2008
- 1:02 pm: At Full City Coffee in Eugene having a Cafe Borgia. Yum!
- 5:53 pm: Pit stop on way to Redwood Forest.
- 8:20 pm: In Crescent City. Awesome drive. Watch for video soon.
- Building Great Products Keynote by Joel Spolsky
- Entrepreneurs On Rails by Dan Benjamin
- Hosting and the Woes by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Jamie van Dyke, Tom Mornini
- CRUD Doesn’t Have an ‘S’ in It: Managing Complex Searching in Rails by Stephen Midgley
- Flexible Scaling: How to Handle 1 Billion Pageviews by TJ Murphy
- UI Design on Rails by Ryan Singer
- Keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson
- Rails 2.1 Keynote by Jeremy Kempter
- Using Git to Manage and Deploy Rails Apps by Scott Chacon
- Asynchronous Processing with Ruby on Rails by Jonathon Dahl
- Build Your Own Distributed, Self Configuring Rails Cluster by Dave Fayram, Tom Preston-Werner
- Custom Nginx Modules: Accelerate Rails, HTTP Tricks by Adam Wiggins
- The Worst Rails Code You’ve Ever Seen (and How Not to Write It Yourself) by Obie Fernandez
- De-Railing: Smashing the Rails Stack by Aaron Bedra
- 11:24 am: Awesome bakery stop this morning followed by an improptu haircut at a cool barbershop.
- 12:12 pm: Childrens Museum in Portland, OR. Very well done. Much Mazie happiness.
- 2:57 pm: Amazing falafel at Karams in Portland. Wow!
- 3:34 pm: Filling up Honda at $4.16/gallon.
- 3:34 pm: Leaving Portland for an impromptu 1-night stay in Eugene, OR.
- 7:08 pm: At Mezza Luna Puzzaria in Eugene, OR for dinner.
Redwood Highway (US-199)
Join us for a time-lapsed view of the 40 minutes of driving from the Oregon/California border on the US-199 segment of the Redwood Highway as we come into Crescent City, CA. Gorgeous drive with amazing trees. About 3 minutes in we get to the actual Redwood Forest. Buckle up, the time-lapse is 1 frame per second, and it gets a little fast at points.
Curly Redwood Lodge
We checked into our 7th hotel tonight after driving on the Redwood Highway and pulling into Crescent City, CA. Tammy did all the research for places to stay and relied pretty heavily on Trip Advisor. For Crescent City, the Curly Redwood Lodge is the only one to get great reviews. We checked in tonight and it’s a real trip. The motel is very 1960’s. The entire motel was constructed out of the wood from a single Curly Redwood tree, hence the name. The wood is beautiful and the place is kept immaculate but very much “in period.” I love this place, it’s the exactly perfect place to stay for some mingling with the majestic giants of the forest.
Tomorrow we are going to get out amongst these huge trees. I can’t wait, and neither can Tammy.
Summer of Love Day 16 Log
See full Summer of Love Collection.
Super Mom
This is definitely a parent story. If you don’t have kids, you may just want to skip this. :-P Being a parent is really great. When Mazie says “I love you Daddy!” I pretty much melt on the spot. But being a parent brings you really close to things like boogers, poop and puke. Traditionally Mom’s bear this brunt more than Dad’s, and that is definitely true in our family.
Mazie is now totally potty trained. She hasn’t touched a diaper for a few weeks, even at night. She’s doing a great job. Fantastic actually. She sleeps through the night and everything. However, she wont go near a normal toilet. She insists, and will really only use, her kids potty. We have it with us as a result. It sits in the van and has made appearances all over on the Summer of Love road trip. Side of the raod potty stop, check. Sidewalk potty stop in downtown, check. Quick potty in the car while getting gas, check check.
Today Mazie announced at lunch that she wanted to “go and take a poop”. We were downtown Portland at a fabulous restaurant and had finished. Tammy took Mazie to the bathroom and she predictably decided she didn’t have to go when she saw the toilet in the bathroom. Off they went to the van to use her potty. Right there in downtown, in the van, we had a #2 stop but lacked anywhere to “take care” of the potty. So, we started driving with a window cracked open.
We stopped after about 15 miles to get gas and Tammy took care of the potty. Tammy, being a fully immersed mom grabs the ‘container’ in the potty. She doesn’t put it in a bag or anything. No real attempt to conceal anything. She just grabs it and walks right into the gas station and heads to the bathroom. Total bad ass. I chuckled to myself while pumping the gas thinking of the amount of angst that would have went into that procedure before being a parent. What are you going to do, right?
