Things have finally calmed down a bit here. We're moved in to our new home, my office is set up, and I'm no longer looking for rogue printers to smash.
What's new? Well, I bought a house, got a dog, and moved. All pretty much within a month or two of elapsed time. I feel about 20 years older after doing all of that, but the calendar tells me that I've really only lost two months. Plus however much time you lose from eating 30 Filet-o-Fish sandwiches in as many days due to not having any of your kitchen stuff to cook with. Probably shaved about six months off my life there.
I've been on Facebook a bit lately, mostly for work. I don't really like Facebook, but on the plus side I've located a bunch of old friends. It's a bit weird how the internet enables you to keep track of your friends without really having to keep in touch with them. I mean, there's the usual "Hey, you're still alive, that's great!" conversation that seems part of the "friending" ritual. But beyond that, Facebook seems to be just a glorified address book for me. I know my friend Dave sees a lot of potential in Facebook, so I haven't completely ruled it out as another fad yet. But it will be a while before I'm really sold on it, as a user. As a technical person, of course I see the huge advantages it provides as an application delivery platform. As a regular person, I don't know if I'd still be a Facebook user if my job did not require it.
Our new dog is proving to be a great addition to the family. We found her at the animal shelter in Belgrade a week after we moved here. She is a Karelian Bear Dog, a breed with which I have been enamored since first reading about how they are being used to help with problem bears at the Wind River Bear Institute. When Elly looked on PetFinder and saw that a KBD was available, it seemed like a sign from above. We had both been joking prior to moving up here that I could own my very own bear dog, but I don't think either of us thought that it would happen so fast. For one, they're supposed to be super active and need some land to roam. Our tiny backyard would seem small to a Pomeranian, so I wasn't planning on getting a bear dog until we moved to a place with more acreage. But luckily for us, Sadie is an older dog who would rather lay around and squeak out dog farts all day in exchange for some chicken jerky treats. She's still a great dog, and she will play with you if you pretend to be a big vicious animal, but she is by no means chewing off our doorknobs or running off into the hills. In fact, just this morning she made me walk at about negative 1.5 mph up a hill back to our house in a windy snow squall because she was tired after our morning jaunt.
On the technical side, I'm continuing work on TravelersTable, while in my spare time trying to resuscitate WalkingBoss and develop a time-tracking module for the IDE I use (NetBeans). I've found that all of the dog-walking I'm doing has been good for my creative-technical side. The ideas come a lot easier when you're not stuck behind the LCD all day long. I'm considering getting back into ObjC or OCaml once I'm done with my other projects. I got an OCaml book for Christmas a year or two ago, and I never made it past the first chapter. Plus I've got some ideas about a WebKit app I want to build in ObjC. Too many ideas, too little time.
I guess today is tax day, as two people have already reminded me in their emails. I had forgotten because my taxes were done a bit earlier this year. The deadline for corporate returns is a month early, so I got all my stuff together for the accountant back in March. I'm pretty excited. I think this is the first year I will get a refund in about three years. It's not too much, but just knowing that the government won't take a big bite out of my hiney this month is a great feeling. For a couple years there, it seemed like any savings I built up were gone after April 15.
Speaking of money, I am totally amazed at the difference between Whole Foods and the local Town & Country supermarket here. I swear we pay 30% of what we did in Boulder. I do not understand cost of living at all. Dave told me he paid $13/lb for turkey at a Whole Foods in California while he was visiting family. Thirteen bucks for a pound. I think here it's like $4/lb or something. Of course, the comparison is a little skewed--I mean, it's not just cost of living differences when you compare a regular supermarket and Whole Foods. The Whole Foods turkey most likely spent part of its young life reading Plato, playing frisbee, and talking about social issues late into the night over some kind bud at a $40,000/year liberal arts college, so that figures into the $13/lb. But still. That's a huge difference.
Elly took this a couple weeks ago during the eclipse:
But the reason I'm writing this evening is that my NYTimes movie reviews RSS feed just told me that the final installment in his Loser Trilogy is out now in certain cities. I'm bummed that Denver is not one of those cities, but Jeff, if you're reading this, you should head over to the IFC Center and check it out!
