On The Paleo Duna On The Paleo Duna

Kombucha Experiment: Phase 1

Following these instructions, I’m giving this a go. In the comments to the instructions, someone described using multiple bottles of store-bought kombucha to get things going faster, so that’s what I’m doing. I got 5 bottles, and made a big batch of black tea and sugar to feed the SCOBY.

It was not difficult, and preparation was delicious!

 5 Jars

Many teabagsSugary Tea GoopInto the gallon jar!The jar of “original” flavor had a nice little chunk of “mother” in it.Covered up, ready to hurry up and wait.

Now, we wait. I’ll post an update when there is exciting news.

 

 

 

 

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Addictions Duna Addictions Duna

Stop Documenting, Start Experiencing

Daniel Gulati, writing for Harvard Business Review:

“…we must choose between capturing these moments or viscerally experiencing them as they unfold. That we can’t do both simultaneously seems obvious…”

I’ve been guilty of this problem, too. Seriously, can we all just put the phones away and live some life for a minute? Facebook and all that endless stuff will still be there later.

Link

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On The Paleo Duna On The Paleo Duna

Pizzerias I’ll Never Open

So one time I had this idea I’d open an organic artisanal pizza joint which, of course, would deliver by bike. Since I’m on the paleo now (no grains), it’s not gonna happen, but here is the list of names I brainstormed.

  • CRUSTIBUS
  • CRUST STATION
  • THE CRüSTIBLE
  • INCRUSTIBLE
  • SAUCEALITO
  • THE CRUST BELT
  • CRUSTILICIOUS
  • WHAT’S DOUGHING ON?
  • THAT’S SAUCESOME
  • WHAT THE SAUCE?
  • PIZZATAR 3D
  • PUFF THE MAGIC FUCKING AWESOME DRA-PIZZA-GON
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Duna Duna

The Whole Collapse Thing

Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk. Without urgent action, we could face threats to water, food, biodiversity and other critical resources: these threats risk intensifying economic, ecological and social crises, creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.
- “State of the Planet Declaration,” London, March 29, 2012

There is a fascinating exchange between a guy who has chosen to sort of give up hope on fixing the environment, and a guy who still has some. It’s a multi-part series, all worth reading.

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Duna Duna

Watch Out for this Domain Name Scam

There are lots of scams regarding domain name registrations, but I nearly fell victim to one recently. It may or may not be new, but it's the first time I've encountered it.

There was a name I wanted to register, something.com (not the actual name), but it was taken, so I settled for something.net. That was almost a year ago.

On November 2, I got an email from a company called WebnameSolution, offering to sell me something.com for $199.95. I really want this name, but not that badly, so I ignored it.

Then on November 11, I got another offer for something.com from an outfit called "dcinchq.com" offering to sell it to me for $99.97. I still didn't want it quite that badly, so I ignored this too.

But today it dawned on me: how could two different companies offer me the same domain, for different exorbitant prices?

It turns out the previous owner's registration expired and the name had simply become available. I got it for the standard price you'd pay for any available ".com" domain (usually in the neighborhood of $15/year).

I think their method is to see who has a name under a different TLD (Top Level Domain, which is the last part of the name, like ".com"). When another TLD becomes available, they offer to sell it to you for an insane profit, acting like they have the right! Buyer beware, as they say.

So here's the short version:

If you get an offer to buy a name you want, always check with a registrar you trust before taking up the offer.

Feel free to pass this on to anybody you know who buys domain names.

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Duna Duna

Complain all you want, we'll sing more.

Look everybody, my first real live Ruby on Rails app!

The Chicago Complaints Choir was looking for a good way to collect new complaints so we can write a new song or two. I've been meaning to learn Rails, but couldn't scrape up the motivation without something "real" to work on. And thus a giant robot was born...

Announcing the Complain-O-Tron 3000™: Complain Here!

Please send in your complaints about anything, one by one, whenever you think of one, and get them off your chest!

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Duna Duna

Shell History

Ok, I'll bite on the shell history meme.

This command will tell you the top 10 things you've been typing in the shell.


isaac$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  101	nosetests
   68	paster
   45	cd
   38	ls
   34	hg
   25	rake
   21	script/server
   21	script/generate
   16	sync
   16	rm


Yes, despite being a total Python freak, I'm using Rails a bit lately. I kinda like 2.0... it's much more polished than 1.x... but so far I still like Pylons + Elixir better... subjectively. It's too soon to say whether that's just my relative amount of experience in each framework. I've been using Python for years, and Pylons for enough time to know it very well. But I've only been dabbling in Rails and Ruby.

I have this sort of tic where I type sync all the time. I picked it up from a sysadmin I knew back in the day (late nineties, remember Mosaic?). I didn't know so much Unix back then (or was that Solaris flavor?) and I saw him type it all the time and I figured it's just what you do right after you do something else. It's useless now, but I still type it all the time anyway without even thinking about it. It just flushes buffers to disk. Back then, on that particular web server (probably a pre-1.0 Apache), my changes to sites would not show up if I didn't run sync, so it became this ingrained habit to type it after changing anything, and I still do it 10+ years later.

And I'm sure typing hg a lot lately. I've switched every project I'm in control of (at home and at work) from subversion to mercurial. Yep, it's that awesome, and I doubt I'll be looking back. Not to say something better won't come along one day, but for now it's the bees knees in version control.

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Duna Duna

What I Want from CSS3

Well you asked…

Positioning and sizing of elements relative to others. Grouping of elements. I want to say #a #b and every div.awesome constitute a group named #superGreat, and then be able to say that #c should always appear below that group, or to the right of it, or 23 ems from the top left of the group. I want to say that every item in that group should have the height of the tallest one among them, based on its content… or that all the members should have their bottom edges aligned, and the tops move down based on each element’s size.

I realize that this is difficult to implement in a rendering engine because an amateur could easily create circular dependencies (to name just one of many). I’m not opposed to the browser throwing an error dialog in this situation. We’re all grown-ups here, and if you can’t think through your design well enough to avoid infinite recursion, then you need to think it through again.

Next, I want to have variables where I can define a set of color, borders, backgrounds, or whatever, and then apply that set of styles to other elements.

That’s about as simply as I can say it. That’s what I want from CSS3. Give me those in every browser and maybe I’ll stop complaining. That’s not true. I joined the Chicago Complaints Choir for cripes sake. But give me those things, and I’ll complain about something else instead. How’s that for a deal?

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