Shiny, Capín.

Sometimes I like throwing in random lingo or quotes from pop culture just to see what happens. Sometimes I get a smile and a nod, sometimes I get a concerned look and the person backing away slowly. Either way I find it funny.

Million dollar idea

I have an idea for a product that could make someone millions of dollars. The potential market is billions of people. And you know what, I'll give away the idea here. All I ask is when you own your own small island, you remember that you read about the idea here and you pass me some products that you create. That's all I want really, not to be the baron of a multi-national company, but to enjoy the product that I'm thinking of. Ready? Here's the idea:

Comfortable dress shoes.

Brilliant, right? I can't believe that no one has thought of this before now. I'll be expecting my comfy shoes soon. ;-)

Puttering around the house

Years ago I always thought that my grandfather liked to putter around the house / cottage fixing and cleaning stuff all the time. My dad also does similar things, keeping busy all the time, always with the next job or eight in mind. They never bitched about the work that needed to be done, they just got to it. I thought that they did it because they loved it. I'm slowly starting to realize that they might not have loved needing to do things all the time - it was a necessity.

With a house there seems to always be something that needs a repair, to be cleaned, painted, replaced, wired, tidied, fastened or straightened. After having a house for less than 2 years, it's not something that I bitch about, just something that needs to get done and it's either going to be me or Laura to do it. I can see how after owning a house for a couple of decades it wouldn't even seem like work anymore, just something that needs to be done like making dinner or doing the dishes.

Today, on a gorgeous late summer day, I found myself puttering around the house doing things that needed to be done. It makes me feel like a Grown Up. It makes me want to go play with my lego.

My first ruby script

It's been a while since I was reading my ruby book. I end up forgetting most of what I read because I have not used it in a project. Today I needed to do some xml parsing and I always find it so clunky to do in java, so I took ruby for a spin.

For the life of me I couldn't get gems to work properly without adding in "require gems" at the top. Not sure if I needed to be setting some env var, but I figure running on XP using cygwin is a bit out of the normal ruby path.

My other complaint (if you can call it this) is that there seems to be 50 different ways to do everything. There are similar issues in java of course, but it took me a bit to find a small, clear example.

After I got through the "research" part, I found it a lot of fun for a 15 line script.

Apple's got me

We were going through the rideau center yesterday, and of course we wondered by the mac store. It's not been there long, but I've enjoyed being in there each time we've gone. It's got a very different feeling than a store like bestbuy.

We've been trying to figure out a good way to listen to our music collection on our stereo in the living room. The speakers are hidden behind the couch and the stereo itself is hidden under an end table. We've been debating getting a "good" stereo that we could hook up to an ipod, but even a crappy stereo starts over 100 $. Instead of doing that, we did a little experiment where we bought an AirPort Express Base Station and just plugged the stereo into that. Then I put the iphone remote app on Laura's phone and we can put the computer anywhere we want. One of these days I'm going to have to hook up an actual media server, but this is a good start. ;-)