Prelude I went on a nice bike ride today to offset some of the gluttony brought on by Thanksgiving . Before I went, I did some basic maintenance: I trued the wheels, lubed the chain, and checked to see if the headset (which I installed myself, using nonstandard methods) is still intact. Truing wheels is often viewed with t...

This Thanksgiving, I'm reminded of the following passage: Habakkuk 3:17-18 Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in...

Portal is one of the most ingenious and innovative games I've played. If you have the slightest inclination to play it, I'd suggest you go do so instead of watching this video. If you're unlikely to play through it, then you really ought to watch the credits. They're sung by the demented computer that pesters you the whole...

In an interview about mounting legal pressure against The Pirate Bay , admin Peter Sunde says: "We're not even worried, since the Internet is too big for morally upset people to get it their way." It always amuses me when people confuse legal and moral issues. They're not at all interdependent. As with the intersection of...

Jessica and I got to see our baby's heartbeat for the first time today! That was one of the single most awesome things I've experienced; I can't wait to meet the kid. It was also really reassuring to us. We're only a few days past the point at which we lost our last baby, and our nerves are often strained with the fearful...

Suppose you're working on a Rails project with the following setup: class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :bar end class Bar < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :foo end Normally, if you wanted to load up a bunch of Foos and display their associated Bars, you'd do something like this: foos = Foo.find(:all, :include =&g...

I won't pretend I know much about SEO . I've read the original PageRank paper , and several others offering criticism or improvements. I've even implemented a rudimentary Ruby library to calculate such rankings , but PageRank (as far as the mathematics go) only describes a system for ranking based on the voting relationshi...