something, something, something

When you exist for very long in something its often hard to see anything different.  One might think that a dream they have is out of reach because they don't see anyone doing differently.

Realizing you have choices helps, realizing you can actually act to make progress on something helps a lot.  When I was in High School I started apply a set of principles to how I "obtained advice" from people, mostly adults.  I simply asked myself if I wanted what they had.  For instance, if some person were dropping a few "wisdom snacks" on me I would ask myself, "do I want what this person has or is?"  Most of the time it was no, so I applied said advice accordingly.  Doesn't mean I didn't learn from watching peoples mistakes or by making mistakes myself.  History is also a good place to learn, looking at the past can inform the future.

I had more to say about that but the words are not coming to my fingers.

That said, if you have something you want to do you should act on it.  All I can say is that doing awesome stuff just takes a fuckload of work.  Lots of thought and correction, lots of growing but mostly just a fuckload of work.

1 Year of The Ghost

Today my game site Cheerful Ghost celebrates its one year anniversary!  Its been an awesome journey.  I write a bit more about its history on the site and you should check it out.

Heres to another year of awesome!

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/937

Cheerful Ghost: Playing Catch Up

I have been working on a side project for a bit now.  Haven't posted about it here for this or that reason.  Felt now is a good time to let you know about it.

A while ago I launched the web app Cheerful Ghost.  Cheerful Ghost is a web app that works the same on your phone, tablet and Desktop.  I am quite proud of that, so check it out on all your devices and let me know how it works out for you.  Its freeing working on something by yourself.  Its nice to be able to define success on your own terms.

Cheerful Ghost is an awesome community for gamers.  You add all your games to your list and from there can start a conversation about any game and share that with the world.  Along the way you can earn trophies for doing awesome stuff and compete with other users for ranking.  To help keep your game list up-to-date I fetch your Steam and PSN game feeds.  But one of the coolest features of Cheerful Ghost is its awesome community of people.

Its awesome to have an idea and work it to the point you can release it.  Its also awesome to make your users happy and build things people love.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Next Steps and Awesomeness.

Recently I started a new gig at LivingSocial.  I love it.  The people are amazing and its great to work on a successful product.  Its also great to see your career evolve in ways you didn't think possible.

Conversations with Chat Bots

This is the log of a chat I had a few days ago and thought I should share it.  I didn't know people still chat botted.

shannon edwards:  heya!

jdodson:  hi.  im not sure i know a shannon edwards.

shannon edwards:  hey whats up? 22/F here. you?

jdodson:  86/M

shannon edwards:  hmm. have we chatted before?

jdodson:  of course we havent sweet chat bot.

shannon edwards:  NO i am not a bot

jdodson:  thats just what a bot would say.

shannon edwards:  Im not a freaking bot

jdodson:  again, more bot talk.  next you will tell me you dont love skynet.

shannon edwards:  A bot? not hardly babe. Are you?
shannon edwards disconnected


I want to warn everyone, it seemed to get angry when I mentioned skynet.  

It Is Time

After a few years of considering which smartphone to buy I have finally settled on which on would work best for me.  Avoiding all the unpleasantries of a flame war, ill list out my use cases for a phone and what I eventually decided on.

1.  It didn't want to pay for internet twice.  Yeah, this is the single area I compromised on.  I absolutely loathe the idea of paying for data, but I can't seem to find an American phone company willing to deal me a smartphone that comes with no data plan.  Yes I do have Wifi every where.  No I don't need to surf the web in the forest.  Isn't wifi around you 99.99% of the time too?  Plus Verizon charges $30 a month for 2G of bandwidth!  If you go $20 a month you get 300 Megs.  This is absofuckinglutley crazy-shit pricing.  I don't care if its mobile internet, its way too expensive. This is one of the reasons why when the current telcos get disrupted I will have a party in their dishonor.

2.  The phone should be fast.  Yep.  And I don't mean "sort of speedy after I sluggard through the menu and wait as an app loads."  I don't mean "quick as in it barely made it to the web browser and now its fast."   I mean "when I want to take a picture I can take it, not wait 45 seconds."  You know, like when I turn on my camera and its ready to go.  Like that fast.

I don't care if it has the ability to run 50,000 things in the background.  Seriously, I don't care.  I just want it to do what I want quickly.  The fact that the phone has 50 cores is irrelevant, if its sluggish its a waste of silicon.

3.  It has to have more than 8G of storage.    I think anything less is silly.  I know, its all cloud these days but its not all ubiquitous yet.  Someday sure, but until then, I need to store higher fidelity mp3, videocasts and pictures.  Sorry, I don't store everything in the cloud quite yet, perhaps not for quite sometimes as I want things to settle down first before choosing a provider to store my data.  For now storage is a cheaper and easier solution for me.

4.  Apps don't matter.  Netflix does, but if the phone didn't run it I would still be happy.  I know this is a huge smartphone marketing point, but 5 billion apps don't matter to me.  Having a few kicking around for fun, sure, but as a first class use case?  I don't really care.

