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://www.freethinkers.co.za/documents/politics/katrina%20and%20race.jpg?racism

With the big push to emphasize the “sanctity of life” my question is can a person lose their sanctity of life?  Does a criminal forfeit his right to a sacred life, or is the sanctity of life ever present and ongoing, something given to us from God?  If all life is sacred shouldn’t the death penalty be considered an abomination?  After reading this CNN story about lethal injections my hate for the death penalty resurfaced.  How on one hand you can fight to preserve the sanctity of life of a blastocyst, but not respect the life of a full grown human?  It frustrates me to the core.  At least be consistent with your policy.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/v/NBZQfAYfH7s

I was just listening to NPR and the whole Kyle Sampson testimony. I was just wondering how old this dude was and haven’t really found the answer — 34? Anyway — I did come across a firm and bio page to send him an email… Feel free to tell him how you feel!

http://www.texasdefenselawyers.com/Bio/KyleSampson.asp

If 2006 was the year of the mashup, 2007 will be the year of the MegaMashup.  Sites will spring up mashing up feeds from 5-20 other sites.   You will see  mashups incorporating everything from last.fm,  amazon, yahoo, google, bn.com,  twitter, flickr, del.icio.us, myspace, digg and many more.

Quick little blurb about nearbie.com on ehub.  Over the next few weeks we will be focusing our efforts on marketing and brand building.  And as always any thoughts about how to make Nearbie better or great marketing ideas — shoot me an email at feedback at nearbie.com.

“Refresh Release” Deployed

Check it out and as always — feedback is welcome and much appreciated at feedback at nearbie.com.

The idea of a quick customizable survey is something I have wanted to build for some time — and of course — that is as far as I got. Bruno on the other hand seems to be working with 36 hour days or something and cranked it out in a week. I would also like to see a quick little customizable rating tool — takes a scale, item type, id, and allows you to rate an item.
Also I just came across a nice interview with the Man/Machine himself on Ruby Inside.

Congratulations Bruno!

This little girl has trouble pronouncing “sparkling wiggles” but what comes out sounds very racist.

Now It’s Personal: Al Qaeda Calls Bush an Alcoholic Liar — well it’s true isn’t it?

Bush Quit Drinking ‘On His Own’

Bush Lies

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

If you don’t already know the Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) is the premier Ruby user group in the Minneapolis, Twin Cities (Mpls and St. Paul) area.  You could call it the Ruby Users of Minneapolis or Ruby Users of St. Paul.  But no matter what the name is, it is still all the same great RUM with the same great people.
Meetings are typically held on the last Tuesday of the every month at the Loring Park Dunn Bros. More information is available at Ruby.mn.

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.

Box in a box for you — So funny — Think SNL — D*** in a Box.

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

Well, I have been a bit remiss in keeping everyone updated on what I have been up to lately.

Earlier this year I started a fairly large Rails project, Yfly.com, a social networking site for teens and celebrities. We did an initial deploy on August 15th and weekly/biweekly updates thereafter. At the end of October I left Space 150 and the Yfly contract to work for Dean Heckler, (inventor, designer and technologist) to start building Nearbie.com. Nearbie is a fun (and practical) tool to enable the exploration of history connections between people, places and events. It lets everyone capture history and see how that history is related to other nearby people, places and events. Nearbie is in active development right now and will be going live later this month.

Democrats win the house and probably the senate… Rummy was thrown under the bus … and I just got done eating a very tasty steak from Mancini’s. Today was one big middle finger from moderate middle America to the neocon Bush, evangelical White House.

The only thing that will keep me drinking is that T-paw was re-elected and I voted for Peter Hutchinson expecting an easy victory for Hatch. Oh well I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

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.

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

And plenty more available on YouTube.com

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/

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/

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?

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

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

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.

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…

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2006/02/seething_midwes.html

Here is a small list of some interesting “keep it in the community” type sites and services.

• http://www.listedlocal.com: Free local classified ads
• http://www.angieslist.com: Angie’s List is a word-of-mouth network for consumers. — A local users consumer reports.
• http://freecycle.org/: Don’t REcycle — FREEcycle — video

The word on the street is that Scott is undefeated in Rock Paper Scissors. I think he should sign up for the World Championships. Otherwise there are weekly Roshambo tourneys at The Nomad Bar on cedar.

Before you go, read up on the latest RPS strategies. And don’t forget to check out the RPS Hotties!

For your viewing pleasure, I just added some hand-selected photos to my flickr site http://www.flickr.com/photos/caseyhelbling.

If that doesn’t do it for you, the entire photo album is always available here http://caseyhelbling.dyndns.org/pics_new/2005/

And if photos aren’t your thing, but movies are, introducing www.youtube.com… Here is a short movie clip from over the weekend back in North Dakota. Bipin and Max battling it to the bloody death.
(continue reading…)