award tour

Microsoft launched a new set of ads to follow-up there Jerry Seinfeld sports. The new ads take the Apple “I’m a Mac” ads head-on. All three ads are linked up here in this techcrunch post. Essentially, the ads start with a John Hodgeman look-alike who says “I’m a PC” and then shows a mosaic of people who say they’re also a PC. It includes you’re average person, an astronaut, Bill Gates, Pharell, a hipster, a teacher in Africa, a guy in the Artic, etc.

It’s interesting that Microsoft took on the Apple ads head-on with a message of “Billions of people use PCs and you can be proud to be a PC”. Though I think the ad is well done the problem is that I have never really seen someone be passionate about Microsoft products. The only exception I can think of is game developers who use Visual Studio, people who use Excel for everything (and that’s just cause they’ve used it forever), and people directly or indirectly on MSFT payroll. That said, all of those cases pale in comparison to Mac and iPhone users.

That said, the ad is quite effective if all it does is give someone piece of mind while buying a computer that “Ya, it’s alright to be a PC”.

Can someone please explain to me why git-checkout is overloaded so that you can get a branch (git checkout master) and also restore a file from the current branch HEAD (git checkout hello.c)? It seems like a misplaced overload. Wouldn’t git-revert be a better overload?

Anways, this confused the hell out of me this morning for some reason.

I just paid $8 for a pint of guinness. Eight fucking dollars! On the plus side, leaving work to go watch Eurocup is quite easy.

Ram mentioned on his blog that he’s looking for a “mouse that doesn’t suck“. I started writing a comment in response, realized it was getting really long, and decided I’d just post it here.

I also spent a lot of time looking for a good keyboard and mouse. The keyboard part got easy when Apple launched their latest keyboard but their mouse, the mighty mouse, was just not for me. It’s horrible small, which cramps my hand, and I’m not big on the tiny scroll wheel.

So my requirements was a mouse with bluetooth (i didn’t want a stupid dongle taking up a usb port), rechargeable (i didn’t want to deal with batteries), and preferably as large as possible to fit my hand. This left few options. I went with the Microsoft Laser Mouse 8000 and I’ve been very happy with it. Though oddly expensive at the time ($80 I believe) I managed to get it from the Microsoft Store (thank you Boris) for $50.

Configuring it on OSX Tiger was a real pain in the ass (you had to install it manually as a random bluetooth device) but when I upgraded to OSX Leopard it worked perfectly. The 4th and 5th buttons on it are off to the sides are rest perfectly under your thumb and ring finger. I use those buttons for OSX’s Expose and Spaces, respectively. The one annoying button on the mouse is the scroll wheel. It’s one of those scroll wheels that also has left-right scrolling (which i never use) so using it to click is near impossible (so I never use it).

I use the mouse at home (so not 8 hours a day like at the office) and since November I’ve probably only recharged it a half-dozen times. It comes with a recharging base so I don’t have to deal with batteries which is quite nice. The mouse is also a decent size. I’d still want it bigger but I didn’t any that were.

Basically, if you want a quality rechargable, bluetooth mouse I’d recommend the Microsoft Laser Mouse 8000 (what a terrible product name).

Looking at feedburner trends over the last few months it looks like there’s about 30 people who read awardtour five days a week. I highly suspect that I personally know every single one of these people. I also suspect that this won’t be news to any of them as it’s been in the works for a very long time…

I’m leaving Amazon in May and Seattle in June. I’ll be driving my 2000 VW Golf across the USofA and should be arriving at my final destination, Toronto, sometime during the second week of June. Soon after that, you’ll be able to find me at the offices of Unspace near Queen & Spadina. I met the guys from Unspace at Railsconf last year and I’m quite honored that they asked me to join their ranks. I suspect this is when I start asking everyone I meet “Hey, do you need a kickass Ruby on Rails consultant for your cool project?” or exclaim “What do you mean you’re not going to RubyFringe? Are you out of your mind?”

“But Tyler, don’t you love Seattle and enjoy working at Amazon? Have you lost your mind?”

