Now that school’s back in session, things have picked up. Now that I’ve finished a long-running PHP project, I’ve decided to delve into the world of Ruby on Rails. Yeah, I’m 2 years behind, but now I have plenty of time to do it since I’m home alone 3 nights out of the week while Julie’s at class. Last weekend I attended the Grand Rapids Ruby Users Group. It was nice to get together with people interested in new and better ways of development. It was very refreshing and I learned quite a bit. For now, I’m working on a pet web application using Rails and the Google Maps API. I decided to throw an app together that would let you quickly plan trips - sort of like Dopplr or Yahoo!’s trip planner, but more focused on a precise Itinerary and less on the social aspect.

The wonders of “Web 2.0” and AJAX design have brought us back to 1979. The innovations of WordPress/LiveJournal, Myspace and GMail - social networking, blogging, and flashy interfaces - have paved way for a new old way to manage your life. You can now send SMS text messages to web applications like Twitter, a site that was intended to be a “microblogging” network. Some inventive people have written programs that will respond to messages you type into Twitter and perform certain actions. For instance, I have my Twitter account hooked up to Remember The Milk. At any time I can send an SMS message to Remember the Milk, say, “meet Joe at 5pm tomorrow” and it will add that event to my calendar. It can even manage shopping lists. Another program offers budget management. So, every time you go to Starbucks, you can type in how much you spent on Lattes and keep a tight watch on how much money you’re throwing at Seattle. Yet another program allows you to keep track of gas mileage by entering your car’s current odometer reading, how much gas you just filled it with, and how much you paid. Over time it will chart out your car’s performance. If you have multiple cars it can even guess what car you entered mileage for based on typical mileage, so you don’t have to specify which car you filled up.

When I first got my cell phone a few months ago, I tried browsing to GMail since I finally had a phone that could handle it. While checking my mail, I noticed a link advertising their GMail app. I downloaded it and ran it. Very cool! It’s just like using GMail on your PC (well almost). You can easily access messages and do all the GMail things you can do with your PC. Sweet!

Don’t ever buy an HP printer.  Ever.

Thank you, Gilmore Girls, for not only being a great show, but also for supporting my technology habbit.

If you haven’t tried out Google Earth yet, you should. It’s free. It’s a program for Windows and Mac that lets you fly around a 3D globe and look at satellite images. It even has 3D terrain, so you can get a cool view of places like the Grand Canyon.