Matt, M.S.

Alright, this one is odd, but it works like a charm. I recently installed Safari 3.1 on my new MacBook and after a reboot I had no audio whatsoever (though the startup chime worked). When I messed with the sound via the keyboard buttons only a greyed out icon and a barred circle appeared. I also noticed a red LED inside my headphone jack (what the hell?)

Googling around I found a super weird fix here.

The fix is to get a toothpick and stick it all the way into your headphone jack roll it around the edge of the jack until the light goes off. Yeah. I know. It really works though. I swear.

My audio was working again immediately without a reboot!

Finally. A politician that doesn’t feed on ignorance nor treats the people as children. Thank you Obama for finally speaking the truth.

I read somewhere once that governments used to sell hope and safety to its people instead of nightmares. I’d like to see the country rally around hope instead of the monsters in the closet.

I think my friends are starting a Darby-centric cult on MySpace. Suddenly they all use a Van Gogh painting as their avatar that is my creepy doppelgänger.

My top eight:

I had two roundtrip tickets to Myrtle Beach, SC for noon today. We were just going for a few days to blow off some steam, and bought the tickets a week ago on a whim. In blows this gigantic record setting snowstorm and 2′ of snow. The normal snowfall around these parts is around 3″ per storm.

I spent most of the day yesterday shoveling the driveway in anticipation of flying out this morning. This morning comes and I look out the window and see that our road is still not plowed. I head out in a feeble attempt to shovel into the road!

If this wasn’t enough our kitchen sink starts leaking all over the floor and we’re out of kitty litter. We have two cats and the idea of them without clean litter for a few days makes my head swim of ruined carpets.

We realized that everything was seemed to be conspiring against our trip. Not one to tempt fate (and hey, I doubt we’d get out of the driveway), so we decided to eat the tickets.

I wish tickets were refundable when these types of circumstances occur. It’s no one’s fault, but I still lose $500.

30 minutes into a call to Travelocity… I hope something can be worked out!

Ah, Ohio.

UPDATE: 50 minutes into the call I’m told that I cannot cancel the reservation as the flight is on time and I also cannot move the reservation as I’d already checked-in online (when I thought I might be able to make it, hours ago). So I’m out $500. What a fucking racket. I wish I could get away with keeping money for non-rendered service. I was so frustrated that I did the retarded guy thing and slammed my fist down on my desk. I broke the center drawer whilst doing so.

I’m going to bed.

This was taken just a few minutes ago in Columbus, Ohio. It was sunny and clear about ten minutes before. Joy!

I’ve been listening to Happy Hardcore all day, so it might have had something to do with perking my brainwaves all on up. Whatever it was, today was fucking awesome.

Today I successfully created a proof of concept Rails application that uses FancyUpload, MooTools, Amazon AWS, attachment_fu, and mimetype_fu. This application allows seamless multi-file uploads to attachment_fu (which generates thumbnails flawlessly) and in turn stores the files to AWS’s S3 service.

To any non-programmers, this is probably not interesting, but shit, I had to do this by hand in PHP less than a year ago and I’m still battling with it. Enter Rails (and some brilliant plugins) and I have the whole damn thing up in a few hours. Not to mention that the whole upload/download is ultra secure and replicated across the globe with basically 99.99999% uptime. That beats my halfassed server petting zoo at the office by about six nines!

89 database tables, 93 fully RESTed objects, 4740 successful tests. Life is grand.I’ve spent years working in web development with PHP (as I’ve describe ad naseum), and I’d hate to admit it, but I’ve never written a test. Ever. My stuff works, but soon after every launch, small cracks start to appear. The worst part is that these small cracks are always found by my users. This is not only embarrassing, but it leads to me furiously debugging a live system with active users, trying to quickly recreate the conditions that caused the error. I like my hair and I’ve losing it fast enough, thank you.Enter RSpec and Behavior Driven Development (BDD). RSpec makes writing tests a joy. Yes, I know, I know, but testing can be a real joy. It’s like working out; it always seems super difficult to start, and you stall and think of a billion other things to do, but once you actually start you feel really good and alive.BDD makes testing second nature, and RSpec makes writing these tests intuative. You know those meetings you have with your clients and you try to distill what they truly need from what they tell you they need? BDD gives you a language that both you and your clients can speak; you simply describe how an object should behave:A Car not only has a color, it also should not be driveable with one tire and it should only be driveable by a licensed driver.

See? Simple. As with most Ruby code, RSpec features English like statements that are immediately comprehensible to anyone — even clients. You know what the best thing is about RSpec though? It not only tests your code, it documents your code. Just look:

Imagine testing and documenting your code at the same time! Two things that many programmers skip altogether! That alone makes the Ruby on Rails framework and mindset the most attractive choice today.

One thing that annoys me when using the RSpec bundle for TextMate is the ‘it’ snippet. I think that any new spec should at least register as ‘Pending’ when it is run, not automatically pass. Having a blank test pass is really kind of dumb. So I’ve tweaked the ‘it’ snippet just a hair to automatically insert a ‘Pending’ statement into a newly created ‘it…do’ block. The description will be highlighted first, then the entire ‘pending’ statement so it will be easy to enter your data.

To use this snippet, just do CTRL + Command + Option + B in TextMate, go to the RSpec listing, and click on the ‘it’ snippet. Copy and paste the below text and you’re in business.

Alright. I’m not nuts. Seriously.

I live in Blacklick, Ohio; a small suburb of Columbus. On January 9th, 2008 we had a massive wind storm overnight. Wind gusts of 55MPH and such. Around 1:20am, I heard a noise that raised me right out of my bed. The sound was of electricity escaping, almost like a Jacob’s Ladder without the snap at the end. The electricity in my house was flickering, trying valiantly to stay on. Outside at this exact moment, was a very bright greenish/blue light; it was so bright that it flooded my bedroom. We have light-blocking shades on our windows and it was still impressive.

This light almost looked as if someone was shinging a light down at you when you’re underwater, and it only appeared when the electricity was flickering. It appeared about two or three separate times. My wife and I were kind of freaking out as we thought that lightening was hitting our house. We quickly realized that there was no thunder and that the light was directly in sync with the electricity sound.

I ran to a window and was looking out at the light, thinking that a transformer must be blowing up (it was seriously that bright and loud). I realized that our neighborhood has no above ground electricity poles. None.

I grabbed a flashlight and looked out to our electicity box in our backyard and noticed that it wasn’t blackened, and still in one piece.

The power was out for a few more hours and I finally fell asleep around 3:00am. When I wake up in the morning, all is calm and the power is back on. Nothing was damaged at all.

So what was it? I have no fucking idea. I am an educated man, and I was completely sober. My wife saw the light and heard the sounds along with me.

Fast forward to today. My Father-In-Law calls and says that he was listening to a local radio program and they mentioned this phenomena. I guess that twenty or so people reported it, and an airline pilot saw it as he was approaching Columbus’ airport (CMH). They said that this exact phenomena was spotted by people in Texas around the same time.

I’m dying to know what this phenomena was. I’ve never seen anything like it. My only guess is that it was St. Elmo’s Fire, but I’m not sure what circumstances are required to create it.