Where’s Lou

The vacation is a huge success so far. After only three days I’m completely bored. Huge milestone. Mission accomplished. But now that I’m bored with two days left, I need something to do for the weekend, right? After all when you’re bored that you’re brain’s little LED saying the batteries are charged, but if you stay there too long you end up in a daytime-tv watching pseudo depression haze.

That’s when I realized it’s time to buy huge chunks of raw meat and spend the next 30 hours slooooowly cooking them. Brenda’s not really a fan of bbq. It’s a shame, but Alex loves it. He’s a meat boy.

Pictured above is Alton Brown and I really like him. He has a show Good Eats on the Food Network, and also acts as an announcer on Iron Chef America. He has a good cookbook out I’ve recommended to people before. First thing in it is skirt steak seared medium-rare in a cast-iron skillet. I’ll tell you what.

So for tomorrow I’m going to be making pulled pork using a recipe from Good Eats, and for tonight it’s going to be ribs. Cross your fingers – I usually wreck ribs.

Hello everybody! Guess what I did today! Give up? Nothing!! And thank goodness too.

This is the final week of a big project and we’re looking good. So much so that I good friend of mine, Kevin, said hey – it’s all good, it’s all under control, take a few days for yourself. So thanks again, great idea.

I’ll be blogging about what the project is once the beta hits the street. It’s less than twenty-four hours so if you’re reading this just come back in one day.

Moving on! Do you drink wine? I know I do, but I don’t know names from anything. I’ll just grab a bottle here or there at random. Brenda has a slightly better method which is to pick one with a nice picture on the label. I saw on diggnation april 19th they have a new sponsor that has a video podcast tv.winelibrary.com that’s a sort of Mad Money for wine. I think I’ll watch a few episodes and maybe jot some names of bottles to keep in the wallet if there are some that sound like what I like.

I like digg. I ordered a diggnation hoodie – and I’m not that guy. I’m not the guy that orders topical clothing to advertise for free. But I do like digg. Maybe someday I’ll put the digg badges back up on the blog but not just yet. There didn’t seem much point right now with them all pegged firmly at zero.

Turns out I left my blackberry downtown too. So my time off really is taking a break. I haven’t been able to check my office email for more than 12 hours now. Is this what life was like before? I don’t like it.

Had a great time at the minnebar (un)conference yesterday. Many of the sessions were very interesting and I saw a lot of familiar faces. The highlight for me however was the chance to hear the creator of RoR being interviewed. He’s the one the left, David Heinemeier Hansson, being interviewed by Jamie Thingelstad.

The guy was amazing. I agreed with everything he said.

I especially loved was how he didn’t have that “stick it to the man” vibe when he spoke about open source. In my opinion no matter how you feel about Microsoft the casual computing and on-line markets wouldn’t exist in the way they do today without them. Instead he seemed to have a completely pragmatic attitude of “getting shit done” in a programmer oriented way. Know what I mean? It’s not about disliking Sun, just that Java wasn’t helping him in the ways he wanted it to. Another example of this is when David stated he had originally tried to build out php on rails but the language seemed to reject it. Php, like Ruby, is also a free language so it isn’t so much “Ruby because it’s free” as “Ruby was right for the job”.

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Looking forward to the minnebar (un)conference coming up tomorrow!

minnēbar is an ad-hoc gathering of technology enthusiasts born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. Participants work together and try to create something exciting by being in close proximity to lots of smart people. Each person contributes in some way by leading discussions, demos, asking questions, or volunteering. Read about the first BarCamp in WIRED or news.com or check out last year’s MinneBar06.

Kevin Dotzenrod, Christopher Leighton-Brooder and myself will be providing a session about MonoRail. In our professional lives we also have� a huge deadline coming up for a product’s public beta next week� – so it’s� been a challenge preparing for the get together -� but I think it should be okay.�

Part of the session will be making an example project, so check back here after the minnebar and I’ll post any source code that comes from that activity.

Hope to see you there!

I put a chrome logo on the site. A friend of mine pointed out a few things along the lines of constructive criticism. Like with chrome the font needs to be much heaver to look good. And the fact the previous text looked better than this, especially over the water. Well that’s what happens when you spend your whole career making things that are invisible. :)

Which got me wondering, is it the case that I haven’t challenged myself creatively and I’m not practiced in this area? Or is it that I naturally have the taste and style of an autistic child and it’s no coincidence I work in an area that doesn’t involve creative design.

