BbfBV” border=”0”>

“

(Via Wonkette.)