And bring a mini-dv camera and send me the tape!
Here's the link to the NY Times review.
What a winter I've had. So busy that I have not written for several months. A mortal sin in this blogosphere of compulsive key-pushers (myself included). This morning I decided to stop procrastinating and redeem this blog. The least I can do is summarize my winter and share with you my newest obsession: vegetables.
First, the winter. This was probably the best winter I've had. Ever. I'm attributing that to my Eldora season pass. Because the mountain is so close, I was able to treat skiing more like going to the health club or going for a run than a vacation day. I would go up there for a couple hours and be back in time to still work most of the day. Not only that, I would spend $0.00 each time, unless I had to stop at the Kathmandu lunch buffet. I bought a ski helmet with headphones built in, some nice fat skis for all the powder we got this winter, and studded snow tires for the Black Stallion (a '97 VW Jetta that I can't bear to part with after 10 years). It was the ultimate ski setup for someone who still lives down here in the Flatlands. The only improvement I can imagine is actually living in a real ski town, where you can walk to the gondola. So that's the first reason I had a great winter.
The second thing about this winter that has made life a little better is my incorporation as an S-Corp. On January 11, 2007, Falesafe Consulting, Inc. was born (thanks to Andy for his creative genius in coming up with that name!). I found myself really enjoying the process of learning all about how a small corporation is set up and run. There were many visits to the lawyer and accountant, but every step of the way things started to run a little more smoothly. I never thought I'd say this, but I actually like using QuickBooks now.
Even more than being a cool learning experience, incorporating has helped me to impose a better work/family boundary in my life, both financially and just in the everyday things. Something about being incorporated feels more legitimate. It forces you to get serious by making you accountable to more people (the lawyer, the accountant, the IRS). I look back at the way I managed things as a sole proprietor and just cringe at the disorganization and confusion I tolerated.
Somewhere in all of that skiing and incorporating, I found time to teach a Ruby/Rails course. My friend Ara and I had a lot of fun introducing some people at NOAA to Ruby and Rails. It was a great learning experience for me and a nice change from coding and consulting.
Through all of this I have been working hard on TravelersTable.com, a website which will make it easier for traveling professionals to connect to talk about their business or other interests. It's akin to Meetup.com, Upcoming.org, and Evite.com, but intended for more spontaneous meetings between people whose jobs take them all over the world. We'll be launching a beta very soon. I'll post an update when the site is live.
So that's what I've been up to this winter. This spring, I've been inspired by my friend Ryan to change my diet. Eating right has been a major focus for me for about a month now. His secret to success is brown rice and lots of vegetables, and so far, it is working for me too. I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't think I ever would want to be one, but I'm making a real effort to eat meat only occasionally. At the moment, that means only when I go out to a restaurant. I read somewhere that Americans eat more meat than anyone else, and more than the average human by a significant factor (I can't recall the exact number). That motivated me to reduce my meat consumption just to see if I really would get skinnier, since we're also one of the fattest people on the planet.
Another motivator behind this new diet was my friend Jeff's post about eating. His rule "Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food," is a good one to follow when you're in the grocery store. Try it--you might be surprised at how many groceries fall into this category of alien-food by 19th century standards.
So far, I've had pretty remarkable results. I don't work out (no time), other than walking to work, and I haven't changed anything except cutting down on meat (and processed stuff). In 3 weeks I've lost like 15 pounds and, even more exciting to me, I have a very consistent level of energy throughout the day. I expected to lose weight, but this energy bonus I did not anticipate. I always thought of vegetables as being really wimpy (rabbit food!), but I seriously get more energy out of a few carrots than a granola bar. If some vegetarian had said that to me two months ago, I would have told them to go sit on their carrots. But now I'm eating carrots and peppers and mushrooms and whatnot and I'm loving it.
