1. Open a new text file, type: dir
2. Save as ls.bat in C:\Windows\System32\

Now whenever I type ls by mistake, it runs the dir command, giving me the directory listing.  Sweet yea?

Who would have ever thought that after a few attempts at making your own home/office brew that we could sit down with our team, identify a client that we would LOVE to work with and then WIN them? Brooklyn Brewery, with its headquarters in Williamsburg Brooklyn, has just signed Blenderbox to be their 2010 Digital Agency of Record. Brooklyn Brewery was started in 1987 By Steve Hindy and distributes a number of their signature brews in 14 countries and growing. Blenderbox welcomes the opportunity to work with such a well known and respected brand. With it’s identity instilled by Milton Glaser, best know for his I Love New York campaign, Brooklyn Brewery will be a great brand to add to the Blenderbox client Roster. We look forward to some inspiring brainstorming sessions catalyzed by a Brooklyn Lager or Cookie Jar Porter!

Check it out here
Created by Petr Stanicek in the Czech Republic. Thanks Petr!

This awards cycle received
 nearly 
3,000 
entries 
from 
ad 
and interactive
 agencies,
 in‐house
 creative
 professionals, web and graphic 
designers, and other
 web
 enthusiasts, and less
 than
 10%
 of
 all
 entries
 were
 selected
 as
 Gold
 Winners.  We are truly honored to be counted among these highly talented agencies.

“We were incredibly impressed by the quality and creativity of this year’s entries.    W3 winners continue to set the bar in Web development and design, push the limits of web advertising creativity and advance the use of web video. We are thrilled to have reviewed such a diverse and respected pool of work” said Linda Day, the executive director of the IAVA. “On behalf of the entire Academy, we congratulate this year’s W3 Award winners as they continue to advance Internet creativity and greatly contribute to the robust and ever-changing online community.”

I aggregated these articles into a bash script to automate installing MySQL, Ruby, Rails, RubyGems and Git.

Prerequisites
As Dan mentions, the prerequisites for this script are:

1. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
2. The latest Xcode Tools (from the Snow Leopard DVD or downloaded from Apple — the 10.5 version won’t work)
3. Confidence running UNIX commands using the Terminal

Caveats

• This has only been tested on a completely fresh install of Snow Leopard, not recommended for upgrades
• This will overwrite your existing ~/.profile

Instructions

1. Download and extract the following gist: http://gist.github.com/178699
2. $ sudo sh
bootstrap_snowleopard.sh

When finished you will have 64-bit versions of MySQL, Ruby, Rails, RubyGems, and Git.

BONUS! Get the installers for Firefox, Adium and Textmate http://gist.github.com/178773

class ActiveSupport::TestCase

  def self.should_be_valid_with_factory
    klass = self.name.gsub(/Test$/, '').underscore.to_sym
    should "be valid with factory" do
      assert_valid Factory.build(klass)
    end
  end

end

Put this in your ActiveSupport::TestCase definition and it will be available in all your tests. Simply call it by name with no params:

class BuildingTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  should_be_valid_with_factory
end

Naming for this method was inspired by a similar method in Dan Croak's Blitz plugin.

If we take a look at dating over the last 10 years, people use to give out their home phone number.  Then people started giving out their e-mail address instead, which led to cell phones and text messages.  Today people just ask “Are you on Facebook, hi5, or Linked In?” or another social media network.

Qualman goes on to say, “[Today] the first date is more like a fourth date, you aren’t asking questions like, ‘Where did you go to college?’ or ‘What are your hobbies?’” Common friends, photos along with what you do, and who you work for all provide insight into their personality.  “It makes you feel more secure knowing that the other person isn’t a lunatic.”  He later states that:

1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S last year met via social media

Some say that social media is a fad, others say that is revolutionizing society.  Check out this video, Social Media Revolution, to find more facts from Qualman to form your own opinion. Whatever social media is, it is definitely interesting to say the least…

Everyone has different habits for keeping track of their time—some people jot down their time on a notebook and enter it all in at the end of the day or end of the week. Others use virtual post-its on their desktop, and others use their outlook calendar. Most people, do not enter time as they go, and as a result most people are always behind and trying to catch up on their time entry. This makes accurately reporting on budget vs. actual for various projects very difficult.

A few years ago I heard of an agency that made people sing “I’m a little teapot” whenever someone showed up late for a meeting. In that vein, I decided it was time to implement an incentive, something from the negative reinforcement camp (I don’t think a reward for most up-to-date time would work).

Introducing the Public Shame 2000. We purchased this device from Karaoke.com a few weeks ago, and the mere threat of having to perform karaoke (sober) in front of the entire office during our Tuesday morning staff meetings has been enough to nip this problem in the bud once and for all. I’m pleased to report that everyone’s time has been consistently up-to-date since the day we introduced this machine.

We have yet to turn on this machine, however, I’m sure that day will come at the next after hours office party.

The NYTimes is trying its best to codify what young twenty-somethings have been doing for decades into a new hipster “lifestyle”, one that’s so integral to Williamsburg’s very infrastructure that you’d think we were literally watching business dry up as a result of mom and dad tightening their wallets. Gawker stalks the hipster grifter not because it’s a particularly interesting story, but because she represents that girl we’ve all met at one point or another in our lives (and no matter how they try to convince you that this girl could only exist in Williamsburg, believe me, she exists in every city on this earth). I’ve lived here for over 4 years, and sure I’ve seen a lot of hipsters hanging out at coffee shops in the middle of the day, and I’ve wondered to myself “What do these people <i>do?!</i>” I’m sure people asked the same question about me while I made my way through grad school, enjoying leisurely weekday brunches with my Powerbook. (I guess a student loan is sort of like a trust fund, except with actual responsibility.)

But you know what else I’ve seen? Successful people moving in from the city, college grads just starting out their careers and working their butts off, people like my sister, my friends, and me, who have been working for years and are finally starting to see the payoff, and lots and lots of local businesses. In a 4-block radius of my house there are three small studios, two groceries, a wine store, and a new Brazilian restaurant, all opened within the last two years. I find it really hard to believe that this was all funded by mom and dad. And as someone who lives behind that row of condos on McCarren Park, I can tell you that they are at about 30% capacity – so don’t tell me that was funded by their parents’ either. You see the truth is, there are actually a lot of really hardworking people who live here, and increasingly, hardworking people who work here too. This myth of a neighborhood inhabited by spoiled, grungy trustafarians may be fun to talk about, but it just doesn’t do the neighborhood justice.

When I first heard of Blenderbox, it was because they had just won a web award for their agency site. An interactive agency in the Burg! It made so much sense. While some of my friends and classmates were still laboring under the delusion that Williamsburg was a place where only the uber-cool, fashion-conscious, trendy hipster could hang out, I was starting to see the truth. This neighborhood is full of interesting people who are actually doing and making really cool things. They’re artists and techies and designers and entrepreneurs. They work hard, they make a living, they start their own businesses. Blenderbox was just one example of what I was seeing all over the neighborhood. I bookmarked the site and saved it for later. That was two years ago.