Excellent Ruby on Rails tips.

This blog post by PJ Hyett and Chris Wanstrath is amazing. It covers something I've been dying to find since starting ruby--the _ command. Yes--that's an underscore. This let's you reference the result from your previous command (like * did back in the lisp days). Read on for more great tips.

Obsessed with Project Runway

Project Runway Season 2 from Amazon I have had a cable-free house for over a decade mainly because I lack any antibodies to turn off the TV. I love Netflix since once my wife and I watch our DVDs we have to wait a few days before we watch anything else. This has been great, but over the past 5 years we've racked up 700 rentals and made it through most of the movies we ever imagined we'd want to watch. We've been limping by with a real reach of titles from our recommendations and wondering where our next source for content... and then came iTunes. Now we're finding there are years and years worth of embarassingly engaging TV programming that we can access instantly and finally understand why all of our friends were talking about getting fired in the "boardroom" and how odd neighbors can be. Our newest find is Project Runway which is the Apprentice reality show for fashion designer hopefuls. We started with the current season and are really enjoying it. The personalities are endearing and besides one character (*Angela*) that seems like a plant (is that part of the reality TV gig?), the interaction is very believable. Although I have a very limited view of the space, I recommend it as the best of the reality TV I've come across--well besides my brief immersion in Japan's crazy, crazy reality TV.

My 2005 Honda Pilot is for sale sold!

My life as a multiple car owner is coming to an end. I have a 2005 Honda Pilot for sale. It is a great vehicle (this coming from someone who drove tiny, tiny vehicles and biked before owning the Pilot) and if I had infinite money and infinite parking I'd never sell it. See my Craiglist listing for details. UPDATE: 10/01/06 Pilot is sold!

How do you find your blogs?

I am an avid blog reader since I was turned on to Engadget et. al. about a year and a half ago. Since then my scope has spread outwards to other "mainstream" blogs like the Ruby On Rails weblog, and TechCrunch. I read these blogs and monitor their feeds regularly to stay up-to-date on technologies that are interesting to me or relate to my business. Then there are another group of blogs--generally small blogs, run for for fun not profit--that I come across by chance in google searches, or cross-linked from a larger publisher. I find these non-professional blogs are incredibly personable, interesting to read, and give an alternative view to a subject. I would love to have more access to this content, but I don't know how to find it. I've spent hours surfing Technorati, but with 52.7 million blogs in their index, I find myself totally overwhelmed. Maybe there is too much content to organize just by algorithm? The opposite approach is to let the audience organize the content. This is Digg.com's model which is awesome for the handful of digg'ed links that make it to their front page--but they often are the larger blogs and content sites that get the top spots. So what do you do to find your blogs? Is it the random button on blogspot? the popular page on Digg? or some other method?