‘Tis true. I am quite fond of Seattle and Amazon, excluding my brutal first year, has been great. But as you might also know, I’ve been dating my lovely girlfriend (who’s still in Toronto) for the last 3 years. Three years of phone calls and flights is more than enough for me. That said, I’m so excited to be moving back to Toronto (more so than Jessie Spano on caffeine pills).

Seattle people, I have no idea when the going away party will be. Toronto people, would asking for a parade upon my return be out of line?

That’s all for now.

Oh, I also suspect this is when Ram comments “Fuck ya! Toronto rules! What took you so long?”

I first got on “the internet” back in 1993 when I was 13. I say “the internet” cause all I was doing was dialing into local BBSs with my high-tech 14.4kbs US Robotics Sportster modem. The BBS basically gave you access to newsgroups, play terrible command line games (which I never did), and use email. The main reason I would log on to the BBS was to get cheat codes and guides for video games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II off alt.videogames.

Back then I didn’t know a single other person who was using BBSs and I can distinctly remember thinking at the time “who the hell needs an email account? who would they ever email?” It seems I was short-sighted as a teenage boy as twelve years later the internet had 1 billion people on it and I personally check 4 different email accounts.

I had never that crazy about the “+” and date links being intermixed for each post on awardtour. It seemed a little confusing. So when I saw this blog yesterday I thought it a good idea to replace my “+” idea with a similar icon-set. I used the two free icon-sets I linked to yesterday to make a set for the site. I’m still not sure what color to make the icon background color. I keep switching between the standard orange, light gray, and a dark gray.

So some of you might have noticed that the other day I added a comment count icon to the side of every post which had comments. I did this so that you could pick out posts which had garnered comments but had fallen out of the “latest comments” list. I changed the comment icon to fit the new icons and it now doesn’t show the comment count in the icon but a mouse-over will tell you via a tooltip.

I also wanted to try keeping the running date on the page as I liked how it conveyed how much posting I was doing over time. I just couldn’t get it to look nice enough beside the icons. I think I might now cook up an icon set for dates and see how that looks.

Anyways, I posted this just to see if anyone had any comments on the change.

So the other week Zed Shaw wrote a post on his blog calling rails a ghetto. His post has some very valid points but most of that gets lost in the vitriol of one very angry man. Then Dreamhost, a major discount shared hosting company, put up a post somewhat akin to one of Zed’s complaints saying rails is a pain to deploy and should have an equivalent to mod_php such that deployment is just a matter of moving files. This is why wordpress and vbulletin (written in php) are the default blog and message board apps. Installation is just a matter of copying some files onto a shared hosting webspace. DHH, the inventor of rails, then made a post saying that the reason such a thing doesn’t exist is that the most of the people working on rails don’t have a need for it because they don’t use shared hosting environments. As I agree with the “scratch your own itch” philosophy of software development, I think this makes sense. People who use shared hosting are probably best suited to develop a rails solution that works in a shared hosting environment.

That said, I actually am a rails developer but I still use wordpress for my blog because I’ve yet to see a reason to pay slicehost $240/year for a virt that can run a rails-based blogging engine (like Typo, Mephisto, or SimpleLog) when my $50/year shared host running wordpress works just fine. But here’s the thing: if you’re an actual developer who has any familiarity with *nix (and not a webdev hobbyist), setting up rails on a shared host really isn’t that hard. Sure you can make it complicated if you’re trying to setup the latest and greatest bleeding edge stack, but something that “just works” isn’t very hard to setup. Hell, slicehost has tutorials for 5 OS variants which are only a couple of command lines. On top of that, let’s say that I finally did implement one of the 10 web-app ideas I’ve been kicking around for far too long. I’d surely do it in rails (or merb) and the time I would spend on it would easily outstrip the $190/year I could save with shared hosting. Even at minimum wage I would only have to work 30 hours to make out the price difference.

