tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79036322012-10-18T10:43:44.706-04:00Divorced Java after 12 years of misery. Eloped with Ruby and never been happier.Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.comBlogger127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-49346773869272603922009-11-26T18:35:00.004-05:002009-11-26T19:05:05.065-05:002009-11-26T19:05:05.065-05:00

Like many of the books I've read, Managing Humans is essentially a printed-out blog, and you can tell that pretty quickly by the terse, disjointed, and stream-of-consciousness hops from one chapter to the next. The first few chapters were rough enough to give me the impression (a) it was going to be painful to finish the book, and (b) I couldn't wait to rip it a new one when I reviewed it.

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-72542286292841519472009-11-11T09:12:00.004-05:002009-11-11T09:19:19.677-05:002009-11-11T09:19:19.677-05:00

I've never read a motivational self-help book, but I imagine this is what they are like. Gary compresses a lot of good content into a very small book, but there's a plethora of cheerleading. His core message can be boiled down to work really hard (crush it) and be honest with yourself and others (your DNA). The chapters are peppered with humorous and inspiring anecdotes from Gary's childhood,

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-90175147898678141602009-09-20T14:07:00.006-04:002009-09-20T14:25:35.137-04:002009-09-20T14:25:35.137-04:00

I downloaded Free on my Kindle because, well, it was free. I hadn't heard of the author before, nor any of his prior books, but I saw a promotional message somewhere - I don't even recall where - noting that Amazon was letting you download the book for free, so I did. And, I read it. And, it's good. What's it all about? Well as the title might have hinted, it's about giving things away for

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-1511502006984547322009-08-25T08:33:00.002-04:002009-08-25T08:42:11.771-04:002009-08-25T08:42:11.771-04:00

If you've read the book Predictably Irrational about the irrational decisions we humans make when it comes to buying stuff, CA$HVERTISING will show you how to exploit those quirks to maximize your profit. I hate to make a cliche analogy (which I think I've used in a prior review) but it's really like The Art of War for advertising; it's a hundred or more little bite-sized chunks of tips and

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-30161667042590947182009-07-28T10:22:00.001-04:002009-07-28T10:23:16.925-04:002009-07-28T10:23:16.925-04:00

Warning, this is not a tech article. Today I'm going to rant about [stupid] business owners.The backstory: A couple years ago, there was a quaint little mom-and-pop coffee shop near my office where I liked to spend my lunch breaks. I'd bring my bagged lunch, order a large coffee, enjoy the half-hour escape from my work day, and be on my way. It was such a pleasant experience that one day I

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-6502005560595210532009-07-26T19:57:00.001-04:002009-07-26T19:57:40.765-04:002009-07-26T19:57:40.765-04:00

Who Moved My Cheese? is a very short book. The publisher went through great lengths to make it feel like a book, with nice thick hard covers and large type, but I think most readers would consider it merely a lengthy essay. It took me about an hour to read from cover to cover.Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable about dealing with change told through four caricatures that live in a maze, subsist

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-55858789919839762062009-05-14T08:25:00.003-04:002009-05-14T08:32:29.787-04:002009-05-14T08:32:29.787-04:00

I had this book on my reading list because I'd heard DHH praise it a couple years back. Although I'm just a lowly software developer, I've always had a fascination with user interaction and interface design. I devoured the books by Norman, Tognazzini, Nielsen, Raskin, etc. I was hoping to glean similar insight from this tome. The BadUnfortunately, it's not an easy book to read. There's

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-32425563844060430832009-05-10T18:52:00.005-04:002009-05-11T07:31:39.183-04:002009-05-11T07:31:39.183-04:00

For some odd reason, it didn't dawn on my until now to pimp my podcast on my blog. It's called The Anachromystic Podcast and we've already got four episodes out. It's just me and my old friend Craig Walker talking about software development philosophies, techniques, technologies, and news. It's sorta half-way between Drunk & Retired (but not as salty) and StackOverflow (but not as much self

