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.

In less than seven days I will be standing behind a podium, giving a talk about Gerrit and Jenkins that is coming as a result of almost 2 years of integrating Gerrit into two separate companies, and almost 4 years of Jenkins. The fact that I’m speaking at the same time as Sacha Labourey (CEO of CloudBees) is just extra gravy on top of it all.

This past Saturday I had the (mis-)fortune of being signed up for the 2011 Cinderella Trail Run. EC (my wife) had signed up for the 10k race at the beginning of the summer to give her running a good goalpost to shoot for, and I agreed to run as well in order to help motivate her.

Our fancy new apartment, the one with the new oven, has two full-sized bed rooms and to full size bathrooms. We have one bathroom we shower and brush our teeth in, and one bathroom adjacent to the “office.” The second bathroom really just allows me a place to take a leak during late-night hack sessions in the “office,” without waking EC.

This past weekend I finally had a satisfyingly large chunk of free time that I could devote to hacking on various ideas, it was glorious.

(Note: this post by reddit user megadrive is responsible for the light-bulb clicking in my brain)

I ended this week with a visit to the California Academy of Sciences so technically, I learned quite a bit this past week. Saw some snakes, penguins, various clusters of small children, etc.

One easy way to learn a lot during a week is to attend a conference or workshop of some form or fashion. Surrounding yourself with people eager to share their knowledge means that even if you are plugging your ears and humming classic Spice Girls tunes, you still might just learn something.