Books I already own

Ruby:

• Programming Ruby 1.9 (the “pickaxe” book)
• The RSpec Book (beta)
• The Ruby Way (2nd ed.)
• The Well Grounded Rubyist
• Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby || (online / free PDF)
• Ruby Best Practices || (slowly releasing free online)
• Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails
• Textmate (I’m a big Mac fan)

Rails:

• Agile Web Development with Rails (2nd ed. - get the 3rd ed. in my wishlist)
• The Rails Way
• Advanced Rails Recipes
• Flex on Rails
• RailsSpace (online via Safari)
  

My “Wishlist”

Ruby:

• Design Patterns in Ruby
• Best of Ruby Quiz
• Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book || (online / free PDF)
• Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby
• Everyday Scripting with Ruby

Rails:

• Rails 3 in Action
• Agile Web Development with Rails (3rd ed.)
• Security on Rails
• Rails 3 in a Nutshell
• Payment Processing with Paypal and Ruby

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The one thing I will bother to list is that she gets to show me just how much she loves me for the next little while before life gets back to normal. For you see Katie is:

This means that for the next 9+ months she’ll need to remember just how much she loves me to off-set her remembering that I caused the morning sickness, food cravings, insanely heightened sense of smell (like seriously - super hero levels!), and random crying (Katie just doesn’t cry except when she’s pregnant).

We didn’t exactly expect it to happen in our first month of trying, so it kind of appears that Paisley is going to have a little brother or sister with a birthday almost the same time as hers (my iPhone apps predict a due date of 24 Sep. 2010 and Paisley’s birthdate was 25 Sep. 2007). Yay for close siblings!

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1. Add a new member to our family
2. Make Katie fall in love with me again ;) (e.g.: even more)
3. Do my chores at least 3 times a week
4. Finish Scrapkits project (HUGE GOAL)
5. Lose 30 pounds
6. Do pilates with Katie
7. Sell some blog designs/templates
8. Blog at least once a week
9. Become a better photographer
10. Read 3 programming books
11. Read the rest of Harry Potter
12. Make more friends (and be a better friend to those I’m already have)

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Here’s a snapshot from FlightTrack when she was flying to her connection in Ohio:

Paisley didn’t cry the whole way home from the airport like she did when I left, but I think it helped that we walked Katie to security and had a chance to go back and forth a lot of times on the walking escalators (for lack of knowing what to actually call them). Distractions are a life saver with kids I swear. It has helped a lot this trip that Paisley already knows that “on a plane” means we’ll be back eventually. I’m sure Katie went through much more difficulty with Paisley than I did - so far she’s been pretty much normal for me (phew).

After dropping Katie off at the airport I started working on my weekend project: cleaning the house as much as possible. Unfortunately I was only able to get a few projects in before my body just shut down. Pretty sure I’ve got a little flu/cold going on this weekend :(

I was able to take Paisley out for dinner last night. We went to Hana Japanese Cuisine (one of my favorite local sushi shops). Paisley ate almost all of her miso soup (I was SO proud of her!):

And I devoured my sushi (as well as my seafood fried rice):

I woke up insanely exhausted and pretty much done nothing all day today. It took all my energy just to get outside so Paisley could play in the snow for her first time (and I’ll have you know that I _love_ snow - my Burton tattoo on my foot serves as proof). I don’t even think I’d go snowboarding today if I had the opportunity to go for free - I just feel crappy :(

On that note, to keep this short so I can put P down for a nap and probably take one myself, here’s the pictures from Paisley’s first time in the snow :)

And just some photos from throughout the day:

And a few special ones Paisley and I did just for Katie cause we miss her:

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It’s been a very hard three years if you I look back at all the challenges we’ve had. Voluntarily taking a 40+% paycut to move to Arizona so Paisley could be with family. Having to sacrifice the second car and learning how to work with one car even with long commutes. Getting laid off or having my contracts end without warning (literally told at the end of the day that my services were no longer needed the next day). Struggling to find money to pay for groceries for months at a time. Wondering what we would do for birthdays, Christmas, and why we ever bothered to take vacations (even one day getaways). Every time I lost my job it happened within days of our only vacation plans we had up until our trip to DisneyWorld this past September.

In spite of all the difficulties we’ve gone through, we’ve had even more blissful moments than I ever thought were possible. We’ve managed to go to Disney in some form or another every year (DisneyLand for a day for our honeymoon, DisneyLand for a day trip with Paisley shortly after she turned one, and this past September to DisneyWorld for a week!!!!) We’ve been able to go through several parts of the country (a trip to Virginia when we lived in Arizona and an interview trip to Portland, OR where we would one day like to live). We had Paisley and were able to spend a little over a year living close to both our families. We’ve been blessed enough to be able to get a contracting job with some former coworkers of mine out here in Maryland and are grateful for how much our circumstances have changed with the current economy. We’ve learned the joy of making thoughtful gifts for each other. A mailed surprise letter, a simple flower arrangement, a candy bar when we shouldn’t have, or post-it notes scattered throughout the house with random thanks (washing machine, computer screen, dishwasher, fridge, etc). We’ve had a few arguments (who doesn’t in some way or another), but ours are generally mild and insignificant (and infrequent). We almost always resolve them in a matter of minutes - the big ones might take an hour or two. We’ve learned the value of honest communication, and the value of constantly working on improving our personal weaknesses in the relationship (and letting the other one support us). We’ve opened our own businesses (my consulting for web development and Katie’s Etsy shop) and supported each other 100% with those efforts when it was needed. Ultimately, we’ve always strove to show unconditional love and support for one another no matter how uncertain our circumstances have been and I couldn’t ask for a more perfect partner as a result.

