Everything In Particular

Somehow we’ve managed to live in North Carolina for nine years before visiting the Outer Banks. It’s been a fun and relaxing couple of days. Instead of boring everyone with details, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Hah, this is great! I’m sure it’s already all over the interwebs. Or, you could just give your mobile phone to a toddler for that random dialing feature. My daughter randomly called a cab the other day.

Hey, we finally got some decent snow on the ground for the first time in a couple years. Compared to, say Denver, this is a pretty lame snow, but we’ll take what we can get!

By way of Paul Graham comes this quote by Kenneth Clark. I haven’t found the original source, so if you read this and know it, please add it to the comments. When I read this, I realized this is the guiding principle I’ve used in determining what new things to learn as a programmer:

If a lot of smart people have liked something, you should try and figure out what they saw in it.

This is what led me to Ruby and Rails. It’s what led me to Python and the world of dynamic languages five-plus years ago. It’s what drove the decision to implement Rails in Ruby (if I can speak for DHH for a second).

Today, I’ve found another opportunity to learn something new that a lot of smart people rave about: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Amazon version, Free HTML version). UC Berkely is offering CS 61A The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs as part of their free-to-the-public webcast series of courses.

If you love to learn, it’s a great time to be alive.

I’ve been a Safari technical books service subscriber for over four years now. The service just keeps getting better. But I’m not here to pimp Safari (or pimp Safari) but to point out how good of a week it’s been for Rails developers with a Safari account.

Just this week we’ve gotten a Prototype and Scriptaculous shortcut, Ajax On Rails, Prototype Quick Reference, and an update to the beta version of Rails Cookbook.

Here’s what was already on my bookshelf:

• two Mongrel shortcuts
• Rubyisms On Rails
• Rails Plugins shortcut
• The Ruby Way
• Ruby On Rails: Up and Running
• the Ruby Cookbook
• RJS Templates for Rails

I certainly haven’t read all these titles yet, but you’ll not hear me complaining about a lack of Rails documentation.

I feel compelled to blog this if only to spread the word a bit more. If you’ve listened to indie rock within the past 20 years, you’ve almost certainly listened to something that J Robbins wrote or produced. J was the heart and soul of Jawbox, Burning Airlines, and Channels. Prior to that he did a stint in Government Issue. He has also produced a number of the better sounding indie records in recent years, including bands like Braid. If you’ve never listened to J or any of his bands, do yourself a favor and track down Jawbox’s For Your Own Special Sweetheart. Nobody has ever made rock music so simultaneously rocking and sweetly fragile before or since. And J’s lyrics are as good as anyone’s, and I mean Bob Dylan when I say that.

My friends and I wondered what was up when J’s latest band Channels cancelled all their recent shows. It turns out that J and Channels bandmate Janet Morgan’s son, Callum, was recently diagnosed with a genetic motor neuron disease called Type 1 SMA, or Spinal Muscular Atrophy. There is no cure and, to put it plainly, the outlook is bleak. As you might imagine, being a self-employed indie rock musician and producer doesn’t come with the best health insurance. In light of that, Desoto Records has set up a web page with more information including a link to make a donation. Please do.

The Velvet Underground’s “first real record” was purchased for 75 cents from a street sale bin in September 2002 and yesterday sold for over $155 large. The street sale find turned out to be an in-studio acetate of the thought-to-be-lost Scepter Studio recordings, and is probably the only surviving copy. Check out the ebay auction and the fascinating story behind it.

UPDATE: This story just made the front page of cnn.com. Generally, I like to steer clear of the echo chamber. Had I known this would be such big news, I’d never have mentioned it.

UPDATE 2: Bid != Sale

A useful cross-browser min-height hack for IE6+ which doesn’t mess up the implementation of min-height in good browsers:

selector {
  min-height: 400px;
  _height: auto !important;
  height: 400px;
}

Props to dustindiaz.com and an astute commenter.

My 20-month-old daughter is apparently so used to seeing my face behind the illuminated Apple logo on my laptop that this morning, when she recognized the Apple logo elsewhere she said, “Apple… Dad.” Then she started pointing at the logo and looking at me, repeating “Apple. Dad.”

UPDATE: I thought this might be a funny, isolated event, but when I mentioned this to my wife, she said, “Oh, yeah, she’s been doing that.”

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about my “ideal” blog package and planning to implement it in Rails. But it’s been pretty far down on my priority list, so it just hasn’t gotten done. That said, WordPress comes pretty darn close to my ideal.

So, this blog is now my personal web home. The thing that finally pushed me over the edge is WordPress’s new domain mapping feature. I’ve mapped tjstankus.com to this blog and set the old blog URL to redirect. I’ve also setup redirects for stank.us so that I can keep using http://tj.stank.us/ as my home page URL.

One of the nifty features of WordPress is tag-based feeds. I like that I can provide http://tjstankus.com/tag/rails/feed to an aggregator or feed reader to get just my Rails-related posts. It’s always a bit of a conundrum for new bloggers as to whether one should create a blog focused exclusively on one subject, or just blog about anything they feel like. Tag-based feeds give you a workaround to do both.

Lastly, since WordPress is actually hosting this content, I don’t have to worry about handling a potential traffic spike that might occur if I were to say, blog about Britney Spears or something.

I’ve got no excuse not to blog now. :)