I’m not exactly breaking news here, but I’ve been out of town so you’ll have to give me a break. :)
Zed Shaw, of Mongrel fame (RoR web server) recently posted a scathing rant attacking the Rails community in general as well as specific members. The post is actually pretty (REALLY) long, and at the end I’m not sure reading it all was a good investment of my time.
But, I did read it all, so the least I can do is give a quick analysis for you so you can decided whether to dig deeper or take a pass!
I’ve picked up a new hobby, Photography. We (my wife and I) purchased a new Nikon D40 and 18-200 VR lens to get started, and so far we are both really enjoying it.
We previously used a Canon Powershot S500 (5 MP Point and Shoot), and while we took a ton of pictures with it, we were always frustrated with shutter delay. We missed a lot of great shots while the camera metered, focused, and did whatever else it did before it would actually take the shot.
I’m done with United. I’ve been frustrated for a while with their deteriorating level of service and frequent flight delays. Unfortunately, due to a previously canceled trip, we had tickets to burn.
We were frustrated before we even reserved our tickets. Instead of being able to fly direct, we had to fly to a nearby city (3 hours away) because the (two) available flights were already booked.
When we got to the airport on the morning of the departure, we found that the flight was delayed due to a delay in the incoming flight. Once they got the plane unloaded, we thought we were on our way. However, they instead informed us that we were changing gates, and that as soon as the current flight at that gate took off, our new plane could come in, unload, get cleaned, inspected, and then load us. We later found out that the gate (and plane) change was due to ‘insufficient water’ on the plane. Go figure.
Never leave your 2 year old alone with a laptop. My son came upstairs and said: “I pushed all of mommy’s buttons”. We knew that couldn’t be good.
It wasn’t. I was able to get about 2/3 of the keys back on, but ended up ordering a replacement keyboard as he actually broke several of the plastic key mounts.
As I outlined in my previous post, I’m using a new 755p. To get my 755p in prime form, there are a bunch of tweaks and programs to install right out of the box.
First, there is some software that comes with the device but isn’t shipped on the CD. It can be downloaded here. Some of the applications do require you to enter your serial number. The software I downloaded was:
As some people have noted (and mypreviouspostssuggest), I’m a little uptight about my mobile phone. I’ve been used a Palm device of some sort since 1998 and am a pretty big fan. I’ve used the Treo 270, 600, and 650 so far, and have had the 650 for a couple years now. However, due to some recent events, I had the opportunity to live in the Windows Mobile world for a while. Here is what happened, and my conclusions.
There have been a reasonable number of people around ’the net’ claiming email bankruptcy. They simply get too much email and have fallen so far behind that they just delete it all and start over.
Well, luckily for me I’m not nearly popular enough to have that issue. However, I’ve created a similar issue for myself.
I checked my Google Reader earlier this week and it listed over 900 unread posts. While I was tempted to simply declare feed bankruptcy, I instead spent much of an evening powering through most of them. In the end, I’m pretty sure I’d have been better off just skipping them. Reading that many posts at once was very draining and I’m pretty sure my comprehension level was low by the end, but I didn’t want to miss anything!
Motorola has lost both their CEO and CTO recently. What is going on over there?
I recently had the privilege to hear Padmasree Warrior speak. She didn’t spend much of her talk on the PR prepared slides but instead had a conversational talk with the audience about the state of mobile technology and how she envisioned things developing. I thought she did a good job answering questions about the iPhone and the carrier dominated market here in the US.
I don’t usually propagate YouTube videos, but I think this one makes a solid point:
In all seriousness, I do think there is room to be concerned. In the first bubble, the big paydays were the IPO. Of course many who did IPO had only a brief success while many others never got there. There were other exits, but the IPO market was a huge propeller.
This time around it seems like there are almost no IPOs, and the major exits are the tech giants. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, EBay, etc. are the main sources of the ‘crazy’ valuations. What is going to happen when these guys slow down their acquisition pace?
Go Illini. After three horrendous seasons the Illinois football team has earned a trip to the Rose Bowl. And with a reasonably young team, and an amazing sophomore and freshmen quarterback/receiver combo, the next few years are looking up as well.
