Jared’s Blog

A week or so ago, I noticed the power cord for my laptop was becoming increasingly sensitive. If it wasn’t at just the right angle, it wouldn’t charge. Knowing my laptop was out of warranty (I thought it was 90 days, but I guess it is a full year) and with a replacement costing $80, I dealt with it. Sunday, I plugged in the adapter and went back to working on my desktop. I looked over an noticed it wasn’t charging. I reached for the cord to try and fiddle with it to get the magic angle again and immediately became alarmed at how hot it had become. I quickly unplugged it from the laptop and the wall as to not start a fire or damage the laptop. After I did this, I noticed there was a small hole in the plastic coating of the cord and it had partially melted.

Rick, Kristi, and I were planning on going to see Superbad (so hilarious!) at the mall and so we left a little early to stop by the Apple store. Once there, I was informed by an employee that I needed to make an appointment to see someone at the Genius Bar and that their next appointment was right in the middle of our movie time. The nice thing is you can schedule appointments online at any time. I got one set up for 1:30 the following day at the Apple store a few miles from work.

At work the next day, my laptop lasted for about an hour before the battery was pretty much drained, so I was forced to use my old Linux desktop machine. Man is it slow compared to my Macbook Pro. After spending about 2 hours just getting the thing updated to where I could start programming, I tried to get some work done. The results were less than amazing to say the least.

I never realized how much more efficient I am on my Mac. I have to give credit to the excellent text editor, Textmate. I felt crippled without it. All it’s little bundles and keyboard shortcuts add up not only a much more enjoyable programming experience, but a more productive one as well.

As 1:30 rolled around, I took my seat at the Genius Bar. The store was packed and the Genius Bar was obviously behind schedule as I sat around for a good 15 minutes before anyone called my name. Eventually, a Genius, Dave, came over and called my name. He explained that he’d seen the melting power cords before. The cause seems to be when the cord gets bent at an extreme angle and breaks a small wire inside the cord. After some trouble pulling up my info (it was due to the purchase being made under my boss’s name), he replaced the adapter without any further questions. I thanked Dave for his help and was on my way back to being an efficient, Mac loving, web developer for the rest of the day.

Owning a pet comes with many responsibilities as most people are aware. It’s really not too different from having children as you are responsible for the well being of another life. That said, I am appalled at the irresponsibility of some when it comes to caring for their pets.

Last weekend, I agreed to dog-sit for Hank and Laura, my former roommates. I love seeing Mishka and Sullivan (the feeling is definitely mutual) and therefore I will never turn down a chance to take care of them. We’ll call this the responsible example.

Now for the irresponsible. The reason I was dog-sitting to being with was because there was a wedding. Some other friends who shall remain nameless, are also dog owners, and were attending the same wedding called me roughly four hours before the wedding to tell me (not ask me) that they would be dropping their dog off at Hank and Laura’s house so that I could watch him for the night.

Now, it’s not that I mind taking care of an extra dog. He’s well behaved and has been socialized with Sullivan and Mishka many times before. It’s fair to say I actually like the dog quite a bit. Had I received even a day’s notice, I wouldn’t even be writing this right now. Instead, they somehow forgot they owned a dog last weekend and took advantage of our friendship and the situation. This act will not easily be forgiven. In fact, I’ve decided this couple will never receive another favor from me again.

I first learned of the Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) through the Rails Pragmatic Studio that I took last December. I thought it would be a good place to pick up some new ideas and skills once I got more comfortable with Ruby and Rails. Soon afterward, I began working with James, who regularly attended the monthly meetings. There were many times I would hear “you would fit in well with the guys at RUM” or “some of the guys at the last RUM meeting were talking about that.”  I always told myself that I should check it out, but I’d always forget about when the meeting was or I’d have something else going on that night.

Well, last month I finally decided I was going to make it to the meeting no matter what and I’m glad I went. I found the new location, the Acadia Cafe in downtown (or is it uptown?), with relative ease and took a seat in the auditorium style room. I probably should’ve sat closer to the middle of the room but the anti-social in me took over and made sat in the back of the room.

As the first presentation began, I thought to myself how weird and nerdy the casual cafe goer would think we were. There’s a bunch of people all staring at laptops and talking about writing code. Only the LAN parties we used to hold back in college rivaled the dork level in that room. Anyway, the first presentation immediately grabbed my attention. I had seen HAML before and didn’t think much of it. However, it’s CSS equivalent, SASS, was completely new to me and I think I had a little nerdgasm right there in my seat. Consequently, I haven’t done anything with it since, but I no doubt will.

The next presentation was on telecommuting/telecomputing. It was actually more of a discussion on the pros and cons. I’m a big fan of working from home and in my situation, I find there are little cons. Our other developer telecommutes 100% of the time, so my contact with him is through email and IM anyway. When I’m in the office, I usually put headphones on, and program away on my laptop; a task I can easily do anywhere there is an Internet connection. I also find that when I work from home, I am more productive. I can just put some loud music on, get buried on my project, and focus for long periods of time without being interrupted. A lot of the cons discussed in the meeting centered around project-specific metrics such as number of developers, distance of developers from each other, and language/locale difficulties. None of these are problems for me, so I only gave it half my attention.

The final two presentations were demos of projects. The first, FanChatter.com, was kind of cool, but I don’t think it’s anything I would use. The other, Lean-To.com, a project management app, was also of little interest to me.

