bryanwoods

Geoff Rickly, who some might know as the singer of Thursday, recently published a fantastic novel called "Soneone Who Isn't Me," which is a lightly fictionalized account of his experience using Ibogaine to kick a heroin habit. It's an artful, stream of consciousness book, and contains fascinating details about his experience at an addiction clinic in Mexico that offers the treatment.

I hadn't heard about the drug before reading the book and found it very fascinating.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189278437/someone-who-isnt-m...

Thanks for mentioning this. I've actually been working through that book over the past few days and think that anecdote really got under my skin. For some reason it didn't dawn on me when writing the article. I'll make note of it.

I'm surprised to hear so much negativity about Amtrak. I live in NYC and head upstate (to Rochester) for business regularly and Amtrak is by far my favorite way to make the trip.

A bus might make more sense on a shorter trip (like the aforementioned NYC to Boston example), but I think there's a real sweet spot for taking the Amtrak on trips longer than, say, 4-5 hours on the bus but shorter than a 2 hour flight (excluding baggage/security/travel to and from airport time).

Especially Amtrak's business class, which is extremely comfortable, with plenty of space for a computer and stretching out, quiet and spacious enough to get work done, and usually only an extra $20 or so.

I admit my fear of flying sways me toward Amtrak when a flight might make the most sense, but to me a bus is almost always the worst possible transportation option available.

This is great!

I work at a startup building apps ( http://zerography.com is currently live; hopefully more soon) to get custom printed stuff into people's hands for free, and think it's really great to see Google getting involved.

There's something extra special about getting a letter or package in the mail, and with the amount of time and cost involved in mailing something to friends and family, I'm really surprised I (and almost everyone else I know, too!) don't take advantage of things like this more.

These are all pretty good examples.

That being said, I recently spent some time reading through the source of both Gemcutter.org and RailsDevelopment.com and found both to be very educational to me personally:

http://github.com/engineyard/rails_dev_directory http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter/

Still reeling from the weekend; my first Rumble.

We also got an app built and deployed, a simple little game: http://marryboffkill.com

The whole time I expected that it would be the smoothing-over of rough edges, double-checking, and doing general "cleanup" that would take the most time, but even so was surprised how quickly the deadline snuck up on us the last day.

I have a feeling if the rumble was over a long weekend instead we would have been able to clean up all the rough edges, but I have a feeling there are many other teams in this boat as well. :-)

Was definitely a great way to spend a weekend (creating something) with friends and a real learning experience. I'm already excited to do it again next year.

I'm suddenly reminded of the Eggers novel "You Shall Know Our Velocity!" wherein the characters go on a week-long international journey trying to give away an inherited sum of money.

Sounds like a great experiment. I'm especially interested to see if these bizarre flights trigger any inquiry by authorities.

While I agree mostly with your view, I just spent quite a bit of time looking over the local sex offender lists of several cities I've lived in, and I can say for sure that at least in these random samples, the outliers you mention (public urination, high school sweethearts separated by too many years, etc) are nowhere to be found on any of the lists I have looked through.

I think it's strangely primitive and archaic for this sort of public humiliation to exist in our modern society either way, but a few moments of clicking around these samples at random goes to show that a vast, vast majority of these people have been convicted of what most would consider "serious" sex crimes.

I was hoping I was about to read a comparison similar to http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ (which is concise and intelligent, even with its inherent bias).

This title might have struck me as even more surprising had it read "Apple Sold Half As Many Macs As iPhones Last Quarter."

This is fantastic! I sent this to some other friends here in NYC who have all had the same response: "I always thought that would make a great app."

It hits the iPhone sweet spot of being a perfect blend of mostly fun and somewhat useful.

Edit I just purchased the app. Really nice and slick. Though living off the G (a cross-town line), it's hard to choose from only Uptown and Downtown options. Otherwise, this is great.

I'm so tired of reading about web servers/services going down.

Great story.

I found myself doing just about the same thing (eerily similar settings in my neighborhood in Brooklyn) when my girlfriend's iPhone was stolen just a few days before WWDC and the Find My iPhone announcement.

At the time I wished for nothing more than this exact technology, but days later when we were reasonably sure we had found (through a few degrees of separation) who had stolen the phone and were still unable to get it back, it dawned on me that this might be one of those social issues that will go mostly technologically unsolved at least for the time being.

