• I was SO close to closing the deal on my MythTV box. I had one more piece to purchase - the TV tuner card. I bought a WinFast 2000 XP RM at Fry’s Electronics (And really - Fry’s is one of the reasons why I moved to Phoenix) for a whopping $37. It was a good deal, but after fiddling with it for a few hours I realized that my poor little Celeron wasn’t up to snuff for software encoding. I need either a beefier CPU or a hardware encoding TV Tuner. I’m pulling for PVR-150 that I can find on sale. MythTV - you will be mine, oh yes - you will be mine.
• Phoenix is a cool place to live. We actually have good sports teams here. Suns anyone? pulling it out in double overtime against the Clippers was awesome! I’m not even a huge basketball fan, but man the Suns really get you going. I can hardly say that about the Utah Jazz. Plus the D-Backs aren’t half bad this year. Go AZ!
• Mmmm… Dapper Drake. Ubuntu’s latest kick-butt offering is almost on us. I’ve been running the pre-release since Flight 2 and it’s SO lovely. Stable has heck too.

I’ve learned several life lessons recently. I’ll share:

1. The tech scene down here in the valley rocks. I attended the Phoenix Linux Users Group last week and heard a sweet presentation by Vince from Google about Linux on the Enterprise Desktop. Nice work - especially about the specifics with Linux (Unix) user scalability issues. Two other cool things happened. I sat by someone taking notes with an Apple Newton (go figure) and more importantly I won the big prize in the raffle swag give-away - a Google Lava-lamp! That sweet baby is going on my desk right next to my well-worn Ruby pickaxe book. BAM!

2. We got to see the Mesa Arizona LDS Temple Easter Paegent. It was a great show and the weather was awesome (as usual). Bailey even managed to stay awake through the whole thing, though she fell asleep soon after hitting the carseat.

3. Rails generally blows on Oracle. Besides the v1.1 issue I found in Active Record, it seems that the whole concept of Rapid Application Development is lost on most Oracle DBA. (Why do you want 3 sepearate users? Why would you automatically blow away your test environment? Blah, blah, blah.) Do what I did - Even if you don’t have root - install mysql and be done with it. (It really isn’t that hard - I even did it on Solaris 8 without gcc)

One of the best things about my current position is all the time I’m getting to spend with Ruby and Rails. After having written 3 different web frameworks myself for internal projects, Rails is *so* freaking cool.

I just saw this on diggdot.us: Rails 1.1 updates!

One of the many things that I’m excited to play with is RJS. The default AJAX stuff was nice, but no easy to customize without having to drill into the javascript. With RJS, life just keeps getting better.

Thanks David.

Things that really excite me this year so far:

• Ubuntu
• KnoppMyth (Sweet action MythTV!)
• Ruby On Rails
• Asterisk (just bought a Sipura 3000)
• RAGI
• SwitchTower
• Ruby

Life is good:

Frozen-Bubble for Mac OS X 

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