Family
- 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.
- Mazie throws blanket on floor.
- Dad picks up.
- Go to step 1.
- 7:23 am: Up earlier than I would like. Time change to mountain time to blame.
- 9:21 am: False alarm roadside potty stop for Mazie.
- 9:59 am: Passing through Circle, MT.
- 12:57 pm: Lunch in Lewistown, MT.
- 1:28 pm: Noticed that Barack Obama is in Montana too. Wish he’d stop following me around.
- 4:49 pm: Through Great Falls, MT.
- 5:02 pm: Getting closer to the mountains.
- 6:50 pm: In Glacier National Park!
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.
Summer of Love Day 15 Log
See full Summer of Love Collection.
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.
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.
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…
Trail of the Cedars
Contrary to the predictions of the weather people, today was a better day than yesterday. The temperature seemed slightly warmer and there was definitely much less rain. We stayed dry most of the day, except for our treacherous trip to East Glacier.
We had a great breakfast at the West Glacier Restaurant. The only restaurant open. Tammy and I are both confused why there are nearly 10 gift shops open in the park, but only one restaurant. It would seem that visitors in need of gifts would also be in need of dining. After breakfast we took headed up the Going-to-the-Sun Road as far as we could go, to Avalanche. It seemed like a popular destination as there were more cars parked there than we’d seen almost anywhere this early in Glacier.
Tammy and I have been trying to gauge our hiking (if you can call it that) expectations with little Mazie. As is typical, we have different worries. I’m worried about her getting in way over her head on even a moderate trail and that we are idiotic parents if we don’t have a basic first aid kit, compass, tent, sleeping bag, 3 weeks of food, etc. along if we have a small child with us. Tammy on the other hand isn’t worried about any of that, she’s just afraid of the bears.
The hike we took along Trail of the Cedars was perfect though. It’s a rare wheelchair accessible trail in a national park so Mazie could walk the whole thing. Most of the trail was a raised boardwalk. Just under a mile long with nice scenery in all directions. We had a great time and took a lot of photos. Thankfully, no bears encountered (or mountain lions!) and we didn’t fall in need of dire first aid care.
We were headed back for lunch and Mazie fell asleep on the drive so we decided to do an impromptu trip to East Glacier. First, a little background. Glacier National Park is huge. There are a couple of main entrances, unimaginatively named West Glacier and East Glacier. Tammy chose to stay in West Glacier because it is much more connected to the park. Typically the Going-to-the-Sun Road is the way to get between these two towns. However, that is closed. So we had to take US-2 all the way around the park, 56 miles one way, to get to East Glacier.
As soon as we got on the eastern side of the park is was raining and the temperature dropped 15 degrees. No good. We continued on and took the road up to where we were told a cool falls was that was an easy hike. We got there after nearly turning around a few times and decided to try the hike. Here however both my fears of hypothermia and Tammy’s fears of bear attack rung loud and after a short 0.2 mile walk we turned back to the van. There was a reasonable amount of snow there still. Not that much, but we were totally not prepared for anything. The lack of fellow hikers got Tammy thinking we were the sole prey for that hungry bear that must be lurking. So, around we went.
Since the Going-to-the-Sun Road is closed and isn’t going to open anytime soon we decided tonight to cut our trip short a day and head to Seattle tomorrow. There is much more to see here at Glacier, but it’s better seen in July, particularly if you have a toddler with you. I definitely want to return here. Next time we’ll maybe just pack our backpacks and hope on the Amtrak. We’ll be driving most of the day tomorrow.
Rainy and Cold
Today was our first full day in Glacier National Park. This place is pretty amazing. Our cabin is a just a couple of steps from McDonald Creek, connecting to Lake McDonald. The water moves quickly, and is so clear that you can see right through it to all the rocks underneath, even at several feet of depth.
Glacier has just opened up for the season. There is only one restaurant open, and it just started up again on Friday. We’ve been there three times so far. Today was cold and rainy. Unfortunately it looks like we will have more of this. The forecast is for rain and temperatures in the upper 40’s to low 50’s for our whole visit. We took it easy today and only really walked around for a couple of hours. Mazie spent two days in a car seat so she got some nice time to just hang out in the cabin and play with toys. With the rain and temperature, Tammy and I were happy to oblige.
I’m making my way quickly through Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. I watched Into the Wild a month ago and the movie really struck me. My friend Kent borrowed me his copy of the book. Reading it in Glacier is a bit of a treat since Alexander Supertramp “tramped” around this area a bit. In fact, I’m sure that he hitched a ride on the rails going right through Glacier. More about this book at another time.
The Going-to-the-Sun Road is not open through Logan’s Pass since it’s early in the season. We can take it up to Avalanche and are going to do that tomorrow. Since the road isn’t open the whole way, our glacier viewing will be limited. We are still hoping to see a couple of glaciers and some good falls.
But even with closed roads and less than great weather this is a stunning place to be. There are beautiful things to see in every direction, and having nice quiet time as a family is priceless. There are no distractions here. No television. No Internet. No telephone. And we are far from even any cellular coverage. That is a treat in its own regard.
Summer of Love Day 2 Log
See full Summer of Love Collection.
Dumbo
Today was another driving day. We got up early in Glendive, MT and hit the road after having breakfast in the hotel. We had a full 10 hours of driving ahead of us and wanted to get it behind us quickly. I drove all day yesterday, so Tammy took the wheel today. While I spent all day on I-94, she spent all day on smaller state highways going down roads that seemed to stretch on into infinity with a perfectly straight path. This was boring stuff.
