Today’s job posting goes somewhat similar to all the previous ones:

Position Title: Ruby On Rails Web Developer Position Type: Permanent Location: Orange County, CA Salary: $70-90k

Work closely with Director of Web, Creative, and Technology teams to create original web pages/web sites utilizing standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. Architect and build dynamic web applications, utilizing Ruby on Rails framework and MySQL databases. Design prototypes, wireframes, and build proof-of-concepts.

QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED:

• Knowledge of development techniques in a Unix environment
• Ability to write clean, well-structured markup code in a text editor
• Familiar with Apache, SSH, SVN and CVS
• Solid understanding and expertise with XHTML, CSS, cross-browser/ platform issues and associated modern browser compatibility issues
• Experience with Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Apache, JavaScript, XML, and AJAX
• Ability to code functional pages from mockups in collaboration with web designers
• Experience building and implementing content management systems
• Ability to work in fast-paced environment and flexibility to accommodate demanding schedules
• Educated in development methodologies and best practices
• Ability to analyze complex problems methodically
• Solid knowledge of technical requirements definition and design process
• Knowledgeable in development tradeoffs between speed, design, flexibility and the underlying page architecture
• Passion for end-user focused software applications design with a high awareness of current industry design and usability trends
• Must be aware of online accessibility issues and have experience working to W3C accessibility guidelines
• Strong proponent of web standards and usability

PLUS FACTORS:

• Previous experience working for an interactive agency, design studio or advertising agency
• Experience with TextMate, Transmit, Flash and Action Script
• Passion for Web 2.0
• Familiarity with e-commerce sites
• Experience integrating Endeca and CoreMetrics
• Knowledgeable in server architecture and design; able to perform Sys Admin duties

If interested, please submit your resume online at http://webdeveloper.techjobslosangeles.com/-web-developer-272

Regards,

Kevin E. Jenkins k.jenkins at tech-source dot com

Tech-Source, Inc.

Advancing Careers. Empowering Companies.

www: http://www.techjobslosangeles.com LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinjenkins

The title for it was “World Famous Cutting Edge Company”, and it’s another advertisement where they just so happen to forget to name this “World Famous Cutting Edge Company”!

Let’s move right on to the person who, if we got this job, we would be reporting to: “Director of Web, Creative, and Technology”. What’s that saying? The longer the title the smaller the intelligence? Something like that. I’ve never met the guy (or girl), so I can’t pass judgement. It’s just a long title; “Lead Developer” is fine, really.

It moves on to say that you should be able to build “prototypes” and “wireframes”, which could mean anything, for example: elaborate real-life models of how all your tables interconnect, kind of like people doing degrees in Science have the models of molecules and so on.

The first two points in the qualifications are fine, “knowledge of unix development” (pay attention to this first one) and “ability to write clean code”, but the third gets a little funky:

Familiar with Apache, SSH, SVN and CVS

Why the need to have familiarity with SVN and CVS? Surely all the projects would be kept on one (SVN, I hope) rather than the other.

It continues on listing the obviously needed skills, such as experience in Ruby on Rails (why would you advertise on rubyonrails-talk if you were looking for a Cobol developer?) It uses a whole string of long words in order to make the qualifications more than what they seem, but in reality all you’ll need is some decent understanding of Ruby on Rails, MySQL and Apache, and lets not forget the obvious Three Big Ones, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

It mentions in there also about being aware of accessibility issues, which is fine if you’re going to have people with a disability accessing your site, which I’m assuming they’re going to do. Just, don’t go over the top with this. I once saw a site which had a small video of a woman translating the page’s text into sign language.

Now remember before how I said to pay attention to the fact that they said “knowledge of unix development”? Well in this next set of text “Plus Factors”, it says “experience with TextMate, Transmit” both of which are Mac programs. Mac is part-Unix as well, but that wasn’t stated in the initial briefing that development would be being done on Macs, and I feel that would’ve been handy to point out from the offset, not that developing on Macs is at all a bad idea. TextMate apparently kicks the ass of anything else out there, I’m yet to try it.

It still bugs me that they didn’t name the company, although I can guess out of the very limited number of “World Famous Cutting Edge” companies around, that it might be…

On the 5th of January this year, Daniel Thorpe hit my car with his car. He backed into it from about 15m away, whilst backing out of a driveway. He didn’t bother turning the wheel because that’s just retarded. I covered what happened in my “Weekend From Hell” post, a couple of days after the event.

Eventually, around Feburary, I started talking to the insurance company. This was in part due to Daniel and my identically superior abilities at procrastinating.