With the basic background of our circumstances covered I’d like to borrow from Katie and list some of my favorite things about her. Katie, I want to thank you for being perfect in every way, here are a few of the things I love most:

• That you watch over and teach Paisley so much every day
• That you get distracted 20 times within a 2 minute conversation
• That you always ask me what I’m actually thinking or feeling, even if it isn’t what you want to hear
• The way you look at the computer screen when you’re engrossed in something
• That you love to read
• That you hooked me on LOST
• You in your wedding dress
• How you always are yourself, no matter where we are or who is with us
• How understanding and forgiving you are when I make mistakes
• That you introduced me to Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, and Trashy
• That you not only let me do things I want, but encourage and help in any way you can
• The way you look when Paisley falls asleep in your arms
• Your goals
• How intelligent you are (and that you are willing to correct me all the time)
• How you still have common-sense even with your intelligence (because we both know I’m lacking)
• How gorgeous you are
• That you encourage and support me to feel confident in who I am
• That you got me to stop saying “I’m Sorry” so much
• That you sleep in late (letting me watch you when you sleep on most weekend mornings)
• That you would do your hair straight almost every day before we had Paisley
• Your legs in tights
• Your love of designer clothes
• Watching you read or color with Paisley
• Laughing at (and even liking) my insanely corny jokes
• Not teasing me for being a girl and crying during movies
• That you bake, make candy, craft, sew, embroider, and scrapbook
• And so many more that I don’t have time to list them all…

And as you’ve taught me that blog posts are always better with photos, here are a few of my favorite photos of you from the past 3 years :)

Thanks for making my life so perfect Katie!

I LOVE YOU!!!

Steven.Joseph.Haddox

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Before I get into my list itself, I thought that everyone might want to know about a really cool tool I’ve been using for nearly the past year or so called the “Universal Wish List Button” by Amazon.  It allows you to easily add items from any website onto your wish lists on Amazon.com. It has made my life a lot easier for managing my wish lists and has been quite useful to me on a weekly basis at least so I highly recommend it :)

I have a lot of Ruby and Ruby on Rails books, but what I don’t have is a ton of swag to go with it. I’d love a few Ruby on Rails related t-shirts and other miscellaneous stuff :)

• This shirt in Medium and Charcoal would be awesome.

  

• This sticker for my netbook would be very cool :)

  

• Or even this button to go on my backpack for the few times I do travel.

  

So nothing in that list is too bad (ranging from $4-$30ish). How about the next genre… Technology :) This will make your mouth water and probably destroy your bank account as well:

• A new 27″ iMac to replace my Mac Pro and it’s crappy 23″Acer monitor. Specs:
  • 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
  • 8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
  • 2TB Serial ATA Drive
  • Apple Remote, Magic Mouse, Wireless Keyboard
  • AppleCare Protection Plan for iMac - Auto-enroll (NEVER buy a Mac without it!)
  • Total price with gov’t discount: $2,622.00

  

• But what if I wanted to just bide myself over until I can save up for the nice new shiny iMac? Well I could always upgrade my current setup. I do have a Mac Pro first generation after all that’s only 3 years old, surely it’s good for something still right?
  • There’s always the 24″ LED Apple Display ($799)

    

  • But then I’d need the ATI Radeon 4870 graphics card to make it work with my Mac Pro ($314)

    

  • I’d also need more RAM (another 12GB should do it) to keep my slow moving Mac Pro going ($402)
  • Total price to upgrade current setup: $1515 (You can see why I’d rather just get the 27″ iMac no?)
• Next up on my list is a Drobo S (NEW at only $799!) & of course I’d need 5 2TB hard drives to go in it ($699.95).

  

• Last, but not least is a TiVo. You see, I absolutely HATE my Verizon FiOS DVR. I hate that in order to use it I have to have their crappy ActionTek Router and then piggy-back my Apple Airport Extreme network setup off of it. So if I could just get rid of that stupid DVR I could ran a CAT5 down to my Airport Extreme and skip the bandwidth throttle on my 50MBPS connection. That would be great… how can I do that though? By getting a TiVo (yay!) (TiVo HD = $250 normally $300). Add in a 1TB drive to store a whole lot more since I can upgrade it myself for only an additional $80.

