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?

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 Root of All Evil

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

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.texasdefenselawyers.com/Bio/KyleSampson.asp

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

Congratulations Bruno!

Bush Quit Drinking ‘On His Own’

Bush Lies

This man is a hero.

Interview with Ehren

• 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

The New Minneapolis Public Library

Alcatraz

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/

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.

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://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

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

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.