jrmehle.com

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.

Today, I’m supposed to be filled with patriotism. Instead, today only means I get a day off without having to take vacation. How can I be proud to live in America when America has so much wrong with it?

Recently, I saw Michael Moore’s new movie, Sicko. A scathing expose of the health care system in America. Many people don’t like Moore because of the way he spins information to tell his stories. Frankly, I tend to agree with most of what he says, so I look past it. This time around Moore spent relatively little time on camera and instead let a small group of people tell their stories. The message was clear, the health care system is broken. People who are sick aren’t getting the care they need to be well or even stay alive.

The movie hit very close to home 2 days after I watched it. We do not have health insurance at TheHoneymoon because it simply was never before needed at the company. As result, my coworker and I both are on continued COBRA coverage. My coworker’s former employer decided to close the business and thus ending my coworker’s insurance policy. She was told by one representative at the insurance company that her coverage would continue until the end of the month only to find out the next week that she was without any coverage at all. She was left with $700 in prescriptions to pay for. I watched her, tears streaming down her face, call the pharmacy asking them if she could pay for her prescriptions 1 week at a time. Sadly, stories like this are all too common.

We are fighting an undeclared war against an intangible opponent, terrorism. The deaths of soldiers long ago exceeded the number who lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks. President Bush insists that sending more troops to their death is the answer. Not to mention all the innocent journalists and civilians who get caught up in the battles.

We have a president who thinks he can do whatever he wishes. When he gets into legal trouble, he just changes the law or makes himself exempt. Most recently, he commuted the sentence of a convicted man because he thought it was “too harsh.” That’s right, Mr. Bush. Rich white lawyer friends of yours should never have to go to that awful place called prison. They can pay a fine and go on probation and that’s good enough. Oh please! Of course I speak of the Scooter Libby case which has now become another scandal. One of many in the past 8 years.

Yesterday, I read a striking story on Digg about a man who was moving. This man, a Holocaust survivor, was moving back to Germany because “…I’ve seen this before.” As a boy, the man had watched Hitler’s government commit atrocity after atrocity and no one did anything about it. The parallels between the Bush administration and Hitler’s government were too much. The man felt he was too old to do anything to stop it and so he was moving out of Bush’s grasp of power.

Millions of Americans will be drinking, BBQing, and watching fireworks today. I ask again, what is it they are celebrating?

Weekends are usually something I look forward to. I can spend my time however I wish without any planning involved. Well, this weekend just decided it was going to be that nice.

On Friday night, I was to head over to my parent’s house after work so that we could celebrate my sister, Hannah’s, birthday. After getting off work, I called them to make sure things were still going on as planned. I was told that they had to go pick up a cake, but that they’d be back shortly. I figured with the time it’d take me to drive, they’d beat me there without a problem.

Driving there in rush hour traffic took about twice as long as I expected (around an hour). In that time, I managed to get a stomach ache that wouldn’t go away. Finally, when I did show up, no one was home. I let myself in and hopped on my laptop to kill some time. Fifteen minutes went by, then 20, then half an hour. If not for WoW, I probably would’ve left. Mom and I chatted for a bit, I wished my sister a happy birthday, and then headed home for the night.

Why? I had (stupidly?) agreed to drive Hank and Laura to the airport. At 5AM! Maybe I’m just a nice guy. Maybe it was because I was thinking I’d only be up for a short while and then I could go back to bed. Whatever it was, I wasn’t thinking the same thing at 4:30 on Saturday morning when my alarm went off. By the time I was on my way home, I had convinced myself that the only way I was going to cure my bad mood was to get some McDonalds breakfast. I’m never up early enough to get it, so might as well enjoy the grease-bomb stuck between two English muffins they call a Sausage Egg McMuffin.

Really, the rest of the day was uneventful. Painfully uneventful. My roommates were both gone for the day (which means their girlfriends were also gone). So, the computer kept me company for the afternoon, evening, and night. Though, I seem to remember it doing a much better job in days past.

And then I get the call. It’s my boss, Scott. He, the other boss, Neal, and their families have had a cruise planned for a few months now so I figured he was down at the office and wanted to get in touch one last time before they left on Monday. Boy was I wrong. As it turns out, the company we process credit cards through made some changes which they neglected to notify us of. As a result, we weren’t processing any cards, which for us, is like Defcon level 5.

For about 2 hours on Saturday night, I was pouring over code, log files, and email trying to figure out what went wrong. Everything I was seeing told me we weren’t able to connect to the credit card processing server, so I merely was able to wait until they brought the server back up. I figured we wouldn’t do much after 10 on a Saturday and figured the server would probably be back up by morning. What we later discovered was that they had changed their server’s URL and didn’t tell us. Thanks to Jeff’s keen sense, things were running before I even woke up on Sunday.

Sunday really wasn’t that bad of a day. If anything, it was just as boring as Saturday. However, it was quite windy. That dashed any hopes of getting a frisbee golf game in. As I later heard, it was much more serious for others. Mankato saw gusts over 60 mph. A forest fire started and spread rapidly in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. And an oak tree fell through 3 rooms of my boss, Scott’s, house (The picture above is something I found online, it’s not my boss’ real house)! How do you like that 2 days before you go on vacation? Your online business stops processing all transactions for a day and then a tree busts through half your house. I can’t imagine how Scott and his family must be feeling. I do know they left for their cruise, so something must’ve worked out.
Murphy and his law were definitely in full effect this weekend and hopefully he got his fill so he can leave me alone now.

