Slurredspeech

em… yah… It has been awhile…

So right back to it…. I guess….

Am I late to the party or what… Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4 …. now that is money… All this time I was “Grabbing” a tiff with Grab… then saving it as a png… so annoying.

What other sweet shortcuts do I need to know?

Man do I love Google’s sense of humor…

Google Custom Time

The Beta User Testimonials crack me up …

“I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the ‘first’ to respond to a co-worker’s ‘first-come, first-serve’ email. Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort of knows I used Custom Time on this one, but I’m denying it.”
Robby S., Paralegal

The Price of Atheism

The Root of All Evil

The MN Daily’s spoof on google.  Pretty funny stuff.

http://xruby.com/default.aspx

A Ruby to Java compiler. It magically turns ruby source files into java class files. Interesting, interesting, interesting. I wonder if the JRuby guys have played with this at all and what they think of it? The better question is … why the hell haven’t I heard about this. It seems to have flown under my radar for a full year.

Ehren Watada begins his court martial trial for failing to deploy with his unit. The government has also tacked on other charges including conduct unbecoming an officer and contempt toward officials (the President). Another example of the heavy handed tactics by the administrations — Either your with us or against us.

This man is a hero.

Interview with Ehren

All that I can say is it is super SICK. Talk about web development on steroids.
http://www.getfirebug.com

In life, mistakes are made all the time that are easily fixed by first admitting the fault and then taking the right course to correct the problem.  A broken war is not one of those mistakes you can fix by simply admitting that “mistakes were made”. Sometimes things are broken that can’t be fixed — a very hard lesson for many people who are “fixers”.  I liken it to the urge you get to buy more of a falling stock.  Initially, you think its a good investment to lower your dollar cost average, but most financial experts recommend closing the position for a small loss rather than investing in a dead stock for an even worse loss in the long run.  In the same way Bush’s Vietnam cannot be fixed by simply admitting “mistakes were made” and adding more troops.

In no particular order

• Attend my Brazilian Jui-Jitsu class at the Warrior’s Cove least 2 times a week with goal of obtaining second first degree gold belt by end of the year
• Get Carson into swimming lessons in the spring
• Do everything I can to help make Nearbie a success
• Give Grails a chance — Write at least 2 apps using it
• Take Erin to Napa Valley in the fall
• Cook more
• Contribute to one open source project (JRuby?) or release something as a plugin or gem

Well, I realize it is light on “Family Time” and pretty heavy on “Casey Time” — which, will undoubtedly be a topic of discussion at the dinner table tonight. Of course, that is because I saved the most important one for last –

• Be the best husband and father in the world

What are your resolutions?

Here are the steps I took to get Rails running on a fresh MacBook Pro.
Start by following
http://blog.nanorails.com/articles/2006/10/17/installing-rails-on-mac-os-x-tiger-10-4-8

The big things to keep an eye out for
Don’t forget to update the Darwin ports sudo port -d selfupdate very very important

Don’t forget the +server portion of the mysql5 install

I typically use mongrel and mongrel cluster so I don’t bother with the fcgi crap.

I also found out that the Darwin Port rb-rubygems is broken in the latest release and you will see a strange stack looking like this when you do sudo gem install blah

No worries, just manually reinstall ruby gems. In my case

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
extract and sudo ruby setup.rb.

That is really about it… The next big part is ImageMagic/RMagick — I’ll add updates as I work through that mess.

Ben and Bruno built a popurls.com type service that is based on cities. http://www.acu.mn

Bush Flip-Flops on Stay the Course. With the upcoming election and probable loss of the House (and possibly the Senate) they are doing everything they can to set the stage for the looming congressional inquiries and oversight proceedings.

Let’s not forget the rhetoric, it wasn’t that long ago

May 6, 2004

“They’ll kill innocent people to try to shake our will,” Bush said of terrorists. “That’s what they want to do. They’ll never shake the will of the United States. We understand the stakes.”
“Bush: Stay the course on terror war

July 10th, 2003

“We’re making steady progress,” he said. “A free Iraq will mean a peaceful world. And it’s very important for us to stay the course, and we will stay the course.”
U.S. ‘Will Stay the Course’ in Iraq, Bush Says

More Stay the Course Video

We recently released a bunch of updates to Yfly.com (personal videos/music and ability to use limitied markup) just in time for the Nick Lachey concert at the Target Center. Star Tribune did a small story mentioning the event and YFly.

Zillowblog.com has some interesting maps aggregating census data. Here are the top and bottom 5 richest and poorest cities.

Top 5
• Douglas, CO – $130,146
• Loudon, VA – $127,118
• Fairfax, VA – $121,044
• Hunterdon, NJ – $119,787
• Los Alamos, NM – $117,563

Bottom 5
• Kalawao, HI – $8,852
• Buffalo, SD – $17,609
• Wilcox, AL – $20,885
• Holmes, MS – $21,275
• McDowell, WV – $21,617

Bob Marley – “Don’t gain the world and lose your soul, wisdom is better than silver or gold.”

