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.