Mark Roseman's Blog

Winter.

Ok, unlike for the people in western Canada where it actually is cold and yucky, it's been quite nice and warm here so on that front I can't complain at all. The shorter days are killing me though... needing a lot more sleep. This used to really affect me back around when I was in university (summers were great, could get by on very little sleep), but hadn't been much of an issue the last few years. Guess it's back to my "normal".

Nice Quiet Day.

Always nice and quiet on the US holidays, especially Thanksgiving with so many people traveling. Got to spend a large part of the day on my for-fun Rails project, and managed to get the majority of the base functionality finished. Threw together some polymorphic associations, did a plugin acts_as model mixin, piled together a heap of gratuitous AJAX, just like all the cool kids. Next step I think is figuring out how to deploy the damn thing somewhere other than my PowerBook and get a few people to play with it. Not a good sign of course that there's a book on the way just about Rails deployment, but we won't go there.

And this wasn't even in Canada.

Check out this morning laugh from the news.

SOAP - the "S" stands for "Simple".

Thanks to Steve for passing this entertaining technology commentary along, which rings far too true. Caught this gem in the comments: "The only thing that’s more depressing than this cluster-fuck is the idea that similar crap probably goes on in situations where it really matters. Like geopolitics, finance and health."

New car.

We brought home a shiny new car yesterday, a 2006 MINI Cooper. We'll use this one as our "main" car, with our Civic (now "the big car") being our alternate. We'd thought about having just one car, but even with me working at home and Pauline walking distance to work, there's been enough times that having two cars has been extremely convenient, which was a bit surprising. In the process, we got rid of my 93 Ford Probe, which I'd had since new and still only had about 120K clicks on it. Our ridiculously oversized garage looks even funnier now (the people who built this house drove a Hummer and some other monster SUV).

A good laugh.

Check out The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0.

Inventions.

There was a blog post this morning over at SharewarePromotions pointing to Time's list of the top inventions in 2006.

Reminded me of an (accidental) highlight along the same theme. A few years back, Pauline and I took a holiday around the Maritimes, stopping at various places. One place we spend a few days was Baddeck in Cape Breton, where we'd rented a little cottage on a hill above the lake for a very relaxing few days. We didn't know it ahead of time, but Alexander Graham Bell had spent a considerable amount of time living there. He'd used the money he'd earned from the telephone to spend time coming up with all manner of inventions across an astonishing breadth of areas. There's a great museum/exhibit setup next to the estate he'd owned which chronicles much of the work he'd done there. For those who dream of inventing, truly an inspiring place. And in an absolutely gorgeous part of the country to boot.