How can any intelligent person with a conscience shop at Walmart? I feel dirty just thinking about it…

“Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they’re held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart “full time” is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year.

Health-care benefits? Only if you’ve been there two years; then the plan hits you with such huge premiums that few can afford it-only 38% of Wal-Marters are covered. ”

http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/companies/antiwalmart.html

Maybe instead you like to discuss sweatshops. Walmart is kickass in this area. 13-20 cents an hour is right up there with Nike!
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/sweatshops.html

Forbes magazine, polling business executives (not employees) has ranked Wal-Mart among the best 100 corporations to work for. Yet the employees on average take home pay of under $250 a week. The salary for full-time employees (called “associates”) is $6 to $7.50 an hour for 28-40 hours a week, which is typical in the discount retail industry. This pay scale places employees with families below the poverty line, with the majority of employees’ children qualifying for free lunch at school. When closely examined, this amounts to a form of corporate welfare, as the taxpayer subsidizes the low salaries. One-third are part-time employees – limited to less than 28 hours of work per week – and are not eligible for benefits.

…..

for employees is the option to buy company stock at a discount. Wal-Mart matches 15 percent of the first $1800 in stocks purchased. Yet most workers can’t afford to buy the stock. In fact, not one in 50 workers has amassed as much as $50,000 through the stock-ownership pension plan. Voting power for these stocks remains with Wal-Mart management.

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/stores3.html

On the other hand…. Costco isn’t quite as bad….

Costco pays its average employee $17 an hour. It offers workers an affordable health-care package that 85 percent of employees take part in. It contributes to employees’ 401(k) plan.

Of course, Jim Sinegal, the CEO of Costco, takes a more modest annual salary of $350,000, a sliver of what Wal-Mart’s Lee brings to his palatial estate.

Just wanted to announce the new addition to the family (and the reason I have been away so long), Carson Alexander Helbling. Stay tuned…. Much more to follow.

Jesus healed a few sick people… Big deal. Warren Buffett’s 30 billion dollar donation will be literally helping millions upon millions of sick people across the world. I suggest we make June 26th Buffett Day. He is far more deserving of a holiday named after him than say, Columbus, or for that matter, Jesus.

The Bible is Bullshit
What it is like to work at Google

Last night I was at the Twins game and got to watch two crazy fans run across the field. One decides to round the bases and slide head first into home. Just then the bat boy steps up and takes him out. Talk about embarrassing.

Crazy Fan Video

This new Dictionary Tooltip Extension beats the crappy old “Dictionary Search Extension” since it displays the results on the same page in a sweet little web 2.0ey “tooltip”. FEBE: Firefox Extension Backup Extension finally solves the problem of trying to synchronize firefox extensions accross multiple machines. It allows you to save one machine’s configuration and “install” it to another machine. It has some short comings like no FTP support, but for the most part will be very helpful.

I guess Bush won’t be getting the Nobel Peace Prize any time soon.

(source guardian.co.uk)

And plenty more available on YouTube.com

Google notebook just released today — useful for saving small clips of text… And notice … they stole the black triangles from WidgetWeb.

http://www.google.com/notebook/

Ben has some cool photos from inside the new library on flickr. Check em out. I get a strange jail or prison feeling. It is very Alcatrazy…

The New Minneapolis Public Library

Alcatraz

Block level view on Amazon maps is pretty cool http://maps.a9.com/

I started using Tool Man about a year ago to help with javascript drag and drop sorting of lists. Lately however, I have been using crap.taculo.us and have come to like many of its features especially the “$” referencing of dom elements. Unfortunately they can’t coexist. They both try to hijack the window.onload method rendering Toolman unusable. I’m sure after some debugging I could figure out a work around, but for now I recommend just using scriptaculous. It has all the same sorting features as Toolman plus tons of other AJAX stuff that you can’t do without. It is also built into Rails so it won’t be going away anytime soon.

Summer of Code is a program designed to introduce students to open source software development. Google provides stipends to about 400 students to work with a mentor on an open source project over the summer. This is just another example of why google is google… supporting the open source software movement and mining the best and the brightest students as future employees. Brilliant!

http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html
http://code.google.com/soc/studentfaq.html

Seriously… WTF. Devotees nailed to cross in Philippines – Boston.com

Artie is a service that utilizes Amazon.com’s public database of images to retrieve any missing cover art for your iTune’s library. Just upload your easy-to-find iTunes Music Library.xml file, wait a second while it analyzes everything, and drag the artwork straight into your running iTunes program. The correct art is found more then 95 percent of the time, however databases aren’t perfect, so it’s possible you might get a Yanni cover for your new G-Unit CD, for these few mistakes, we appologize.

http://www.patrickmoberg.com/artie/

I heard about Sketch It from Ben and thought I would give it a try. A local artist, Kelly Newcomer, did a sweet sketch of Bipin. The results are perfect…maybe better than perfect. I’m going to have it framed and hang it over Bip’s bed. Everyone should have a sketch done, and for only a dollar, how can you afford not to?

