Turning the Radio Off

Last weekend was Chicago Trip #1. The drive put a pretty good dent in my Unlistened Podcast playlist – down to 17.5 days (from a high of 24). There were a couple of spots near the Wisconsin/Illinois border and around Schaumberg where the FM transmitter couldn’t hold a frequency.

Rather than scanning the dial, I turned the radio off.

“Nowadays I prefer silence to NPR” – Dave Slusher

Definitely.

We’re in the early stages of exploring what to replace our 10 year-old Dodge Neon with. Looks like every car comes with an AM/FM CD deck. Three things I don’t want. At all. I just want an auxiliary jack. That’s it.

Can anyone out there help explain the tight connection between automakers and broadcast radio?

Elsewhere:

“i told the mpr people i wouldn’t pledge again until the current played a phish song.”- Dave Cecchi

Ququoo.com: Twitter Timesheet Looking For Beta-Friends

Ququoo.com, my first Rails app is finally up and at a place where I’m happy with it.

Ququoo turns Twitter into a timesheet – by grouping your tweets and measuring the time between them.

As with any web app that was launched moments ago, there’s probably a few more things to tidy up and sort out. That said, Ququoo is looking for some beta-friends. If you’re interested and have a Twitter account; add ququoo

Elsewhere, Ed Kohler wonders if something like Ququoo.com can find an audience:

“I’m sure there are plenty of Twitter users who bill or their time on a consulting basis who would love to be able to Tweet their billable hours.” – Ed Kohler

Web 2.Over: Google Buys FeedBurner

Consistent with my hypothesis that Google is a social gesture company, they bought FeedBurner (a company finally reaching its only exit strategy, Thank god).

Four Predictions:

  • Six Apart now pulls auto-FeedBurning from TypePad blogs due to conflict of interest.
  • Google incorporates FeedBurners metrics into Google Analytics and sends the rest of FeedBurner to play with Dodgeball.
  • More than half of FeedBurner’s current customer-base will wonder why the hell they even used the service.
  • The downturn is in full effect

Elsewhere:

“Google is Buying FeedBurner this is pure Evil!” – Todd Cochrane

“For all of FeedBurner’s success, monetizing the feeds has been a struggle. The inventory they manage always seems to grow so much faster than the advertising they sell….FeedBurner fits like a glove into the Google advertising system, adding feeds to the growing number of places an advertiser can reach audiences through the AdWords system.” – Fred Wilson

Short Message Silo

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Jaiku’s growth strategy is getting Twitter’s overflow. But only if you look at it from a winner-take-all, one-silo-for-everyone, perspective.

Look at email. I like Apple’s Mail.app. Lots of other people like Gmail. I still know people that swear by Eudora. Despite the different applications, we all still get the messages from each other. The short message space is exactly the same.

Yeah, I’ve got an account at both Jaiku and Twitter, and this morning I signed up at ShoutAt [screencast].

In the same way I don’t know which email client people write their email in (yet, we still have community and friendship), Twitter and Jaiku and MySpace and Last.FM and LinkedIn silos need to melt away.

Then they’ll actually be useful. Not just today’s overbooked, over-hyped hang-out.

To the rescue: TwitKu.com. Thanks for the pointer Harold.

Rails: Cookies, Frozen Gems, and TextDrive

Jon Steinhorst once told me a movies are rewritten from script to shoot, and again from shoot to editing. I spent a good chunk of this week re-writing a Ruby on Rails app to go from development to production.

Works fine in development. Not at all in production.

The issue was a combination of frozen gems and cookies.

First off, while TextDrive recommends depending on your vendor directory for any Ruby gems unique to your project, I found success with Geoffrey Grosenbach‘s Freeze Other Gems Rake task that sends them to /lib

Secondly, I wasn’t able to reliably set and retrieve cookies. Turns out I needed to access the cookie with a string, not a symbol.

All the resources I found say this should work in the controller
cookies[:the_timezone]

But it doesn’t, this does:
cookies['the_timezone']

Then in the view (specifically a select menu) I need to use this:
time_zone_options_for_select(cookies['the_timezone'].value,TZInfo::Timezone.us_zones,TZInfo::Timezone)

Gas Line Break: Old Highway 8 & New Brighton Blvd

From the St. Anthony Police Dept, 8:47am:

“Our department is currently on the scene of a significant gas line break in the area of Old Highway 8 and County Road 88. At this time, officers are evacuating the residents of the Arbor’s Townhomes located in the immediate area of the break.”

Update 9:20am:

“The damage to the gas line involves a steel pipe that can not simply be pinched off. They are currently awaiting a part to repair/replace the damaged line and it is expected to take over an hour to complete the repair.”