Ploafmaster General

Well this evening Valerie and I purchased Adobe CS3 Web Premium. This was mostly for her as she already knows how to use Photoshop and Illustrator. She's pretty psyched, and I'm happy for her, but now I know that I'll have limited computer access for the next few months :-)

I have 11,000 words worth of St. Maarten pictures up on my Flickr account, so go check 'em out.

Last night - quite late last night - Val and I returned from our first Caribbean vacation on St. Maarten.

Wow. What a blast.

Frequent fish and barbecue dinners, fantastic sushi at Bamboo Bernie's, and one of the best beach days of my life - a whole day snorkeling trip to the uninhabited island of Prickly Pear.

The entire island is a mere 37 square miles which meant our trusty yet grungy Toyota Carolla sipped a little more than a quarter tank of gas the entire week (yet still cost almost twenty bucks to refill!!!). The entirety of the island is this sort of funky dingy shopping and tourist land with the exception of the beautiful town of Marigot on the French side. That town is a funky dingy shopping and tourist land with a little European flair and some excellent pastry shops :-)

The beaches themselves are fantastic, from the calm sheltered coves at our hotel to the gorgeously clear Maho Bay at the base of Princess Juliana Airport's runway. And while I got a bit of sunburn on my shoulders, it was well worth it for the amount of swimming I logged.

I hope to have some pics up on Flickr tonight of the whole affair, so keep your eyes peeled for another post about this. The words don't quite do it justice.

Ugh. Tired. Got in to Richmond at 2:05 am. Gotta go to work tomorrow anyway. Had no interwebs all week, but it was no problem since the week was righteous. More on that tomorrow.

Q: Are you still doing Ask Dan? If so here’s my question: what would you do if you were President of the US?

A: Elizabeth, you first have to realize that I'd never want the responsibility and 24/7 pressure of the office of President of the United States of America. So much stress. No rest. No real time off. For at least four years.

Unless you're kicked out...

So here's what I'd do. I'd throw the first ever Oval Office Keg Party. For realz. I'd have heads of state doing keg stands while members of my cabinet bonged cheap brew from another keg in the corner. The secret service would be around to make sure nobody drove home under the influence, and to keep things from getting too rowdy. Then we'd all go for a ride in Marine One, buzzing the tops of well-to-do townhouses in Old Town Alexandria before landing in the middle of I-95, just to disrupt things a little more.

I figure that'd get me impeached in less than a year. And if not? I could always start a war with Luxembourg, or something.

How do you solve a problem like Maria? A hilarious post on McSweeney's seems to have some ideas...

Just read an interesting article on Wired's Gadget Lab about lip-reading software for the UK's millions of CCTV cameras.

And the British worry that they're "sleep-walking into a surveillance society."

Sunday morning my wife and I will head off to St. Martin in the Caribbean for a week vacation with her mom and sister. My hope is to hit up some WiFi action and blog the crap out of my vacation. I'll have my digital camera and tripod with me as well, and I just bought a 2 gig memory card, so I hope to be snapping pictures by the hundred.

One day in particular should be interesting. The popular photo site, Flickr, created a special group called 24 hours of Flickr in which the members are to document their day on May 5th with photographs. The members will then select what they feel is the best photo of their day and submit it to the group. My hope is that this day alone will provide me with dozens of pictures to add to my library, especially since I'll be in such an idyllic location.

The end of this week can't come soon enough!!!

VIRBº finally rolled out the blog import feature.

Thanks to Joshua Blankenship for the heads up. Now I'll finally have some content on my profile page since I write on my own site with reasonable frequency.

McSweeney's has a hilarious piece up about Democratic Presidential candidates.

Clay Risen writes a response for The Morning News' "The Non-Expert" this week about modeling. Check it out and laugh your $400 jeans off.

Once again...this exemplifies why Ask Dan never had a fighting chance :-)

John Gruber's Daring Fireball links to Adobe's new font family, Hypatia Sans Pro. The page describes in excellent detail the background behind the design. Good read, if you're a nerd like me - or simply appreciate good design.

And you thought eating spicy food could lead to hot times on the porcelain bus...

Peep Engadget's story on the Head from Hades.

I don't post often about food, and my few posts have spanned the full range of culinary quality - from a sandwich at 821 Cafe, to the fine dining of 1 North Belmont.

