I was working on a shaker oval box this weekend when the work slipped, and the knife I was using to define the swallowtails turned, cutting a 3/4″ gash on my left index finger.

I’m very fortunate: one of the guys drove me to the ER (thanks Tom), and I’ll be able to finish my boxes another day (thanks John). Surgeon says I only cut the skin and nothing critical, so five stitches later, I was ready to go home.

I’ve got a splint until Tuesday, which has halved my typing speed, but the splint will keep the wound from opening back up (the injury’s pretty close to a joint).

I blame it all on still being exhausted from the move and less aware than I could have been. I thought I was safe, but I was wrong.

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1) Colored packing tape to color-code various rooms. Way easier to see than reading some scribble that may not be legible. Obviously, this may be less useful if you have color blindness.

2) If you have a lot of books, actually buy some boxes of the same size. They will pack much tighter until you unpack them.

3) A suitcase with essentials for a day or two is a wonderful thing. Even though you know where your underwear is, it may not be accessible.

4) Don’t expect to keep track of anything. If it’s important, pack it in a given place and move it first (then don’t put anything in front of that place).

5) Exhaustion is a fact of life, so plan for some post-move downtime. Every one of us has been physically stretched to our endurance limits. I managed to wrench my good hip.

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Not that this will surprise anyone, but moving sucks.

The one good thing about moving is the re-evaluation of what one has vs. what one really wants.

The one bad thing about moving is the time and energy for the re-evaluation of what one has vs. what one really wants.

We should be finished by Monday. I’ll be SO happy when it’s Tuesday.

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Chris Wanstrath offers a pretty complete transcription of a very flawed talk by Alex Chaffee. There were some really interesting talks, but one thing I was hoping for in the domain-specific language talk was, you know, an actual example for creating a DSL.

(edited to add)
I have been meaning to write up notes about the conference (rather than just a few criticisms), but I haven’t gotten to it yet. Tonight’s out, so probably tomorrow.

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If you’re going to have a technical conference that’s one or two full days, I have two key concepts for you:

1) Power available to everyone.
2) A place for everyone to put their laptop that makes notetaking convenient.

There were these devices invented many thousands of years ago, though it seems novel to this group: tables. Sure, you can’t pack as many people into the room, but people will actually learn more if they’re not fussing about looking for power.

While the chairs are wonderfully comfy, I’d rather have tables and power.

Should you be planning an event, the standard parlance is “classroom seating” rather than “theater seating.” This will cut the capacity of the room approximately in half, but everyone will be a lot happier.

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When search engines first came about, I was typically the top ranked Deirdre. However, other Deirdres have become active on the net, so as recently as a few months ago, I was the #4-ranked Deirdre.

I’m currently the #2 rank on Google for Deirdre.

Even though Saoirse is fairly commonly seen without the word Deirdre, nearly all the ranks for both terms together are me (except for some people in Ireland named Deirdre associated with the the newspaper (Saoirse) from Sinn Féin.

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So, it happened that I was doing a rails project where I needed joins in paginate and I wound up discovering something unexpected: foo.id came through as the id for one of the join tables.

The way around that is to find_by_sql instead, and to avoid a similar problem, something like:

def self.find_my_foos(for_which_bar)
  find_by_sql("select foos.* from foos, bars where foos.bar_id =
   bars.id and bars.name = #{for_which_bar} order by foos.position")
end

This does have a side effect of not pre-loading the joins correctly, so that may not be the best solution for your case, but it does fix the larger issue.

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Sometimes, you want ActiveRecord to do all the heavy lifting of data conversion. Plus, then you can use all the stuff you want during the conversion.

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

Copies stuff from old mysql db to new postgres db, including changing of icky

old int fields to shiny booleans.

require ‘rubygems’
require_gem ‘activerecord’

require ‘../app/models/survey.rb’
require ‘../app/models/topic.rb’

Read database config via YAML

@dbs = YAML::load(ERB.new(IO.read(“../config/database.yml”)).result)

connect to old db.

curr_db = @dbs[‘production-mysql’]
ActiveRecord::Base.establishconnection(:adapter => currdb[“adapter”],
:database => curr_db[“database”],
:host => curr_db[“host”],
:username => curr_db[“username”],
:password => curr_db[“password”])

read in all the records

@surveys = Survey.find(:all)

close the db

ActiveRecord::Base.remove_connection

change to postgres db.

curr_db = @dbs[‘production’]
ActiveRecord::Base.establishconnection(:adapter => currdb[“adapter”],
:database => curr_db[“database”],
:host => curr_db[“host”],
:username => curr_db[“username”],
:password => curr_db[“password”])

for survey in @surveys
s = survey.clone
s.save
end

close the db

ActiveRecord::Base.remove_connection

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One of the first things you learn in a woodworking handtool class is how to sharpen. Unfortunately, this turns a lot of people off.