As I said, I was relatively anti-social during most of the night, but I did end up talking to one gentleman in between presentations. Dave was just getting started with Rails and was having trouble getting his database data into his view pages. Drawing on my TA experiences, I tried to instruct him as best I could, but I have a feeling a lot was lost in translation. However, I gave him my card and invited him to email me if he had any questions. Maybe he did get it, because I haven’t heard from him yet.

I’m looking forward to the next meeting and whatever people come up with to present. The meetings are open to presentations by anyone, so maybe I can demo The Honeymoon once we finish it.

I was startled awake moments ago by the vibration of my cell phone in my pocket. I must’ve dozed off watching TV after eating dinner. It was my Dad checking to make sure I was OK. He said, “turn on the news.” To my amazement, I learned that 35W had collapsed over the Mississippi River!

Now the scary part. I drive over that bridge every day on my way too and from work. Most days, I leave work between 5 - 5:30PM and that would likely put me directly on that bridge at 6:05PM when it collapsed. Luckily, today I was working from home and was not out on the road.

I have a feeling that the reason the bridge collapsed was due to the construction that was happening on it. There have been workers on the bridge for several weeks. Almost every day I drove over it, there had been jack hammers there and yesterday it looked as if they were ready to start laying fresh concrete back down over it soon.

I have just heard on MSNBC that there has been 1 fatality. This is truly tragic. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to a tragedy of this magnitude.

My last post contained a little foreshadowing about the content of this post. I figured I had a lot to say about Warped Tour and it was too much to cram into one post; especially for the negative content. Sorry to say, but I’m still on the rant. It’s really sad that the overwhelming feeling I got from Warped this year was that I was being sold to. Maybe I’m just getting older and wiser.

Anyway, the next thing I ran into at Warped was the religious zealots. You can count on them showing up every year. For some reason, you only ever see them inside the halls of the Metrodome. I think they’re afraid if they go outside, they’ll have to actually listen to the artists that are there. Their tactics are always the same. They walk up to you and say something like “Do you want to hear something that will change your life?” Smoothly, they slip you a book with catchy titles like “The Truth, You, and Your Future.” To those people, let me clue you in on something: while Warped Tour was on Sunday, no one goes to Warped Tour to find God! If they did, they’d be in church instead. So leave the kids alone and go hole yourself up in some compound in Texas.

I also take exception to the whole ticket system for food. First of all, you can’t bring any food in save for a single open bottle of water. When the majority of people are jumping around all day expending energy, it’s a safe  bet they’re going to need to eat. Apparently punks only like to eat fried junk food because that’s the only thing you can buy. Hamburgers, corn dogs, brats, fried cheese curds, nachos, french fries, gyros, and ice cream are the only things on the menu. When you do decide to give in, you can only buy blocks of 10 tickets for $5 each. It usually works out though because everything is so over-priced, you’d have a hard time spending less than that. For instance, a 20 oz bottle of Gatorade is 8 tickets: the equivalent of $4! Bottled water, 6 tickets ($3). A gyro sandwich, 14 tickets ($7). To top it off, you almost never use up all your tickets so end up wasting that money.  Fortunately, the Metrodome is open, so you can use the bathrooms and water fountains for free water.

This past weekend, I attended the Warped Tour as it rolled through Minneapolis. This won’t be a show review, rather a rant on the rampant commercialism I was witness to.

Up until a few weeks ago, I didn’t really care if I made the Warped Tour which has practically become a summer tradition for me. I took a second look at the band list, and Burns decided he wouldn’t mind going. I figured it would be worth my money to go. $37, I had a ticket. Of course this is after Ticketmaster tacks on $7 in fees per ticket. It kills me to pay those fees every time. I understand Ticketmaster is a business just like any other and requires money to opperate, but somehow a 25% fee seems excessive.

Now as Burns, Rodney (Andy’s step-brother), and I show up to wait in line for Will Call (it would’ve cost me another $11 to ship the tickets to my house as I ordered them a week before the show) I heard some music. At first I thought it was a soundcheck, but as we came around the bend and down the slope, there was a small tent set up with a band playing to the line-waiters. This was new. There wasn’t much else to do besides watch the “tent bands” in our hour wait for the gates to open.

As I mentioned previously, the first band was already playing when we got there and they didn’t sound like anything special. There’s a reason they were playing in a tent to the line instead of on one of the stages inside and the reason isn’t because they’re undiscovered. Of course they had one of their buddies walking around and selling their CD for $5. Far more annoying, however, were what I call the “groupie bitches.” The whole time the band, their name was Allura by the way, were playing, they were bouncing up and down, cheering, and snapping pictures. The groupie bitches also walked over and told us we should buy that band’s CD which kicked off the following exchange:

Jared: Which one of the band members is your boyfriend?

Groupie Bitch 1: He’s not my boyfriend! We flew here all the way from Southern California. (As if it was the most wonderful far away paradise in the world)

Groupie Bitch 2: Do you want to see our tickets?

J: I don’t doubt you flew here. I’m not going to buy your boyfriend’s CD so you can go hawk your shit somewhere else.

GB 1 & 2 (with a look of disbelief while walking away and giving me the finger): Hrmpf!

Rodney and Andy thought it was hilarious as did I. I guess I’ve seen one too many ads with pretty girls in them trying to sell stuff they’d never be into themselves. I’ve got a few more rants to go on about crazy religious people and big ass sunglasses, but I’ll save those for another post (possibly later today). I also took a few pics that I’ll post when I get around to processing them.