Last Saturday was Barcamp Philly and it rocked (thanks to you @jptoto, @stellargirl, and @kelaninichole)! The first session I went to was titled “Web Apps and Hookers” which was presented by the dynamic duo of Allan Branch and Steven Bristol of Less Everything fame.
Sadly, I have to admit, before I met those guys I wasn’t huge fans of them. I thought they were kind of arrogant. However, all that changed when I got a chance to hang out with them at LessConf last month. I can truly call them friends now and they are some of the nicest people I have met.
Ok, back on topic! They had many nuggets of advice but the most important segment in my mind was the part about partners. They went on and on about how important they are. At one point they asked if anybody was starting a business without a partner to which I raised my hand. Their basic response was “you need a partner” but Steve mumbled at the end “except Randy, he’s spot on”. Ok, that had me glowing a little bit. However, I do understand the importance of a partner and wish I had one.
I am surrounded by very very awesome people but I don’t know if I have met someone that would pass the 3 AM call test. I’m not sure if this was their original idea, but basically the 3 AM test is if a potential partner would pick up the phone when you call at 3 AM instead of silencing it and going back to sleep, then they are your person. I think this is a great test and one I’ll be using going forward.
The part I haven’t figured out is how to keep from offending the people you don’t choose to be your partner. Any ideas?
(: PS I promise I’ll stop gushing about the Less Everything dudes for a while, I don’t want them to get any ideas :)
Please bare with me as I tell a story about my trip home from LessConf!
It was 1:30 PM on the Monday after LessConf and I had just checked my baggage with Southwest and was heading to security at the Jacksonville airport. As I was about 100 feet from the entrance to security, I noticed there was a Nathan’s hot dog place to my left and I hadn’t eaten anything yet.
Realizing I had plenty of time before my flight, and wanting food I would later regret, I headed over there and purchased a hot dog and cheesy hash browns (OMG they were so good!). I finished chowing down in about 1 minute 46 seconds, picked up my trash and headed to the trash can. I threw out my trash and reached in my pocket to fetch my receipt to throw away as well.
It was at this instant I realized I had about 3 dollars in change in my pocket and was about to go through security. The thought passed through my head that I would rather throw the change in the trash than deal with it in security. WTF? Did I really just think about throwing away a perfectly good $3 because I didn’t want to deal with change in my shoes as I fumbled through security?! I DID. Change is your mortal enemy when going through security!
Then I got really excited because I realized many other travelers probably face the same dilemma! What if we took advantage of this and gave them the option, when removing change from their pockets, to either put it in their shoe in one of those plastic buckets or one of those buckets collecting change for charity?
I really think this is a great way to raise massive amounts of money for charity. Does anybody know where I would start to get something like this implemented?
Sending photos from your iPhone is easy and fun, however, if you are looking to email the highest quality picture, you have to put forth a little effort.
You see, when you click “Email Photo” while browsing, the phone will resize the image before attaching it to the email. That is ok in some situations, but in others, it is not.
To send a full-resolution picture, tap and hold your finger on the image for a few seconds. You’ll see a “Copy” button come up. Click that then head over to the email application and paste it in a new email.
I asked twitter “Can’t figure out which part of the artichoke to eat… suggestions?” and I received the following responses:
“Shake well w/ ice 2:1 vodka:artichoke juice & 1 artichoke heart (canned, no oil) Enjoy!” ~ @ruthkalinka
“Artichokes: First tear off leaf, put formerly attached end in mouth, pull through almost-closed teeth to drag tasty lower part of leaf off.” ~ @tangofoxtrot
“Artichokes: But first, dip soft end in melted butter. Dee-lish. When finished all leaves, scoop out fuzzy part covering heart.” ~ @tangofoxtrot
“Artichokes: the heart is the base of plant. Clean off fuzz, cut sides off, down to circumference of heart. Cut heart up, dip in butter, eat” ~ @tangofoxtrot
“eat it all - just chew slowly… (I never know either)” ~ @sauldraws
“yeah, you scrape the flesh off the back of the leaves with your teeth. then throw out choke (fluffy stuff), and finally savor heart!” ~ @harvrock
“eat the leaves with some kind of dip. an aoli will work well.” ~ @moonpolysoft
“TEAR OUT ITS HEART!” ~ @eagleapex
“ALL OF IT… nom nom. Seriously - scrape the leaves with you teeth, and the heart is the best part. Mmmm vegetable poetry.” ~ @pufferfish
People seem to be confusing Swine Flu and Mad Pig Disease. The former is just like the flu, spread human to human. The latter is spread by eating the flesh of infected pigs, and completely imaginary.
