For a while now I’ve been watching the development of Camping. I’m not sure anyone can really trace where or how Camping came about – I’m sure why won’t reveal the true history. It has to be an interesting story. I’ve only played around with creating Camping applications a little bit, but I’ve found it’s quite intuitive and easy. The funny thing about this is that the source of Camping itself is quite the opposite in many ways.

In binary that is. Yes, today I turned 32 (making it easier for those of you not so inclined). Not much in the way of plans, but I’m taking a half day from work so that I can properly sit around and relax for a bit.

I can’t believe I just used that word… well, I’m back. Some shifting of hosts and wrestling with ruby, rails, typo and some missing ruby gems on the new host, and here I am again.

I’ve also now got Drivel running, so adding posts should be a little smoother. And smoother means more frequent, right? Well, we’ll see about that.

A few days ago, Chad Fowler‘s new book Rails Recipes was released in beta by the Pragmatic Programmers. As soon as I saw this, I printed out and read the excerpts they were making available. As I had hoped, they were great. Aside from a few typos (to be expected for a beta), the quality was excellent and I’ve already learned a few tricks. It was fun setting up mini-rails projects and quickly running through each recipe.

I think my brain just exploded. It appears that the Vatican are dismissing Intelligent Design while NASA scientists are being told to alter their language so as not to discount it.

Sorry for those of you coming here expecting non-technical posts, but I did start this thing for technical purposes, after all, and I figured it was about time to return to form. Tonight I was working on a little side project I’m doing. I needed to pull a bunch of legacy data into a new table for event data. To make this work, I created a set of models that referenced the old tables, using the syntax ActiveRecord provides to override it’s default settings.

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Nicole, the doggies and I went to Cannon Beach this last weekend. It was gorgeous weather for it and we had a splendid time. I’ve upload some of the photos to flickr. Check them out here and here. That second set is of the sitka spruce we saw on the way out there. It’s the tallest of it’s kind in the US. It’s an amazing site, but this place is full of things like that.

Well, lots has been going on lately. Too much, in fact, to bother keeping up with this blog. And, of course, there’s that whole things where each time something else goes on I find myself thinking, “well, there’s another thing I haven’t gotten around to blogging about.” And after a while the load just piles up so high… So, we’re in Portland now. Oregon, not Maine. It’s beautiful here. Nicole started law school.

Kottke acutely points out the “meaning” of Pi:

Oh, and as for patterns hidden in pi, we’ve already found one. It’s called the circle. Just because humans discovered circles first and pi later shouldn’t mean that the latter is derived from the former.