Friday, I went to bed and there was only a couple inches of snow on the ground. By the time this weekend blizzard passed, eight or ten inches of new snow covered everything. It’s the most snow I can remember getting in recent years.

Then today, I get to work and open my email to find our lead developer is leaving for another job in a little more than 2 weeks. I think everyone in the company was a little surprised. Granted, he wasn’t a true employee (only on a long term contract basis), but we still thought he enjoyed things enough to stick around. I kind of thought that we would be bringing him on as a full time employee as the company matured. Maybe he just got sick of waiting around.

Frankly, I’m scared. The only other dev (also on a contract) was brought to us by the guy who is leaving. It’s not that James and I don’t get along or work well together because I think we do. The problem is, I think I saw him coming to us as sort of a “favor” to Jeff. I know there was some dispute over wages prior to James’ contract signing, and I have a feeling Jeff sort of talked him into the job. Now that Jeff is abandoning ship, I don’t see James sticking around for long. His only reason for being loyal is now on it’s way out the door.

That leaves me; alone. Now, I’m sure Scott will be gearing up to hire a new developer soon and hopefully that person can be as good of a programmer and mentor as Jeff is. I just have this feeling that it’s not going to be an easy road the next couple of months. It’s kind of like that feeling you get when someone breaks up with you and you never knew there was a relationship problem (it’s happened to me twice).

And on a small side note, I’ve bought a domain name and hosting from GoDaddy. My hope is to get everything on Rails. I’ve yet to choose between Typo and Mephisto for a blogging engine, but if last night is any indicator, I’ll be going with Mephisto. I spent a good 3 hours trying to get Typo installed on my new host, and it didn’t go very smooth. In time, I also hope to rewrite the other portions of my site in Rails. And lastly, because I now own my own domain, the address will be changing. What I plan to do is point this domain at my new host or set up a redirect until my time runs out with my former host. Regardless, jrmehle.homelinux.net will become jrmehle.com.

As I alluded to last week, my Macbook Pro came and it is wonderful. Like I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’m worse than an 8 year old on Christmas Eve when I’m waiting for new computer gear to arrive. Most of my morning at work consisted of me doing a task, then refreshing the tracking page to see if my MBP had been delivered yet. Finally, about 2 in the afternoon it showed up.

Now that I’ve had the chance to make my “the switch,” I decided to weigh in with my thoughts so far. Overall, it’s good. Very good! I will admit, I’m by far not your typical person who would switch from Windows to Mac. The primary reason for wanting a Mac was for virtualization. It’s the only piece of hardware that can (legally) run OS X, Windows, and Linux all at the same time; A web developers dream.

That dream doesn’t come true out of the box though. First you need to get Parallels, the app that does the virtualization. With it, I was able to get Windows XP (and Vista — just because I haven’t spent much time with it) installed and running in virtual sessions. Ubuntu wasn’t so easy though. I thought I got it installed a few times, but it would never boot right (it hung or would continuously reboot) or the install would fail before I even got to that point. I decided that was OK because we aren’t as quite concerned about our app looking good in Linux.

Being the good little Ruby on Rails developer I am, I decided to check out TextMate. My initial reaction was “that’s it?” I later learned that TextMate’s killer feature (besides being a lightweight text editor with synatx highlighting and project management) is it’s keyboard shortcuts. They’re modules of their own. That means, each language has it’s own set of shortcuts. Until I learn them, I’ll be sticking to RadRails.

Installing Ruby on Rails itself, however, has been quite the challenge. I followed the HiveLogic guide which was recommended by just about everyone and it got me going for the most part. I didn’t follow the pieces on installing LightTPD or the FCGI stuff because I’m using Mongrel and Webrick. Over the weekend I thought that was the problem, but I figured out today that part of my problem was not having subversion installed. Now, my problem is that Rails drops it’s MySQL connection every few requests. I’ve narrowed it down to Ruby’s MySQL bindings, but haven’t been able to get it all playing nice yet.

Overall, working with a Mac is pretty much working on a PC (at least for what I do) with a little better interface and some nice bells and whistles. It’s a pretty damn slick piece of hardware to show off as well! A PC just doesn’t provoke the same response. I can see where the “it just works” phrase comes from, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the case for me. I’m still a little ways away from my dream development environment, but after spending some time with it, I’ll get everything singing in unison.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the best thing about my new Mac yesterday. It came with double the memory and 50% more hard drive than I ordered it with. Figure this one out. The order page said it had 512MB of memory and an 80GB hard drive. The packing slip confirmed this. The little sticker under the battery even has those same numbers. But shortly after pulling my little gem out of it’s box, I noticed it was sporting 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive. I don’t mind one bit because it would’ve cost the company another $100 for the upgrade. The only problem is the 2GB of additional RAM we ordered from a 3rd party already showed up. That means it’s going to cost us a 15% restocking fee to send back the extra RAM.