Nobody Listens Anyway

I spent two years in Japan. While there I met all kinds of interesting people. I remember one individual in particular because he was a chess grand master. He was also very good at Shogi. In fact he had written Shogi the video game for Nintendo.
I like chess and [...]

The Desert News is saying what we already know. Cache Valley is a great place to live. Of course the numbers don’t tell the actual story. This is a great place to live because it has a small town feel, the biking is awesome and people are friendly. The schools are [...]

I just got an invite to a FamilySearch Webinar. I imagine you are supposed to be a member of the developer group to attend, but I doubt they would throw you out. Here’s the details:
FamilySearch Developer WebinarJoseph Smith Memorial Building (JSMB) 5th Floor, West Lobby Conference Room 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Agenda:

Introduce Robert [...]

On the way back from the Mountain West Ruby Conference we dropped by xocolate in Salt Lake. They have a mole chocolate made with something that will set your mouth on fire. I bought a half a pound of chocolate and a half pound of peppermint bark. That stuff will be the [...]

In church today an older lady stood up and said she was grateful for her marriage of 60 years. I was impressed. I think that the divorce today tends to discourage people from believing that they can spend a lifetime with another person. It seems rare to find a couple that has [...]

We missed the first talk this morning (sorry Devlin we suck). I slept till 9:30, but mainly because we were up till 4am. Dave South gave me some great info on using TestSpec. RSpec seems to be the hot thing right now, but I like how TestSpec is lightweight:
Install the gem:
sudo gem [...]

Right Scale has a great gem:
gem install right_aws
RightScale RightAws::Sqs
RightScale RightAws::Ec2
They will automatically retry errors for you.
gem install kato
Kato - EC2 Pool Manager

require ‘rubygems’
requrie ‘right_aws’
RightAws::RightAWSParser.xml_lib = ‘libxml’
SQS = RightAws::Sqs.new(access_id, access_key) #get an SQS object
queue = SQS.queue(”name_of_queue”) #create a or get a reference to an existing queue
queue.psuh “put message in the queue” #8k max
queue.size # get an [...]

I’m at the Mountain West Ruby Conference for the next few days so I will be doing a bunch of blog posts that look like notes.
Up right now:
Strengthening the Ruby Ecosystem & Ezra Zygmuntowicz Evan Phoenix
Evan is talking about Rubinius. Engine Yard pays him to work on the project full time. Even doesn’t [...]

Team Astana has been barred from the Tour de France and all other ASO events this year which means that Levi Leipheimer won’t be able to ride which is absurd. Team Astand is basically brand new this year and its members include champions that should be allowed to compete.
Join the campaign and push for [...]

My wife will kill me I am sure, but this morning I dropped by the bike shop. I had a few minutes and if I go in the morning I can work with the shop manager which is always a better experience. My intention was to drop in really quick, lust, get a [...]