Despite being first introduced to Ruby via working on More Things Need To, I haven't really gone full-on into Ruby-learning mode until now. I believe I've made some small inroads toward getting to know it better in the past few days, though.

My webhost, as awesome as they are, already helped me fix the problem and nebyooweb.com is now live. Check out the sleek new look in all its updated glory.

Any comments or criticism are gladly welcomed.

I was about to put up the new, much improved version of nebyooweb.com tonight. Of course, moving from a local dev environment to a shared hosting production server is always fraught with some peril. Things are different on the server as far as location/permissions, and you might not even realize certain dependencies you’re using in your app are non-existent server-side.

I had just uploaded all the files and hit refresh on nebyooweb.com only to see a largely white screen and a scant few elements appearing. Where’s my website? I asked myself. An error message pointed me toward a library I was using for RSS parsing and I remembered at once what I needed to do. Unfortunately, when you share server space with others certain security measures have to be taken to make sure no one ruins things for others. Doubly unfortunately, this means currently I can’t install the dependency and nebyooweb.com is on hiatus until my host’s support can help me out (which they always end up doing, as they rule). My triumph of being done and showing off my new toy to the world is stunted and I will have to wait, however. Tonight’s failure will hopefully turn into tomorrow’s success.

A webplace space originally launched in February 2009, More Things Need To is a simple site. Much like Texts From Last Night or Bash.org, it's a place where anyone can submit short humorous blurbs (the former being supposed funny texts, the latter being supposed funny chat logs). MTNT's particular slant is that the blurb needs to be in the form "More X need(s) to Y", which is the snowclone-like template of a joke that a friend and I have been using for many years. Eventually the idea to make our shared comedy a website so that we could keep track of them, and furthermore allow others to read them and contribute their own, came to fruition.

Our house is awesome. It’s big and airy and when in the main living space feels reaaaaaally huge because it’s not enclosed and you can look from the first-and-a-half floor all the way up to the third floor. Painting this sweet room-that-encompasses-many-rooms is not so awesome. In fact, it took 4 days, 7 gallons of paint, a 22′ ladder, and an extended paint roller connected to a 12′ extension pole to reach the very top of some of the walls. We’re done now, but it was an epic adventure that left both Robyn and I tired, sore, and mentally exhausted.

Read the entire sordid tale here.

AT THE TOP OF THE HOUR

It’s always good to be home. Changes in routine and environment are often welcome, but nothing quite beats returning to that which is safe and known and comfortable. Lots of family and eating last week has turned into a bit of friends and less eating this week.

Christmas 2010. It’s almost upon us. TWO-THOUSAND TEN. We are living in the FUTURE, MAAAAAAN.

It’s been raining for, like, 4 days straight now. I drove to and from work yesterday in the rain, and then to a friend’s house in back, and again to work today. All of it with wiper blades on and hard-to-see roads. It unnerves me.

Ever since I was no longer forced to read by school, I pretty much stopped. Except for the nets and a magazine here and there, I don’t read any long-form things like several-hundred-page dead-tree things very often. I need a crazy amount of focus and a crazy lack of distraction to even get into the groove of trying to read.

Making a big deal out of my birthday has never really been a high priority, but when you have a significant amount of friends, and you have close family, well…it just kind of becomes that way. Sorta.

From the evening of Wednesday, December 8th, until the evening of Sunday, December 12th, my birthday was just kinda around.