Instead, our teacher asks for experienced volunteers, who come in before the class and sharpen some of the school’s planes, then the newbies get to start with a tuned plane. Great idea!

Anyhow, my planes still aren’t sharp, but at least I have the success of having learned to flatten (and having flattened) one side of a board with an already-working plane.

We did lose one student, who decided to go over to a power tools class. He could not understand why anyone would pay the money for a Lie-Nielsen plane (and god forbid he should learn about any of the modern infill planemaker’s prices), nor could he understand why anyone (::cough:: Anant ::cough::) would ship planes that were miserably unflat.

Thus, a lot of the drudgery of getting one’s tools in shape was distinctly unappealing to him. While I sympathize, it’s something you need to do only once, really.

I’m sure I’ll get the shipping grease off the Record planes pretty quickly, though.

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Possibly the best April Fool’s day gadget I’ve seen in years can be found here. You don’t even have to be a tool geek to think it’s funny, but if the humo(u)r strikes you as overly dry, just skip to the disclaimers.

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A few days ago, I changed the table name of the wrong table (without realizing it, of course). Suddenly, my rails app wouldn’t start at all, and no errors in the development log. Naturally, I had a client demo in less than an hour….

What I’d done is change the name of the sessions table to something other than what was in environment.rb.

So, if you happen to have this problem, that’s one place to look.

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My mother is a huge fan of Project Runway, despite not really being a fashion afficianado (though she does have a humongous wardrobe).

As a teenager, I took several classes in tailoring because, at that time, there really weren’t as many options for someone large (especially not someone who was just big, not fat).

Anyhow, one of the things I’ve learned over the years of sewing and knitting is that the fit of a shoulder is critical. For example, one of the typical problems of a blouse (or shirt) from today’s ready-to-wear is that if one lifts one’s arms, the sides of the blouse/shirt lifts. This is bad fit.

So, getting back to Project Runway.

Santino has no idea how to make a garment’s shoulders. Therefore, sleeves also elude him. Some people have said they didn’t understand the comments about Santino’s outfits being poorly made (or poorly fitting). Well, go back and look at all the garments he did — and how he (failed to) managed shoulders and/or sleeves. Now, granted, he designs around this limitation, but I’d like to believe that the next Great American Designer could actually make a suit that didn’t require being pinned to another designer. Ugh.

I’m really glad Chloe won. You did good, girl. Some people didn’t like the first dress. I thought it was stunning.

Daniel V. may have a job, since Michael Kors offered one. I’m sure we’ll see more of his work — his white coat was, imho, stunning.

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Lately, I’ve been taking a yoga class twice a week (though I may take it a third day so I don’t stiffen up quite so much over the weekend).

I first took yoga as a teenager, back when hatha yoga was hatha yoga, and the pronunciations seemed to come from Hindi speakers rather than Tamil speakers.

This quarter, I decided to enroll in a yoga class at foothill. Not only were the poses named with the English (rather than Sanskrit) names, the pronunciation of Sanskrit (even for words like savasana) threw me off.

So, it turns out I’m taking Iyengar, and, while I wasn’t paying attention, it took over as the dominant form of yoga in the U.S. There’s reasons this is a Good Thing, mostly having to do with each of the postures being designed to strengthen and/or flex certain things and precision helping in that regard.

However, right now, Just Doing Anything is quite difficult for me. I’m in even more chronic pain than usual. Yoga teacher will chide me, “You could go deeper.” I respond, “Well, it took me prescription muscle relaxants and pain medication to get even this far, so that’s where I’m going for now.”