On the topic, a post came up on Ruby Inside asking why a viable mod_ruby doesn’t exist. Though the post doesn’t add much to the debate, the comments are actually quite interesting. Here’s the ones worth looking at:

• #13: topfunky mentions how rack might help as an alternative to mod_ruby
• #25: why ruby’s threading issues cause havoc for any mod_ruby, mod_mongrel, or tomcat like solution
• #50: links on how django does it with mod_python
• #56: Dr. Nic points out that deprec makes slicehost setup a breeze (which gets argued later in the thread)
• #65: more reasons why mod_ruby won’t work because of threads, an argument for a better fcgi solution, and why hosting is moving away from shared hosting
• #72: how ironruby (microsoft’s dlr version of ruby) could make IIS the easiest rails install
• #99: Ezra mentions how the Rubinius Ruby VM currently supports “multiple instances of it’s VM within one process, each VM on it’s own native thread. [...] Each VM has it’s own heap and so each VM could load different apps that wouldn’t interfere with each other.” and they have plans for a “mod_rubinius for apache that takes full advantage of this feature.”

I wrote a post one year ago this week called books in 2006 which included brief reviews of all the books I read (or tried to read) in 2006. Here’s the same thing but for 2007 and, again, in the order that I actually read the books.

The Blind Side - Michael Lewis. This is the fourth book by Lewis that I’ve read. The book intertwines two stories. One, about the evolution of football over the last 30 years which led to the left tackle (the guy who protects the quarterback’s blind side) being the second highest paid position. And two, the remarkable story of Michael Oher, an orphaned teen who became a high school All-American left tackle. I absolutely devoured this book and I don’t even like football. Every person I recommended this book to also read it in record time. Lewis is a born storyteller.

Way of the Peaceful Warrior - Dan Millman. This is essentially a primer on Buddhism but told through a fictional tale. I found the book to be very similar to “Ishmael”. It features an old and wise teacher with special powers and a hapless student who asks far too many questions. Unfortunately, also like “Ishmael”, much of the writing is second rate and reads like incredibly forced dialogue. That said, I still enjoyed the book.

Mavericks At Work - William Taylor & Polly Labarre. Includes some really great case studies in how bucking trends and valuing people can lead to business success. The book still struck me as verbose at times and a little too “cheerleader” in others. No real concrete advise.

Thinking with Type - Ellen Lupton. A fantastic primer on typography. It was exactly the overview on fonts that I was looking for. Also a very quick read at 176 graphic filled pages.

Making and Breaking the Grid - Timothy Samara. Cool book on the history and theory of page setting and grid systems. Lots of interesting and inspiring examples. I was hoping for more web-related content but it was still a useful read.

The Seven Day Weekend - Ricardo Semler. Probably the most interesting business book I’ve ever read. Semler is the CEO of the Brazillian conglomerate Semco which has lines of business in industrial machinery, inventory control, HR management, internet ventures, etc, etc, etc. The company has no defined roles or work hours, no planning longer than a few months, no mandatory meetings, and a whole slew of other ideas which fly in the face of accepted thinking. If you’re interested in the topic, I highly recommend checking out this lecture Semler gave about some of his ideas or check out this summary of the video over on the 37 signals blog. Oddly enough, the book doesn’t seem to be in print and Amazon only offers the book through used-book sellers (or on the Kindle if you have on).

Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond. This book made my 2006 did-not-finish list and, holy crap, did it take a long time for me to finish in 2007. The book, which attempts to explain why western societies came to become so dominant. Essentially, “those who domesticated plants and animals early got a head start on developing writing, government, technology, weapons of war, and immunity to deadly germs.” The book is very long in some parts which, in retrospect, I wish I had just moved on to the chapter summary. I found the chapter on the development of writing systems to be especially interesting. I’d definitely recommend the book to anyone but would also advice you just skipping sections that you don’t find interesting.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond. I starting reading this within days of finishing Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book profiles societies which have collapsed and provides a terrifying allegory for where our globalized society could be heading. The single biggest thing I took away from the book was a quote about the fallen society on Easter Island, which used to have lush forests but is now a barren dustbowl: “What were Easter Islanders saying as they cut down the last tree on their island?”

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment - David Swensen. Great book on long term portfolio management. Talks heavily about the virtues of working with core asset classes & rebalancing and talks very extensively about the failures of the mutual fund industry. I’d recommend just reading the summaries of the last two chapters about the extensive failures of the mutual fund industry. I also just started reading The Four Pillars of Investing which seems to be a better intro to portfolio theory and appears to include real world examples of a portfolio (which I found Swensen’s book lacked).

