Cooperstown
Last year, right after the Red Sox had won the World Series, I was lucky enough to go to the Baseball Hall of Fame. My best friend and I went and came home to two very upset kids, our sons. So a few months ago, A asked me if I wanted to go back again, this time with the boys.
Duh?! 
Leaving tomorrow am with Aidan to go pick up A's son D, going up to Albany, picking A up at the airport, and driving out to Cooperstown. We're gonna spend a few hours walking around town, maybe pick up some souvenirs, grab a bite to eat while talking about baseball the whole time, and then head back to the hotel and let the boys swim for a while before crashing. We're going to go over to the Hall first thing Sunday and spend the day, be back Sunday evening sometime. Gotta love a chance to hang out with your buddy, your kid, and talk baseball for two days
Cool Tech Stuff
Okay. I'm sure that most of you have gotten this call, for those of us who do this for a living, probably weekly.
"Hi honey, it's <insert relative's name>. I'm having a problem with my computer. There's an error"
You sigh to yourself and say, "Okay, what does it say?"
"It's just an okay button. Do I push it, it says I should if I want to buy something"
or
"My printers not working, why not?"
"Well, I'm in Jersey, and you're not, so it's not like I can look out my window and see"
"There's a flashing light, does that tell you anything?"
I think you get the point. I'm all for my family asking for help, I don't mind at all, but it's REALLY hard to diagnose things when I can't see their screens.
Well, thank my boss, who found a really good app. And please consider buying the whole thing, it always helps developers, but they do have a free app version :) It's called LogMeIn (it's Log Me In) and what it does is allow you do download a small application onto a computer, and you can log into their website, and 'see' what they do. I used it the other day and it's really cool. This way, when Aunt Gertrude calls you and asks you to help them with their computer (which is probably older than your kids), you can log into the website and help them easily and probably a LOT faster.
I'm going to spend my holiday vacation at my parents installing it on their computer, my aunt's and probably my bro too.
The other little doodad I found is a Twitter app. It's called OutTwit and it allows you to update Twitter from Outlook. Just type, hit enter and boom. Don't have to open a browser or go to Facebook because come on, you already spend enough time in there as it is.
Funny for the Day: Get a Mac
Okay, I'm not as rabid as some, but I definitely prefer to use a Mac for almost everything. To that end, to add to your morning, go here - http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/
Entirely too funny, especially the one about free pizza.
Truthfully, PC makes these commercials, but Mac being such a foil for him, makes him so much funnier.
Techie Post: Google Chrome
As if there weren't enough out there to play with, Google comes out with a browser of their own. Google Chrome was release today and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I'll have to play with it some more, but I have noticed several things so far:
- it's Fast
- it's open source
- it imported EVERYTHING from Firefox, including my passwords which is a little scary
- I'm writing this post using it right now.
Techie Post:Random Geekery
Yeah, I'm not sure if that's a word either, but truthfully, I couldn't care
A friend sent this to me, and it took me a sec to get it:
2 steps forward, and randInt(1,3) steps back
Techie post – Redmine install on Ubuntu
I am trying to put that in the title of my posts so my honey doesn't bother reading it
I'm making attempts to branch out in our infrastructure by using different technologies. Right now, almost everything is Microsoft using SQL Server and C#/.NET. Not that I'm totally against MS, far from it - IF you're willing to spend the money. I'd like to start saving some, and I needed a bug tracker, and I like the way Ruby and Rails look, so I chose Redmine.
this walkthru over at MartinLanner.com is very good if you're going to Ubuntu, which we decided on as a linux server platform. The server guy and I are familiar with it, as is the VP of IT (man, just make the guy CIO, save me some keystrokes!).
Now all I have to do is figure out how to set up LDAP and we can all log in! I can, and any id's I create can, I just want to get it so anyone in our Active Directory can without having ANOTHER id and password.
Excel help – separating name into two columns
I had a need to take one column with a persons name and separate it out into a first name and a last name column. Rather than cut and paste everything, I googled for a formula and after about 15 min, found it:
http://www.bluemoosetech.com/microsoft-excel-functions.php?jid=32&title=Separating%20First%20and%20Last%20Names%20in%20Microsoft%20Excel
hope it helps anyone who is looking for it.
Hello World
Okay, so I got started with Ruby tonight. I went out on saturday and bought a book on it, and decided to dig in. As a developer, you can't really say you've attempted a language until you've built your first Hello World application.
It's official, I am a Ruby on Rails (ROR) Newbie. I built it on the new mac machine I got my from work and after a problem with a file inconsistency:
MissingSourceFile in SayController#hello
no such file to load—sqlite3
I googled around a bit and found the answer (http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/msg/366ae75593ed8b46). It's amazing what you can find
Okay, so what does this all prove? That I'm almost 40, I can learn new things, and it's past my bedtime.
Goodnight Mr. & Mrs. Internet.
Few new things
First and foremost, I'm writing this post on a Mac Mini. I've been a fan since my roommate in college got a computer from his dad and it had this thing in it that he paid an extra 150$ for. "Dude, it's too expensive and no one's going to produce stuff for it"
Well, it was a CD-rom, and he's never let me live it down. This was 93. It's 15 years later and I've had a few Macs here and there, but this one's probably the slickest. Granted, it's a much better OS and the graphics and hardware have come a long way, but after downloading a VPN client to connect to my work network and installing a few programs, I'm running perfectly.
Leads me to my next new thing - Ruby on Rails. Yeah, it's a buzzword language, and I'm jumping on the bandwagon, but I've been looking for a lightweight alternative to the C# generator I've been using. Truthfully, the way RoR is structured, it'll really force me to learn more about the language in order to do things, but from what I've seen so far, there's a lot more I can do with RoR, and I won't code myself into as many corners thank god.
Is it going to solve all my problems and do everything for me? No. But I'd like to become a little uncoupled from Microsoft, and this is a decent step in that direction. If anyone wants to see stuff built in RoR, check out Basecamp. The guy who wrote the Rails stuff, wrote Basecamp in Ruby and decided that a lot of the code could be reused, so he created Ruby on Rails.
Keep an eye out, I'm going to start creating small apps because my hosting company will host them for me, so I'll be able to show you what I've learned. "Hello world" should be coming soon 
mac mini
So it looks like we have a mac mini lying around the office and I've been wanting to get my hands on a mac of some sort to test run a development enviornment, so this will work out well.
The other thing I've been wanting to wrap my brain around Ruby and Ruby on Rails(ROR) to build web apps. It's a lightweight language that seems to be working for a lot of people in place of PHP. I've been tasked with building a PHP app for someone and I'm thinking of setting up the mini to use Ruby and taking a stab at the app with it.
Wish me luck.