RailsConf 2008 Recap
We just left Portland today on our continuing Summer of Love trip. You wont find much about Portland from me though. Our stop in Portland for me was a visit to RailsConf 2008. Tammy did post about her thoughts on Portland. It was totally awesome that our good friends, the Tangen’s were able to come out and join us in Portland. Kent attended RailsConf with me, and Maril, Simon and Caroline hung out with Tammy and Mazie. Mazie just adored Caroline the whole time.
Let me share some of my comments on RailsConf 2008. I’m not going to dive into super detail on the Rails 2.1 release announced at the conference, or the details of various sessions. You can find that elsewhere online and many of the presentations and sessions are now up on the RailsConf wiki.
Sessions
Here are the sessions I attended:
Sadly, I missed Kent Beck’s Keynote on Saturday evening. I hear it was really good.
Highlights
The conference started off on a strong note with Joel Spolsky’s keynote. Some of you that have mentioned Spolsky to me may have heard my immediate rant. Prior to his keynote I wasn’t a Joel fan. However, his keynote was great. He had a good message, presented it very well, and really got his point across. I liked it a lot, and take back anything bad I’ve said about Joel in the past (or at least most of it). It was really good.
I liked the Entrepreneur session quiet a bit. Unfortunately halfway through it the fire marshall ordered about 1/4th of the people out of the room because it was standing room only. Ryan Singer’s session on design and Rails was awesome. Ryan was preaching what I truly believe is the model for designers and developers to engage and work collaboratively to make great things. The world needs more Ryan Singer’s out there evangelizing and showing how this can be done to do great things. Jeremy Kemper’s keynote on Rails 2.1 was really good as well. The 2.1 feature set looks great.
Perhaps the most high-density presentation was Scott Chacon’s Git presentation. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten barraged with so much high-density information so quickly. At one point I turned to Kent and joked “I feel stupid.” Directed acyclic graphs were being thrown around as quickly and furious as could ever be done. Great presentation though, really liked his stuff. I recommend checking out his site, Gitcasts.
David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote on Friday night was a little odd. He steered away from any technical topics and really focused on giving some input on creating great products and being a great developer. I’m not sure how the talk went over with the audience. DHH is the creator of Rails, and as a result I doubt anyone would pan it that much. He drew a full crowd back from dinner at 8:00pm after all. His talk however seemed to me to be trying to get people to appreciate the aesthetics of code. To admire the beauty of architecture. It seemed clear to me that he was trying to send a message beyond Rails, to creating great things and continuing creative inspiration. I liked the message, but I wondered how many people in the room really heard it.
Lowlights
There weren’t any bad sessions that I went to. Some could have been better, but I wouldn’t say any of them were horrible. However, I would have liked to see a bit more technical depth and heavy lifting in the sessions. Too many of them seemed to gloss on big topics of scaling, deployment and architecture. I realize it’s a big conference, but more technical depth would have been good.
The WiFi network for the conference was a general disaster. It had 14Mb and was 100% full every single day except Sunday. Not sure what was using that bandwidth, but it made even checking email painful.
With that said, I almost wish they would just get rid of the WiFi. There was simply too much social networking, messaging going on. RailsConf has an “official” back-channel in IRC at the #railsconf channel. I hopped on it at one point to see what was going on and found 200 people bitching, whining and making inappropriate comments in the channel. It was horrible. The worst of anonymous streaming spew that you could find. In several sessions I watched more than a couple of people just sit there and type into the IRC channel the entire time. Yikes!
Lastly, I really wish there was some more diversity in the developer community. There was maybe 1 woman in attendance for every 50 or 100 men. The group could use more diversity, I think it would help the developer community in a number of different ways.
Bricking my Linksys WTR-54GS
Sometimes I really should know better. There are some things you just don’t do, like updating firmware on something when you need it right away, or hacking the firmware on your travel router, when you are in the first part of a six week road trip!
I’ve had a Linksys WTR-54GS for a while now. I’ve used it quite a bit. It’s nice to get to a hotel that doesn’t have wireless and pop the WTR-54GS in and you’ve got your very own private, secure WiFi network. This is a good thing for our trip since we are traveling with two laptops and two iPhones and WiFi is a must have.
When in Seattle I did some research on hacking the WTR-54GS and putting DD-WRT on it. This sounded great to me, since Linksys has done a horrible job supporting this device. It is now discontinued so effectively it’s dead and DD-WRT gives a great way to put a Linux based system on it and get a ton of additional functionality. Great!
I checked out the instructions and decided I shouldn’t do it. It was too risky. I may need the router at the next stop. If it went wrong, I’d have a brick on my hands. Nope, no way.