I got in the back with Mazie and we decided to watch one of the movies on the new iPod. I had purchased some new kids movies for the trip. Dumbo was one of them. I vaguely remember watching Dumbo when I was a kid and thought it was pretty cool. After watching it today I’m tempted to delete it off of iTunes.
Seriously, have you watched Dumbo lately? Watch it yourself before you have your kids watch it. In an hour this children’s classic teaches some less than valuable lessons. First, we start of with a whole-hearted reinforcement that if you are different you will be laughed at, picked on and ridiculed. The movie is completely over-the-top on this.
After starting with this, the characterization of the circus that Jumbo, Dumbo’s mother, is in is so backwards as to be offending. She is whipped and then caged for protecting her baby elephant? And there is no backstory here on how horrible and bad that is. Oh, and then it gets better. We learn when Dumbo and his mouse friend accidentally drink a bunch of alcohol that that is really funny!_ Hey kids, go get drunk!_ It’s hilarious!
Now, we start the highlight of the whole movie, the 5-minute pink elephant drunk hallucination scene. I mean really, forget about watching The Wall. Just fire up this doozy. I encourage you to make sure you are flatly sober since anything else would likely result in you hiding under your bed shaking in fear.
For its final touch Disney introduces you to the four crows that help Dumbo figure out that he can fly. Here we have black crows, that are wearing fedoras and other garish hats, sucking on cigars and doing everything they can to invoke black imagery. Wow!
If you, like me, remember Dumbo as this nice movie about an awkward baby elephant with ears so big that he can fly, I offer the following advice. Watch the first 5 minutes, and then the last 7 minutes. Done. Cut everything in the middle.
The movie aside, we had a nice drive and got into Glacier National Park just before dinner. As we pulled close to Glacier we realized that Mazie has had a different understanding of Glacier National Park. She immediately asked to go to the swings. She wanted to go swing for a while. And hey, we had driven all this way to go the park after all! Let’s swing. This presented Tammy and I the challenge of explaining to a nearly 3 year old that a National Park wasn’t the same as a park at home, and there certainly weren’t any swings here.
We had a nice dinner and got checked into our cabin. We are 10 feet off of McDonald Creek right where it empties into Lake McDonald. The water is sparkling clear. The mountains are beautiful. I’m looking forward to exploring, although Mother Nature looks like she isn’t going to cooperate and is sending cold and rain.
New iPod Classic 160G
Before heading out on the Summer of Love, our 6-week family road trip, I suggested to Tammy that we may want to consider getting one of the big iPod Classics. We are going to put a lot of time in the van on this trip, and the van has a full AV input that can take the audio signal as well as video. We picked up the 160G unit before the trip and I was really happy to be able to put every single on of our 15,000 songs on it as well as a dozen movies for Mazie and even had enough room to put 4 rented movies on it for us.
Today was the first day of use and I was really happy we splurged for this extra. It was just great to have all of our music on hand at any whim. It was also nice being able to play movies for Mazie without having to fumble around with the DVDs and then navigate their menus to get them playing.
I love this use case for rentals too. We dumped 4 rentals on the iPod and will just watch them as we wish over the next 4 weeks of the trip.
We also happened to have a set of compact speakers to use with our other flash-memory based iPod. I’m still getting life out of the iPod Mini that I have using it only for kids music. But now we can drop the iPod Classic in it on our stays and enjoy some tunes in between the drives too.
All Day on I-94
Today we loaded up in the Honda Odyssey and started our big trip.
Packing was a bit last minute, we weren’t really done until just shortly
before leaving. It was a pretty busy weekend.
Today was spent entirely in the van except for two quick stops for food. We went about 15 miles from our house and got on I-94 and didn’t let it leave our site the whole day. Mazie did a great job all things considering. We fired up a bunch of different music on the new iPod Classic that we got for the trip. Mazie enjoyed a full watching of Charlotte’s Web as well. Tunes for the day included Son Volt, Willie Nelson and Frank Sinatra among others.
Gibber Jabber
Yesterday we had a birthday party for Mazie. Her actual birthday is a few weeks away and we’ll be in Las Vegas on the Summer of Love trip at that time. So, we had this one so she could celebrate with the family. She had a great time and really got into the birthday celebration. She also likes to make up words. Here she is having a great time doing just that for the camera, and Uncle Max joins in the fun as well.
She had just eaten all the frosting off of her cake. 🙂
Taking Mazie to School
One member of our family sure is happy to have Dad home this summer! Mazie has been Daddy-this and Daddy-that. It’s awesome. She keeps asking me if I’m going to stay for a long, long time. You bet. Here she is before we went to school this morning.
Cute isn’t a big enough word. :-)
Mazie's School Picture
I love this picture! Mazie had her very first school pictures at preschool this year. She seems to be communicating very well what she thinks about it.
Why is it so predictable that the one button Mazie would be most obsessed with on my MacBook Pro is the POWER button.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
More FriendFeed Fun
I wrote earlier about FriendFeed and I’m continuing to really enjoy it. I’ve played in the past with aggregation and this is by far the best solution for “life streaming” out there yet. Here is the perfect example of why FriendFeed is cool.
Find missing image uploads/2020/18e4b47555.png.
The Twitter and Flickr actions tied together; open and mashable in a “Web 2.0” way. Very cool.
Mazie to Dad using iPhone, “Dont do that.”, pointing at the iPhone.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.