On the 26th of March, I finally managed to get it to a crash repairer after waiting for about 3 weeks after initial contact with the crash repairer, due to them being “busy”.

I rock up with my car at 10am and they’re all sitting outside having a smoko. I leave them my car, and they say it will take them 2 days, and off I walked all the way back home (catching a train in between Salisbury and Elizabeth).

Today I phone them up asking when my car will be ready, to which they reply any time between 4:30 and 5pm. I accept this, and find out what train I can catch to get there around 5ish, giving them a little bit of lee-way so I’m not waiting around too long.

I shouldn’t have expected it to be done when I got there.

It was almost deja vu, the whole crew sitting outside on yet another smoko. I was there at 5pm. I walk inside expecting to see a receptionist, only to buzz and have her come in from the door where next to they were having their smoko. “Oh, you’re here for the VL? Won’t be too much longer.

So I wait.

And wait.

And wait.

At 6pm I am starting to get moderately pissed off. It shouldn’t take two days to fit a new door, which they didn’t do.

At 6:15pm I am getting more and more pissed off. Tapping my feet, rubbing my face… ugh.

At 6:30pm I make it my mission to walk out at 6:45 without telling them, leaving to get dinner and hopefully returning when it’s done.

At 6:40pm My car is finally ready. I get in it and try out things. The first thing I tried was the door handle, which was still the original door handle. They had only replaced the outer shell of the door, not the entire door like I thought they would. The handle is probably still going to be dicky, and if it fucks up I’m going to raise Hell.

Then I wound down the window, which worked. Then I got in and tried adjusting the mirror only to find the control on the inside was still unresponsive as before hand. This was another thing that wasn’t fixed.

This is sub-par service from an “approved repairer”. No customer should have to wait an hour and forty minutes without any kind of compensation, offer of food/drink or mention of how long it’s going to take. I would ask the RAA to take away their status as an approved repairer, but I’m thinking it’s more of the insurance company’s fault for not doing a proper inspection of the car, like they should have. I’m pretty sure I mentioned to them about the handle and the mirror, but nothing was done.

Now I’m going to have to wait until Monday before I hear anything more about my mirror and handle. I don’t want to pay anything, I shouldn’t have to pay anything. They should’ve done the job properly the first time.

Never trust crash repairers. Always get THEM to call YOU when it’s done, don’t ask them when it’ll be ready because whatever they say will be false.

I’ll be back later, building my mini-nuke “in case of emergency”

Not so long ago I wrote a post about receiving a call from a telemarketer after bragging about never being called by one the day before.

Today I received my second call from a telemarketer, this time from a different mob. This time my number had been “randomly selected” and I was entitled to a whole heap of gift cards from various retailers. After listening to his spiel (whilst typing “LOL TELEMARKETER” in chat) I asked him where he got the number from. He gave back a vague reply of “our database”, and I informed him that my number is a top-secret government number and any company calling it can face a fine of up to $250,000. I asked if he knew about that law and he replied he didn’t. I kindly asked him not to call the number again else his company will be fined, and to take the number off his database.

“Right away, sir! God bless. Bye!” he said hurriedly.

From Friday morning up until midnight this morning (or last night, depending on how you view it), I was attending InLAN‘s Great Friday LAN event. Before the event started however, I had Devastator and Freddy who wanted to attend the church service held in the same building beforehand. So that’s what we did.

I’m not a fan of church. Never was, never will be. I used to go to an Anglican school (Trinity College) and I found the assemblies a waste of time, and that just re-enforced my view of church being a waste of time. Time spent doing other things, like singing, instead of improving my knowledge. Notices could’ve been distributed by email as every student on the campus had access to email. Trinity Sunday was a 3 hour “celebration” of the school, basically a large yawn-fest. Worst of all, it was held on a Sunday.

But! I went to this service, and I found it not as drawn out as my other past church experiences, apart from Ray Frost who had only one tone of voice to speak in. The songs were variable, but could’ve done with more variety other than Jesus this, Jesus that, but I guess that’s what church is about. I even got a “Care Card”, which lists such options like “I want to commit my life to Christ”, “I would like a name badge” and”I would like someone from the prayer ministry to come and pray with me”, all of which I rolled my eyes at. Didn’t they think of all the trees that died just so they could print out these cards?! God.