  

And that about sums up my main dream items right now. Is there anything technology related that is in your ultimate setup wish list? Anything I should know about but have somehow missed? Let me know in the comments :)

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I’m thankful for (in no particular order):

• Katie and her constant love, support, understanding, forgiveness, and encouragement. Her belief in me and how valuable and special I am is more than I ever thought of myself and has helped make me the confident, cheerful, and kind person I am today.
• Paisley for her smile, laughter, hugs, kisses, pain, crying, and growth. Watching her grow on a daily basis helps me realize how much we take for granted every day and how there is always room to do more, learn more, and be a better person.
• A job that provides a stable income for my family and allows me to grow professionally.
• A boss who cares about his employees and takes the suggestions we have to heart and really listens to our needs.
• Ruby for making my life as a programmer enjoyable.
• Rails for providing the easiest web development framework that just gets it right the first time.
• Friends for being there even when you haven’t talked to them in months.
• Online friends for getting you through the months when you never make time to talk to your old friends. For meeting up to eat sushi when you’re in town. For teaching you new skills, experiences, and helping you realize how important a random stranger can be to anyone.
• Google Reader, Twitter, and social networking in general for distracting me from whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing.
• My iPhone for making it so much easier to get distracted on the go.
• Vacations for forcing me to take a break.
• Impromptu trips for reminding me that family is always more important than that blog, website, side-job, or house project I wanted to work on right then.
• Shopping for making Katie look gorgeous no matter the time of year.
• Eating out for saving me from having to find energy to do dishes.
• Vocelli’s pizza for giving me an easy pre-planned meal (even if they always get it wrong) at least once a week.
• Katie’s baking for satisfying my sweet tooth and helping me keep my tummy she loves ;)
• Computers for providing me a way to make a living without having to be a “real man” (e.g.: cars, hunting, manual labor, hardware, and hammers).
• LOST for being the most amazing television show ever!
• Snowboarding (even just once a season) for reminding me about the beauty of the Earth we live on and giving me that rush that nothing else quite can.
• My savior and constant example, Jesus Christ, for reminding me to turn the other cheek, bite my tongue, forgive others, and be patient.
• Life for helping me to realize that there’s always a reason to keep going even when it seems like there’s no point to it at that specific moment in time.
• Being a girl and being able to express my emotions freely not caring about what others may think of me.
• Portland, OR, Japan, and San Francisco for giving me places I would one day like to live because of their community, beauty, and kind people.

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respond_to do |format|
  format.html # reports/show.rhtml
  format.js { render :partial => 'reports/show' } # reports/_show.rhtml
end

This example is just rendering a partial that is also used in my show.rhtml to save updating more than one file at a time. However, my current project started turning into things like this (due to the API methodology we had decided upon with the client in advance that got extended into doing things we hadn’t anticipated):

# show method
respond_to do |format|
  format.html # reports/show.rhtml
  format.json { render :json => @report } # json format of the report data
  format.js { render :partial => 'reports/show' } # reports/_show.rhtml
  format.js_vdata {
    render :template => 'reports/show.visual_json', :layout => false, :content_type => 'application/json'
  }
  format.table {
    render :template => 'reports/show.html_table', :layout => false, :content_type => 'application/json'
  }
  ... [more formats for special MIME types here with customized views all from the same report data] ...
end

As you can see this code was being extended to generate multiple kinds of reports for loading via an API with AJAX requests. The extra formats are all being returned as JSON in order to allow for JSONP and remote-access from other domains and then the user can display the requested data / customize it as they desire. But how did I go about providing those same views to users on the web application itself? Create another format just to render the same view for regular HTTP requests? Definitely not very DRY. So it occurred to me that the following might be a possible solution:

#Controller show method
respond_to do |format|
  ...
  format.js_vdata {
    if request.xhr?
      render :template => 'reports/show.visual_json', :layout => false, :content_type => 'application/json' and return
    else
      render :template => 'reports/show.visual_json', :layout => true, :content_type => 'text/html' and return
    end
  }
  format.table {
    if request.xhr?
      render :template => 'reports/show.html_table', :layout => false, :content_type => 'application/json' and return
    else
      render :template => 'reports/show.html_table', :layout => true, :content_type => 'text/html' and return
    end
  }
end

#View template for reports/show.visual_json
< %- if request.xhr? -%>
  < %= @report.visual_data.to_json %>
< %- else -%>
  
  < %=debug @report.visual_data %>
< %- end -%>

Although this was a basic proof of concept there was already a problem with it. Any request coming from a remote domain would send requests for ‘jsonp’ and would not be recognized by request.xhr? (at least with jQuery 1.2.6 on the server we were consuming this API). I’m not sure why this was, but it seemed to be the situation I had to work with. This meant those requests were getting the HTML version of the page (not fun for parsing via Javascript). The solution I found was this (please note this is a very initial stab and is more than open to refactoring suggestions):

