Last night, during morris dance rehearsal, I noticed some hairs starting to get loose on my bow. Examination revealed that the hair was starting to slip out of the tip end. (The violinists among you will know how unusual this is -- normally hairs break rather than slipping out while intact.) I was hoping the bow would last the evening, but the little wooden block that holds the hair in completely popped out as I was playing.

I was starting to wonder why this happened, since I've gone to the same luthier (Deborah Segel in Troy) for all my rehairings since moving to Albany, and she's always done excellent work for me in the past. Then it hit me. While on tour in England with The Flying Romanos last August, I had to get my bow rehaired at a violin shop in London. They seemed to know what they were doing...but I guess they didn't.

So today I am making an unscheduled trip to Deborah's shop, knowing now she can accomplish what a high-end London luthier could not. Who says the Capital District is lacking?

[	Tags	|	css, geeky, web	]
[	Current Mood	|	accomplished	]

From a Web application I'm developing:

Before	After

And most of the changes were just style attributes. Did I mention I love CSS?

EDIT: I neglected to mention that the icons are from the excellent (and free) Silk set, by Mark James. Thanks for making such great icons, Mark!

[	Tags	|	development, jedit, mac, rails	]
[	Current Location	|	Princeton, IL	]
[	Current Mood	|	surprised	]

I just switched in the last couple of days from Eclipse to jEdit for Rails development, following the tips here. I knew jEdit was a nice editor on Linux (about on par with TextWrangler on Mac OS), but never seriously considered putting it on my Mac -- or considering it an IDE -- till I read that article.

As much as I like Eclipse for other languages, I am coming to the conclusion that it's overkill for Ruby, and that the Aptana team has not really followed through on RadRails' early promise. jEdit has Ruby code completion and Haml syntax coloring modules that work now, not whenever the bugs get around to getting fixed. jEdit's UI isn't quite as nice as Eclipse's, but it's a lot less bloated and more responsive.

(And before you ask, I really don't understand all the fuss among Rails developers about TextMate at €39, when TextWrangler is free and seems to be no worse, and jEdit and -- yes -- Eclipse are free and apparently better. Would someone care to enlighten me on why it's worth the €39?)

[	Tags	|	recruiter, stupid	]
[	Current Location	|	Princeton, IL	]
[	Current Mood	|	frustrated	]

More stupid recruiter tricks today. This one comes from Working with Rails, which has a job board that's generally excellent, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have its share of silly posts. If you have a Working with Rails account, you can see the post at the link above. If not, here's the whole thing, complete with spelling and markup errors.

RUBY ON RAILS DEVELOPERS

Type: Permanent

Resource Management Solutions (RMS) are, in short an IT recruitment company; specialising in niche technology areas such as SAP, Oracle, CRM, Remedy, BMC.

But we also maintain a focus around specific Industry’s within IT, for instance Telecommunications, New Media and Web Development/Design (Front and Back end) and then we focus in on specific technologies within these areas; such as Ruby on Rails, Flash, Java, C#, XHTML, Web 3.0, PHP, CSS, Drupal and MySql etc..

Our main aim is to be specific and to maintain a niche, by concentrating our focus around these Technologies.
I have chosen to focus my core business around the New Media, Marketing and Web Development space.
As you are obviously aware this is a cutting edge market, with new, exciting and emerging technologies.

I am currently working with a hand-full of Web Development companies who are looking for Ruby on Rails developers on a permanent basis, some are in the City, others outside.

I would like RUBY ON RAILS developers of all levels to contact me, from junior to senior in experience, but recent experience must be Ruby focused. Solid undesrstanding on my SQL and standards based JavaScript & CSS.

I would like to expose your CV to these Companies by placing your CV in an Online portal; a Talent Bank which only the recruitment manager and myself have access to.

As you will be area this market is very tight and this is a way of companies being aware of who is on the market; it saves them having to trawl through numerous job boards and gives you the best shot of having your CV seen by the right people.

The idea is that we have an Online database where we submit CV’s for them to browse and as and when they need anyone they would contact us.