I don’t believe in the whole God thing either. My opinion on the subject is that somebody wrote a semi-fictional account of events back in those days, and the book, or collection of books, has spread to so many people that they actually believe in what was written. Songs have been written about characters from this book, mostly about Jesus and God. I view the bible as an excellent work of fiction, much like Lord of the Rings. Now imagine if somebody wrote a book on a gamer. The gamer who was born into poverty (north or south suburbs of Adelaide), and rose throughout the ranks to become one of the greatest gamers. Along the way, he could not only own the noobs, but also teach them how to play better. The fiction? Simply by his touch could he improve the skill of any other player for any game by a significant amount. The Church of Gaming has a nice ring to it.

I guess we already have a very similar format to churches. We all meet in one place, we share a common interest, we give thanks to the gaming gods (Devastator, Insane Gazebo, me Fatal1ty, etc.). We sometimes exclaim in joy or frustration, “hax!”, much like the Christian term “Jesus Christ!”. But one of the key differences I see is that we don’t have a gaming book to read from, like the Bible of Gaming. Instead, we rely on knowledge and products of and recommended by other people. It’s a great way to share information and socialise at the same time.

InLAN was great fun (apart from getting a talking-to by TheScream about selling Jolt, which I broke even over), and I had a lot of fun there, I even got plenty of sleep.

The first comp I participated in was Quake 3 Corkscrew in which Insane Gazebo utterly dominated. Some of the kills he was getting were extremely awesome, and by the end of the 30 minute round he was >100 points above second place, me. I asked him after what his accuracy was, and it showed to be 61%. He’s a bloody legend.

I participated in the TF2 6v6 competition with Devastator, Cadiniller, Spike, Insane Gazebo (Zebo), TheScream and we easily won on 2Fort. My favourite part of this competition was in the second game, two minutes after Zebo and Devastator had taken out their only sentry we were on 1 point and we needed 3 for an assured win. We were planning on attacking and I switched to scout. I got into their base with no resistance whatsoever, managed to get down to the intel room and back up the straight stairs without seeing a thing, and then jumped into their courtyard to be confronted by a Heavy and Soldier. Heavy started spinning his minigun and the soldier shot a few rockets at me (all missed) and I walked out of there with most of my health still. The speed of which Cadiniller and TheScream were able to get their sentries up was amazing, and their placement of them. Nobody got close. Zebo was an amazing soldier and Devastator should earn a purple heard for his medic work. Let’s not forget Spike who ensured anyone walking in through the front door would have 8 sticky mines to contend with. For that comp we all won a 2GB flash drive, which Devastator and I gave away (I have no need for one) to a daughter and father combo who attend the LAN regularly but never win anything.

I also participated in Call of Duty 4 FFA, which I won. I didn’t have a strategy and Woodstar and I convinced aX to run the comp on Shipment because we didn’t have that many players. I switched to my 5th custom class which just so happened to have Martydom (drops a grenade when you die), which got me most of my kills. Favourite part of this was Sgt. Moo running at me, did almost a complete circle and then stabbed me for the kill. He was so quick. Also Woodstar’s and Morita’s identical abilities of just so happen to be standing on top of my dropped grenade when it exploded. Thanks guys. For this I won a Logitech G7 which roxxors my soxxors.

Thanks to the InLAN guys for holding an awesome lan party and to all the other people who attended for making it fun.

Since I switched to Ubuntu for my development work on my main PC, and I’m loving it. Here’s a few things that make Ubuntu cooler than Windows XP:

• Tabbed Consoles. I can press Alt+and I get a new tab, instantly, in my console window open to the current directory I was working in. If I need a new console I can setup a new shorcut in System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts to create one when I press Ctrl+ (you people who type on the home row might wonder why I did this… I don’t type on the homerow. Fingers go wherever they please)
• The inability to click that naughty TF2 icon. Earns me more money every time I don’t think about playing it. To get to TF2 I have to reboot, maintain attention through the reboot to remember to press Escape and then select Windows XP, wait for XP to boot, and then wait for the game to boot. I get… emotional when I play TF2, so it’s probably also better for my blood pressure.
• irssi. My god! For a console chat client this kicks ass. I’ve set it up to automatically connect to three servers, (EnterTheGame, EyeRC and Freenode), authenticate me and join all the channels as soon as I start it up. No registration window, no welcome screen, it just does it.
• I can install anything and there’s multiple ways to do it. Firstly, I can do apt-get install <anything> and it’ll install it. It even takes multiple parameters, so I can install as many things as I want, at the same time. It doesn’t even care about what programs I have running, it just does it. The other way to go about it is to go into System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager, and select your packages in there. It even comes with a search feature.
• I don’t have to compile everything I want to install, unlike certain other linux operating system.  Everything installs as fast as I can download it, plus a few seconds on top of that, at the most.
• Automatic updates. It gives you a non-obtrusive indication that there’s updates available, whenever you need them. Oh, and it’s not just for the operating system, unlike other operating systems. It’ll update all your programs that you installed using apt-get or the Synaptic Package Manager.
• Want office? That’s automatically installed. Want tetris? That’s installed. Want Firefox? That’s installed. Want a photo manipulation program? That’s installed. Want something to draw pretty pictures in (Gimp)? That’s installed. I can go on.
• The places menu. Why, oh why, does Windows not have this? This is awesome.
• Compiz (which currently doesn’t work for me, but used to). Makes everything pretty. You can spend minutes, if not hours, toying around with Ctrl+Alt+Left Arrow or Right Arrow and all the funky settings for making your windows fade in/out, exploding or whatever. Again, kicks ass.
• Shit actually installs. I can install stuff because I’ve installed the build-essential package (quite sizable, but worth it), by using the compiler. Does Windows come with a compiler? No? Well that’s too bad. Switch to a decent operating system.
• Memory usage. Currently I have, Pidgin, two consoles, Netbeans, gFTP, Firefox, XMMS, an IM window from Pidgin and System Monitor. I am only using 456mb. Doing the same thing in Windows would probably push it up to something more like 700-800mb.

The only thing I can’t do (yet, and because I haven’t set anything up to do it) is play games. But this is my development operating system, if I want to play games I’ll use Windows. I could go on, but there is so many awesome things about Ubuntu. Try it for yourself, do yourself a favour. http://ubuntu.org. You’ll thank me later.

A while after completing work at SeaLink, Tom asked me about my forum hobby project and why it wasn’t working. This led to me working on it for a few days and getting it all up to scratch again, and this involved moving it over to Rails 2.0 (that’s how long I hadn’t worked on it for), and using the awesomeness that is namespacing.

Namespacing is where you have some controllers in a separate area of your site. In my example, I have an admin folder in app/controllers which contains all the controllers for the administration section of my site, and all the relevant actions. Just inside the app/controllers directory, I have the other controllers which do all the basic stuff such as showing forums, basically anything a standard user can do.

It seems to be a fairly common question asked in places, so I figured if I sat down and wrote this, I would have something to send to people, much like my Restful Routes tutorial, which ideally should’ve covered namespacing too.

First of all we’re going to create our namespace. To do that, we open up config/routes.rb and specify our namespace:

map.namespace(:admin) do |admin|
admin.resources :forums, :topics, :posts
end

Now what this does is defines some routes for us. If you’ve seen map.resources you’ll know that this defines routes for us, for example doing map.resources :forums will define methods such as forumspath which is the same as { :controller => “forums”, :action => “index” } and forumpath(@forum) which is the same as { :controller => “forums”, :action => “show”, :id => @forum.id }. These methods really are lifesavers and save you a hell of a lot of typing. The routes defined by this namespace method however are prefixed with whatever argument you pass it, in this case we’ve passed it :admin so it’s going to give us routes like adminforumspath, which is the same as { :controller = > “admin/forums”, :action => “index” }, and as you can see again saves us a lot of typing.

Now that we have our namespace, we can create our subfolders. These subfolders are placed in app/controllers and app/views and are given the same name as the namespace, admin. So go ahead and do that now. In app/controllers/admin is where we place our controllers. As an example, here’s what my forums controller’s edit and update actions look like:

class Admin::ForumsController < Admin::ApplicationController
  beforefilter :storelocation, :only => [:index, :show]
  def edit
    @forum = Forum.find(params[:id]) 
    @forums = Forum.find(:all, :order => "title") - [@forum] - @forum.descendants
  end


def update 
    @forum = Forum.find(params[:id])
    if @forum.updateattributes(params[:forum])
      flash[:notice] = "Forum has been updated."
      redirect
    else
      flash[:notice] = "Forum has not been updated."
      render :action => "edit"
    end
  end
end

What I really want to show you in here is only the first line the class is defined as Admin::ForumsController, which shows that we’re namespacing it. We don’t have to define the Admin prefix anywhere. What we do have to define however is our non-existant Admin::ApplicationController. In my code, I’ve defined my own Admin::ApplicationController as a means of calling methods that should be called before all admin actions, such as my nonadminredirect method, which is defined in lib/authenticatedsystem.rb and goes something like this:

  def nonadminredirect
    if !isadmin?
      flash[:notice] = "You need to be an admin to do that."
      redirectbackordefault(:controller => "/accounts", :action => "login")
    end
  end

To define your Admin::ApplicationController, make a file in app/controllers/admin called applicationcontroller.rb. Even though the main application controller is defined as application.rb in app/controllers, that file is automatically loaded by Rails. If we named our applicationcontroller to just application.rb, it would not be automatically loaded because Rails only looks for application.rb and files ending in controller.rb in the app/controllers directory, so we name ours applicationcontroller.rb so it plays nice with Rails.

