Random Tidbits

Posted on December 16, 2007 by Matt Behrens
  • I saw I Am Legend at the Thursday midnight showing and it was excellent. A very haunting, psychological thriller that reminded me a lot of Children Of Men. Will Smith has been working on his acting range and this really showed it off pretty well, plus it had plenty of stuff blowing up. I definitely want to read the book for this now.
  • Speaking of books, I’ve been trying to read more frequently. Recently finished Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and it was an excellent piece of knowledge. It showed me the power of networking and socializing, two things that I am now working to improve on. I wasn’t oblivious of these principles before, I just didn’t have them explained in such detail. Understand how being social works and then realizing what you can do to improve at it is the true goal.
  • I need to learn to sew! Jeans are falling apart.
  • I’ve been updating some of my PHP scripts on the site. Main thing is my Birthday script for Shacknews.  I formerly had the script just dump any new data into a text file, which I would then edit and input the data into MySQL. I felt it was better not to put bad data into the database and be the middle man. After 6 months now, I’m a a lazy middle man and I realize Regex would be a better middle man. Also, for such a simple application, entering a bit of bad data isn’t that big a deal and it would be easier to just edit the database directly to fix the bad data. Lesson learned, simple is always better. Less clicks, less middle men always save time.
  • Along that same line, I’m working on Ruby on Rails again now that 2.0 has come out. Again, after 6 months of RoR, I see the major point of simple web applications and where to use them. Get the basic data interactions planned out, how you want people to use things, and then expand off that. Once you get people entering data, you can polish and clean it up, but the data and functionality is king. I was formerly too wrapped up on Rails and trying to accomplish too much.
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