Microblog

OK I forgot what a batshit movie Flubber is. Sports cheating, jealous AI, dancing slime—it has it all.

Making dinner and watching Flubber (the 1997 Robin Williams movie) with my kids. If you know the professor is going to miss the wedding, he’s missed it before, maybe send someone to pick the guy up instead of setting unreasonable expectations and reading into it when they’re unmet.

Don’t tempt me with a PDF because I will download it

Emily Freeman had my favorite election day quote:

Schrödinger’s democracy.

Now we know what’s in the box.

“I can always make another vision board.” —8yo

I had a realization earlier this week when someone I hadn’t talked to in years emailed me. We’d met on a design forum I ran as a teenager in the early aughts. Something he said made me realize just how long I’ve been building online communities:

the forum kinda kept me in tech probably made me who I am today, always appreciated the work you did way back in the day.

like, damn. I’m not sharing this to brag; I’d just honestly forgotten how important this has always been to me.

I think it’s part of why I’ve worked so hard to build the Ruby community first on Mastodon¹, and now on Bluesky². It was a really nice reminder. 🩵

1. I think I gave away probably a hundred Honeybadger t-shirts to get people to move to ruby.social back in the day, and we were one of the first sponsors along with Mike Perham/Sidekiq) ↩

2. My Ruby and Rails starter pack is currently the 5th most-used starter pack on Bluesky ↩

Just got my COVID + flu shot 💉

In hindsight, I probably should have gotten the Covid one in my non-dominant arm. Oh well.

I’ve been using index cards to track priorities again. Every time I come back I don’t know how I lived without them. 📝

“When I print this book it’s all gonna be worth it.” —8yo

According to this directory, my Ruby and Rails starter pack is the 5th most-used on Bluesky, and one of the oldest. 😮

Democrat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has won a second term in the U.S. House of Representatives in the closely watched 3rd Congressional District race.

We did it again!

Washington in general has defied the rightward gravity this election season.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this has been a long week. It feels like seven thousand days.” —8yo

America’s doppelgänger just won the election. Welcome to the mirror world.

Imagine waging an 80-year war on fluoride and winning it in 2025.

It’s so weird to experience reality warping to match the fringe shit I grew up with.

Feel free to tell me about Trump/Elon derangement syndrome when all our kids have measles.

Get ready to take notes as business and software leaders start to signal their assent. You could already feel the rightward shift in some communities; I guess this explains it. This will enable and empower the worst behavior. Pay attention and push back.

I still can’t believe what Bezos did to the Post.

Currently at the stage of election coverage where I’m searching for “relaxing videos” on youtube

I just started going to this new gym that skews older and they aren’t playing election coverage but they are playing the andy griffith show. How concerned should I be?

Finally removed X/Twitter from the company website (and replaced it with Bluesky, of course)

My kids’ school scheduled parent-teacher conferences this week, and it’s a full week of half days. Not sure what they were thinking with that one.

my plan to handle the stress today is to catch up on my 2-year backlog of Foreign Affairs

I apologize in advance for the next 76 days of election posting.

This seems very cool. You probably know Wired, but if you haven’t checked out 404 Media, you should. Awesome journalism startup.

Fox Mulder’s first words were JFK

Thank you to Mads Ohm Larsen for contributing the first PR to my new festive_errors Ruby gem!

Each of the first five holiday stylesheets now have festive AA compliant accessible color schemes.

I was born into the evangelical premillenarian dispensationalist “theology of despair” and this is dead on 🎯

Wes Bos on Bluesky:

How did you get into web development?

MySpace? Comp sci? Made the jump from print? Bootcamp?

GeoCities. 😅

Some of the first code I wrote was mIRC script for IRC chatbots and other utilities, and I made a website to share it. After that I always had a website and from there got into Perl (made guestbooks, photo galleries), then PHP, and ultimately Ruby. And lots of JS, obviously.