So I think I’m going to continue to challenge you, kind audience, to endure a mild and half-hearted ongoing attempt to change the style of the site.

And that’s the big question really. Is it better to do something yourself by hand with questionable (or tragic) results, or to choose something that looks far better but you had no part in beyond the choosing?

Update — you can check out additional works of art in the Random gallery.

The cool thing of the day this week is Jott. I have a friend who struggles with metadata over and over. Myself, I don’t have a problem with metadata. I wish I had a problem with metadata! I have a problem with managing the original data much less the derivatives. I have an awful memory and horrible organization skills, which I like to think in the end turns into a strength as an engineer.

How can that be a strength? Simple – it forces you to simplify as a survival mechanism. Don’t build things you won’t need. Don’t build complex abstract things when simple concrete things will do. Don’t assume you will remember why a thing is done – so everything you build should be as if a stranger will be reading it the second time instead of yourself. Which is what it’s like when you read your code from a year ago. I’ve even gone into source control to prove to myself there were hunks of software that were in fact done by me.

But back to the point. Jott! I have no memory. I rely on notes, memo pads, todo lists, Trac project databases, etc. The BBerry is also convenient for providing notes to self by keypad but they’re also a bit of a pain to key in and manage. But by adding Jott, which for some unexplainable reason is currently free, you can streamline the act of providing yourself with a reminder down to one keypress and a statement. The 877 area code’s toll free right? I feel like I must be missing something.

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On TWiT 57, around 35:40, by Jason Calacanis.

The only thing that works in blogging is authenticity, and it carries over to your life. Life’s too short and I’m going to say what I mean and I feel like if you live your life like you blog, with authenticity, you have a better life. You have less to explain, you have less battling.

To which Dvorak adds, “You’re making me sick over here.”

I like Dvorak too – he has a column Second Opinion on MarketWatch which I’m connected to professionally. Like anybody who would be reading this wouldn’t already know that. :)

I switched from the bcm43xx module to the ndiswrapper module for the wireless card in Ubuntu Linux. For some reason the bcm43xx was topping out at about 22kbyte/sec. Ndiswrapper is a module that hosts windows x86 drivers in linux – so all you need to do is download the latest windows drivers and hand it the inf and sys. It’s now running at… One moment… Up to 350kbyte/src.

At the bottom of this post are the steps you would take to do this. Which is why this post involves the word manky. The conclusion I drew from this is that in my humble opinion Linux/Unix sucks for the same reason I feel golf and gambling sucks: they’re difficult, painful, and frustrating, but the joy you have the moment when something finally goes just right makes it all seem worthwhile. I think it’s a human brain chemistry bug or something.
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Yet another iron was thrown in the fire this week. As I was going through some of the older video podcasts I came across one I’ve seen earlier about a forty-five minute install of RoR on Ubuntu Linux distro. Which reminded me of the Ubuntu LiveCD I had downloaded earlier that I had used to put the GNU Grub bootloader on a usb stick.

See at the time I needed a way to dual boot a machine and I wasn’t having any luck getting the Vista boot sector to play well with others. With Grub a usb stick I had a device on my keychain I could use when I needed to choose which partition to run. The howto is typically from a Linux prompt and I was having zero luck with grub4dos or the super grub disk – which is why I burned a LiveCD in the first place.

But that left me with a virtually empty $20 bootable 1gb USB stick. Totally unacceptable of course – so the other day I brought it to the next level. Following the steps online I copied a USB adjusted Ubuntu onto the stick, altered the boot sector so it would start itself too, and it was good to go. (It was actually not nearly as tidy as that but there’s enough truthiness there for blog purposes.) Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a video podcast I’m following named PixelPerfect by Bert Monroy. Each episode he describes a particular Photoshop technique or explains how an aspect of Photoshop works. I’m extremely challenged in the aesthetics area though I have been known to chop up a graphic or two for web purposes. He does such a great job walking through the process in a way that seems so simple that I just *had* to give it a try.

So I started with a sample image file and went through the steps of the “rain” episode. Fun stuff! If you’re following along with Bert you can pause and rewind all you need. It’s like going through a Legend of Zelda by following a Perfect Guide step by step. Fun and simple. I showed Alex the results and he said it looked great and that the lightning should hit the boat and it should be burning. I left the lightning where it was, but I went ahead and torched the boat following the steps of another episode “fire”.

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