This is probably the longest blog post I've ever written, but it's also the longest overdue. Hopefully for those of you who are about to delete my RSS feed from your reader, this post redeems me enough that you'll reconsider. I promise to be more blog-happy this spring and summer, and keep you updated on the vegetables I'm eating and other nonsense that will help you waste more time at work or wherever you may be reading this.
This is why I dare not enter the foosball room at Collective Intellect.
Incidentally, I found that somehow my talk was also posted as a colloqium on the CU computer science page. I had to look that word up in the dictionary to get an idea of what I was supposed to be doing!
UPDATE: I want to thank Steve Gaede and everyone at FRUUG last night for being such great hosts. There was a very good showing, despite the snowy weather, and I was really impressed with the level of interest and discussion at this group--people seemed more interested in Rails and Ruby at FRUUG than they have at some of the Ruby groups I've spoken at!
I also wanted to point out some local groups to FRUUGers who may be interested in learning more about Ruby or Rails. For those of you in Boulder, there's the Boulder-Denver Ruby Group, which meets on Pearl Street. For those of you closer to Denver, there's the DeRailed Ruby/Rails User Group which meets at the Tattered Cover in LoDo.
I've posted my slides from the talk as a PDF if you're interested. Thanks again FRUUG!
I had never really hung out around town before. My only previous trip was compressed into one afternoon, most of which I spent fishing a few miles outside of town on the Arkansas. This time, Elly, Tova, and I stayed at the Thomas House, which was within walking distance of basically everything (except Sonic).
On Friday night, we went to Amica's Pizza, which was extremely good. I ate way too much but I do not regret it. If you go to Salida, definitely eat here at least once. We also went to this store called Slim Pickens, which sold insanely high quality Pendleton flannels for an insanely low price ($13.99 for any shirt). These shirts sell for around $90 online. So, yes, this store was a gold mine if you like wool shirts! I bought two and Elly bought a cape (wonderwoman style).
On Saturday, we walked around town, played on the playground, interviewed strangers about life in Salida (in case we ever decide to move up there), watched skaters at the skate park, and ate dinner at Bongo Billy's. We also took a stroll by the river so Tova could check out the fix and throw rocks into the water.
On Sunday, we stopped by Buena Vista on the way home. Since the yarn store was closed and the coffee shop had a power outage, we only stayed for a few minutes. We got home Sunday in time to grill some burgers and watch the few remaining Robot Chickens and NYPD Blues on our Tivo. A fun weekend!
Greg did the first wheel, so I could watch, and then I did the second one (with a few ninja kicks on the socket wrench from Greg to loosen stuck bolts). While I was doing the second one, since it was getting late, Greg did the valve cover gasket himself. So far, so good--the brakes feel great and I don't smell any burning oil after driving for a couple of days! Thanks Greg!!!
The first wheel:
Greg removing the air intake junk to get at the valve cover.
Valve cover off!
Stay tuned! I'm doing the rear brakes next week!
Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.
For me, the conference was a success. I felt like my talk went well, and I got a few new beta testers for WalkingBoss. Most of the feedback I got was pretty positive, and I found that a lot of fellow geeks were really excited about getting a GPS and giving this thing a try for themselves. I guess I was encouraged by the response.
Some interesting highlights for me from this past weekend were:
- Martin Fowler saying that, in a sense, we had failed by having a RailsConf at all, since the goal of Rails is to reduce all plumbing to the bare minimum, thus obviating the need for a technical conference to talk about said plumbing.
- Learning a little bit about Open Laszlo and Rails thanks to Mike Pence
- Meeting my friend and fellow MOG veteran Josh Sierles in person and chatting about everything from MOG to PHP-to-Rails conversions.
- Meeting and hanging out with other Ruby/Rails guys from my area, like Fernand, Greg, Dave, Chad, Bruce, and Marty.
- Writing the Facebook Mashup.
- Eating at Chili's for every other meal.
In other news, WalkingBoss is looking for beta testers! If you have a GPS and a digital camera and you want to play with the coolest new web-based trip logger, head over to WalkingBoss.com and fill out the form. I'll send you a beta user account as soon as possible. Be sure to let me know what kind of GPS you'll be testing with and your location in the comments section of the form.