Catching Up
It’s been awhile since the last substantive post, so I’ll just dump as I can while I wait for Mom to get into the neighborhood for dinner.
CISV NBM
The CISV board meeting went well. I got the different work plans for my committee put together, and even a sniff from Venkat out in San Fran who wants to collaborate on a Rails project for the member database. If he thinks I’m going to let him slip past on that, he’s crazy!
Probably the best part of the NBM was the quality time I got to spend with my Dad. He’s in a funny state of mind after having his position eliminated at Capital One, but we talked about the world of possibilities out there, and how good his situation is– you know, relatively.
My mom’s grant proposal went through, so I’ll be project manager on a Rails project that I’ll only be peripherally involved with. That’ll be a plus.
Work
In my own Rails work, I’m just continually impressed with the depth of the framework. I’ve been working with it for a few months now, and I just got around to functional testing. Not only is it a piece of cake, but it also tests rendering the page itself for you! In essence, if you mess up something in your .rhtml file, your functional test will find that and bomb out. Talk about minimizing surprises!
I was also impressed with how easy it was to throw in a mock object. One piece of my code goes out to the Internet to fetch data, for which I had already amassed a large amount of offline example data. A few lines of code and a few require statements means I can run those tests using the files I’ve already downloaded to my hard drive. I still miss Hibernate, but Ruby and Rails sure have some tricks up their sleeves.
The new job is going well, and I would say that even if I didn’t know that one of my three readers works there, too. (Hi, Ryan I had to abandon the dream of Linux on the desktop which Ryan will now excoriate me for in the comments. I am just going to have to fool around with that on my own. I’m back on Windows and will be ready to start kicking butt tomorrow.
Personal
I’ve been feeling under the weather recently, but I’m trying to stay up above it.
The Richmond RING had it’s first Cashflow game on Tuesday evening. The game was over in less than an hour—the most extraordinary performance I’ve seen yet. It was a smash hit with the group, so that will turn into a regular engagement.
The album review will return this week. Maybe I should just cut the crap and make it understood that I’ll have one out every two weeks.
I finished Trigun last night– after converting all my downloads to MPEG2 and transferring them to my TiVo– and I would have preferred it to be a piece of crap right from the start. That way, I would have felt satisfied that I hadn’t missed anything. As is, the tone totally disagreed with me, there are not nearly enough Ninja Scroll type moments with the Gung Ho Guns. The main character makes Hilary Clinton look like Newt Gingrich (or Mother Teresa look like Christopher Hitchens?). Anyway, I give the thing a straight C. Watch something else.