Books I didn’t finish

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges. One part uber-depressing and one part terrifying. Couldn’t get that into it.

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Got through most of it but just couldn’t get it done. Some interesting arguments about our tendencies to under account for the impact of randomness. This is probably the first book I’ve read where the author’s arrogance shown through so clearly that it seemed he was annoyed that you were reading his book. I’m hoping to take a look at Taleb’s latest book, The Black Swan, sometime in 2008.

The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst. More than I cared to read about typography. Might be useful if you were actually going to be designing a typeface.

Maverick - Ricardo Semler. Semler’s first book about what was going on at Semco. Originally published in 1988, it’s more autobiographical and not nearly as interesting as his aforementioned book.

Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise - Ray Anderson. I first heard about this book and Anderson when I watched the The Corporation earlier this year. This is also how I found out about The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken. I didn’t have a chance to really get into either of the books but I’m hoping to in 2008 as I’ve been really interested in the topic since reading my favorite book of 2006, Cradle to Cradle. I’m sure that not a week goes by where I don’t wonder how I might be able to pursue a corporate endeavor which can create a positive environmental impact by design.

Have your own opinion on one of the books mentioned? Read any books in 2007 that you’d highly recommend? Then add your comment below.

So Amazon is currently trying out a grocery delivery business in Seattle. They’ve been operating it for employees for a couple months now with pick-up in the offices and limited delivery in a couple parts of town. I never tried it out because I live 1 block from a grocery store and don’t even do that much grocery shopping. The big problem I have with my local QFC grocery store is that some items are oddly overpriced, especially produce. And since the majority of food I make at home is boring-ass pasta with lots of veggies the overpriced produce seems to add up. Well, after paying $6 for a pound of asparagus the other day I decided I’d give Amazon Fresh a run.

They’ve expanded delivery to lots of Seattle proper and it’s open to the general public. Delivery options are pretty decent. There’s two pick-up locations open to the public and employee-only pick-up at the offices of amazon, google, eddie bauer, and some other local companies (not microsoft at the moment). Pick-up doesn’t have any delivery fees. Delivery to your house has some interesting options. You can get unattended delivery (as in they’ll leave it at your front door) for either pre-dawn (before 6am) or after dinner (post 7pm). If you place an order at night you can get next day pre-dawn delivery, which is pretty cool. The option is only available for houses but there is a program to get your condo/apartment signed up to allow the delivery person access to the building. Unattended delivery is free with orders over $25. Attended delivery is available within an hourly block (like between 5pm and 6pm) from 7am to 10pm on weekdays (until 6pm on weekends). Delivery is free for orders over $50 or a $10 fee if it’s below. I’ve only done office pick-up so I can’t comment on the quality of the delivery service.

The variety of items on Fresh is quite good and the website is easy to use. I’d say that the only glaring omission is that the products really lack further description and you don’t currently have access to ingredient or dietary information that you can find on a product box. But since I’m mostly buying produce and stuff I already use, I didn’t really care. The best thing about the site is the prices. Compared with my local grocery store I was able to find lots of things 30 to 50 percent cheaper on Fresh. Apples, 30%. Bocconcini and Goat cheese, 40%. Red Peppers, 50%. Pesto sauce, 40%. Things like milk and cereal were the same price. You can even buy local artisan bread from both Macrina Bakery and Essential Bakery.

Anyways, I’m very happy with the site. Guess I’ll now have to get my apartment building signed up for pre-dawn drop-off.

I went back and forth on whether to put Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga on the best-of list. There’s a couple songs on the album I’m not too crazy about like The Ghost of You Lingers and Eddie’s Ragga but, in the end, I thought this was overshadowed by the fantastic stuff that’s on the album. And by fantastic, I mean the best.

After much much contemplation I decree that You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb is the song of the year. Though several songs on the album grew on me, this one was love within 30 seconds. The song starts off with a great hard driving drum beat and a fucking stellar bass riff, something I find I can rarely ever really distinguish. But the real genius strikes you once the hook kicks in with its big horn section and the tambourine in the drums. It strikes me as an stellar mix of pop-rock (Beatles’ pop-rock, not modern day pop-rock) with the bass, tambourines, and horns that make up the Motown sound. Honestly, we need a Motown sound revival. I don’t think anyone’s really gonna top Stevie Wonder but it’s worth trying.