Today, though, I have to opine about Wawa and their quality eats. Yes, Wawa is a convenience store, but man. Their food is a huge step up from their immediate competitor, Sheetz. Wawa eschews variety for quality, limiting it's menu to an assortment of sandwiches and subs, made fresh to order. They use good bread, real cold cuts, and fresh toppings. I'd have to say that the toasted chicken Philly sub has become one of my favorite subs in town.

The side items make the whole meal better, however. Wawa offers up a huge variety of snackable items such as apple slices with caramel or peanut butter, yogurt, fresh fruit cups, or pepperoni slices with cheese cubes and crackers.

It's fair to say that I've had too many meals at Wawa over the past few months, but I've enjoyed every one of them.

Alright...hopefully the final theme change before I rebuild my site.

I found this slick theme today, and I think it demonstrates my Apple nerdiness. You can collapse elements in the sidebar if you want, and rearrange them, too.

Enjoy, or if your Mugs, complain :-)

So you can probably see that I've changed themes...again.

I just updated to the latest version of WordPress (for security reasons), but it broke the VeryPlainText theme. So here we are.

Just biding my time with this anyway while I roll my own blog app...

Two weeks from today will be the last day of work before my vacation. Then, on Saturday, April 28th, Val and I will drive up to Montclair where her mom lives, and on early Sunday morning the three of us will fly out of Dulles International Airport, stopping in San Juan, Puerto Rico on our way to Sint Maarten in the Caribbean. Val's sister will join us there the following day.

I'm REALLY looking forward to this relaxing beach trip...

...that the first thought in my mind, upon seeing the eye-patch-ed cashier at Taco Bell, was "Arrrrr!!!"?

A couple of months ago I joined up with the Central Virginia Ruby Enthusiasts Group - CVREG for short. This is a small but excited group of fellas who seem genuinely to want the use of the Ruby programming language to advance in the Richmond area.

Last night I went to my second meeting - a "code jam" - aimed at getting newer users involved. I'd have to say it was quite excellent. There was camaraderie, good work time, effective networking between IT professionals, and plenty of helpfulness from the experts in the room. These were not th "RTFM" crowd. These guys, rather, are the type who prefer to see questions answered, even if somebody else asked them.

While I suppose it may be a little too early to call it more than a club, I certainly plan on continued participation in the future.

So it feels, lately, that my site here is kind of dead...My last comment was a week ago, and before that a few days. Even Jake and Mugs seem to have quieted down a bit.

This hasn't removed my motivation to keep writing stuff here, however; rather, I've been pretty busy working on my Blog application in my spare computer time, so I've sort of neglected this page. I'm actually quite close to having a really bare prototype of my blog site up on the web soon, however. As soon as I can sort out the routing issues :-)

I read an article on CNN's site today (which I cannot seem to relocate here at home for the life of me) that highlights ABC.com's move from flash-based online video to a new format.

This new technology requires the installation of a small plugin which is definitely available for Firefox, and works in both Windows and OS X.

The essential benefit of this switch is fast-loading, high quality streaming video that's playable "full-screen" (it only filled half the screen on my Macbook Pro). I have to say the quality is impressive. The load time is extremely fast, and you're only interrupted periodically by 30 second ads - less advertising than a regular TV program over all.

It may just be the thing to introduce me to a few ABC programs.

Holy crap.

I mean...wow.

EIGHT CORES.

'Nuff said.

Dale breathed a sigh of relief and dusted off his jacket while he reflected on his narrow escape when, suddenly, before his eyes...

w00t!

I finally got the post categorization functionality to work on my work-in-progress blog app!

I think I'll spend the next hour or so detailing the functions I want, and what I want each function to do. I figure I should outline my goals a little better before I get too ahead of myself and forget to take care of certain things.

I'm just glad to finally build something of my own from scratch, and each small victory is motivation to keep going.

I'm still pluggin' away at my new blog application built in Ruby on Rails, and tonight I managed to get the Post functionality up and running...at least listing and adding.

Once I get a chance I plan to put up a test database on this site and post the blog in progress with frequent updates so I can show you how it's coming along.

Be forewarned, however...I'm working on functionality first - looks last. I already know how I plan to style it, but I have to have the frame before I can add the facade.

This is nerdy, yes, but it's a step in the right direction for my personal development work. Building an app from scratch is enabling me to truly see how this stuff works, after which I'll feel confident enough to offer my services to other people. Rock on!