r38y

Source of My Unhappiness

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 09:28:44 -0400

I think I recently figured out why I am often unhappy. For as long as I can remember, I have been doing things I thought I SHOULD be doing, not what I WANT to be doing. I’ve been “responsible”. Even as I sit here and write this, I feel like I should be getting to work, and it’s stressing me out.

I SHOULD list examples from my life, but I don’t WANT to. So I’m not.

From now on I am going to evaluate things based on whether I should be doing them or I want to do them. My goal is to make the wants win more than the shoulds.

Two Parts To Getting Married

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:07:27 -0400

I think a lot of religious people forget that there are two parts to getting married, the legal part and (optionally) the religious part. When you go to a religious or traditional wedding, you almost never see the legal part taking place so everyone forgets about it. It’s the legal part that gives a married couple rights and the religious ceremony is to fulfill the requirements of their religion.

Why am I explaining this? Well, you see, I grew up religious but I don’t share a lot of their views, I’m sure. I’ve been dying to say I support same-sex marriage, but I feel like I can’t say that without pissing off people from my family.

I believe everybody should have equal rights, and as part of that, I believe that same-sex couples should be able to get married legally and have the same rights as everybody else.

I also believe religions have a right to stick to their beliefs and have whatever rules they want for the religious part of marriage. If your religion doesn’t believe in same-sex marriages then they don’t have to allow same-sex ceremonies in their place of worship.

WHEW.

More Background Info

My wife and my wedding was very traditional. The legal part was taken care of when the pastor handed us some paper work, said to fill it out, and send it to the state or whatever. Everything else about our wedding was centered around the religious ceremony.

On the other hand, my wife’s sister’s wedding was pretty much equal parts religious ceremony and legal. There was a ceremony and then the couple, pastor, and everybody walked inside and watched them sign the papers making it official. If I hadn’t witnessed that I don’t know if I would have the views I have today.

Howdy Par'dner

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:07:19 -0500

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 :)

Cha Cha Cha Change, TSA Style!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:04:45 -0500

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?

Email Full Resolution Photos From Your iPhone

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:49:33 -0500

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.

Artichokes

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:23:00 -0400

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

Mad Pig Disease

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:38:59 -0400

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.

The New Ride

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:08:00 -0500

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.

Nerd Merit Badges

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:17:17 -0500

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.

I think I want a tattoo. Ever since my mother died in September...

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:02:43 -0500

I think I want a tattoo. Ever since my mother died in September 2003 I have been looking for a way to remember her. This is a photo of a symbol from where her side of the family is from: Isle of Man. Ohh, the coat of arms looks pretty rad too!

More Email Resources

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:22:16 -0500

In response to my post about ActionMailer Balancer, Chris Nagele pointed me to a blog post of his explaining the ins and outs of setting up an email system. It’s a great read so make sure you check it out.

Also check out the series of articles from Slicehost on how to set up an email server properly.

ActionMailer Balancer

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:42:00 -0500

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

S3 Awesomeness

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:30:00 -0500

We recently needed an easy way to do a few tasks with some files in Amazon’s S3. We couldn’t find anything that fit our needs out of the box so we created a thin wrapper for s3sync called S3 Awesomeness.

You simply configure your production, staging, and archive buckets as well as the credentials in a yaml config file and use the available rake tasks to sync from production to staging or archive production in a separate S3 bucket. Use rake -T to see what rake tasks are available. For example, we use the following command to sync the production bucket to the staging bucket:

rake sync_from_production_to_staging

Which syncs the files locally to cache then back up to the production bucket.

You can find it at GitHub. There isn’t a license yet… I’ll get to it.

utf8 + MySQL

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:59:52 -0500

If you are having problems with utf8 characters in MySQL, add this to your my.conf:

[mysqld]
init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_general_ci'
init_connect='SET NAMES utf8'
default-character-set=utf8
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci

Note that init_connect won’t run when the user has super privileges, so make sure you use a user without them:

REVOKE SUPER ON *.* from 'user';

if the user already has SUPER privileges.

"If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:18:41 -0500

“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

- Henry Ford

"Everything should be made as simple as possible — but no simpler!"

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:18:13 -0500

“Everything should be made as simple as possible — but no simpler!”

- Albert Einstein

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for..."

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:17:48 -0500

“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return.”

- Leonardo da Vinci