The other day, when I was in tears of frustration because there was so much I couldn’t do, one of the instructor’s assistants said that I could go do Child’s Pose if I wanted. I pointed out that I can’t even do that without a supporting bolster (which, since this class isn’t in a yoga studio, I didn’t have access to). Fortunately, I’m now starting a restorative class in a yoga studio. Yay.

I’ve discovered that my weak spots weren’t the ones that I’d thought were weak — sure those were too, but they weren’t the primary problem areas.

The harder part, though, is that I hurt more (on average) than I did before — and expect to do so for some time. That’s the nasty part about working through chronic pain (and fibromyalgia in particular). In fact, that’s why I’m up writing this at 4:45 a.m. — I haven’t been able to sleep yet.

Anyhow, one of my problem areas has turned out to be weakness in the muscles on the top of the feet, which frequently hurt after yoga.

I believe I’ve mentioned before that a friend of a friend runs a site called betterhealthguy.com, and he has mentioned help achieved with the detox foot pads.

Well, I’ve discovered something: these also work particularly well for sore shoulders and sore tops of feet. There’s a few other places they work well, mostly where the ache is very close to the skin’s surface. For example, I’ve found them helpful when my knuckles hurt, or when my mousing hand gets a knot in my forearm. I use gold for the bottoms of my feet and blue for everywhere else.

To put this in perspective, when my primary pain is in one of these places, using the pads can cut the quantity of analgesics I need by 1/3 to 1/2 plus make me feel just a bit better overall. At first, I wondered if this were simply placebo effect, but that would have worn off in three months, and I’ve been using the pads for six.

Unfortunately, today I’m out, so my shoulders hurt and my feet hurt.

I should have more in a couple days, though….

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One of the things that surprised me about Sue was that she had only two fingers, not the three I remember T. Rex having. In part, this is due to finding more complete skeletons over the years.

But to see an animal that large, with arms literally the size of human arms (yes, really), and two long claws at the end of the hands. Just two.

And, so help me, maybe it’s where I had a side trip in 2002 when I visited South Dakota, but all I could think of was corn forks.

T. Rex arms aren’t really long enough (especially given the head size and angle) to hold something to eat, so the only other thing I could think of was sort of impaling something edible onto a tree so one could eat the part above the point of impalement.

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By the time I woke up, Strata had caught her flight back home.

I got up, ate a Luna bar, then headed to the Field Museum for two things: to see Sue and to see the Pompeii exhibit.

When I first walked in the building, I’d started to pass one of the dinosaurs before I looked up, realizing what an incredibly long neck it had. How long? I was unable to get the neck completely in my camera’s view (I didn’t think to try from the upper level, darn it).

Even though I’d arrived just in time for my Pompeii exhibit, I decided that Sue was a bigger priority. I went over to see her, stunned both by how large (and how small) she was. Her pelvis bone was much larger than I’d expected — it had also suffered some damage, including a missing tip. One of the museum staff was there answering questions about Sue, and generally joking.

“We’ve been going out for seven years,” he said. “I like older women.”

When I asked him about the pubic bone, he said that the leading theory about why the bone a) was so large and b) had suffered so much wear and tear was likely due to the fact that a T. Rex, like a chicken, slept in a squatting position, resting on the pubic bone.

The image that went through my head went something like: Chicken Run, only with T. Rexes. Hrm.

I was also surprised at how much characteristics one could see in the bone, including breaks and mends, as well as some of the attachment points. In all, Sue is an extremely well-preserved (and prepared) skeleton.

After visiting with Sue, I went to have my morning coffee and some soup, then headed over to the Pompeii exhibit, where I had to wait in line. Frankly, it was a much bigger exhibit than I was expecting. While there was the usual jewelry, and so on, I was quite stunned to see entire frescoed walls (three walls of one room, actually) and the variety of goods displayed.

I also felt quite humbled to see a statue believed to be from Julius Caesar’s father-in-law’s place in Herculaneum. Quite amazing.

There were precious few places to sit; the place was also quite packed. By the end, my feet were quite sore, but I managed. After that, I bought a t-shirt (for Rick) and an Octopus plate for myself.

I rested for a bit, then re-visited Sue again before going upstairs to see Sue’s real head (the real head is too heavy for the model of the body, thus it’s upstairs with a replica on Sue’s skeleton).

I wandered around through several other exhibits, including one about Tibet and another about the Southwest Pacific before heading back to my hotel.

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