What method do you use to prepare your coffee or tea?
Submitted by AgentBouche.
Wow, doesn't seem like 3 months since Oracle OpenWorld, but Vox says it is so. I really need to try and write some more about crap in general. Some things that I need to write about at some point
- Bought myself a Nikon D40 for X-Mas.
- Rails 1.2 is out now, looks like some more learning.
- Get around to trying out Flickr / Picassa / Smugmug
Nasdaq is being closed today live from the Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. There are 41000 people attending the conference packed into the Moscone center. Oracle announced Unbreakable Linux 2.0. Similar to CentOS they are using RedHat as a base for their system and offering enterprise support for a cheaper price.
It was pretty neat to see Leo Laporte in real life this morning at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo. You'd think with two camera phones in my pocket I might have grabbed a quick snapshot, but no, I forgot. I don't think the organizers quite anticiapted the number of people that were going to show up as the room for the keynote was absolutely packed with probably close to a 100 people standing in the back and a ton of people standing out in the halls trying to listen. He talked a little about the term podcast and his decision to use netcast going forward with the TWiT network of shows that he does. He has no illusions about changing the term podcast as it's too far entenched in people's minds already. He also discussed the monetization of podcasts and the difficulties that all podcasters face in doing so. He touched on several different problem areas: international listenership issues (Most advertisers only pay for domestic counts), accurate listener counts, and selling by listener counts.
I wish I could have stayed longer this morning, but it looked like it was going to be a great conference today and tomorrow. I was happy that the organizers let people attend the keynotes without buying a full conference pass, which was really great for local enthusiasts.
How many languages can you speak? Which languages can you read or understand
Sadly, I've lost most of my skills in the languages I learned in college and high school. I used to be to speak, read, and write in German and French enough to get by; not fluent by any stretch of the imagination. I can still read and understand quite a bit of both, but have a very difficult time trying to speak or write myself. I was never formally taught Spanish and just picked up listening comprehension from a previous job and that is still OK since I still hear it out and about in So Cal most days. In the programming world I can use a handful of languages pretty well. My latest language adventure is learning Ruby for a Ruby on Rails site that I've started working on. I'm also starting to pick up a bit more of C# when I have time.
I hadn't reinstalled Windows on my laptop in about a year and half, so it was time. Since I have a copy of Pre-RC1 Vista, I thought I would give that a whirl. The initial install went great and is very quick, probably less than 30 minutes for an install from scratch. Every driver for my Dell Inspirion 9300 was installed from the start with no work required by me. I went ahead and changed my user to NOT be the adminstrator of the machine (Since this is supposed to work well in Vista), and things were looking good. I had some issues with User Account Control (UAC) after installing Firefox that I think I could have prevented had I gone in and changed the default download directory to the correct path.
The show stopper for me though was my internet connection speed. I started to notice that all of my downloads were pretty much topping out at no more than 80k/sec combined. I've got a 6000/768 DSl connection so this is way low. Installed the java run times (Note: Current version doesn't support Aero) so I could run some speed tests. These all came back with about 768 down. Jumped on the file server and ran some tests from there, and it was rocking the full speed 6000/768. Well that wasn't good. I played around with things trying to figure out why it was so slow and come up with nothing. I wasn't willing to spend any more time playing with it after a full night of fighting so went ahead and went back to XP on Sunday morning.
It looked great visually, ran quick and stable. The sleep feature is awesome, almost instant on from sleep. But in the end, I enjoy my connection speed and wasn't willing to fight with the thing anymore to try and get it fixed.
I spent most of the weekend trying to get a better understanding of some of the various MVC styled frameworks out there. I looked at a few PHP based ones, but found most of them lacking in some way. I decided to give Ruby on Rails another try after only giving it a basic once over a few weeks ago.
I must admit I'm really starting to see why people love this thing so much, you really need to get past some of the basic tutorials though in my opinion. When I did the OnLamp tutorial I wasn't real impressed. However, after doing the Four Days on Rails tutorial I began to get a better understanding of what is possible. So, for the time being I'm going to begin working on my project in Rails I think. I really need to come up with a name for it one of these days.
What was the last wedding you went to? Were you in the wedding?
Last weddings were about a month and half ago. My brothers wedding on a Sat morning which I was in. Then my nephews wedding in the afternoon the same day which I was not in. Needless to say it was an insanely long day.
When was the last time you had to speak in front of a group? How did you feel?
About two weeks ago for a couple new high-level execs that joined the company. It doesn't really bother me at all anymore after doing it so often over the last several years for work. One of the best things that ever happened for me was taking a public speaking course about 8 years ago. Ever since that class I've had very little trouble. Another key factor for a lot of people I think is not having a confidence in what they are required to talk about. That can make all the difference in the world.
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