Gmail now has IMAP!

My account does not have it enabled yet, but it looks that tonight Google decided to start letting users have IMAP access to their gmail!

To me, this is huge. Ive been wanting to use my phone and Mail.app on my iMac to manage my email, but really wanted IMAP access to it rather than using POP. Basically, with POP email, you just log into the server and download your messages and your done. But with IMAP, you can manage folders, download just the header information of your emails, and status of emails (read or unread) is saved on the server. So if I read something on the Mac, it will mark it as being read online, or any other mail client I have checking my email.

Listening To: ‘The Weight of the World’ by The Editors

a picture filled weekend

This past weekend was a lot of fun, and I have a bunch of pictures from everything!

Debs and I ran errands after work on Friday, and checked out the new ‘Nuevo Mexico’ restaurant near our house (its owned by the same people that do ‘Mexico’ restaurant around here). It was absolutly disgusting, and recommend no one ever eat there. We like Mexico Restaurant, but here they ‘Americanize’ it to much, food has no flavor, and wait staff was worthless. After eating, we picked up 2 games for the Xbox, and went home to play for a little while.

Saturday after washing the cars in the morning, we went to moms with Courtney to go pull up carpet, work on wallpaper, and move boxes. The carpet we removed was about 30 years old, and the hardwood floors underneath looked brand new. Mom has a few pictures of the change, and they are doing a great job documenting the whole process. That night we took our friend Tina out for her birthday, jumping around from BW3’s, a house party, Mulligan’s, and then a friends house. I dont think we got home till about 3 something Sunday morning.

Sunday we did some cleaning, I did some organizing, and we both did some relaxing. I also was able to finish up the first roll of film I recently got developed, and you can check them out here (or click the lily above).

While making a few calls, I went outside to take a few pictures around the house of the beautiful colors of fall. I got some really cool shots which you can see here. Were possibly going to the mountains sometime this weekend to take more fall shots, which could be a blast.

Later last night, Tina, Nate, and Courtney came over so we could carve our Pumpkins, while of course watching Pumpkinhead. I did Gizmo from ‘Gremlins‘, Debs did Tigger, Nate did Homer, Courtney made Frankenstein, and Tina made Jack Skellington from ‘Nightmare before Christmas‘. They all came out amazing, and I posted pictures already of these as well!

Well, after such a nice weekend, im still back in the groove at work. Hopefully going to try to deploy again this weekend as long as some major bugs get fixed. Ill post more on that when we actually get the thing live.

Listening To: ‘Stronger’ by Kanye West

Customer service comparable to Sprint’s Customer Support!

Even though our favorite company Sprint hired more Customer Support reps this week, I hope I never have to talk to one again.

Well, it looks like First Market Bank hires about the same quality as Sprint (if you call it ‘quality’ even!). Ukrops (where Debs and I both started off) has a HUGE share in FMB, and so Debs had some really nice pirks tied to her account (which some banks are offering everyone now anyways).

This morning when she logged into the Online Banking tool, she noticed that CarMax or FMB decided to put her car payment in twice…with the same check number. So she decided to call customer service to find out what was going on.

Their response?

‘Im sorry, but we are really busy, and are not able to talk right now.’

Practice safe txt

What will they think of next!? These are rubber fingers that you can wear so you don’t get fingerprints on your new multitouch device.

Ruby on Rails – not all its cracked up to be…

Recently at work I have found myself having to debug a lot of Ruby code for some sites that we recently put live. I also had to do some further deployment on the sites, since things like email were not actually working correctly when put into production. But when clicking around through the code, deploying new builds of the site, and testing my changes, the only thing going through my head was ‘why does this Ruby stuff have such a following’.

Im not writing this post to bash anyone, the community, or the language. Im sure it has its uses, and I have to say that I really like the community around the language (which I will talk more about later).

Its almost like some type of ‘cult’ around it. While yes, many people can say that I could be a member of some of these ‘cults’ (ie the Mac people)…im definitely not a ‘fanboy‘ by any means (hell, I even think most Mac people are weird…espc the ones who act like they saw the second coming because they ‘switched’). In the case of ruby, you have a huge cult following that has produced some REALLY cool products. These products then get a ton of publicity, and it all just rolls up together (oh that site was made with Ruby…then it has to be good!).

