Posted by casey at March 31st, 2008
Man do I love Google’s sense of humor…
The Beta User Testimonials crack me up …
“I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the ‘first’ to respond to a co-worker’s ‘first-come, first-serve’ email. Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort of knows I used Custom Time on this one, but I’m denying it.”
Robby S., Paralegal
Posted by casey at June 1st, 2007
Posted by casey at April 25th, 2007
http://www.freethinkers.co.za/documents/politics/katrina%20and%20race.jpg?racism
Posted by casey at April 24th, 2007
With the big push to emphasize the “sanctity of life” my question is can a person lose their sanctity of life? Does a criminal forfeit his right to a sacred life, or is the sanctity of life ever present and ongoing, something given to us from God? If all life is sacred shouldn’t the death penalty be considered an abomination? After reading this CNN story about lethal injections my hate for the death penalty resurfaced. How on one hand you can fight to preserve the sanctity of life of a blastocyst, but not respect the life of a full grown human? It frustrates me to the core. At least be consistent with your policy.
Posted by casey at April 18th, 2007
A Ruby to Java compiler. It magically turns ruby source files into java class files. Interesting, interesting, interesting. I wonder if the JRuby guys have played with this at all and what they think of it? The better question is … why the hell haven’t I heard about this. It seems to have flown under my radar for a full year.
Posted by casey at April 17th, 2007
Posted by casey at April 16th, 2007
Deployed new features on Nearbie.com like history item commenting, history browsing (earlier and later for each item that makes up the history) and slowly adding more cities of the world (all Canada is imported — I think UK is next).
Enjoy!
Posted by casey at March 29th, 2007
I was just listening to NPR and the whole Kyle Sampson testimony. I was just wondering how old this dude was and haven’t really found the answer — 34? Anyway — I did come across a firm and bio page to send him an email… Feel free to tell him how you feel!
Posted by casey at February 28th, 2007
If 2006 was the year of the mashup, 2007 will be the year of the MegaMashup. Sites will spring up mashing up feeds from 5-20 other sites. You will see mashups incorporating everything from last.fm, amazon, yahoo, google, bn.com, twitter, flickr, del.icio.us, myspace, digg and many more.
Posted by casey at February 28th, 2007
Quick little blurb about nearbie.com on ehub. Over the next few weeks we will be focusing our efforts on marketing and brand building. And as always any thoughts about how to make Nearbie better or great marketing ideas — shoot me an email at feedback at nearbie.com.
Posted by casey at February 22nd, 2007
Check it out and as always — feedback is welcome and much appreciated at feedback at nearbie.com.
Posted by casey at February 22nd, 2007
The idea of a quick customizable survey is something I have wanted to build for some time — and of course — that is as far as I got. Bruno on the other hand seems to be working with 36 hour days or something and cranked it out in a week. I would also like to see a quick little customizable rating tool — takes a scale, item type, id, and allows you to rate an item.
Also I just came across a nice interview with the Man/Machine himself on Ruby Inside.
Congratulations Bruno!
Posted by casey at February 19th, 2007
This little girl has trouble pronouncing “sparkling wiggles” but what comes out sounds very racist.
Posted by casey at February 12th, 2007
Now It’s Personal: Al Qaeda Calls Bush an Alcoholic Liar — well it’s true isn’t it?
Posted by casey at February 5th, 2007
Ehren Watada begins his court martial trial for failing to deploy with his unit. The government has also tacked on other charges including conduct unbecoming an officer and contempt toward officials (the President). Another example of the heavy handed tactics by the administrations — Either your with us or against us.
This man is a hero.
Posted by casey at January 25th, 2007
All that I can say is it is super SICK. Talk about web development on steroids.
http://www.getfirebug.com
Posted by casey at January 20th, 2007
If you don’t already know the Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) is the premier Ruby user group in the Minneapolis, Twin Cities (Mpls and St. Paul) area. You could call it the Ruby Users of Minneapolis or Ruby Users of St. Paul. But no matter what the name is, it is still all the same great RUM with the same great people.
Meetings are typically held on the last Tuesday of the every month at the Loring Park Dunn Bros. More information is available at Ruby.mn.
