Reso-phobic

To catch us all up to speed, I've left the Jews, and am currently saving the world one virus at-a-time at McAfee.

Taking from an old skit:

Nate: My commute has change from an hour and fifteen minute train ride to an hour long car ride through evil evil traffic.

You: Oh, that's bad.

Nate: Not really. I've listened to The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Rings in the car, and am already starting The Two Towers.

You: Oh, that's good!

Nate: Actually, I've had to burn the Mp3s onto CDs every night. Two CD's per day for the last four weeks... it is starting to get annoying.

You: Oh, that's bad.

Nate: Again, not really. It has given me reason to give in and buy an iPod (yes, the latest Video one) and all the fun equipment to hook the iPod up to my car stereo.

You: Oh, that's good!

Nate: Heck yeah, that's good!

I digress. My real reason for posting, as alluded (sp?) to in the Title, is my recently acknowldedged fear: resolution.

Which is ironic, because I am a problem solver by nature and by trade. But from this same source comes the dichotemic problem: I want to solve problems, but I also DON'T want to solve problems, because then there will be no more problems to solve.

Case-in-point: I've spent the last three weeks trying to solve an absurd rendering problem for our site redesign (March 21, 2006... keep your eyes peeled). This is the last big problem of 30 or so. 30 minutes ago I solved it. After dancing a jig around the office, I sat down to implement it and... I couldn't. I found myself dawdling with other projects, writing this blog, checking my mail, etc.

I am reso-phobic.

What will come next? Smaller problems will be unsatisfying, like crumbs on the ground after a feast. Bigger problems will... will there be bigger problems? is this it? is this the peak of my architecture project? shouldn't I let it linger?! shouldn't I relish this moment for a while?!

Yosemite Revisited

Last weekend I took a group of guys from JBU to Yosemite. We had a good time, and you really should ask them for stories rather then me, as they were at least 8 times more excited than I.

But I wanted to share some fun bits with you.

First, these guys sang. They sang in the car, sang at night, and sang in the morning.

Second, most of them had never been to the Pacific, let alone California, or Yosemite. It goes without saying that they were very excited.

Check out some of the pictures, and if these guys ever roll your way, be sure and invite them in for stories.

The Arctic

An advertisement placed in London newspaper by Ernest Shackelton circa 1850.

Men wanted for hazardous journey.
Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness.
Constant danger, safe return doubtful.
Honour and recognition in case of success.

It attraced hundreds of volunteers.

What powerful things honour and recognition are. The desire to say "I did that. What nobody else had done before, I did." I think that's my problem.

Railsday

So there were definately a few straggling comments on that last post. While I'm guessing that most of that is due to the unreliable flow of interesting content, I'm also going to guess that many of my readers have never heard of a new aggregator. The exception being Ben. Ben has trained his aggregator to follow him around the house. Anyway, get one. For those of you who consistently check friends blogs, you will be very, very happy.

And now for the main event...

Tomorrow, June 4th, will be the first ever Railsday. It will be an exposition of the forthcoming web application suite known as Ruby on Rails. (100% of my regular readers just found something better to do... seriously though, skip the nerd part and go down to the At Least Read This section). Participants have 24 hours to build the best, most complete, web based application from start to finish. Only sketches on napkins are permitted (of which I have dozens).

I'm going to start tonight at 10p.m. and work until I get tired, crash, and then proceed to spend all of Saturday programming. I'm excited. Not so much about the programming, but about being part of something new, an agile community of cutting-edge developers... oh, and the possibility of winning a PSP, iPod, and MacMini in one swoop.

I will be updating this post as I progress, like some day-long science experiment performed on myself and recorded for your enjoyment.

At Least Read This

The Ruby on Rails book has been prereleased due to incredibly high demand. I purchased a copy.

The neat thing is that by prereleasing it, they pretty much get hundreds of free editors to nit and pick and catch the mistakes for them. I think this is a splendid way to publish a book. Everyone wins.

Even more exciting, the author extended an invitation to illustrate his co-author for excerpts called "David says". I drew something up based on a photo. It looks like it is going to be published. Yippee!

Search Engine Visibility

As some of you may know, I recently redesigned the Jews for Jesus Website. It is a sweet little database driven web application that is easy to maintain, standards compliant, and (hopefully) easy to get around. We launched it in mid-march without much fanfare or ticker tape.

One of the goals for the site was search engine visibility. I wanted Google's army of robots to latch onto the site like little binary parasites. Using the mostly internet resources on how to do this (the book is still in my wishlist if anyone cares to randomly bless my library) it appears to have succeeded.

As of today I am quite proud to announce these rankings on google.

Google Rankings for jewsforjesus.org

Query	Ranking	Thoughts
Jews for Jesus	1	Not to suprising. Of interest though would be the "Sponsored Link" on the right to an opposing organization. This means that they are paying google to place their ad there whenever someone searches for the phrase 'Jews for Jesus'. Silly rabbits.
Messianic Jews	9	Cool I guess. The word 'messianic' doesn't come into my vocabulary very often so I'm not to concerned.
Jews	1	Great Scott! If anyone googles 'jews' our site comes up first! Needless to say we are very happy about this.
Jesus	3	Another amazing ranking, although we are behind a rather disturbing "Jesus Dress Up" site.

So, to God be the glory for the great things He has been doing on the web.

Mystery

Major points will be awarded to those who can correctly identify the male voice in this recording.

The "Hey, you! Lady with the apron!" sealed the deal for me.

A Cappella Nintendo Medley

Can someone please tell me why we didn't sing these kinds of songs in my high school Madrigals group? Why?