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-7195645943268699472009-05-06T10:03:00.004-04:002009-05-06T12:48:09.911-04:002009-05-06T12:48:09.911-04:00

As a follow-up to my post a couple weeks back on putting a progress meter in your long-running migrations, I've whipped up a more helpful and re-usable tool.I've called it simply "Progress" and here it is in its entirety:class Progress require 'action_view/helpers/date_helper' include ActionView::Helpers::DateHelper def initialize(total, interval = 10) @total = total @interval =

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-50023218055514186042009-05-01T11:29:00.002-04:002009-05-01T14:54:35.713-04:002009-05-01T14:54:35.713-04:00

A few weeks back I posted about recording Skype calls on OS X using only freely available tools, and it worked out pretty well, but it had one annoying flaw: I could hear my own voice coming through the headphones, which often tripped-up my speech pattern. So I did some more Googling and I managed to cobble together enough scraps of information to workout a slightly improved version of my

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-42447591656264168162009-04-23T09:16:00.002-04:002009-04-23T13:46:45.002-04:002009-04-23T13:46:45.002-04:00

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!I've done my fair share of hiring and firing as a Chief This and Vice President of That over the last fifteen years. Since I've taken the dive into independent consulting recently - putting me on the other side of the interview desk - I've discovered that there's a lot of hiring managers out there that just don't seem to understand the simple math of contracting. In

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-2225776578516061152009-04-20T19:50:00.002-04:002009-04-20T19:52:59.647-04:002009-04-20T19:52:59.647-04:00

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!I'm working on a Rails project now that requires lots of database massaging and repair. This repair work needs to be tried and tested on a development workstation, reviewed on a staging server, then applied to the production system. Since the work needs to be repeatedly applied to several environments, I'm logically using migrations. One nuisance I got sick of real

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-34362570289992680412009-04-11T20:10:00.003-04:002009-05-01T14:55:56.978-04:002009-05-01T14:55:56.978-04:00

UPDATE: I've posted a follow-up with a slightly better configuration.Over the last decade, I've had many entertaining and enlightening "debates" with an old colleague of mine, so I asked if he'd be willing to record a few over Skype and see if they might be worthy of releasing as podcasts. Since it was my bright idea, he left it to me to figure out how to pull it off. I figured it couldn't be

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-47588663970146724912009-04-10T08:25:00.002-04:002009-04-10T08:42:02.324-04:002009-04-10T08:42:02.324-04:00

I think I can pretty much sum up the entire book in one sentence: Be a networking whore, but be sincere, and pay it forward. Those are the three main points author Keith Ferrazzi drills into your skull, but he uses a few more words, and couple hundred more pages. Everybody in your life is an important networking contact, from your garbage man to your employer's president. Never be a phony;

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-52985646999740777372009-04-03T09:55:00.004-04:002009-04-03T10:45:36.298-04:002009-04-03T10:45:36.298-04:00

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!One of my clients uses the hosted version of CompanyX (not their real name) to serve ads on their site. A couple weeks back, CompanyX applied some "upgrades" and things didn't go as planned, so for nearly a week their service was up and down like a yo-yo. That resulted in me getting calls along the lines of, "Hey our site is loading slow because of the CompanyX ads,

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-83779750025177785232009-03-26T21:41:00.002-04:002009-03-26T21:44:45.241-04:002009-03-26T21:44:45.241-04:00

Several weeks back I was down at Barcamp Miami and I wanted to send a quick tweet from my iPhone. I have several Twitter clients on my phone - there's a bazillion of them out there - but most of them are very slow to start as they have to load all their fancy views and suck down all your friends tweets and blah blah blah. I wanted a small simple fast app that just let me post a quick tweet and

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-972390399680049902009-02-14T13:52:00.002-05:002009-02-14T13:56:52.367-05:002009-02-14T13:56:52.367-05:00