Then that just cycled and cycled. I had to. I now knew I could hack it and I therefore must. To make matters even better, I would be running the hack from Windows running inside of Parallels on my MacBook Pro. Great – even more risk. 🙂
I did the hack and everything went really great, until it didn’t. The router just died after flashing a new boot-loader on it and I can’t get it do to anything. I may be able to bring it back to life with a JTAG cable, but that is a serious amount of work for sometime when I’m back at home. Lesson learned, should have left it alone.
Of course the hotel we stayed at for RailsConf lacked WiFi, and my brick didn’t do any good.
Summer of Love Day 15 Log
See full Summer of Love Collection.
Summer of Love Index
Number of days on the road so far: 14
Mileage on the 2006 Honda Odyssey at the beginning of the trip: 48,139
Mileage on the minivan at the end of the day, June 2nd: 50,738
Total miles driven during Summer of Love: 2,599
The average number of miles driven per day: 185.64
Fewest miles driven in one day: 0
Approximate CO2 footprint for driving portions of the trip, thus far: 963 lbs
Cost of fuel for the trip thus far: $481.13
Cost to offset the carbon emissions of the driving portions of the trip, thus far: $2.41
Cost for fuel per mile driven: $0.1851
Number of hotels stayed in: 6
Total number of photographs taken during the trip so far: 944
Average number of photographs taken per day so far: 67.43
Fewest number of pictures taken in a day thus far: 8
Find Friends on Flickr
I find myself really liking Flickr more and more. I’m really pleased with the features and how usable, and very importantly, how extendable it is.
However, one area where Flickr falls really short is finding your friends. Sure, if you have a GMail or Yahoo! Mail account you can find people via that, but what about everyone else? Enter Flickr Friends!
Flickr Friends is a great little site that will take an address book export (including a vCard dump from Leopard’s Address Book) and find anyone in your address book that has a Flickr account. It’s great stuff and I was able to connect with a bunch of friends right away.
Trying to find a way to buy carbon offsets for the Summer of Love. Confusing, and way too hard.
Seattle Recap
I’ve been trying to post updates from the Summer of Love trip pretty regularly but we seem to have arrived and left Seattle without even a mention of the stop. So, rather than backdating some posts (which I always feel gross doing) I’ll just do a big recap post. If you get bored easily, suffice it to say that Seattle was really cool.
Put on Your Walking Shoes
We did a lot of walking in Seattle. After being in the car for three long days of driving interspersed with a decent amount of driving at Glacier National Park we decided to park the Honda and set out on foot. We stayed on the fringe of downtown, about 5 blocks from Seattle Center, and about a 10 block walk from downtown Seattle. We probably walked around 4 miles or more total each day. It was nice to stretch the legs and see the city up close. However, the downside of this was that we didn’t get much further out of downtown than our feet allowed.
Great Places
We found a number of great places to check out. The first full day we were in town we found the Elliot Bay Trail and had a nice morning walk while checking out Puget Sound. Then we had a nice coincidence of being in town during the Northwest Folklife Festival. We didn’t plan it but we really enjoyed checking it out, listening to some music and hanging out in Seattle Center.
We decided, and Mazie let us know, that it was high time she got to swing. She was looking for the swings when we got to Glacier National Park. It was high time she needed to do some swinging. We walked over to Cascade Park and Mazie was able to get a solid hour of swinging in before we went over to the Flagship REI store. I feel a little odd gushing about a store, but this REI in Seattle is amazing. Just entering it you go on a little mini hiking path and can’t help but want to buy some hiking boots by the time you get into the store. Plus, they had the perfect layout with the play area for the kids, sitting area for dad with free WiFi and the massive array of womens clothing for mom. Genius.
We checked out the Experience Music Project. The architecture of the EMP is pretty amazing, so even just visiting the building was a lot of fun. They had a great exhibit on Jimi Hendrix as well as an overview of music of the northwest, with a big spread on grunge music and related bands. It was a cool place, but not the best place for little kids. In contrast though, it would be a great place for older kids, and there were a lot of them there having a great time.
Great Eats
We had some good meals in Seattle but two places were really great. We had some amazing pizza at Tutta Bella followed with some great gelato. And we had a wonderful dinner at the Five Spot with a relative of mine that lives in Seattle. We liked it so much we made a return visit for breakfast before we left and had the most amazing cinnamon french toast I’ve ever had.
819 photos taken so far on the Summer of Love. At this rate, I expect to end this trip with ~3,000 photos.
New Blog Theme?
I’m experimenting with a new blog theme. Before I go through trouble getting it all wired up, I’m curious what the folks visiting this site may think.
So, what do you think?
Checking out Powell’s Books in Portland. This place is huge.
Mount St. Helens
Today we hooked up with the Tangen family on the Summer of Love. Kent is here going to RailsConf as well, and Marilee and kids came out to join Tammy and Mazie while he and I go to the conference. Today though, Tammy and Marilee decided to hit the town all day and Kent and I loaded the kids in the van and headed to Mount St. Helens. It was a great day.
