Off-Topic

Off-topic: Mending fences (literally)

The storm this past week did some pretty crazy damage in my neighborhood. Lots of trees and fences down all over the place.

Just to prove that I am actually a nice guy please enjoy this photo of me repairing the part of my neighbors fence that didn't fall over entirely.

And, yes, it was pouring at the time. Had I just waited a few hours I could have fixed it in the sunshine. Meanwhile, after the fence fixing we went to Corte Madera and ran into celebrity-chef Tyler Florence who is opening a place in Mill Valley and … Read more

"Rails is a Ghetto" -- a ranting exit from the Ruby and Rails Community

I know it's only January 1st, but Zed Shaw, creator of Mongrel, a hugely popular library and web server for Rails has posted the rant of the year already.

This is that rant. It is part of my grand exit strategy from the Ruby and Rails community. I don't want to be a "Ruby guy" anymore, and will probably start getting into more Python, Factor, and Lua in the coming months. I've got about three or four more projects in the works that will use all of those and not much Ruby planned.

This rant … Read more

Open Season Episode 8 - Anger and Coffee

Just when you thought that content couldn't get any more superfluous we are back with a new episode of Open Season, where me, Matt Asay and Ashlee Vance talk smack about pretty much everything while delivering the occasional insight.

I had a rough morning the day we recorded so please forgive my rage. Ashlee was sick and Matt wanted to watch Soccer. I miss my blog-hater already.

Open Season Episode 8

Leopard getting buggier as time goes on?

Hesitant as I am to incite the world of Apple fanboys, I have to say that my Leopard install seems to be getting worse. Literally every application crashes whenever it feels the urge and applications like Photoshop have basically become useless. Matt Asay had been hassling me that I was the only one then he had to fly back from London with a dead battery when his MacBook Pro didn't go to sleep.

Yes, I have run all the updates and yes, I have fixed all the permissions. There is something really weird going on.

In the last 3 … Read more

My first "you are an idiot for that blog post" phone call!

After an especially difficult morning, I was welcomed to the office with a delightful voicemail from my new pal Jon Prall. Jon took offense to the fact that I think that MS Exchange should die and that Google is taking over the planet. Being that it was my first experience with this blog bearing human communication I did the obvious thing and called him back. At first he didn't want to tell me who it was until I said that I don't deal with anonymous comments (plus I had his phone number :>)

Jon was concerned that I, … Read more

The Register proves journalism still alive with Wikipedia story

Earlier this week I went to lunch with Ashlee and Cade from The Register and they were telling me about this giant story that had been in process for weeks. The story "Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain" is a wild-ride of Wikipedia editing, stock-shorting and false identities that is more like a bad Sandra Bullock movie than it is Web 2.0, but that's not my point.

My point is that for all the naysayers who say that journalism is dying thanks to blogs and social media there is still clearly room for real … Read more

Video music lessons at Show Me How To Play

UK site Show me how to play.com provides you video clips of individual instrumentation for each part of a song. So far the lesson selection is limited (no Black Sabbath?) but there is something interesting here in terms of being able to upload your own clips and lessons as the community builds.

Dare I say that I think a social network for this site would be cool?

Link via Lifehacker

Time for public humiliation: If I get one more resume that I have to unsubscribe to I will publish your names

I wrote awhile back about this cursed trend of spamming your resume. I got five of these today and guess what? Not only am I not going to hire you but I am going to start publishing your names as people who are clearly unable to manage their careers so that they have to rely on SPAM tactics to annoy hiring companies.

And guess what morons? I am not the hiring manager for every job at my company. So, the least you can do is research it and spam the right person.

By the way, all of this resume spam … Read more

Coining a term: SaaS-turbation

As I parsed through the multitude of blog postings about Live Documents, a service that is not yet live, doesn't offer screenshots and no one seems to have actually seen, I started to think we all got duped into writing about it. Admittedly, it was a slow news week but when Dan Farber doesn't have an account something is screwy.

I started to ponder if all of these pseudo-applications that are just online versions of not great desktop applications are just software onanism.

Does the world need an online version of MS Office 2007, a product that has … Read more