#Controller
before_filter :set_request_type

#show method
respond_to do |format|
  ...
  format.js_vdata {
    begin
      render_dynamic_template('reports/show.visual_json')
    else
      render_dynamic_template('reports/show.nil')
    end
  }
  format.table {
    begin
      render_dynamic_template('reports/show.html_table')
    else
      render_dynamic_template('reports/show.nil')
    end
  }
end

private
  def set_request_type
    @ajax_request = true if request.xhr? or (params[:callback] && params[:callback].include?('jsonp'))
  end

  def render_dynamic_template(template)
    template = 'reports/show.nil' if template.nil?
    if @ajax_request
      layout = false
      content_type = 'application/json'
    else
      layout = true
      content_type = 'text/html'
    end
    render :template => template, :layout => layout, :content_type => content_type
  end

#View template for reports/show.visual_json
< %- if @ajax_request -%>
  < %= @report.visual_data.to_json %>
< %- else -%>
  
  < %=debug @report.visual_data %>
< %- end -%>

#View template for reports/show.nil
< %- if @ajax_request -%>
  < %= [nil].to_json %>
< %- else -%>
  
  < %= 'There is no data at this time.' %>
< %- end -%>

Also, the best tutorial I could find for implementing jsonp support with a quick (like 2 minute) Google search was over at Sitepoint

And that should allow you to render both html and json/jsonp results based upon the kind of request coming in. Obviously it makes an assumption that remote jsonp requests will provide a parameter of ‘callback’ that includes ‘jsonp’ in the string, but given that it is your API that’s not a huge requirement to impose and you can customize it to how you see fit.

If you know of a better way to go about approaching this kind of task I’m more than open to being educated, but given the short time-frame I had and the few tutorials specific to jsonp I found this to be a pretty good first stab. Hopefully this post will help someone else if they find themselves looking for some way to accomplish similar tasks.

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The cozy aura of accomplishment had settled upon our little team when we soon discovered that all was not well in Rails-land. You see, we are processing data at defined intervals (on a per-record basis by an attribute on the object). We have a cron job setup to invoke a rake task that checks and sees if each record needs to be updated or not (I love .minutes.ago and built-in timestamp fields btw). Then the rake task fires off the method call to update with the new data as often as needed. After the update is complete we parse the new data and create a JSON string that is stored in the database (for performance over parsing every time we want to display it). We also do a combination of all the past data sets we’ve received (one for 24 and 72 hours each) and store those in JSON format to the database as well. This worked out great on all our sample instances where our objects didn’t have hundreds of data sets being merged and combined into one long JSON string.

However, once we get some live data our application started blowing up rather quickly. We came across an ‘rbuff’ error (or something weird and very vague in its meaning) and spent a little bit of time realizing that the string we were trying to write to the database was more than 64KB. We had set our fields to ‘text’ and it was truncating our data (and hence blowing up all our JSON.parse methods to get our strings back into Ruby hashes). The fix seemed fairly easy, we just had to change our column types from ‘text’ to ‘longtext’.

If you do a Google search you’ll find several ways to have MySQL create a column in the table with a longtext type in Rails. However, none of them worked for me (we tried :text, :limit => huge_number as well as :text, :limit => 64K+1, and several other methods we found online). I couldn’t find any documentation to indicate that Rails had added in support for :longtext as an actual column type as it seems to be MySQL specific. My pair suggested (for the 10th time) that we just put :longtext in our migration file instead of :text and see if it worked. I’m not as much of an off-the-cuff kind of guy as he is and I was skeptical it would work as so many blogs said to do it the ways we had been trying. Well I finally gave in and said, “Okay, well try it your way, but I bet you’re wrong.” We edited the migration to:

change_column :table, :column_name, :longtext

rake db:migrate and all of the sudden our MySQL table was showing a column type of ‘longtext’ as we had wanted all along. Needless to say I was rather embarrassed that this wasn’t better documented and I lost the bet to my pair. My question now is, does anyone know if :longtext as a column type is supported on other database types or is tied directly to MySQL with Rails? I can’t seem to find any documentation for this as a column type anywhere so I’m not sure if it is new to Rails 2.3.2 or if it just has been overlooked in the docs. As the searches I performed hadn’t brought anything back of any use for migrating my column to longtext I figured I should try and make sure I at least get a blog up about it to help anyone else who may be in a similar situation.

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We got a letter earlier this week stating that the company who published her most recent page was trying to avoid bankruptcy.  In order to do this they were offering most of their payees a 40% settlement.  We failed to get the paperwork to them in time (not that Katie was ever really able to decide if she wanted to or not in the limited time we had).  The response was due yesterday by 5pm.  We checked the mail this afternoon and her check for her layout was there waiting in the full amount (woot!)  We still have to get a check for her font that you’ll see in a second, but at least she’s got part of her hard-earned money so far.

Without further ado, I’d like to turn the focus over to the good news.  Katie was published in the most recent publication from Simple Scrapbooks.  This special publication is called, “Scrapbook Play With Photos.”  Her layout is featured as the second out of 145 layouts!  Her handwriting is also featured as a font throughout the entire magazine.  Her font will eventually be available to dowload online over at http://www.simplescrapbooksmag.com.  You can download her font from Katie’s blog.  Here are some photos of her layout and font:

Katie was also kind enough to take some photos of Paisley this week while I was at work.  They are absolutely adorable so I wanted to share them with you as well. There’s even one of Katie that she took of herself not knowing I’d post it ;)

We also had the chance to go on a nice family walk together this week.  Here’s some of the cute pictures we got of Paisley walking with us for the first time in our new neighborhood.