In here we define our class, layout and helper:

class Admin::ApplicationController < ApplicationController
  layout "admin"
  helper "admin"
  beforefilter :nonadminredirect
end

I’ve defined a new layout here because my admin layout is different to my main layout, but still includes some elements from it (thanks to nestedlayouts)

The before_filter is triggered before every action in the admin controller to make sure it’s an admin doing the action rather than a standard user.

And that’s all there is to it, really. It’s all pretty simple. Now all you’ve gotta do is generate your views. Remember to place them in app/views/admin/thecontroller’sname, otherwise you’ll run into problems.

It seems I forgot to mention how it’s supposed to work when you’re calling the method to go to the namespaced path, well that’s simple. If you have a forum you would like to edit, the correct method is editadminforumpath(forumobject), because you want to edit, in the namespace of admin, a certain forum. For paths not requiring a prefix, such as the show and index actions, they are adminforumpath(forumobject) and adminforums_path respectively.

For an action such as an update action, it would be adminforumpath(forumobject) with a :method => :put option specified in whatever you’re using. Usually you won’t have to do this, because the formfor helper would do it for you, but in some cases you might have to.

I was joking on Eyerc yesterday that we haven’t yet had a power outage, and at dad’s house last night just after he finished cooking dinner, the power went out. gg etsa.

I went over Dad’s for dinner last night and he was telling me he was sick of getting calls from telemarketers. We joked about what we should do when these idiots call up. I bragged about never receiving a single call from a telemarketer since I moved into mum’s house.

That changed this morning.

Apparently I’d won a free trip to Florida! So I pressed “9″ for more information and waited. This is the worst part, where they call you and then put you on hold. It’s a pathetic tactic. I waited some more, and eventually some guy with either a very good or a very bad (depending which way you look at it) american accent came on the line. He greeted me, and I greeted him back with the line: “Never call this number again. Take it off your list. Call it again and I will hunt you down.” I don’t exactly view these people as human, so I hung up.

So what’s your stories for telemarketers? I want comments!

So I installed Ubuntu on my main computer to give me some distraction from that lovely TF2 icon sitting in RocketDock, and so I could use Git (that’s another story altogether). Everything worked beautifully! I installed it two nights ago at 12am, shortly before going to bed and got up halfway through the night to finish the installation process and set a few downloads (build-essential mozilla-thunderbird ruby1.8-dev ruby1.8 irb rake rubygems rails mongrel apache2 mysql-server5.0) going, and then went back to bed. I didn’t mind the fact that both my screens were clones of the same window at this time of the morning.

I got up and tried to do some coding but I needed my dual-screens. So I went on the nvidia site and downloaded the drivers and then I had to kill X to install them. So that’s what happened. Installed the drivers fine, loaded it all up again and it was perfect! nvidia-settings was my next installed item, which gave way to ultimate dual-screening glory and my coding for the rest of the day. It was sunshine, rainbows, lollipops, unicorns, fluffy bunnies and more. It was beautiful. I was at peace.

Until the kernel updates came through.

“Please restart your computer”

And so I did. That’s where the fun started. Upon rebooting my computer all hell broke loose. The rainbows turned to rainclouds, the lollipops to tofu, the unicorns to rottweilers and the fluffy bunnies to those burning head things from Doom. Ubuntu had launched itself into low graphics mode.

But I was young and naive! I thought “surely I can just click this configure button, set it to the proper settings and it will work perfectly”. I was stupid. Upon clicking the OK button, it launched me into a black screen of doom for all eternity. Until I pressed the reset button. I did this a few more times until I figured out the Ubuntu low-graphics dialog is a piece of crap, and should never be trusted.

Launching into the recovery console got me further (as I was actually able to type) so I ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and the driver’s install again and X started perfectly. Everything was reverted back to the sunshine-land state of rainbows, lollipops, unicorns and fluffy bunnies. Running nvidia-settings again worked, and I even restarted X just to make double sure it wouldn’t happen again.