Please email me with an up to date copy of your CV. I will then be in contact with you.

cwinn-morgan AT rmsportal DOT com
01256 885986

My translation: I work for an IT recruiting firm. I barely have any idea of what I'm doing, but I thought it would be cool to focus on new media and Web 3.0 [sic!] because it's full of buzzwords. We're trying to get some Web development companies to actually return our phone calls. We'd like to put your résumé in a private database that no one is ever going to look at, unless lightning strikes and one of those Web shops calls us back and wants to do business with us and pays us a fee for our private job board instead of using their existing Monster account and actually takes the time to browse our database (because we're certainly not going to go out of our way to tell them about any great people we have available) and isn't turned off by my inability to spell or carry a clue in a bucket.

Did I miss anything? Would people like to see a line-by-line exegesis of where I got that interpretation? Am I totally off base here?

[	Tags	|	bibimbab, cooking	]
[	Current Mood	|	pleased	]

I (well, collwen and I) made bibimbab tonight, partly to use up some of the kimchi that's been sitting unopened in the fridge for several weeks. I used this recipe, slightly tweaked into a vegetarian form; it came out beautifully, and I highly recommend it (I can still smell a nice scent from the kitchen as I write this in the bedroom a few hours later). Some notes:

• Apparently there's some sort of weird food shortage going on due to weather in the south and west. So neither the supermarket nor the co-op had beansprouts, and I couldn't get the mint that collwen had asked me to pick up. Rats. On the plus side, however, that meant that a big helping of kimchi took the place of the beansprouts on the rice -- not a bad thing.
• I found presliced baby bella mushrooms at the supermarket, and used them in place of beef, without modifying the marinade at all (except that we didn't have quite enough scallions). Then I accidentally dumped the marinade into the skillet when stir-frying the mushrooms, rather than taking them out of the marinade. I'm glad I did: the marinade turned into a delicious sauce, surprisingly teriyaki-like. Yum.
• Bibimbab is traditionally served with a spicy sauce involving kochu chang (spicy soybean paste). I'm sure the Korean grocery has it, but that was out of the way for me, and none of the other stores had it (no real surprise). So I improvised. I picked up some very dark miso (brown rice miso, specifically), and -- not really expecting it to taste quite "right" -- mixed it with sriracha, a little sugar, and enough water to thin it to the proper consistency. Wow! If I hadn't known it wasn't the proper kochu chang sauce, I would not have guessed: it tasted just like the real thing. And given the small amount used, it's surprisingly essential to the overall flavor of the dish. I'm glad I didn't just leave it out.
• The recipe doesn't say this anywhere, but kim is simply the Korean term for nori. If you're like me, you probably have some in the house.

[	Tags	|	car, mileage, odometer, scion	]
[	Current Mood	|	surprised	]

Here are a couple of pictures taken last night (well, OK, early this morning) in my 2006 Scion xB:

I bought the car new on 12 September 2005. You do the math. :)

This probably won't be of interest to anyone who isn't a Ruby on Rails developer, but since it seems that the thing to do in the Rails community is share tips in blog posts, I thought I might as well jump on the bandwagon.

content_for is a great method to use in Rails views, but I found it hard to test in RSpec -- I couldn't mock the right object to test for the method call, and I couldn't figure out how to get the content variable out of the response. Then I stumbled on RSpec patch 12701, which was incorporated into RSpec releases some time ago (it's in 1.1.3, certainly, and I don't know how far back it goes). It seems that while response can be tested for the main body of the response, anything defined with content_for is available as if it were a hash element. So if your view looks like:

<% content_for :sidebar do %>
  <p>Here's my sidebar text.</p>
<% end %>

<p>And here's my main content.</p>

describe "my view" do
  before(:each) do
    render 'myview'
  end

  it "should populate the body content" do
    response.should have_tag("p", /main content/)
  end

  it "should populate the sidebar" do
    response[:sidebar].should have_tag("p", /sidebar/)
  end
end

[

Current Mood

|

silly

]

And now for the latest stupid Web trick -- MyMiniCity. Kind of like SimCity, as far as I can tell, but with two key differences:

• It runs in your Web browser
• Your population grows depending on the number of people who visit your city on the Web

I've created a city called Ookamizaki (狼崎, Wolf's Point) in the virtual country of Japan. Check it out at http://ookamizaki.myminicity.com and increase my population!

[	Tags	|	d&d, dice, geeky, meme, quiz	]
[	Current Mood	|	amused	]

Thanks to zimarra...

