I’ve moved on from a job cowboy coding (read: shoot from the hip, work alone) ASP.NET websites to a job working at an anti-spam software company using Ruby on Rails, Perl, and sendmail under an agile/eXtreme Programming methodology. It’s heavenly bliss! Definitely worth the hour drive to Ann Arbor each day.

It’s not very often that I get to seriously consider what my next Mac will be.  My 4.5 year old PowerBook is on its last leg with a broken display and dwindling performance.

One of the cool things with OS X’s address book is that with my old Sony Ericson phone, I could manage calls.  I would pair the phone with my Mac using address book (by pushing a little bluetooth icon).  Whenever someone called, their vcard and picture would pop up on my screen and I could choose to answer or ignore it.  Of course, I couldn’t talk through the Mac’s microphone/speakers, but it was nice when using headphones - I could still catch calls while the music was blasting.   It’s also interesting to note that under the bluetooth utility, it states the iPhone supports no bluetooth services whatsoever - no file syncing or address book syncing.  So, it’s really only for bluetooth headsets.  That’s pretty lame!

Last year I set up my old Athlon 850 as a MythTV (both front and back-end) box. With a PVR-150 and a PVR-250 installed, it was a passable DVR running Mythdora. During our transition to Michigan, it fell out of use. One day I tried to upgrade to MythTV .20 but the Mythdora installation that supported it did not allow me to use the older NVidia drivers and so it would freeze up when XOrg launched. When DataDirect started charging for channel listings. I gave up on the project completely. I put my PC into permanent retirement.

On my way down to Illinois today, I listened to a podcast giving an overview of American history before 1870.  In it, Dr. Reilly talks about the industrial revolution.  I was enthralled as I contemplated the changes that the revolution brought about and the similarities to the changes taking place in web development.

A week ago, Dr. Frens spoke about continuations in Ruby at the Michigan Ruby Users Group. It was very interesting as it brought back my college days when I learned Scheme and functional programming concepts. I always enjoyed functional programming because it presents such a different way of thinking through problems.