There was recently a post that came across Digg about ‘The 10 reasons you should be using Ruby on Rails‘. Well, following a long with a lot of the comments, ill back every one of these 10 reasons with 10 truths:

1. Most modern languages give you these ‘treats’ already. I use try/catch and namespaces every day! Pretty much any modern iteration of any language supports all 5 of these topics.
2. What little things? This topic pretty much points to the fact that Ruby reads almost as easy as English. Wow, AppleScript has been doing this for years. But when it comes down to it, I am more concerned about what the code actually means instead of it looking grammatically correct!
3. Yeah…and you will never be able to put more than one command per line of code. Who cares? Its easier for me to understand that a semicolon is the end of a line of code, rather than figuring out why a method is ending in a exclamation point or question mark (from the posters reason #2)
4. In most object oriented languages, everything is an object! Strings, Integers, you name it.
5. This just doesnt make sense. Its just being lazy.
6. Again – anyone can do this. And honestly its a lot easier to set up a webapp in IIS than it is to configure mongrel and update it.
7. Also doesn’t make sense.
8. While its not a standard everywhere, XML itself is standardized, and used just about everywhere. No one cares that you make up your own markup language that reads easier.
9. ‘foreach’ is one of my favorite commands…and a lot easier to use than what the writer is describing here.
10. This is slow. And the fact that ‘Ruby has features no other language can offer’, I really hope the user wasnt using the previous 9 topics to prove that.

All of this is up to preference. I do love how the writer ends with ‘…the next time your frustrated because your code looks ugly…’. I can’t stand reading scripting languages (always seem like a hack job), so its more of a pain to me than reading standard C# code. In reality, its the developer and their processes that build the final product more than the platform used to get there.

I just can’t understand how people get so excited about a plain-old scripting language that has been around for quite a while. This is where my community comment above comes in. Any group, idea, method that has a gathering can mold it to many different objects. With Rails becoming so popular, many online networks have formed creating a close, very active community.

Just wait for all those Mac fanboys…so excited that Mac OS 10.5 ‘Leopard’ (if you haven’t heard, its coming out next week) has ruby on rails built in. Alas, if they paid any attention, they would have noticed ruby ( and partially rails ) has been there for quite a while :).

Listening To: ‘Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)’ by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss

Two big Apple announcements

I hate to really only be ‘cross posting’ stuff from around the web right now, but Ive been to busy to really write any posts right now, and these two things are pretty big news that haven’t gotten that much coverage yet.

First of all – Apple today announced over 2 million tracks in the DRM-free format, and now for 99 cents! This is a pretty cool deal! While I have very few (5 or less) of the iTunes Plus tracks already, its cool to see how much music they are offering at this new price. Basically, iTunes Plus files have no DRM’s attached, and since they loose file size from not having the DRM, they are encoded at 256kbps rather than 192. While in most cases I wouldn’t care, it appears that for once, Apple is really feeling pressure from others about its pricing scheme.

The other big note is HUGE…they are going to release a SDK to write apps for the iPhone! Something his ‘steve-iness’ said over and over again wouldn’t happen is going to be coming this Winter. Again, the community is really driving where they want to start taking this product.

You can read these stories, and more, at the Apple Hot News page.

NIN is now a free agent!

Trent put a post up on NIN.com this morning announcing some really big news, he is now a ‘free agent’. Ive copied the text below (since no one knows how long that will actually be up on the front page).

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have
been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a
direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.
Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008.
Exciting times, indeed.

This is pretty freaking exciting! I’m sure many people (myself included) somewhat saw this coming with the release of year zero. Its also pretty awesome to think of what he will be able to produce now, without some big corp CEO telling him what to sing.

New pics from a night out on the town…

I just posted some pics from my little celebration on Flickr. We jumped around from Bar Louie to Pour House (both in Short Pump), then went downtown to Capital Ale House till they closed, then to Rich’s house for a little bit. All in all it was an awesome night, and I had a blast!

Check out the photos at the set on Flickr.