Posted by casey at January 10th, 2007
In life, mistakes are made all the time that are easily fixed by first admitting the fault and then taking the right course to correct the problem. A broken war is not one of those mistakes you can fix by simply admitting that “mistakes were made”. Sometimes things are broken that can’t be fixed — a very hard lesson for many people who are “fixers”. I liken it to the urge you get to buy more of a falling stock. Initially, you think its a good investment to lower your dollar cost average, but most financial experts recommend closing the position for a small loss rather than investing in a dead stock for an even worse loss in the long run. In the same way Bush’s Vietnam cannot be fixed by simply admitting “mistakes were made” and adding more troops.
Posted by casey at January 8th, 2007
Box in a box for you — So funny — Think SNL — D*** in a Box.
Posted by casey at January 5th, 2007
In no particular order
Well, I realize it is light on “Family Time” and pretty heavy on “Casey Time” — which, will undoubtedly be a topic of discussion at the dinner table tonight. Of course, that is because I saved the most important one for last –
What are your resolutions?
Posted by casey at January 3rd, 2007
Here are the steps I took to get Rails running on a fresh MacBook Pro.
Start by following
http://blog.nanorails.com/articles/2006/10/17/installing-rails-on-mac-os-x-tiger-10-4-8
The big things to keep an eye out for
Don’t forget to update the Darwin ports sudo port -d selfupdate very very important
Don’t forget the +server portion of the mysql5 install
I typically use mongrel and mongrel cluster so I don’t bother with the fcgi crap.
I also found out that the Darwin Port rb-rubygems is broken in the latest release and you will see a strange stack looking like this when you do sudo gem install blah
No worries, just manually reinstall ruby gems. In my case
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
extract and sudo ruby setup.rb.
That is really about it… The next big part is ImageMagic/RMagick — I’ll add updates as I work through that mess.
Posted by casey at December 8th, 2006
Ben and Bruno built a popurls.com type service that is based on cities. http://www.acu.mn
Posted by casey at December 5th, 2006
Well, I have been a bit remiss in keeping everyone updated on what I have been up to lately.
Earlier this year I started a fairly large Rails project, Yfly.com, a social networking site for teens and celebrities. We did an initial deploy on August 15th and weekly/biweekly updates thereafter. At the end of October I left Space 150 and the Yfly contract to work for Dean Heckler, (inventor, designer and technologist) to start building Nearbie.com. Nearbie is a fun (and practical) tool to enable the exploration of history connections between people, places and events. It lets everyone capture history and see how that history is related to other nearby people, places and events. Nearbie is in active development right now and will be going live later this month.
Posted by casey at November 8th, 2006
Democrats win the house and probably the senate… Rummy was thrown under the bus … and I just got done eating a very tasty steak from Mancini’s. Today was one big middle finger from moderate middle America to the neocon Bush, evangelical White House.
The only thing that will keep me drinking is that T-paw was re-elected and I voted for Peter Hutchinson expecting an easy victory for Hatch. Oh well I guess you can’t win ‘em all.
Posted by casey at October 22nd, 2006
Bush Flip-Flops on Stay the Course. With the upcoming election and probable loss of the House (and possibly the Senate) they are doing everything they can to set the stage for the looming congressional inquiries and oversight proceedings.
Let’s not forget the rhetoric, it wasn’t that long ago
May 6, 2004
“They’ll kill innocent people to try to shake our will,” Bush said of terrorists. “That’s what they want to do. They’ll never shake the will of the United States. We understand the stakes.”
“Bush: Stay the course on terror war
July 10th, 2003
“We’re making steady progress,” he said. “A free Iraq will mean a peaceful world. And it’s very important for us to stay the course, and we will stay the course.”
U.S. ‘Will Stay the Course’ in Iraq, Bush Says
Posted by casey at September 15th, 2006
Zillowblog.com has some interesting maps aggregating census data. Here are the top and bottom 5 richest and poorest cities.
Bob Marley - “Don’t gain the world and lose your soul, wisdom is better than silver or gold.”
Posted by casey at September 8th, 2006
How can any intelligent person with a conscience shop at Walmart? I feel dirty just thinking about it…
“Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they’re held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart “full time” is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year.
Health-care benefits? Only if you’ve been there two years; then the plan hits you with such huge premiums that few can afford it-only 38% of Wal-Marters are covered. ”
http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/companies/antiwalmart.html
Maybe instead you like to discuss sweatshops. Walmart is kickass in this area. 13-20 cents an hour is right up there with Nike!