5.  The Mobile Browser Has To Be World Class!

I like using the web.  Its in my DNA now, its just how I think.  Its odd to me you can't bookmark or link to apps.  I like sharing things.  I think the web is amazing and I love developing for it.  I love using it.  The mobile web is awesome and I require that any smartphone I get has to have a top notch browser.  I mean that if I start using the phone and the browser ain't great I will not purchase it.

6.  The Camera Must Be Fantastic.  One of the coolest creative elements of a smartphone is the camera.  Id like to take a ton of pictures on it so it needs to look good.  Bonus points for great HD video.

Without further ado, the winner of the 2011 year end "What smartphone will I buy challenge is?"

The iPhone 4S.

I know, sort of anti-climactic but in tech its like saying you are a Red Sox fan(sort of).  I mean... already certain tech people are applauding and some think I sold my soul to Uncle Joe.   In a way its sort of an odd choice as my primary desktop at home is Ubuntu.

It does seem like with my history of being pro Free Software Android is the best choice.  That is, until I tried them.  I mean its Free Software and its Google!  I think you can like even install whatever App you want on it!   And I run Ubuntu so its a match made in heaven!  The unfortunate reality is that I don't like using Android phones.  They seem sluggish.  The browser doesn't seem first class to me.  Some of them take way too long to load the camera.  Plus, and this is only of the last year or so, all the top line phones are way too big for my taste.  Its possible there is a great Android out there for me, I just haven't seen it yet.

All that said, its about time I got a smart phone and I am excited to own it.

Ruby 2011 Restrospective

I am a Development Lead that uses Ruby on Rails to do awesome things.  I really love the Ruby language and find Rails to be a great way to build web applications.  Its fun to learn about the edge of Rails and what new gems people are writing.

Ruby Inside recently posted an article about notable Ruby news in 2011.

A few things I found interesting from the article:

"Ruby Turns 18 - Matz had previously said Ruby was "born" on February 24, 1993, so "she" turned 18 years old in February. Yes, I'm sad enough to have had that in my calendar ever since I read about it ;-)"

"Netbeans Drops Ruby Support (And JRuby Picks It Up) - The Netbeans IDE team announced they were dropping support for the Ruby and Rails specific features in their popular IDE. Separately, though, Thomas Enebo of the JRuby core team said that they had spoken to the Netbeans team and they would be adopting the project."

I know this might seem odd, but I <3 Netbeans.  I think its a great IDE and I like using something that works on any platform.  I know VIM really well, I just don't find it satisfying enough to use full time.  

"DHH Offended by RSpec, Says Test::Unit is Just Great - Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson inadvertently kicked off a relatively interesting discussion about testing tools."

I totally agree that Test::Unit is just fine.  Ive seen RSpec, Ive heard people make some interesting points in favor of RSpec.  I just don't see any benefit based on the tests people write to RSpec.  

I use Cucumber and it is painful.  I'm not sure what is much better for BDD testing.  Thoughts?

"LivingSocial Acquires Ruby/Rails Consultancy InfoEther - This wasn't your typical boring acquisition. LivingSocial, a daily deals site, purchased InfoEther, the US's first significant Ruby consultancy and home to Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer, Tom Copeland, and others. Ruby recruitment in overdrive!"

Awesome to see great people in the Ruby community doing well.  I went to Rails Conf and met Chad many moons ago.  I also bought his Rails Recipes book WAY back in the day.  

"Cucumber 1.0.0 Released - Continuing with the testing theme, Cucumber also hit a significant milestone in 2011."

Boy was that one difficult upgrade.

"Ruby's Creator, Matz, Joins Heroku - Surprise in the Ruby community as Yukihiro 'matz' Matsumoto took up a Chief Architect position with Heroku, the Salesforce-owned Ruby application hosting company."

<3 Heroku.  Its good to have a cloud company understand that a certain amount of service should be free and when you realize the value of it you pay for it.  Its a very equatable model.

"Rails 3.1.0 Released - A full year after Rails 3.0, Rails 3.1 was released to much fanfare, adding key features like the asset pipeline, roles, reversible migrations, jQuery as the new default JavaScript library, and a new focus on CoffeeScript. I explained the controversy behind some of the changes when they were announced back in April."

Using for some personal projects.  Its a really cool upgrade.  I don't find it too odd bouncing between Rails 3.0 and 3.1 at all.  

"Ryan Bates Unveils RailsCasts Pro - Ruby's most popular screencasting legend (other than Geoffrey Grosenbach, of course!) 'went pro' and started to charge for extra episodes of his popular weekly screencast series."

This was met with some un-positive vibes from some people that I work with.  I am happy Ryan is trying to get a few coins for RailsCasts.   Ive shown so many in meetings to convey a topic I really understand the value of them.  I hope he makes a mountain of diamonds off RailsCasts.