Finally, I just realized tonight that although most people I see everyday know that I am growing a beard, the ones I don’t see everyday (including family) don’t necessarily know that.  Here’s a picture Katie took of me a little less than two weeks ago when my beard was about six weeks along.

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First things first, several different sites use different terminology about Twitter. From what I can tell the most commonly used terminology is as follows:

Tweet: A new message posted to Twitter (eg: ‘That tweet by @sunnythaper was hilarious!’)
Retweet (RT): Prefixing ‘RT’ or ‘Retweet’ in front of a tweet of importance to you allows you to give credit to the original author (eg: RT @sunnythaper: Nobody’s beard is as cool as mine. Not even @santaclaus).
Overheard (OH): If something is particularly hilarious to you that someone else said you can overhear it (eg: OH: @sunnythaper, unless it’s about the KKK on twitter I’m good!)
@username: Prefixing a username with the @ symbol (usually at the beginning of the tweet) is a public reply in response to another person’s tweet (eg: @sunnythaper Are we still on for sushi next Tuesday?)
Direct Message (DM): A direct message is used to send a private message to another user. To send a direct message to a user prefix the username with a ‘d’ and a space (eg: d sunnythaper Do you mind if I use your Twitter handle for examples in a blog post about Twitter?)

Once you get the basic usage down you’ll find that Twitter can be very useful, relaxing, hilarious, time-consuming, productive, or any combination of the above. No matter what how you use Twitter you may want to find easier ways to interface with it than just twitter.com/home. Personally I use Twitterific on my Macs and iPhone (although I use TwitFon for my second phone application and I’ve heard Tweetie is amazing on the iPhone). There are tons of desktop clients but Tweetdeck seems to be the most common for cross-platform use as it runs on Adobe Air and is very customizable. You’ll probably want to look around and see what works best for you.

So what’s the point in investing all this time into learning all of these use-cases, learning the new terminology, and picking up yet another social networking tool? That’s entirely up to you. Twitter is what you make of it. For me Twitter is a way to keep in touch with my friends and find new ones (real or virtual). It’s a way to share and get ideas for activities and projects. It’s a way to follow great thinkers in web development and hence the newest trends. It’s a way to help others and in turn seek help on that stupid CSS bug I’m banging my head against the desk on.

What’s with the #hashtags earlier in the post you ask? Well hashtags are just one of the cool things about Twitter. They aren’t actually part of Twitter itself, but like all good things on the web as of late, they extend Twitter’s API over at www.hashtags.org and show you all tweets from users that have the same hashtag. Many third party Twitter clients support hashtags and automatically link to the appropriate URL to show you other tweets.

If you’re a developer you can find out how to extend Twitter by looking at their API.

Hopefully this post has helped to serve as a very basic introduction to Twitter and how it can be of use to you. If you haven’t yet, you’re more than welcome to follow me at: http://www.twitter.com/stevenhaddox

Also a special thanks to Sunny (http://www.twitter.com/sunnythaper) for letting me use his handle in my examples. If you’re looking for someone humorous to follow, he’s even more funny than I am serious ;)

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• 2: The number of years Katie and I have been married (as of December 2, 2008).
• 12: The number of hours I am trying to work on average each day to earn some savings for possible unemployment come January 1, 2009.
• 15: Paisley’s age in months currently.
• 20: Katie’s age in years currently.
• 26: My age in years (as of yesterday).
• 75: The number of lightbulbs we replaced on our Candy Land tree in order to get one of the two missing strands of lights to work again this year.

I’ll take a quick moment to go over some of these in more details.  My two year anniversary with Katie was amazing.  We made reservations to go to The Melting Pot in Scottsdale and had a really good time.  Katie wasn’t feeling great at the start of the evening but got better as the meal progressed.

It turns out that I was the one who ended up sick in the end though.  Apparently almost our entire family has been sick at some point this week due to something we ate at Sunday dinner last week we are guessing.  I ended up losing 4 pounds in one night while another family member lost over 6 and had to go to the hospital to get two bags of IV fluid.  Wednesday was a pretty bad day for me but I’m mostly back to normal now.  However, Paisley has had her go around with it as well and I spent a good fifteen minutes cleaning up a lot of poop earlier this afternoon.  I feel so bad for her.

My birthday was simply amazing.  Although we had less than $20 in the bank account, Katie made it an absolutely amazing day.  She gave me this beautiful painting that says, “I LOVE SUSHI” on it:

I also received a wireless Apple keyboard from Paisley which is a million times easier to carry around on the go for programming with my laptop (or a PC laptop) than having to take a big wired keyboard (of any kind).

I can’t stand PC keyboards now that I’ve adjusted to Macs and the first week of this job was sooo annoying compared to my Mac setup at home.  Now that I at least have a wireless Apple keyboard I can get through the day without wanting to kill someone at the end of it :)

Anyway, it was an amazing birthday and an amazing anniversary.  December is certainly off to a good start, and although it may be my cheapest Christmas I’ve had since I lived back with my family during high school I can’t think of a time in my life when I was happier!