I launched straight back into my coding with gusto, but got sick of listening to the radio, especially those new songs by Rihanna, Souljah Boy, Akon and so on. I wanted my music. I thought, no problem! I’ll just install ntfsprogs and mount my Windows partition.

Apparently my windows partition hadn’t shut down properly (it requires lulling to sleep on a bed of silk sheets with velvet pillows whilst listening to Chopin), so I rebooted and launched into Windows only to shut it down, this time I hoped properly. I went back into Ubuntu and low-graphics mode made it’s stunning return.

More than likely at this point I made some choice remarks about Ubuntu, none of which should ever be repeated since Ubuntu is my bitch now, and the neighbours on all four sides (behind, left, right and across the street) probably made out what I was saying with minimal effort. Again the whole rebooting into recovery console and re-installing the drivers.

That was yesterday. Today I turned on my computer and I knew that low-graphics mode was going to come up, so I went into the recovery console and did my thing, and it all worked perfectly. But it was annoying! I did not want to do this every time I booted my computer! Why should I?

I looked for a solution, and even grumbled about it in #rubyonrails on freenode, until a user by the name of dfr came along and suggested a few things. He told me there’s more than just running the drivers, you can specify options like it not asking you questions at all and automatically accepting the license agreement. So I hacked up a nice file that now lives in /root/fix-stuff, that looks a little like:

!/bin/bash

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1.run –no-x-check –no-recursion -N -b –no-runlevel-check -n -q -a

Which is called from /etc/rc.local (a file that runs on every runlevel) which reinstalls the drivers for me on every boot.

The options are, obvious, obvious (doesn’t check for conflicting files deeper than the surface), no networking, no backup,obvious, no precompiled interface, don’t ask any questions and I agree with the user agreement!

On another topic, I’m sick of the 20 spam posts per day so I finally got around to getting a WordPress API key. If you look at the bottom of the template you should see a counter to exactly how much spam this has killed. So, all you spam-whores: Go away.

So there you go, that’s why I’m now 100% more evil, and 100% happier.

Wow, this is the 9th day in a row above 35 degrees celcius here, apparently a record for the state. No relief until Monday next week at least. Keep those airconditioners going people! Maybe if we turn them up high enough we might just reverse global warming! rolleyes

Last week I got a phone call from my Nanna’s husband, Doug, a 70-something year-old who’s semi-competent with computers. He wanted me to come over and take a look at his computer because his Internet Explorer kept hanging when he went to his church’s website (Church of Latterday Saints). So I went over there.

His place is about 20 minutes away. This day just so happened to be one of the days where my car’s air-conditioning was doing a fantastic job by not turning on at all. I wind my window down as far as it goes. (about 1/3rd, thanks to Mr. Daniel Thorpe) I arrive there and peel myself out of my seat, and step out onto the footpath. It was warm out here, but not as bad as what the car was. I knock on the door and Nanna answers it and lets me in. It’s like the friggin’ Arctic. I couldn’t spot the polar bears or penguins, and I might’ve seen an igloo. (heat exhaustion, anyone?) There’s Doug sitting in his computer chair, and he welcomes me in. He’s not wearing a shirt. Not what you want to see. I helped him through his problem and almost instantly suggested he try Mozilla Firefox and so he did. Importing his bookmarks was a cinch, and that’s all he wanted. They bought me lunch and afterwards we talked for a bit, and I left.

That image will still haunt me. Doug, in shorts, no shirt. shudder

After finishing my contract with SeaLink on the 25th January, I took a two week break from doing anything Ruby on Rails and then jumped straight back into it. I’ve recently tied up my loose end with JustComputing and they’re happy enough that I’m done with their system that they gave me 4 x 500GB harddrives. I’m now doing some contract work for SA Window Cleaning and I’m hoping that I’ll be done in about a month. After that, Dad wants me to do a job for him for his work (photocopier company) and I’ve still got offers from NetFox and CarbonPlanet, as well as Lama Chandrasena.

I appreciate everyone’s interest in wanting me to do work for them, but unfortunately I’m tied down for the next couple of months at least, which is a good thing. I’d love to work for NetFox, as that was the first thing to gain my interest when I went to the first Ruby Users group back in May last year, but I wanted a break from anything networking (after doing a couple of years of it at TAFE), so I went for SeaLink and that was a blast!

NetFox still has me interested and I’ll probably go for that after these couple of other jobs are done.

Thanks again to the people who have asked me if I want to work for them. I hope to talk with you all at the Ruby Users Group meeting next Tuesday!