Negotiator
A bit more catchup
The House
The house is really rounding into shape. As far as I know, there is no finer moving coordinator in the world than my wife Megan Van Fleet, and she has done a masterful job getting us unpacked and sorted as usual. There are still a few odds and ends about, but overall I could not be more thrilled with how it’s turning out.
Moving On Up
What do these things have in common?
- Shopping for a house
- Making an offer on a house
- Having the offer accepted
- Getting financed
- Closing on the house
- Moving in
- Unpacking
Well, they have multiple things in common, but the one I’m thinking of is that I apparently do not consider them blogworthy.
Read the rest of this entry »
NSFW
Wow.
End of an Era
From the department of “no one could care less”, I have switched the software that runs this blog from Mephisto to WordPress. Read the rest of this entry »
A Modern Tale of Tech Support
I recently encountered a good round of good old-fashioned customer service. In this day and age, that’s rare enough, but this story also involves social media and no direct profit motive. I’ve wanted to write about it for quite some time. Read the rest of this entry »
Charlotte Disc Golf
My back injury kept me away from the disc golf course for quite awhile, but since it looks like the cold part of winter here in Charlotte lasts about three weeks (fine by me!), I got to looking at disc golf courses here in Charlotte and whipped this up.
In the interface itself, the links never looked like they were working, so I stopped doing it. I see now that they do work! But I think it came together well! For those of you who like shorter things http://tinyurl.com/clt-discgolf-map is usable.
Seven things you may not know about me
I lost track of everybody who sent this. @vinnie did it via DM, so he gets name checked, but feel free to leave a comment if you can provide evidence that you did it first.
1. I was a DJ in college at KTRU for several years. (I probably scanned that logo.) My favorite story came during my first shift when I satisfied all my playlist requirements during the first hour of my shift, then played Brainfreeze in its entirety for the second hour. I had one caller who claimed to be on their way to their probation hearing prior to returning to jail, but Brainfreeze still put a smile on their face.
2. My three cats are a Volunteer, a Longhorn, and a Tar Heel.
3. I have probably imbibed 100 cases of Cherry Coke Zero this year.
4. My middle name, Alanson (uh-LAN-son), has been in my family for three generations. It is my father’s first name, and his father’s middle name.
5. I have been a part of a volunteer, non-profit organization called CISV since I was 11 years old. Its message is that children are basically the same the world around, but they grow up in different cultures. I haven’t lived in the same city as a chapter since I was in high-school, but I have never stopped volunteering.
6. I am a recovering video game “addict”. I think Megan may hate World Of Warcraft more than anything in the entire world. I probably logged thousands of hours on Super Smash Brothers for the N64. I once won a game of NCAA Basketball on the SNES 132-0 without using the reset button. I found every exit on Super Mario World for each of the three saved game slots. I am pretty sure I spent my entire freshman year playing Diablo and reading comic books.
7. If I were to review my resume for college application at this point in my life, I doubt that I could remember 50% of the things on it, even though I know I must have done them.
Next up:
What’s Now In Rails: IDE
What does your environment look like these days? Still using TextMate or have you moved on to something better?
There’s TextMate…
I still use TextMate. It still has a lot to offer, and to me, it’s the most natural environment. Here are the additional bundles that I have as a part of my installation.
GetBundles
Available from SVN here, GetBundles is your one-stop shop for getting these bundles and more. Check it out, absolutely.
Ack in TextMate
(Also interesting is the rak gem for Ruby, if you are into the command line.)
Git
Use this to help you use git while you get used to it. The command line is so powerful, you’ll probably have to end up learning to use it there, but in the meantime, it doesn’t hurt to have some simple things at your fingertips.
GitHub
This is basically just a glorified blame right now, but I anticipate that I will be able to use it to quickly load and comment publicly on certain commits.
rSpec and Cucumber
These are my friends for testing. I’ll be using that material for a talk (or lengthier blog post) soon.
and everything else.
There are a lot of people trying out things like emacs and vim again. What’s old is new again! If either of these are your favorite editor, I’m sure you can poke around and find some good resources.