Registered for RailsConf 08
Justin and I registered for RailsConf just the other day. I’m excited of course. Last year was a great time. I learned a ton… I hadn’t even been using Ruby/Rails that much before then. So I think this year I’ll get even more out of it. And having another team member along with me means we can double the sessions—last year I was often disappointed that I had to choose between two equally decent sounding talks.
I again signed up for the first day of tutorials this year. Last year I ended up sleeping on a bench in O’Hare and therefore missed my first tutorial. I’m hoping on a better flying experience this year.
I picked: Justin picked:4 months, today, until the conf…
gem environment 1
This is another one of those things I learned way too late:
$ gem environment... tells you a bunch of things about your environment. Including where your gems are installed. Handy! It’s the little things like this that can make one so much more productive.
The trouble with services 5
I’ve been evaluating services from 37signals recently including Basecamp and Highrise. We’ve been long overdue for an upgrade to our internal job and contact management systems and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try what many people say are some great apps.
So far, I’ve been generally happy. I still have hurdles to get over in my mind such as having to pay each and every month, not having my data under my own control, and not being able to instantly add whatever feature we want. But in general, I’ve been pleased.
But at this moment, I can’t seem to get to any 37signals product. Perhaps they’re having some kind of technical trouble. I’ve tried navigating to their services from several points on the interwebs and: nothing.
And so, I’m confronted by the other reality of hosted services: Outages are out of my control. Which, of course, has both benefits and disadvantages.
- Benefit: I’m not running around like mad trying to get Basecamp up and running right now.
- Disadvantage: I’m powerless to do anything.
Even if I was using a home-built, in-house app, somewhere down the line someone else is still responsible. For the datacenter, for the bandwidth, for the hardware, etc. And so I think that the benefit of not being the one up shits creek without a paddle outweighs the disadvantage of having to sit on my thumbs right now.
But, it’s still frustrating as hell.
Philadelphia not very wired
How sad it is indeed to not see Philadelphia make the top 10 or even top 30 most wired cities according to Forbes.
When Philadelphia unveiled its Wireless Philadelphia plan so many years ago I was thrilled. I was proud to be a resident and excited to be a business owner in the Philadelphia area. But the project has been dogged by problems and delays. And I’ve yet to be able to get wireless internet at my own house and only rarely been able to obtain it in a few locations even in the downtown area.
Please, Philly, get your act together, get this network built out and let’s all start enjoying the benefits of ubiquitous wireless internet access.
PS: What marketing asshole high on the thought of increased ad-impressions decided to split this list into 30 separate pages in a “slideshow” fashion. Give me a break.