Interesting, I'm not getting this flaw at all. Which version of 2.3 is this addressing? Rails 2.3.1 only? I just tried this on a 2.3.2 app and got HTTP Basic: Access denied.

You can do it easily in Rails without a redirect too, and without regex as used in Django.

In routes.rb for example: map.login '/login.php', :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'new'

But I suppose that wouldn't make for a very funny April Fool's joke.

It's worth taking a look at the results of the David Foster Wallace Parody Competitions:

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/parody.htm

Making lighthearted jokes about Wallace's syntax and verbosity are the common first steps I've watched people make when they begin reading his prose, but it usually doesn't take very more reading at all for these people to see that even attempting to parody Wallace on a humorous, surface level would require the kind of introspection and effort that takes a near-lifetime and of the sort that probably isn't the most satisfying or healthy way for a person to spend their time.

Nested Model Forms are a timely addition. When I was learning Rails, I always kind of assumed forms could work more like this. More information: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/1/26/nested-model-forms

The 2.3 release seems to go a long way to limiting the amount of configuration required for all sorts of these slightly-bothersome tasks, which is really nice.

I went to two meetings here in NYC. Met some great people and had a great time seeing what other hackers were up to. I keep assuming all the layoffs combined with the onset of winter were to blame for things kind of petering out. It was a particularly weird time to keep momentum going for anything, but it'd be nice to get together again. I'm glad some links to similar groups have been posted, I hope to check them out.

It always puts me a bit off when I see people trying to apply science to an aesthetic issue like this one (this article is way less guilty than many others on the subject).

There is no doubt that engineers are mastering pop music "louder" now than in decades past, but it's too easy to jump to the usual conclusions of there being some kind of Volume Arms Race, with each successive album attempting to be louder than the others surrounding it.

There's a hard limit of 0dB that digital recordings can reach before digital distortion, and it's not like professional audio engineers are trying to push the envelope there, curious to see what happens.

The real reason pop music (and we're only talking about pop music) is mastered so loud these days has much more to do with the general trendinesses of pop music than some kind of unscientific and unjustified commercialism.

In other words...

In 2009 Kanye West is a popular musician. When asked why they like Kanye West's music, people often say things like "it's got a good beat to it," or "I like dancing to it." People think Kanye West's music has a good beat because of the overall mid-scooped equalization of the track, and the effect of compressed and "loud" mixes coming out of large speakers. It makes people want to dance, and the dancing makes them happy.

But, when they get home from the club, exhausted and tired of being on their feet all day, they put on a relaxing Sufjan Stevens (or whatever the kids are listening to these days) album. The mastering is far lower in perceived volume, and the same person who was dancing to Kanye West because it "had a good beat" is now saying how much Sufjan Stevens lets him "mellow out."

Think of the difference between top-selling pop music today versus 20 years ago. I think that alone does a better job justifying common engineering practices than conspiracy theories of being the loudest song on the jukebox, or on a radio segment or whatever. Especially considering that there's a volume ceiling that is already being reached.

I've been really excited for this for about a year now, and have been having a great time playing with the pure Git workflow. If you look at this problem in one direction (only does Ruby, won't kill the AppEngine), you're probably missing the point.

We were about to bring our apps to Engine Yard's Solo EC2 management system, and Heroku's essentially deprecated similar offerings from a bunch of companies all over the place.

I'm sure adding new technologies and languages will bring more people over in the future, but for now it seems like this platform could end up being a great reflection of the current state of the Ruby, with our preference for all things distributed and collaborative like cloud hosting and Git source control.

This is a really great idea. I'm excited to try it out. Congratulations!

It's interesting, actually. The idea is that you should be able to set the price of your music, but there's quite a bit of weirdness and technical issues. For example, I'm selling an album I recorded on Amazon. It's a full-length, so you'd expect something like ~$9.99 to be the final price, but since it's only one track (21 minutes long), it ended up going for 99 cents at Amazon. I have no doubt that somewhere on the internet exists a form where I can edit the price, but it'd be a real pain to deal with. I'm glad selling music on Amazon/iTunes is a hobby of mine and not a business.