Two other songs on the album are also worth severely pointing out. First, The Underdog. I think I’m a sucker for a rock song with a horn section (and hand claps, love the hand claps). The best part of the song is the build-ups to the chorus. You know how every great Daft Punk song builds up to the chorus so perfectly that by the time it gets there you’re like “fuck yeah!”. This song has that same kinda feeling. Britt Daniel’s even yells out “Right!” right before the last chorus, signifying exactly what I mean. It’s a very celebratory song and was actually used perfectly this year in an episode of How I Met Your Mother when the gang is at the bar celebrating the fact that Marshall passed the Bar exam.

Second, is Black Like Me. I don’t know how to explain this song so I’ll just steal Pitchfork’s comment as it made their top 100 songs of the year: “Emotionally, Black Like Me is heartland indie rock territory, and Spoon know the tiny details that make songs bleed you a little”.

Feist’s The Reminder is a great album. But first…

Usually when a great song is used in a carpet bomb ad campaign which results in the nuclear fallout of mainstream radio saturation, a music snob, such as I, would write the song off as trash. This is not the case for Feist’s 1-2-3-4. Maybe this is because I’m softening with age. Or maybe it’s because I don’t own a television (so no carpet bombing) or ever have to listen to radio (so no fallout). Don’t get me wrong, this song (like any other) could hit a tipping point which could ruin it. For example, being used in the trailer of a feature film starring Amanda Bynes. On a side note, I once took a flight which played Bynes’ She’s The Man. Although I didn’t watch it, I did catch one scene which probably set a brand new low for slapstick comedy. Luckily, plane seats are equipped with barf bags which prevented me from having to vomit in my own mouth. Now back to the album at hand…

I wasn’t very big on Feist’s previous work but this one is definitely a winner. I don’t know too many artists who pull off the super depressing ultra minimal stuff (like The Park) and also feature a track like Sealion (maybe Sufjan, that’s the only person that comes to mind). Several of the tracks, especially The Limit To Your Love and Brandy Alexandar, remind me quite a bit of the arrangements and vocals of Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Though the meloy stuff on the album is great, the stuff I love are upbeat tracks like 1-2-3-4, Past In Present, and my personal fav I Feel It All.

If for some crazy reason you still haven’t heard this album, you can sample the whole thing here on Amazon and pick it up from the mp3 store for measly 8 bucks.

These guys just consistently put out great records. Though probably not as memorable as their previous albums (I love Twin Cinema and Electronic Version, there is some awesome stuff on Challengers and the whole thing is very enjoyable. Stand out tracks include My Rights Versus Yours, All the Old Showstoppers, and my personal favorite Unguided. There’s also two gorgeous songs which Neko Case solo’s entitled Go Places and the title track, Challengers.

Though I already named an album of the year, I also have a list of albums which I think are worth pointing out. It might reach 4 in total and they are in no particular order…

So I’m a big fan of the Weakerthans. And, I must admit, on first listen I wasn’t really that impressed with Reunion Tour. Then, while driving up to Vancouver for Canadian Thanksgiving I found myself listening to KEXP and the band showed up to do an in-studio session. The performance was top-shelf and John Samson had some really interesting things to say about the songwriting on the album. Sadly, for some insane reason, it’s the only KEXP performance I know of that isn’t available on their website. This, is a terrible shame.

In the interview Kevin Cole asked Samson about some of the odd topics that come up on the album. Samson explained that he wanted to challenge himself and only write songs from the perspective of another person. This explains the odd mix of topics and the first person narratives. There’s a song entitled Bigfoot came about when a friend of his was making a documentary about a man from Norway House, Manitoba who said he saw bigfoot and produced a blurry home recording of the event. The song points out how he was exploited by tv tabloids and ridiculed by the media and his friends while trying to comprehend a traumatic sight which he genuinely believes he saw.

There’s also a song about the story of David Reimer, a man who got a very raw deal in life and was profiled in just about every medical journal because of it: “and if they remember me at all, make them remember me as more than a queer experiment, more than a diagram in their quarterly”. The album even features the return of Virtue the run-away cat coming back home to explain why she ran away.

