Note: This is a rant, I’m not actually going to explain anything of use

There was a time when I was a big fan and user of open source microblogging site Identi.ca. I regret to inform you that this time has passed and I can no longer in good conscience support the platform.

This upcoming February I will be making the trip to the bitterly cold cobblestoned streets of Brussels, Belgium for FOSDEM 2012, one of the most fantastic open source conferences of the entire year.

Every now and again I’m taken aback by technology, I become overwhelmed by my own sense of awe with things we can so often take for granted.

My wife occasionally gets annoyed with my constant analysis and experimentation with just about everything. I have this incessant need to find the try to find improvements in everything that I do. For example, when boarding my train to head home in the evening, I board at just the right place such that I exit at the base of the stairs upon arrival. Not that big of a deal, but I like to walk stairs two at a time and all getting stuck behind all the slow tiny people was infuriating.

One of the developers that I follow on Twitter, Pablo Villalba (@micho), posted this update today:

A couple months ago I posted some tips on making the ri a bit more useful.

Disclaimer: I hate the term “business value”, it’s completely subjective and generic; it is one of my least favorite synergies.

I have been exploring the wide world of Behavior Driven Development lately with Cucumber. For the longest time I’ve been fascinated with Cucumber from a conceptual standpoint; a written-word testing framework, do go on! I’m quite pleased to finally be able to put it to good use with some recent projects that I’ve been working on.

There was once a time when I prided myself on my ignorance of SQL Joins, foolishly proclaiming “if I need to use a JOIN, I’ve already screwed up.”

It’s almost that time of year again! Almost time for Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles!

There’s something weird in the Ruby community that has been driving me crazy since I started using the language. There’s this habit, by what I hope is a minority, of choosing “clever” gem names instead of useful or descriptive names. I’m not above a good pun or play on words, but some gem names range between confusingly stupid and utterly aggrevating.

Jørgen pointed out that there’s no real compelling reason to use IO#popen over a combo of Open3#popen3 and IO#select. That said, Open3#popen3 is practically as brain-dead in 1.8 as IO#popen is. Regardless, I’m not going to let that get in the way of a good cathartic rant (the changes in 1.9 are pretty sweet though).

I figured I’d try something different for my birthday this year, an event which I normally don’t celebrate at all.

A couple of months ago my wife and I did a 10k trail run because, frankly, we’re idiots. Continuing in that tradition, we have a 12k trail run coming up this weekend, again, because we’re idiots.

One weekend in the not-so-distant past I started playing with Evernote, reading all sorts of LifeHacker-esque articles on how to use Evernote for super mega-awesome organization and note-taking, etc. I was so convinced that I would change everything to revolve around Evernote that weekend, that I went ahead and signed up for Evernote Premium after only a few hours.

Since I was terribly over-ambitious with what I wanted to cover in my session at CampDevOps. Oof.

Disclaimer: I dislike “devops” as a term in general. The tools and practices that are associated with “devops” however (puppet, chef, continuous deployment, automation of ops, etc) I am a very big fan of.

I’ve mentioned in the past how absolutely in love with Sonic.net I am. They’re by far the best ISP I’ve ever encountered and treat their users, especially technical ones, very well.