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

[	Tags	|	grammar, recruiter	]
[	Current Mood	|	annoyed	]

From: meena <meena AT cbsinfosystems DOT com>

To: Marnen Laibow-Koser <marnen AT marnen DOT org>

Hi,

             I came across your resume through DICE .I have Very urgent
requirement matching with your Profile .If you are interested for this
position Please  send me following details ASAP ,as Requirement is
very urgent .You can contact me at this no.   5108702259 .Do you
have any other Consultant for this Requirement ,you can send their details .

(and then a job requirement followed)

[	Tags	|	japan, pictures	]
[	Current Location	|	Washington Plaza Hotel, Takayama, Gifu-ken, Japan	]
[	Current Mood	|	excited	]

For those who don't already know, I'm in Japan with The Flying Romanos, having a fascinating trip. I hope to write more about that at some point here, but in the meantime, I'm thrilled to announce that the first few photos are up (from Kamakura, where I took over 90 pictures in the course of one afternoon). More will come soon: see the album I've created at Picasa. Enjoy!

[	Tags	|	geeky, library, mount kisco, wi-fi	]
[	Current Mood	|	geeky	]

I was in Mount Kisco today, and considering going to the library to take advantage of the Wi-Fi there. A quick look at the library's description of their Wi-Fi service dissuaded me from doing that:

• Only 5 simultaneous users are supported, "so patrons may be asked to limit their time online when others are waiting."
• Outlets are not available "due to tripping hazards for other patrons"!

I received the following e-mail message from an IT recruiter. I am posting it in its entirety, editing only to render into HTML and to obfuscate e-mail addresses so I don't make more spambait. Names have not been changed to protect the linguistically challenged.

Note: I realize that this guy may be perfectly intelligent and capable of expressing himself in his native language, but there's no way that he should be sending out English-language e-mail without more study -- and I am surprised that his employer didn't realize this, since previous messages from them haven't been nearly so bad.

From: <vijay DOT majji AT makrotech DOT com>
Date: September 17, 2007 9:43:44 AM EDT
To: <marnen AT marnen DOT org>
Subject: Direct Client Requirement

Hi Marnen,
                   I Got U'r EmailID From Our DataBase.We Have A Reqt For Java Developer Position So I sent A Mail to u.If U'r Looking For This Type Of Requiremenet's ,I Would Appreciate U,If U Send me U'r Updated Resume .

Regards,
Vijay Kumar Majji,
Makro Technologies,
P:973.481.0100 ext 3095.

[	Tags	|	boycott, business, recruiting, talentdrive	]
[	Current Mood	|	annoyed	]

I am recommending that people boycott TalentDrive. Here's why.

I received a phone call today from an unfamiliar number in area code 312 (Chicago). I answered, and what I heard next astonished me. As an IT professional, I'm used to calls from recruiters -- but this was an automated message telling me that TalentDrive had just sent me an e-mail message regarding a job opening, and that I should check my e-mail soon. Yes, that's right, they were being both tacky and patronizing at the same time!

The message gave a phone number to call for more information (the same as on the caller ID). I called, and had a curious conversation with someone in customer service (I want to say her name was Courtney, but unfortunately I neglected to verify that). Without attempting to quote verbatim, the call went something like this:

Me: I just received an automated phone call from you, and I found it rather annoying. I'd like to make sure that doesn't happen again.

Her: OK, we can unsubscribe you from our list.

Me: You don't need to unsubscribe me. I'm fine with getting e-mail from you, but I don't want the automated phone calls.

Her: Well, our system sends both the e-mail message and the phone call out at the same time. You can't get one without the other.

Me: Who could change this behavior?

Her: No one can; that's just the way the system works.

Me: I see. In that case, please either connect me to your IT department or let them know that that's very annoying and should be changed.

Her: Well, actually, I'm the one who would make that sort of change. But we can't do that.

Me: You can't make it so that I only get the e-mail?

Her: No. We've addressed this before: other people have called to express their concerns with this, but we can't change it. [Emphasis added.]

Me: In that case, please do unsubscribe me. I have no desire to do business with a company that cares so little about the people it deals with.

In other words, TalentDrive knows that its automated phone calls annoy the very people it's trying to hire, but would rather just shrink its applicant pool than fix a problem it is aware of! With an attitude like that, I will be more than happy to help TalentDrive shrink its applicant pool.

(And by the way, the job TalentDrive had called me about wasn't even close to my areas of expertise. Oy.)