I bought a motorcycle. A Suzuki DRZ400SM to be more exact. I took the PA Motorcycle Safety Course last October and received my license in anticipation of this day.
I wasn’t planning on buying one until the Spring but there were a number of reason why I did. First, we have had some incredibly warm days for February and not having a motorcycle was driving me crazy. Second, it was a Friday and work was driving (no pun intended) me crazy so I took the afternoon off and went looking at motorcycles. Third, I found out the bike I was planning to get was in stock and $600 less than if I bought it in the Spring.
SOLD!!! Well, to me at least. I talked to the wife and she was cool with it so went the next day and put down a down payment. A week later, Saturday, she was dropping me off to drive it home. The first day of riding, yesterday, was terrifying. I hadn’t ridden since October and even then it was in a parking lot.
That brings us to today, my second day of riding. I am no longer terrified and actually starting to enjoy it. I plan to ride this bike back and forth to our office in West Chester so I decided to try riding it with a messenger bag and it went ok. I do not have a strap on my current bag to go under my other arm to hold it steady which may end up being a problem. I have been looking at a larger bag with all the right straps but I haven’t decided if I want to drop the $$ to get it.
So John Young and I received our first batch of Nerd Merit Badges yesterday and threw up a website to collect information from people who are interested.
Patch 01: Contributed to Open Source - The thing that started it (for me at least) was contributing some fixes and enhancements to a few open source projects hosted on GitHub which made me extremely happy that I was able to give back. Some of you may not be familiar with Git or GitHub, but I believe the combination of the two has really encouraged people to contribute to open source projects. I know I wouldn’t have taken the effort to submit a patch if it wasn’t for GitHub. The image on the patch is that of GitHub’s “mascot”, the Octocat. If you haven’t looked into Git or GitHub, I highly suggest you do since they are great tools and lower the barrier to entry to contributing.
Side note: I understand we’re going to get some criticism for the image we chose but I don’t really care. It’s mostly going to be from people that won’t use new tools just because they think they are “trendy” or think they earned something “more” than someone else. If you have given back to the community in any way, even just 1 little bug fix, I think you should be proud and deserve to be acknowledged.
Making sure email gets delivered can be one of the more challenging aspects of developing a web application. One way to alleviate this is to use a trusted email server like Google’s. However, Google only allows users to send to 500 recipients/day with their free accounts and 2000 recipients/day with their paying accounts. This works ok for small volumes but the limits become an issue with a medium to large applications.
To get around this problem, Tony joked about creating a load balancer for ActionMailer. I thought it was a great idea so I created it! I would like to introduce ActionMailer Balancer. It allows you to configure several SMTP user accounts that will be used at random every time an email is created or delivered.
To use it, configure your smtp server as usual in environment.rb:
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => "587",
:domain => "test.com",
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => "no-reply1@test.com",
:password => "password"
}
It is probably a good idea to have a default account set up. Then add something like the following to an initializer:
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_users = [
{
:user_name => "no-reply1@test.com",
:password => "password"
},
{
:user_name => "no-reply2@test.com",
:password => "password"
}
]
Check out the source at GitHub.
Update: If you plan to use Gmail or Google Apps to send those emails, make sure you use something like action_mailer_optional_tls until you’re using Ruby 1.9