One morning last week a curious idea popped into my head:... and that afternoon I had accomplished this:The premise is simple:1. I set up a private Twitter for just my laptop status, and subscribe to it from my personal Twitter account.2. I set up a cron job on my laptop to run ever hour, tweeting the geographical location of my laptop to the private account.The theory is that if my laptop were

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-38997062757810870402009-02-09T19:42:00.002-05:002009-02-09T19:47:58.902-05:002009-02-09T19:47:58.902-05:00

The beauty of RSS is that I can aggregate all of my information sources, read them at my leisure without worry of expiration, and organize them however I desire. It's always bugged me that I couldn't have that luxury with Twitter. Sure Twitter has RSS feeds, but they don't include the avatars, and they don't include direct messages, and they commonly truncate the tweets (blech). There are some

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-44415831056428862372009-01-25T11:47:00.008-05:002009-01-27T17:20:01.500-05:002009-01-27T17:20:01.500-05:00

My first book of 2009 was a crusty old out-of-print classic I'd given up on finding a copy of years ago, but I found it under the X-mas tree last month courtesy of my awesome girlfriend. The book was, of course, Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I'm a sucker for software development stories, no matter how

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-29605223653609520892009-01-14T13:18:00.006-05:002009-01-14T13:29:33.018-05:002009-01-14T13:29:33.018-05:00

With my recent pet project I used AJAX to provide a majority of the site functionality on the main page with it never having to reload itself or load another page. This resulted in a drastic drop of "page" views in my Google Analytics reports, because the only "page" being loaded on each visit was the sole main page; every click after that was an AJAX call to update only a portion of the already

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-40556049200655650872009-01-10T21:27:00.007-05:002009-01-11T13:42:14.753-05:002009-01-11T13:42:14.753-05:00

Since I "became independent" exactly two months ago to the day, I've launched two pet project web sites: Pocket Rails and Rate Marina's Outfits. I tracked my time on each, just like I would for a billable client, and oddly enough they each took about twenty hours from inception to launch. Turns out it's pretty damn easy, and cheap too. Here's how I did it.Get organized I'm a "to do" list guy.

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-35391515497881227382009-01-09T08:50:00.006-05:002009-01-09T09:22:20.152-05:002009-01-09T09:22:20.152-05:00

Yesterday I soft-launched my latest pet project, which I wrote on New Year's Eve of all nights, with graphic design graciously contributed by Allan Branch of Less Everything.What is it? Well, for those of you too lazy to click the link, it's essentially a mash-up of YouTube and the Ajaxful Rating plug-in for Ruby on Rails that lets you rate the outfits worn by Marina Orlova on her popular

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-3475666605811246542008-12-18T21:37:00.002-05:002008-12-18T22:00:22.344-05:002008-12-18T22:00:22.344-05:00

The premise of this book is the cut-throat no-mercy end-justifies-the-means killer instinct that got you where you are today (upper management) is paradoxically going to prevent you from climbing that final rung of the ladder to becoming a successful top dog CEO. The author preaches - with anecdotal parables cherry picked from his vast clientele - once you reach the pinnacle of your career you

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-88476016756025404692008-12-13T22:04:00.003-05:002008-12-13T22:40:27.289-05:002008-12-13T22:40:27.289-05:00

I added this book to my reading list a long time back but kept bumping it down in priority because I expected it to read like one of those get rich quick infomercials you see in the wee hours of the morning when most sane people are sleeping. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I was dead wrong, and the timeliness was uncanny as I was "downsized" from my employer of nine years shortly after I

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903632.post-62925946069676591102008-12-06T19:08:00.005-05:002008-12-07T15:53:13.129-05:002008-12-07T15:53:13.129-05:00

I just made public my GitHub repository for a pet-peeve project: an RDoc template that looks good on the iPhone browser.I used this template to generate the Rails documentation and you can check it out at http://pocketrails.com (visit it from your iPhone).

Teflon Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14076074529160569225noreply@blogger.com0