WebWriting.com

Ruby is truly infuriating. Not only are there six dozen different ways to instantiate a string but they vary in subtle ways. Single quotes interpret escaped characters and double quotes don’t and anything followed by percent becomes a quote terminator and even though double less than appends to strings, when followed by any non-space they also become a quote terminator and you call it a here document. And you can quote the terminators. So while a << "b" will add "b" to a, a <<"b" will expect a bunch of text followed by a freestanding "b" that terminates the here document. I can only imagine the BNF.

Why does anyone willingly write in this language?

Things that annoy me (when coding it’s all in the syntax):

• elsif is missing an e
• resuce should be called catch or except or anything else but rescue
• there are five dozen ways to say if x then y
• :symbols
• @@globals
• case/when isn’t switch/case
• parens to functions are optional

The combination of the above leads to things that are nigh unparsable:

begin @@master = case @slave when :dude: “dud” when :man: “chicken” else “rub” end if eyes.poke_out? elsif puts “Go learn python” resuce me

Flock isn’t slow.  My wife is downloading “bellydance” videos.

I just grabbed flock 1.1. As best I can tell the only downside is that everything seems to run via flock.com, which slows down the web browsing experience.  If flock really makes it easier to share then you’ll see more postings here in the coming weeks (that and I’m on vacation in a couple weeks).

Reading FB status on my watch

Q: What do you do with leftover Chinese food takeout rice (or any leftover plain rice for that matter)?

A: Fry it!

Oil or butter

1 Cup of leftover rice (approx ½ a Chinese takeout box)

¼ cup frozen peas

2 tbps soy sauce + flavoring

1 egg, beaten

Saute the rice and peas in oil or butter. Don’t worry if the rice has gone stale, it will rehydrate. Add the soy sauce plus flavoring (Chinese fish sauce or salt or turmeric) to taste. Fry up the egg and mix it in. Serve hot!

Better yet – have leftover leftovers the next day!

Almost ended up taking the train to Salem this morning. That would have been interesting. Clearly something wrong with my coffee…

Checkout my twitter profile.

On United Airlines flights an inch is apparently worth about $12. For the low price of $60 you can chose a seat with 5″ more leg room. I’m not sure what’s a bigger rip off - this or that Northwest charges $15 for a guaranteed isle seat. I should just fly JetBlue.

Drop me an e-mail and I’ll send you pictures of our pet person.

Ten big news stories you aren’t hearing

I’ve gone missing. It was not until I discovered this evening that someone other than my wife reads this blog that I realized how long it has been since my last post. I can only ask for forgiveness and hope that you have not given up on me. It’s been a long couple of months at work. We’re building a great product but it has taken a lot of time and energy. I promise have a dozen posts in draft form that I’m going to try and get some finished in the coming weeks. I am Glad to know you are out there reading.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who has noticed that there’s something wrong with our spending habits.

Bad news on savings

Now when will the people doing the spending start paying attention?

To day is the day
We write our haikus for its
May seven ‘oh’ five