Best Wishes,

Steven.Joseph.Haddox

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So here it is:

This photo was taken of Katie when she was getting her wedding dress fitted on November 17, 2006.  It was taken with my Motorola Razr (yeah, I hate admitting to that).  So that explains the crappy quality.  In spite of the bad resolution, it is still one of my favorite pictures as it reminds me of one of the happiest moments in my life!

Now I’m going to think of four people who I know that blog who may actually participate in this activity and tag them…  Wish me luck.

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Anyway, the short and sweet of this is that there is a solution if your mysql gem install is giving you grief in Leopard. Simply run the following command and take note of the options in the parameter –cflags after the -I/usr/local/mysql/include directory. Those options will need to be passed in as your ARCHFLAGS value when you execute your gem install:

$ mysql_config
Usage: /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config [OPTIONS]
Options:
        --cflags         [-I/usr/local/mysql/include -Os -arch x86_64 -fno-common]
        --include        [-I/usr/local/mysql/include]
        --libs           [-L/usr/local/mysql/lib -lmysqlclient -lz -lm]
        --libs_r         [-L/usr/local/mysql/lib -lmysqlclient_r -lz -lm]
        --socket         [/tmp/mysql.sock]
        --port           [3306]
        --version        [5.0.51b]
        --libmysqld-libs [-L/usr/local/mysql/lib -lmysqld -lz -lm]

In my instance (on a Mac Pro and MacBook Pro) I was able to get ruby-mysql working with the following command:

$ sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-Os -arch x86_64 -fno-common" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

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• Why are all politicians liars in some form or another?
• Why is it impossible to be involved in politics without being a hypocrite?
• Why is it okay for the government to be hypocritical but not for its citizens?
• Why won’t people just vote for the candidate that most similar to them so that we can get rid of this stupid bicameral system?
• Why are people so uninvolved?  Why do we wait until something effects our daily lives to care about it?
• Why is everyone so greedy, selfish, or inconsiderate?

However, amidst all these questions the only truly important one I find is:

Why is it so hard for people to peacefully coexist?

It seems that when you enter the realm of politics you start talking about a sensitive matter to almost everybody in some way or another.  This is because the vast majority of our population has not learned to separate their emotions from their beliefs and logic.  It is an understandable situation and an understandable reaction when a discussion touches a “button” that is important to someone else.  However, what I don’t understand is why almost everybody insists upon keeping their emotions so strongly attached to their political beliefs and agendas.  Everyone seems to want world-peace and lower taxes but nobody is willing to really look at what is involved to achieve that.

There are a couple of issues in Arizona that are pretty important this year, but I honestly don’t know enough about them so I’m not really going to comment on them specifically at this point in time.  I do however want to vent a little about an issue that has irritated me pretty much since at least high school.

Why is it so okay to be hypocritical in this country?  We expect our politicians to be honest and vote by their platforms and values, but we don’t do the same ourselves as citizens.  The biggest example that has come to mind to me over the past few years is that of “gay rights” or more specifically homosexual marriage.

One of the major reasons citizens moved to the colonies of America was to seek refuge for new ideas, especially in relation to religion.  And one of the things almost everyone who is a somewhat respectable person will say is that we should honor others, respect others, and be considerate of others.  This seems like pretty sound advice that generally will cause a more peaceful society with more understanding, compassion, and consideration towards things that aren’t completely the same as another individual’s view.  However, as soon as someone mentions “homosexual” or “gay” with the same words as “rights” or “marriage” these formalities are discarded and it is suddenly okay to be as critical of someone else’s choices as we want.

Here’s the part that irks me.  If a woman thinks that women are superior to men in intelligence, performance, or anything else they are labeled a “feminist.”  If a man thinks women are meant only to be seen and used they are considered “sexist.”  If a member of the KKK expresses their hatred towards someone who is black they are labeled “racist.”  If an African American says that a white individual is a “cracker” they are generally also labeled a racist.  If someone who believes in Christ talks badly of another Christian or an aetheist it is generally considered rude and inconsiderate.  If an aetheist tries to prod a Christian then it is also generally considered rude and inconsistent.  When someone cuts somebody else off while driving it is considered rude and inconsiderate.  If one politician says something negative about another one that really has nothing to do with facts it is considered “mud-slinging.”  If religion is taught in school it is considered a violation of the Constitution.  If evolution is taught in school it is labeled as biased by the majority of church-goers. The list goes on, I am merely naming the first things that come to mind.

The point is, that the majority of time in our society it is considered rude not to be thoughtful of others or to respect their opinion, even if it is not the same as our own personal opinion.  Whether you are a loose-skirted lady of the night, a member of the KKK, or a Bible-thumping Christian it is almost always considered respectful to try not to judge others who believe differently than you.  You may explain your thoughts, beliefs, and views to them as much as you like as long as it is respectful and people generally won’t disagree.  But if you say something obviously rude or offensive it is almost always understood that you have gone too far and looked down upon.

