Rumors and Heresay

Some nasty rumors have appeared on a certain blog regarding my behavior during a recent card game. I won't stoop to comment on what may or may not have happened during the game, but I think the outcome speaks for itself.

create vs. create! vs. new in Rails

I've been spending a little time lately on updating The Secret App to remove cruft (Login / User Engine being the two main sources of said cruft).  Now that I'm no longer locked into an old revision of edge, I have noticed that Rails's ActiveRecord behavior seems to have changed a bit.  Before, I could get away with saying
@widget = current_user.widgets.create!(params[:widget])
Now, that gets me a big fat nil in @widget.user_id.  Unfortunately,
@widget = current_user.widgets.new(params[:widget])
gives me the same darned thing.  The only way I could get the user_id to  fill properly was with
@widget = current_user.widgets.create(params[:widget])
Maybe it's something I am doing wrong, but I haven't found it yet.  I wouldn't put much effort into it, but I really like the clean syntax I get from #create! and so it has gotten under my skin.  Any ideas?  Anyone?  Bueller?

Good reference for RESTful Rails

I love a good cheat sheet; anything to condense a big ol' reference site into a page or so that I can flip to when I need it. However, no one has made a good cheat sheet (or even a good reference, period) for the new RESTful Rails stuff. The best one-post reference I've found is simply_restful in Rails Core on David Goodlad's blog. Plenty of bloggers rah-rahed about simply_restful and gave a few examples of how to set it up, but David includes something unique: a table of all the auto-generated named routes and how to use them. I swear, I must have spent half an hour looking for exactly that information. Ah, sweet spoonfeeding! Thanks again to Mr. Goodlad for putting that out there.

A nuanced view

Here's our governor-elect, Mike Beebe, speaking on how he'd like to work with the legislature:

"I expect I'll probably be a little more like Clinton," Beebe said. "I like members of the General Assembly. Virtually all of them are friends of mine. I was a product of the legislature, so I understand some of the nuisances of the way they think and act."

I think he meant to say nuances, but you never know.

That stinks!

Watch this video with the knowledge that I had to be in the same building with this man later that same day.


Man, even the camera stunk.

Diminishing returns

While browsing Amazon tonight for a new television, I was presented with the following offer:

Yes -- Amazon suggested that since I'm looking at a large-format television, I might be interested in buying two of them. First I was flattered, but now I'm starting to feel a bit patronized. Are they trying to make some kind of subtle statement about how many times I've looked at this TV on their site?

This also brings up the question of how these "Better Together" offers are generated in the first place: is it via humans (obviously not very smart ones), or from past purchases... by people who impulse-buy a second television.

Tags: amazon, television, dlp

Panning for gold

Children make memories as a river makes stones; what appears at first to be a swirling mass of chaos reveals, on closer examination, countless specimens of exquisite beauty.  The riverbed is our gold mine, each stone tumbled and polished to perfection.  We sift and examine, and eventually decide that we want to take the whole riverbed home.  We know that the river never stops moving, never stops changing, despite our wishes to the contrary.  The best we can do is to gather a handful of our favorites to take home.  I think I found a keeper this afternoon.  On arriving home from work, I found α at her desk.  I asked what she was up to, and she said, "I'm doing my work.  My homework."  Without missing a beat, she returned to her addition worksheets.  This is a child who was too sick to go to school today.  They don't even give her homework when she is at school, so she makes up her own assignments.  To quote Homestar Runner, "I know, can you believe it?"  A child doing homework by choice, for the sheer joy of learning; I think I'll hang onto that one.

Tags: river, parenting, homestar runner