There really is something about the Weakerthans music that makes it truly satisfying. It’s like a solid meal that leaves you quite content once it’s finished. Several of the songs of the album have some great rock guitar riffs, drums which command me to bob my head, and build-ups which always seem to make the last minute of their songs so enjoyable. These include Civil Twilight, Tournament of Hearts, and Relative Surplus Value. There’s also a couple songs that feature some sweet keys and great harmonizing such as Sun in an Empty Room and Night Windows.

Again, you can sample the whole album off Amazon and even pick it up for 9 bucks on the mp3 store.

Not only is Band of Horses’ Cease To Begin one of the best albums of the year and Is There a Ghost one of the best songs of the year, but the album also easily features the best album cover of the year. It’s simple, stunning, and fitting.

Grand National’s Kicking the National Habit originally came out in 2004 but I completely missed it. Oddly enough, the band actually did put out an album in 2007 called Drink and a Quick Decision. It’s good, but it’s no Kicking. The band released a limited edition version last year which features 4 bonus tracks and a couple remixes. The bonus tracks are good (i enjoy the remixes probably more than the bonus tracks) but don’t compare to the brilliant stuff that makes up the original album.

I’ve listened to this album a ton this year. This is quite surprising since I listen to almost no other music which sounds similar to this album. It’s one part rock, one part digital, one part 80s, and one part fucking awesome. I think if I was asked to DJ at a place on College street in Toronto I’d just put on this album. It has something for everyone who could be in a College Street bar (minus the Cloak & Dagger). Some of the tracks could be played in a house club (Playing in the Distance), some seem fit for the lounge at the W (Peanut Dreams), whereas others could be used in the closing credits of a Michael Mann film (Talk Amongst Yourselves).

This wasn’t even close. Why? Because every single song on The National’s Boxer is a fucking masterpiece. I don’t have many albums which I can listen from start to finish without fail. I’ll be listening to this album from start to finish when I’m 80 years old. Any song on this album is probably better than the single on half of the records I listened to this year. Hell, it seems foolish to point the “highlights” of this album as it’s that damn good. The musical arrangements are varied and gorgeous and although Matt Berninger puts his pants on just like the rest of us, when he does, he makes writes genius and haunts people with his voice. Honestly, someone name that guy Poet Laureate or something. Go sample the whole album on Amazon and if you don’t have it just use Amazon’s mp3 store and immediately download it for $9 (unless you’re in Canada, then just order a spinning disk or pirate it).

Bryan over at herohill has several “top ten” lists for 2007. This includes top ten EPs, LPs, Canadian LPs, etc, etc. Bryan has lots of lists cause he listens to a horrible about of music and seems to enjoy writing about it. I, on the other hand, rarely found the urge to write about music in 2007. I think this occured because of three reasons. One, my music snobbery has caught up with me and I don’t enjoy listening to random stuff or going to concerts nearly as much as I used to. Two, oink got shut down. And three, since I have no musical talent nor training I have a good bit of trouble describing the music I like short of saying “This album/song/etc is stupidly good. You’d be a fool to not love it”.

So in the coming days I’m just going to point out stuff that I loved this year and for which you’d be a fucking fool to disagree.

As of today, December 3rd 2007, postage for a standard envelope to Canada from the United States via the US Postal Service is 69 cents. Non standard envelope shapes (such as a square envelope) is 86 cents. I am writing this on a blog as a reminder to myself. Why? Well, I can never remember the price and figuring it out from the USPS website is horribly confusing. This always leads to me waiting in line at the post office to get the correct postage instead of buying stamps at a machine or a store. Now, in the future, I’ll just go to a machine.

But why is waiting in line at the post office such a big problem (especially since I only really have to do it around 4 times a year)? Well, it’s because US Post Offices are probably the most soul-sucking work (or retail) environment I’ve ever been in. It does not surprise me in the least that Postal workers are synonymous with killing in the work place. If my office had the air quality of a damp locker room, the dim and oddly off-green glow of crappy fluorescent lights, gave you the same eerie feel of an indian burial ground, and faintly played some terrible easy listening radio station all day long I would (A) work at the post office and (B) easily be on my way to going postal.