So why is it okay then, that when an issue is put on the ballot or discussed regarding the rights of somewhere around 6% of the population, to just disregard courtesy, undersatnding, compassion, and acceptance?  It seems that we are quick to forget that it was only a little over 200 years ago that America was fighting for the right to practice its own beliefs and governance.  That it wasn’t that long ago that we were the 6% of the population that nobody else agreed with.  It was even less time since then that African Americans had to be given the right to be considered full-individuals.  That they were freed and entitled to the right to voice their opinion.  Even less time since then since women were allowed to vote, and even more importantly be respected as fully capable members of society outside of the household.  Why is it then, that we are so easily able to forget about the history we have all come from when it comes to 6% of our population wanting to express their love to another member of 3% of that population?  Why is it okay for women and men of any race to say that it is “wrong” to see them get married and to think that their personal prejudice makes for good political law?

You may deem me a “gay-lover” or an idiot depending upon your personal opinion.  But the more important question to me is this: Why is it so hard to peacefully coexist?  Why can’t everyone see that it shouldn’t matter what race you are, what sex you are, what way you wear your hair, what clothes you wear, how many piercings you have, who you want to express your love to, or what it is that you do for a living.  We are all PEOPLE occupying the same geographic location and living in the same society.  This can extend beyond Americans as well, but in particular we as Americans, who are supposed to be considered the melting pot and accepting of others, are often the first to throw attacks out at people who do not believe or feel the way that we do.  We are some of the biggest hypocrites I have ever come across and it irritates me that everyone thinks it is okay.  It is NOT OKAY.

I don’t care how you feel personally.  If you want to be a racist then be my guest.  Go out in the streets and express it verbally all you want.  If you want to talk crap about anyone of any sex, religion, or sexual orientation have at that as well.  However, don’t expect that when you deny other people their rights to practicing what they believe when it doesn’t cause any harm to you that you should be entitled to those same rights.  We all have the right to free speech and I strongly believe in using that right.  However, when it comes to casting our votes we should step back from our personal opinions and look at what is the best vote for the rights of everyone involved, not our personal agenda.  If we don’t respect the rights of others then we will eventually have our own rights taken away by someone who doesn’t respect ours (currently the big government who has gotten out of control and only grows more corrupt each week).

I guess what I’m saying is, just try to cast your vote using the same principles we all learned in Kindergarten:

• Don’t be a bully (just because you are part of the majority doesn’t mean it’s fair to take other people’s lunch)
• Don’t tease others
• Don’t touch / harm others
• Don’t disrespect others
• Treat others as you would like to be treated
• Listen
• Be understanding

I think if we all practice these basic principles we will find that our society is a much happier place where people of varying personalities, opinions, and beliefs can all coexist peacefully.  Your thoughts on the matter?

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This year I have changed my blog again (obviously).  However, with a custom made WordPress theme and my own CSS styling it was only a matter of changing two lines of code to get it to a point that I felt good about instead of hacking a pre-made and poorly coded theme that took me several hours last year.

Please be aware of the risks that breast cancer poses and do what you can to help out in whatever way.  Katie and I were buying a new vacuum last year and knew we were going to get a Dyson, so instead of just getting any Dyson we bought the pink one that contributed a good portion of it’s profit to support breast cancer research.  It isn’t much but every little bit helps (as opposed to our political situation where just about nothing short of a revolution will help it seems).

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Afterwards I was talking with Katie when I said (mostly jokingly) that I should grow my hair out like Nate’s.  She replied, “I think it’d be weird to see you with long hair.  And it’d be weird if you didn’t have the same haircut as your boss.”  I managed to keep a straight face as I said:

I don’t think so. It would be like Jenny and her design lady… Elanor. He would hear me say, “Faux Hawks are so nineties” and then he’d fire me and we’d get stuck in a black out together.  After a few hours of talking about hair styles and code he’d see that my way was right and grow out his hair like mine.

I know that probably won’t make sense to anyone else, but it was funny enough that I had to blog it so as not to forget it many years from now.  Hmm…. I should probably note which episode that was so I can watch it again some many years from now and actually remember what I’m referencing.  Oh well… too lazy.

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I must admit that there are several factors involved in my decision to start getting more healthy.  I decided to cut the majority of soda out of my life after my incident several months ago where I had 4 kidney stones and some major medical issues that were not very pleasant to go through.  But in addition to cutting out soda there needs to be more.  Something more substantial that will make it so I’m not having a heart attack before Paisley has even graduated high school.  So here is the list of things that has helped change my motivation for working out and getting healthy:

• The Wii Fit called me Obese.  This isn’t too surprising honestly.  Even when I worked out 1-2 hours a day with the Army I was still between 178 - 185 pounds on average (+/- 3 or so pounds).  Currently I’m at 185.0 which is a decrease from 186.7 earlier this week.  My long-term goal is to get below 166 pounds and hit the “Normal” threshold for BMI.
• Paisley has a pretty consistent routine that I can start to work around.  If she’s going to be consistent in her life and she plans on being around longer than me then I need to try and make sure I’m here as many years as I can be to be with her.
• Katie has started working out over the past several months, eating healthier, and expressed some concern about my long-term health.  She loves my tummy and me as I am, but she doesn’t want me to have a heart attack before I’m 50.
• I want to prove that I can out-endure, out-perform, and out-live my ex-wife who used to make me eat all sorts of healthy crap and play nearly 2 hours of tennis a day just because she wasn’t confident in her self-image.  I’ve never really cared about how I look, as long as I’m healthy.  I still feel that way, but I want to make sure that I am always healthier than her.  I know this is a very revenge oriented reason, but in my experience that’s not always a bad thing.  Sometimes anger is the best motivator for working out (it always worked when I was lifting weights or doing a physical training test in the Army).
• Lastly, I want to be ready for snowboarding season.  I’ve only been snowboarding once in the past two seasons and I am suffering hardcore withdrawals.  I have one of the nicest boards available and a tattoo on my foot and I want to make sure I can perform and endure as well as my board can in order to maximize my snow-induced high.

So what is my plan of attack?  There are several factors involved in getting and staying healthy.  Have I ever mastered any of them?  No.  I don’t really think I will ever be a “master” or “expert” when it comes to nutrition and health.  My body is just too abnormal to fit into the normal process.  I used to live on one meal a day in high school because I simply wasn’t hungry.  I did it during the year after because I was too busy trying to keep up to Army standards to worry about eating.  I pretty much tend to eat only one main meal and then small snacks throughout the day.  Those snacks are often what will get me.

Diet:
Over the past six or so months I have cut out almost all soda from my diet.  It’s time to extend that to all soda.  I have also slowly been decreasing the amount of red meat that I eat.  Where I used to eat at least one steak a week (preferably two or three), I now eat a steak maybe once a month (if that).  I eat a hamburger about once or twice a week, but I eat smaller amounts than I used to.  Instead of getting a triple burger or double quarter-pounder I’ve cut back to single patty burgers and junior burger items when I eat hamburgers from fast-food joints.  I’ve also found that I have a preference for chicken sandwiches over burgers more than half the time anyway so that is a huge help.  I also used to be a huge Gatorade drinker.  Recently Gatorade has come out with G2 which I find tastes pretty good and is definitely better than Propel or other flavored water options as far as taste.  I’ve also come to enjoy just a simple glass of water more than I used to.  Perhaps enough time has finally passed from all the forced piss-tests in the Army that I can finally enjoy water again.  Tonight I just remembered that Crystal Light makes a Fruit Punch mix I love that only has 5 calories and no sugar per serving.  Sure beats the heck over those two Coke Zeros I tried last week in taste.

Cardio:
In addition to healthy eating, I am focusing on increasing my cardiovascular activity drastically.  I have always been pretty good at getting in 3 to 6 hours a weekend on the slopes when I can afford to snowboard (time wise or money wise).  However, with the past two seasons being a bust I have to find other ways to keep in shape.  Enter the Nike+ and my iPod Nano.  The perfect equation to fun cardio:

With the Nike+ I get free statistical analysis and tracking through http://www.nikeplus.com and I can actually visualize, monitor, and challenge myself through friends remotely, online, or just personal goals.  It really appeals to my geeky side (in spite of its Flash only interface).  At least I can get some numbers to go with all the hideous amounts of sweat it will cause.  My goal is to run at least twice a week for a minimum of a mile.  Preferably 2 or more miles and hopefully at least 3 days a week.

Strength, Breathing, and Balance:
On the days I am not running (and possibly on the days that I am) I plan on utilizing the Wii Fit to complement my cardio workout by focusing on strength and balance training primarily (muscle building and muscle control through fun mini-games like pushups, ski slalom, snowboarding, and yoga).  With the neat little child-like robot voice and the simple graphs it provides for BMI, weight, and activity log it makes it a sinch to really enjoy visualizing and computing how my health is progressing.  I especially love the accuracy of the scale.  It is impossible to get a scale that doesn’t fluctuate by .50 to 2 pounds every time I step on it.  The Wii Fit is accurate to a tenth of a pound.  Already within a week of use my posture has improved drastically and my center of balance has become much more conscientious to me (which will help a lot in improving for snowboarding I hope).  Thusly, we can hope that the Wii will stand as a digital record of my overall progress between cardio and other efforts.

You may also notice on this image that there is a brown pouch on my right shoe.  This is the make-shift Nike+ sensor pouch that Katie made for me so that I can begin my health efforts immediately rather than having to wait on either buying a pair of Nike+ shoes ($50-$100+) or a more proper Nike+ shoe pouch ($7 on Amazon and already ordered).  Thanks for the temporary fix Katie!

Anyway, it’s getting late and I have to get up and run in less than 5.5 hours.  I wish everyone the best and hope that I have the commitment to keep-up on the hard effort laying ahead of me for the rest of my life.  Ah, laziness, I enjoyed you as an accomplice for as long as my geekiness could be justified.  I’m afraid that my inner-geek simply could not stay with thee forever.

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