Where Are The Wise Men?

It’s been almost two weeks since I have posted anything. Must be a new record. But it’s not like I haven’t been doing anything. Here is an update:

• Leah started soccer three weeks ago. It’s about time I posted something — the season is half done! Leah loves it — she can’t wait until the next week. They don’t actually play any soccer games at this level. Instead, each kid always has a ball and they play games to work on fundamentals, listening skills, etc. It’s a great program. Gina has some pics and a video. More pictures of our little soccer star are forth-coming.
• A cold has ravaged our household. Leah was spared the worst of it, but both Gina and I had it really bad. We first thought it was allergies but it’s wasn’t. I just got my voice back yesterday, after struggling since last Thursday. It’s been horrible!
• In my not-very-copious spare time, I’ve been working a Ruby on Rails project. It’s, ah, interesting. I don’t know Rails very well but my partner does and he has been mentoring me. This is my first real work with it. The plethora of plugins are nice, but it’s “convention over configuration” thing gets annoying because they wouldn’t be conventions I would ever pick. Example: starting partials with a “_” but never actually using that character when using them. Anyway, it’s been interesting and I’m learning a lot.
• Adia posted a link about rain barrels. I’ve seen them before when I was in Australia years ago. I love the idea but I’m not spending $100 for a rain catcher. My brain is started to hatch a plan to build one myself, but I did just mention my non-copious spare time.
• On the subject of outdoors and environment and recycling . . . last fall I decided to make our compost pile bigger. And bigger it is — much bigger than it probably should be. If anyone in Omaha wants to stop by and take a bucket or two, drop me a line. Not all of it is ready, but it would make a great starter for a pile of your own. It’s just lawn waste and a few fruit peels — no manure is involved. And if you think it must stink — it doesn’t.
• Today I’ve been trying to get a handle on Wicket – the new Web UI standard at my employer. The “leader” of the Java UI team gave us a demo but it turned out to be more a sales demo than a technical how-to. He didn’t mention that you have to had a new log4j as well as SLF4J. And he forgot to mention that you have to put your HTML templates with your classes. Therefore, getting it working has been very problematic. And after I get it working, I don’t know what I would think of it. Maybe it’s like my problems with Rails — the concept is nice, but putting all your page representation as POJO’s instead of in configuration will just give you bad code instead of a bad configuration. Is that better? I simply don’t know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under Life, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.