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Jack Baty – Director of Unspecified Services

Kung Fu Hustle

And speaking of Kung Fu. Please see Kung Fu Hustle. Yes, it’s silly and completely over the top. It’s also an absolute blast from start to finish. Roger Ebert sums it up nicely: “When I saw it at Sundance, I wrote that it was ‘like Jackie Chan and Buster Keaton meet Quentin Tarantino and Bugs Bunny.' You see how worked up you can get, watching a movie like this."—Roger Ebert

Kung Fu Framework

I’ve been quiet about Ruby on Rails – reluctantly, suspiciously quiet. Why, because everyone else is making so much noise there’s not much else for me to say. I will sum up: After several months and several “real” projects, it completely rocks. Just listen to me say, “Woah, I’m never touching PHP/ASP/ColdFusion again – ever.” a dozen times a day and it becomes obvious that Rails is an absolute joy to use.

Pentrix

Have you ever been in a meeting that was going long and someone started doing fancy tricks with their pen? You know, spinning it around their thumb or flipping it back and forth without any apparent hand movement? Well I have, and it’s always made me envious. I should be able to to that, but never have been able to figure out how. Enter Pentrix.com. (via Lifehacker)

In a dress

Jess mentioned today that I haven’t written about or posted photos of her in a while. Well I hate to disappoint, so here’s a rare one from this past weekend. Yep, that’s a dress she’s wearing.

Oblique Strategies Widget

I love the Oblique Strategies cards and keep meaning to buy them. With the new Oblique Strategies widget I may not need to. “Into the impossible”

Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and Lazy

My lawn sucks – what remains of it. The result of Oak trees, dogs and neglect, I’m now left with several greenish clumps helping to break up the otherwise unfettered expanse of dirt and weeds. I water, mow, and pay too much for a service which, as far as I can tell, comes around once every 6 weeks or so just to stick a small sign in my front yard and an invoice in my mailbox.

Seven Blunders of the World

Seven Blunders of the World Wealth without work Pleasure without conscience Knowledge without character Commerce without morality Science without humanity Worship without sacrifice Politics without principle —Gandhi

Typo 2.5

This here blog has been running Typo for some time now. It also proxies Apache to Lighttpd and uses FastCGI. A lot of this is fairly new and I’ve run into a few snags, as you may have noticed. I track the main line of Typo via Subversion and tonight just ran svn up without much thought. Ooops. Seems Typo 2.5 is out and there’s much new goodness. After a couple hours getting the database working again (The Rails “migrate” feature is great, except when it sucks) I’m back up and running.

My God. It’s full of links!

Shirky has a great article, Ontology is Overrated—Categories, Links, and Tags which describes some of the advantages of tagging systems versus a typical hierarchical ontology. I love the Dewey Decimal System example categorization for religions of the world… Dewey, 200: Religion 210 Natural theology 220 Bible 230 Christian theology 240 Christian moral & devotional theology 250 Christian orders & local church 260 Christian social theology 270 Christian church history 280 Christian sects & denominations 290 Other religions No bias there, eh?

Mary’s Violet Eyes…

“Mary’s Violet Eyes Makes John Stay Up Nights, Period.” That’s how I used to remember the nine planets, in the correct order. Nine planets you say? Not any more. But I suppose the new mnemonic will have to wait until the planet is officially named.