I did major in computer science at one point but dropped out. Then Multimedia & Web Design, also dropped out. I was already freelancing by the time I was in college, and never looked back.

I know that hasn’t been the story for everyone and I feel so fortunate to have had that head start and opportunity.

(I’m not sure I was actually making good money by then but I was happy if I didn’t have to get a “real job” lol)

I like that Nosferatu (1922 and remakes) made the Count more driven and monstrous rather than sexy/seductive, but I must admit that when I read the book I pictured someone more stately and less gangling vole.

I can’t wait for Willem Dafoe’s portrayal though.

I think I’ll reread the book before Christmas, I forget how it describes him now.

Trump has ravaged the GOP, metastasized, and we’re watching the death throes.

So, inspired by schwad, I made a thing:

Festive Errors is a Rails gem that spices up the Rails error page with fun holiday themes. We all like to do a little coding around the holidays. Get into the holiday spirit with Festive Errors!

Debugging an exception in the month of October.

It’s a simple Rails engine that hooks into the layout for the error debug page in dev mode. If it’s currently a holiday period, it adds some custom CSS using a content_for hook that Rails provides in the layout.

That’s it! Just add it to your Gemfile.

I tested this on Rails 7.1 and Rails 8, but it doesn’t have tests or CI yet. Themes are also limited both in supported holidays and design (they currently just add an emoji to the page H1).

It will also need some config options eventually for when there are concurrent holidays!

Let’s get festive (errors)

I still can’t believe that the lunatic fringe may be running the country a few months from now.

Except they’re NOT fringe anymore. Maybe that’s what I can’t believe.

How cool would it be if users could submit alt text back to the OP if they forgot it (on social media, I mean).

Lost 60lb and I can still squat 315. 👍

Someday I will code again

Justin Jackson writes:

Telling someone they have “Trump/Elon derangement syndrome” is a pejorative way to dismiss and minimize destructive behaviors that have real consequences.

Yes. It’s the most ridiculous accusation given the reality and it tells me everything I need to know about the person who makes it.

When a consultant wastes an hour of my time, they should pay me.

We carved jack-o’-lanterns last night. One of us is much better at it than the others. 😸

Happy Halloween everyone 🎃

“We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

—Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

make a Bluesky starter pack they said, it will be fun, they said. They didn’t tell us we’d be deciding who lives and who dies

You think things can’t get worse, but they can.

May I suggest that Talia Lavin is doing capitalism right and “coats the soul in spray tan” is one of many delightful turns of phrase you will appreciate in her latest book on the rise of the Christian Right. Go get yourself a copy, it’s 20% off.

Now is a great time to spend some reputation capital on a presidential endorsement (I endorse Kamala Harris for President in case it wasn’t clear).

Anyone who is not furious and dismayed by Trump and his party right now should seriously consider why they’re siding with fascists.

Apparently someone in my town is starting fires in our ballet boxes and burning the ballots. There was one in Portland too. 😦

Here’s MGP’s response:

I am requesting an overnight law enforcement presence be posted at all ballot drop boxes in Clark County through Election Day. Southwest Washington cannot risk a single vote being lost to arson and political violence.

If you’d like a peek into our local congressional politics here in Southwest Washington, I made a short photo essay on Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s first campaign in 2022.

MGP’s opponent Joe Kent is a known associate of violent extremist groups including the Proud Boys.

Going to an “apocalypse” halloween party and I was going to wear my 9/11 was an inside job shirt but apparently that’s not the vibe we’re going for.

Have you tried a hedonic elliptical? It’s easier on the knees.

So let me get this straight: First they deny (accelerate) climate change, then they profit from it, then they use it as justification to subvert democracy.

Also this quote, lol (emphasis mine)

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) told reporters on Friday he hadn’t heard about any plans for the state Legislature to take the steps discussed by Raiklin and Harris. Asked about Harris’ comments, McHenry said, “It makes no sense whatsoever to prejudge the election outcome. And that is a misinformed view of what is happening on the ground in North Carolina, bless his heart.”