Got my Google pages page set up. Not very many features and definitely not a viable blogging solution yet.

http://caseyhelbling.googlepages.com

In other news finance.google.com is up and running. They are mashing up news data points with the stock charts. This is something I have thought would be nice for awhile now. The other sweet feature is the deep links right into other third party data like finance.yahoo.com and Wikipedia.

You Tube: Real Life Simpsons Intro Need I say more?

John Kerry, the 2004 presidential nominee, was overheard in an Irish bar on Capitol Hill talking about how satisfying it would be to impeach Bush if Congress went Democrat. He was just having a laugh, his spokeswoman rushed to explain: “Impeachment jokes in Washington are as old as Donald Rumsfeld.”

But then she turned serious: “How are the same Republicans, who tried to impeach a president over whether he misled a nation about an affair, going to pretend it does not matter if the administration intentionally misled the country into war?”

Times Online

Man… I’m falling behind. When the hell did they do this? They got all the information wrong… but still…

In very sad news, American hostage, Tom Fox, was found dead today with apparent torture wounds.

In other sad news, the US continues to hold its own hostages in order to demonstrate to the world what it takes to be strong democracy.

About 490 foreign terrorism suspects are being held at Guantanamo, many for four years and only 10 charged with a crime.

Maybe in an attempt to be more like the US, the new Iraqi government should hire Tom Fox’s captors to teach them how to take hostages, torture people and all in all just be more like the US.

This morning Erin and I had the ultrasound for the baby. It was so amazing to see the little guy/girl?! wiggling around inside Erin. We are 19 weeks along and it is really starting to sink in that in less than 5 months I am going to be a daddy. Wow! Have fun with the photos… The first three are aggregate photos with about 4-6 individuals on one page. All the rest are broken out individuals. “baby_individual_2006.03.06_06.jpg” seen below is a cool image where you can see him/her yawning… or … insert random alien screaming joke here.

Small photos
Large photos

An amazing video of a robot mule. These things just keep getting better and better. Watch the robot regain its footing after the operator tries to kick it over

If people want a theocratic state move to fucking Iraq. I’m just sayin… ’cause If you haven’t noticed we are doing a hell of a job setting one up for yah.

Missouri bill proposes Christianity as official religion

While most of this survey is “good news,” there are a couple very troubling statistics about why the troops believe we are fighting in Iraq.

The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure. While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”

http://www.zogby.com/news

Thank god… I went out on a limb on this new notebook but it sounds like I should be happy with it. Notebookreview.com has a review on the 27th about the Sager 9750 and gave it outstanding marks…. now if the damn thing would hurry up and get here so I can see for myself.

The bill cites “credible research” that proves children raised in GOP families tend to exhibit “emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and an alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities.”

Andrew Sullivan remarks:

“It’s absurd, of course. But no more absurd than the empirically baseless claims that kids brought up by gay parents are somehow at a disadvantage.”

My tired, old Dell Inspiron 2650 needed an upgrade. It was slow, hot and didn’t have a subwoofer. Since it only had 512 MB of RAM it was only really good for surfing and checking email. Bringing up Jboss and Eclipse at the same time was almost as painful as developing on Visual Age for Java in the early days. This time I decided to go all out and get something that I could actually use for development. Here are the specs of my recent purchase:

17″ WUXGA+ (1920 x 1200) Active Matrix , Glare-Type Display
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (2.2Ghz; L2 Cache: 1MB x 2) Toledo
Artic Silver 5 (AS5) Thermal CPU Paste Compound
256MB GDDR3 nVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX PCI-Express 16x
2048 MB DDR SDRAM (400 MHz, PC-3200, Dual Channel) (2 x 1024 MB)
80 GB Hard Drive (7200 RPM) SATA
HDD RAID Settings – Off
8X DVD±R/RW / 4X+Dual Layer / 5X DVD-RAM / CD-RW Multi Drive (Pioneer DVR-k16)
External USB Floppy Drive
Built in 56k V.90 Modem
Built in 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet / LAN Network Card
Wireless (Wi-Fi) Lan Card 802.11g (54 Mbps)
Add Internal Bluetooth Card (Combo card with Wi-Fi)
Smart Lithium Ion Battery (12 Cells)
Integrated 7-in-1 Card Reader
Integrated Video Camera / Internal Subwoofer Module
Auto-switching AC Adapter (220W; 100-250V)

ahhh snap…