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/sweatshops.html
Forbes magazine, polling business executives (not employees) has ranked Wal-Mart among the best 100 corporations to work for. Yet the employees on average take home pay of under $250 a week. The salary for full-time employees (called “associates”) is $6 to $7.50 an hour for 28-40 hours a week, which is typical in the discount retail industry. This pay scale places employees with families below the poverty line, with the majority of employees’ children qualifying for free lunch at school. When closely examined, this amounts to a form of corporate welfare, as the taxpayer subsidizes the low salaries. One-third are part-time employees - limited to less than 28 hours of work per week - and are not eligible for benefits.
…..
for employees is the option to buy company stock at a discount. Wal-Mart matches 15 percent of the first $1800 in stocks purchased. Yet most workers can’t afford to buy the stock. In fact, not one in 50 workers has amassed as much as $50,000 through the stock-ownership pension plan. Voting power for these stocks remains with Wal-Mart management.
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/stores3.html
On the other hand…. Costco isn’t quite as bad….
Costco pays its average employee $17 an hour. It offers workers an affordable health-care package that 85 percent of employees take part in. It contributes to employees’ 401(k) plan.
Of course, Jim Sinegal, the CEO of Costco, takes a more modest annual salary of $350,000, a sliver of what Wal-Mart’s Lee brings to his palatial estate.
Posted by casey at August 1st, 2006
Just wanted to announce the new addition to the family (and the reason I have been away so long), Carson Alexander Helbling. Stay tuned…. Much more to follow.
Posted by casey at June 27th, 2006
Jesus healed a few sick people… Big deal. Warren Buffett’s 30 billion dollar donation will be literally helping millions upon millions of sick people across the world. I suggest we make June 26th Buffett Day. He is far more deserving of a holiday named after him than say, Columbus, or for that matter, Jesus.
Posted by casey at June 20th, 2006
Posted by casey at June 15th, 2006
Last night I was at the Twins game and got to watch two crazy fans run across the field. One decides to round the bases and slide head first into home. Just then the bat boy steps up and takes him out. Talk about embarrassing.
Posted by casey at June 15th, 2006
This new Dictionary Tooltip Extension beats the crappy old “Dictionary Search Extension” since it displays the results on the same page in a sweet little web 2.0ey “tooltip”. FEBE: Firefox Extension Backup Extension finally solves the problem of trying to synchronize firefox extensions accross multiple machines. It allows you to save one machine’s configuration and “install” it to another machine. It has some short comings like no FTP support, but for the most part will be very helpful.
Posted by casey at June 14th, 2006
I guess Bush won’t be getting the Nobel Peace Prize any time soon.
(source guardian.co.uk)
Posted by casey at June 2nd, 2006
And plenty more available on YouTube.com
Posted by casey at May 16th, 2006
Google notebook just released today — useful for saving small clips of text… And notice … they stole the black triangles from WidgetWeb.
Posted by casey at May 3rd, 2006
Ben has some cool photos from inside the new library on flickr. Check em out. I get a strange jail or prison feeling. It is very Alcatrazy…
The New Minneapolis Public Library
Alcatraz
Posted by casey at May 3rd, 2006
Block level view on Amazon maps is pretty cool http://maps.a9.com/
Posted by casey at April 24th, 2006
I started using Tool Man about a year ago to help with javascript drag and drop sorting of lists. Lately however, I have been using crap.taculo.us and have come to like many of its features especially the “$” referencing of dom elements. Unfortunately they can’t coexist. They both try to hijack the window.onload method rendering Toolman unusable. I’m sure after some debugging I could figure out a work around, but for now I recommend just using scriptaculous. It has all the same sorting features as Toolman plus tons of other AJAX stuff that you can’t do without. It is also built into Rails so it won’t be going away anytime soon.
Posted by casey at April 24th, 2006
Summer of Code is a program designed to introduce students to open source software development. Google provides stipends to about 400 students to work with a mentor on an open source project over the summer. This is just another example of why google is google… supporting the open source software movement and mining the best and the brightest students as future employees. Brilliant!
http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html
http://code.google.com/soc/studentfaq.html
Posted by casey at April 17th, 2006
Seriously… WTF. Devotees nailed to cross in Philippines - Boston.com
Posted by casey at April 6th, 2006
Artie is a service that utilizes Amazon.com’s public database of images to retrieve any missing cover art for your iTune’s library. Just upload your easy-to-find iTunes Music Library.xml file, wait a second while it analyzes everything, and drag the artwork straight into your running iTunes program. The correct art is found more then 95 percent of the time, however databases aren’t perfect, so it’s possible you might get a Yanni cover for your new G-Unit CD, for these few mistakes, we appologize.
Posted by casey at April 5th, 2006
