So, I started playing around more with Ruby on Rails (RoR) recently. I’m seriously impressed. There’s an excellent tutorial available that walks you through making a todo list application via rails.
I’ve done a fair amount of CGI programming in Python. And a good bit of Java servlet application programming. Neither feels as natural as RoR. I feel like once I actually have a better handle on both the Ruby language itself, and the Rails framework, I’ll be able to pump out database-supported web applications quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
Now two recent posts have been lost to the ether. The first one, a few days ago about motorcycling, I clicked “publish” and got a server error. When I clicked “back” the form field was empty.
Just now, I had a long, long talk about bicycling. I took a quick break to check email before posting because I wanted to give a moment to see if I really wanted to be that incendiary. I clicked on a link in an email, but instead of opening up a new browser window (which it seems like it ALWAYS did in the past), it used the active window — with my post in it. I clicked back to, again, an empty form field. This time, I had a “Recover post” option which I clicked and got back about the first third of my post. I’ll save what was recovered as a draft. But there went over an hour of prose creation. *poof* Damn, that’s frustrating.
(with apologies to Wallace & Gromit for the title.)
Today was my birthday, though I pretty much used the whole weekend to celebrate.
Yesterday, I borrowed a motorcycle from a friend of a friend (how cool is that!?!) and went for a motorcycle ride with about 8 others in a motley collection of motorcycles (only 2 were even from the same manufacturer!). We headed south from Altoona along twisty back roads and found ourselves (with a little bit of searching) at the Road Kill Café. Oh boy was that a treat. And easy on the wallet to boot! All told (including an unintentional detour into Maryland, we figure we did approximately 170 miles or so.
I always get a lot of spam attempts. I assume everyone does. But lately, it’s been insane. In my current mail log (which begins on April 10 at 4:00 AM) I have all sorts of entries like:
`I always get a lot of spam attempts. I assume everyone does. But lately, it’s been insane. In my current mail log (which begins on April 10 at 4:00 AM) I have all sorts of entries like:
We had an odd outage recently. It started last night, and continued through today. I had figured it was just another random network outage granted us by our benevolent cable company. I figured they were aware of it and working on it. But as it stretched on toward 24 hours, I thought I should at least call and check on it with them. I was surprised and worried when they said “No, no known problems in that area.” and “Yeah, I can ping your cable modem just fine.” So, I started looking into it on my end — something I probably should have done to start with. It’s just a good general rule that it’s not my stuff that’s broken. Only this time, the rule failed. I still don’t quite know what was up. Either the linksys WAP switch/router was messed, or the vonage voip box was messed. What was odd was that I could get to the web interface of both of the and they both reported fine. But there was a red light on the “WAN” connection on the linksys. I’d been wanting to rearrange the network anyway, so I moved the voip box from between the cable modem and the linksys to hanging off the linksys as a peer of the other items in my network. We’ll see if it degrades phone quality much.
A website entirely unrelated to the content of this blog entry provoked the entry. I cracked up at this guy’s “camtoons”, and thought that I really needed to share ’em. I guess I’ll add them to funny in my wiki too. But the way I found that guy’s camtoons was from his page where he had linked to a picture of his motorcycle. You see, I’ve been lusting after a new motorcycle since… well, pretty much since I sold my previous motorcycle in the move to Altoona.
I bought it because I was sure I would love it. A Bluetooth headset so I could use my cell phone hands free, and without wires. Only I pretty much never use it. It’s off, or inaccessible, or I’ve got to pair it again, or… it’s always something. And given the choice between that, and some cold, hard cash in my paypal account… I’m going for the dough.
So, treat yourself to a Bluetooth headset. Buy mine!
Through another randomish web walk, I came upon someone’s home page that had various Gay & Lesbian support banners, and included a(n incorrect) link to “The Equality Project”. Seeing that, I thought that gay pride was under-represented on my web page. I was looking for a rainbow icon, and a reasonable place to link it to when I came across the “Homo Depot”. Just the name cracked me up and they have lots of interesting fridge magnets, buttons etc. OK, and leather, and all sorts of other things.
I was wandering through Netflix (not quite as fun as wandering through a “real” movie store, but much cheaper!), and I came across The Experiment which I added to my queue. I was interested to read one reviewer say that it was clearly based on the Stanford Prison Experiment which a quick google search turned up for me.
I enjoy psychology, even though I did rather poorly in it in college. And I think that the Stanford Prison Experiment is fascinating. Of course, one thing in particular stands out for me:
Yay! Spring visited Altoona today. I don’t know how long it will last, but today was glorious. It got up to close to 70. It was sunny. The snow is gone from all but the highest and shadiest parts of the area.
I went for my first “real” bike ride of the season today (on the road bike, not the bike in the picture). It was good to get out. I went through town, out (and up!) past the “Horseshoe Curve National Historic Landmark”, through a cute little town called “Coupon” along skyline drive (which feels heretical to say because it’s not the Skyline Drive), and back down Juniata Gap Rd. Juniata Gap is steep there, and I managed to exceed my personal bicycle speed limit on the way down. I got up to 55.9 MPH! That’s a blast, I tell you, but a little freaky too. All told, the ride was a little under 25 miles. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I set out. Rides like that are just the best. What easy livin’ I have that affords me such pleasures. 😉