The drive to Mount St. Helens from Portland wasn’t too bad; about 50 minutes on the interstate and 30 or so on the highway. We got started somewhat late and stopped for lunch at the last place for food before heading the final 20 miles to the Volcanic Monument. Driving through the valley presents you with evidence of the massive destruction of this eruption even 28 years later. The valley that you drive through is 100 feet higher than it was before. Before it was a gorge and now it’s a pancake flat valley settled between the mountains. All the result of the eruption.
The view of the volcano, and the very young trees everywhere, just exclaim the power of something as mighty as a volcano. Looking at the mountain inspires awe and respect. It takes a wild imagination to envision the cubic mile of dirt that was blown out during the eruption.
If your in the area, take the time to see it. Even the kids thought it was pretty cool. I’d love to come in the summer and hike around the area – although access is very limited even now. I took a bunch of pictures – good stuff.
Rhythm of Travel
Doing extensive travel with Mazie has a certain rhythm to it. I’m sure this is very familiar to all parents. I find that this rhythm provides some structure to the day, as well as some forced downtime that is good pacing. Given that the Summer of Love is six weeks long, a more relaxed “marathon” style trip is appropriate.
Each day starts between 6:30a and 7:00a. So far on the Summer of Love we’ve started the day right around 8:30a with a little variance on breakfast. Everyday at 12:30p is the search for a kid friendly food spot, and then a return to the hotel for Mazie’s nap at 2:00p. She sleeps for approximately 2 hours and then the second part of the day is picked up. Bedtime is at 8:00pm so the 2nd part of the day is always pretty short so the agenda is lighter.
For Tammy and I the result is an early start to the day, a forced two hour break in mid-day and evenings are spent usually tucked in the hotel while Mazie sleeps in the other part of the room.
So, when you see me on email, posting on the website or twittering – it’s probably timed with this rhythm.
Greg Merkle: Great Music
This post is a bit of a tease since you can’t (yet) just go out and buy this music. I know Greg Merkle from working at Dow Jones and have been lucky enough for him to share some of his recordings with me. It’s great stuff. He’s starting to do more stuff and getting more online. Check out this video he just posted.
Delicious Library 2 Released
Last night Wil Shipley, and the Delicious Monster team, released Delicious Library 2. Delicious Library is a cataloging application that I’ve put to very real use to manage my CD and DVD archive. Since I’ve moved all of my media onto my network, the physical assets are of no use other than as proof of ownership. I’ve moved them all into Slappa cases and to track where things are I use Delicious Library. Yes, a spreadsheet could do it, but it would suck. Delicious Library is such a nice application for this.
Delicious Library 2 has been anticipated for a long time so it was exciting to get ahold of it. I’m happy to report that with my 1,400+ item library it is much faster. The old Library just stored things in XML, the new one uses CoreData and makes things much faster. Smart Collections are a very welcome addition and remove a needless step from my workflow. I’m also really excited to see additional item types. Software is now trackable and there is a field for serial number so I may move to using this instead of Backpack to keep my software licenses around.
I knew one of the big things coming was web publishing of your library. That’s neat, and I’ve already published my library on the web. You can see it at library.thingelstad.com. Pretty nifty! There is even a special iPhone view. However, even cooler, you can actually load a published library into another users copy of Delicious Library 2. So, if you have Delicious Library 2, add my library in and you can get native access to it. Very nice!
Publishing lists like this is a long standing tradition with me. My very first website had a list of my CD’s, as well as a list of Laserdiscs.
Blogger Born? Smaller Than A Redwood
Fire up your RSS reader and get ready to add a feed! Some of you know that my wife Tammy has had a blog, Smaller Than A Redwood, for a while, but it’s been pretty much idle. She’s gotten her blogger shoes on during the Summer of Love and has been posting pretty regularly. On top of that we outfitted her with a new theme. Exciting stuff! Check it out!
Baby Monitor in the Hallway
Tammy and I are hanging out in this extremely cool, funky hotel in Portland called McMenamins Kennedy School. It used to be a school, but they converted it to a hotel, restaurant and bar. It’s very cool.
Anyway, Mazie is asleep and the monitor doesn’t quiet reach to us. We have it sitting in the hallway about 30 feet from us where we can see the lights if she started hollering for us.
The funny thing is watching people walk by. People keep looking at it. Picking it up. Listening. Etc. It’s a pretty funny social experiment. It makes me think it would be pretty funny to actually broadcast something over it and put it in the hall. Maybe the original War of the Worlds or an early episode of The Shadow. Hmmm…