106 Miles to Chicago

lucasjosh.com

In case you are curious, I'm blogging a bit more over at lucasjosh.com. Not sure if it is forever but at least for a little bit...

Holiday Party

Yesterday was an interesting day. I'm part of a team who will be launching a new product at The Times in the next few days. It's not going to be the total answer to what ails the newspaper business but it's something fun and a way of getting something out to folks in a relatively short period of time.

Whenever it's for a launch, tons of different things start popping up ranging from meetings that all of a sudden show up on your calendar to company functions. Last night was our division's Christmas party. It was a nice diversion from launch issues but I honestly was hoping for something more. But everyone was there including one of newest employees. Tony gives his overview of his first day including what happened at the Christmas party. And yes, I was one of those wonderfully dressed geniuses that was talking to him.

In the next few days, we'll be soft-launching our product and I'll be blogging about it and various other things. Hopefully this can restart the blog. I know I've said this a few times but maybe it will stick.

Tony Pierce is joining the Times!

I got a text message from Gregg Friday night on my way home from Beer Friday at The Edison. It said something about Tony Pierce joining the Times. It definitely took a few minutes to sink in.

I've been reading Tony's blog for a long time and more recently have added LAist to the feed rotation. Having someone who has been involved on the Web for so long is a definite good thing.

You can get a good sense of Tony's belief in the value of the Times which is something we agree on.

An Entirely Other Day

It's always awesome when Greg Knauss decides to blog again!

The 5th of the 11th

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up King and Parliament.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

For more... and even today, VendAT*Ta?

Forty Three Years

That's a long time and it was the consecutive win streak that Notre Dame had over Navy. That is no longer the case. It's been a long year for the Irish and the season still has games. I'm still wearing my leprechaun shirt every week. Someone asked me today while I still wear it given how bad they are. I looked at him kind of funny and answered that if I didn't wear what sort of a fan would I be. I don't think he quite got it.

Vendor/Gems and Rake

Today, I hit a little bump along the road of having a nice, simple checkout/run path in the Rails project I'm working on. The problem occurs when you don't have a gem installed on the system, instead unpacking it into vendor/gems. In order for those to be included in the environment, you need to add everything underneath vendor/gems to the load_paths, something like this:

  config.load_paths += Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/gems/**"].map do |dir|
    File.directory?(lib = "#{dir}/lib") ? lib : dir

Unfortunately, the Rakefile only requires boot.rb and the load_paths aren't updated. Since we are using Rcov, it was bombing out because the Rake task couldn't be found. I had to add an additional line in the Rakefile, require(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'config', 'environment')) After that, everything worked just fine.

Chicago Taxes

It sounds like Mayor Daley is looking for new ways of generating income for the city. He's raising property taxes as well as implementing some sin taxes. The folks at Schadenfreude have come up with some additional taxes which are definitely needed.

Here's a sampling:

$2 tax for every TV in sports bars.

$35 tax on eating hot wings on El.

$25 dollar tax on your bill at Ed Debevics, Rainforest, Hooters, et al.

A $1500 tax per month on any authentic Irish Bar established in 2000 or later.

Also check out the comments with some even better ones.

Technorati Tags:
chicago, taxes

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Yesterday was a day of up-and-downs.

I have to 'Wait until Next Year' again. Now the sign outside of Wrigley will say AC0063100. It will be 100 years since the last championship. 100 years!!! That just seems so unfathomable especially when trying to put it into perspective for the kids. I know I have cursed them by making them care about the Cubs, forcing them to feel the disappointment at the end of the year but I'll shoulder that responsibility because I wouldn't trade the Cubs for anything in the world. So now, it is wait until next year but let me tell you, it's going to be the year they win it all!

And then there's the Irish, playing just down the 210 from me. They came in 0-5, a laughingstock throughout the country. A team that hasn't put together a full game's worth of play all season and honestly they still haven't. Yes, their defense stepped up and played very well but they were also against a walk-on quarterback who definitely wasn't ready to play. Their offense still struggled but it did enough to put points on the board. But those criticisms don't matter right now. All that matters is the hurdle of getting the first win of the season is over. Now it's time to head back to South Bend and get ready for back-to-back rivals coming in, Boston College next week and then USC the following one.

Technorati Tags:
cubs, notre+dame

News Organizations and Social Networks

I enjoy reading Fred Stutzman and his thoughts on social networks. He was recently interviewed about how news organizations can spread their content thru social networks.

The column, What's Your Facebook Strategy? gives some additional thoughts about how to do this.

I've only been part of a newspaper for four weeks and there's plenty of things we will be working on but I see the importance of getting the news in front of as many people as possible.

Technorati Tags:
social+networks, los+angeles+times, facebook, fred+stutzman

Cubs win, Cubs win!

Yesterday, I was a mess but last night as I followed the Brewers game on the train home, I started to relax. The Cubs are in the playoffs for the first time since 2003. I don't bring that year up too often, it's still painful. On the other hand, this is only the fifth time the Cubs have made the post-season in my lifetime. I see the Yankees have gone to thirteen straight playoffs so that should give you some perspective.

So I can breathe until Wednesday when everything gets cranked up another notch.

2 Up with 3 to Play

The Cubs are not making it easy on me. I was hoping that being up three games going into the last week of the season would be enough to let me breathe easy but being a Cub fan for so long, I should have known better. Now, three games to go, up by two games, not freaking out daily will be my mantra.

Two Weeks Completed

So, I'm starting my third week at the Times and things are moving quickly which is pretty cool. I'm definitely going to start keeping this more up-to-date but for now, how about a tab dump to get the juices flowing?

Personal unit tests Could be an interesting way of keeping yourself on target for whatever goals you are aiming for.

Tim Bray and Erlang

Rails, the 15 minutes is Almost Up. Meet Erlang.

Rails performance presentation and another one

QueryTrace

Monitoring Rails Performance with Munin and a Mongrel

Everything is Fast for Small n

FeedHub - Individualized RSS feeds

Google Code for Educators - Distributed Systems

ThingFish - ThingFish is a network-accessable, searchable, extensible datastore. It can be used to store chunks of data on the network in an application-independent way, associate the chunks with other chunks through metadata, and then search for the chunk you need later and fetch it again, all through a REST API over HTTP.

CouchDB views in Ruby instead of Javascript

Use vendor branches for plugins, not script/plugin install

Bayesian Network Classifier Toolbox

If They Come, How Will They Build It?

Last Day at EarthLink

September is traditionally the time for going back to school and the start of football season. For me this year, it's also time for one chapter of my life to end and get ready for the next one to begin. Today is my last day at EarthLink.

It's actually the third time I've had a last day here which is pretty funny. I have a feeling though, there won't be a fourth one. No, I'm not burning any bridges but let's just say that things are a bit in flux around here.

I have worked with some amazing folks, learned a lot and was given freedom to investigate new and different technologies. You can't ask for much more in a job but now is the time to make a move and that's what I'm doing.

Monday, I start working at the Los Angeles Times. I'll have much more to say on that after today.

Technorati Tags:
earthlink

The Blue-Gray Sky

One of my favorite blogs is The Blue-Gray Sky. It's a blog focused on Notre Dame football and it's just really well-written and not so homer-ish that it is embarrassing.

Here's an example of why it is awesome, a breakdown of the various packages / formations the offense has run the last two years under Coach Weis. It's an impressive amount of data and research.

Technorati Tags:
college+football, notre+dame, blue+gray+sky