Tonight, listening to my “Getting Things Done” playlist while going through Day 4 of Ruby, the Spaceshots’ tune ‘I Promise the World’ came through the headphones. I picked up that tune last November, while subscribed to BlogDigger’s mp3 feed (which I highly recommend for 2-3 days at a time). I search for ‘spaceshots’ at iTunes. …
Monthly Archives: March 2005
Don’t Make a Plan B
Related to the previous Thought of the Day – One Foot Forward, Repeat – today’s thought is: Don’t Make a Plan B Then there isn’t an out when Plan A gets tough.
First Crack 34. Get Your Own Radio Show By Dave & Huna
Two years after their first demo, Dave and Huna got a real, over-the-air, AM call-in talk radio show on March 6, 2005. They tell you what it was like and how to do it. More Stuff: AM 1500 “The Next Big Thing” Dave’s posts on the experience at doodledee.com “yes, i’ll be imagining all of …
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Learning Ruby – Day 3
Day 3 is all about strings, arrays, hashes, and ranges – abstract, geeky terms for buckets In Ruby, strings can be treated like arrays. Meaning it’s super easy to access substring. For example: theString = “It’s raining today” theString[13, 5] # returns ‘today’ Finally, I always thought substr() methods were an awkward solution for something …
First Crack 33. HourCar Brings Car Sharing to Twin Cities
Kurt Fischer, Program Manager for HourCar – Minnesota’s non-profit car sharing venture, and I sat down at Nina’s Coffee on Dale and Western in St. Paul. HourCar is planning to introduce car sharing to Minnesota in early May 2005. We talk about car sharing, who is a good candidate for car sharing, and how car …
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First Crack 32. The Tea Episode with Mindy Kelly
Mindy Kelly from Mrs. Kelly’s Tea and I talk selection, brewing, and finding the right tea. Listen to the Tea Episode with Mindy Kelly [16 min] Got questions about coffee or comments about the show? Call: 206-20-BEAN-1 Like the show? Support the First Crack Podcast
Auto Insurance Companies Gamble Double or Nothing
This morning, NPR reported on a study finding auto insurance rates in No-Fault states 20% higher and rising more quickly than in “Fault” states. In a No-Fault state, each driver’s insurance pays for their claim. Elsewhere the accident-causing driver’s insurance pays for both claim. This means insurance companies prefer the double-or-nothing gamble over having to …
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Learning Ruby – Day 2
Day 2 starts with one of the most valuable programming exercises. What can I do with an object? Just ask it: self.methods With ‘self’ being the current object, the above question returns a list of all the questions ‘self’ knows how to answer. Every object in Ruby can be asked this question. So many languages …
RSS is Advertising, Not a Channel for Advertising
(originally published at MNteractive.com) This afternoon, I was listening to an interview on RSS advertising. Overall, it sounded like Pheedo is shoehorning the dying interruption-based ad model into the relationship-based world of RSS. There are a number of companies trying to make RSS measurement more accurate (Pheedo, Feedster, FeedBurner). This is excellent, RSS feeds are …
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Learning Ruby – Day 1
Mark Slagell’s writing style is conversational and educational. I’ve gone through a number of software language tutorials. I found Slagell’s first chapter a comfortable mix of background info, simple examples, and experiments. On the outset, Slagell states Ruby is based on the: Principle of Least Surprise: “If you don’t know how to do something and …