Conferences

I’m attending both GoRuCo and RailsConf in the coming weeks. With SXSW already under the belt, it’s been a busy start.

Hope to see you there.

Hate moving

For the past few years, I’ve hosted everything at Site5, under a shared plan. They’ve been pretty good to me, with responsive support and all the bandwidth and storage I could possibly use. There were some hiccups early on, but those brief outages have been ironed out.

My most recent ambitions, however, call for more control and I’m planning on moving to Slicehost over the next few weeks. I’ve heard and read great things about them, and I’m eager to start building up a VPS of my own. Home sweet home.

In particular, I’ve been working on more web applications these days, lots of toys, prototypes and half-finished ideas, and it will be nice to move to an environment that’s better able to handle them. Rails via FastCGI on Site5 was less than optimal, although watching Mongrel eat into the 256MB slice isn’t going to be pretty.

With cloud computing all the rage these days, I also considered ditching hosting and opting for something like Amazon’s EC2 instead. While appealing, it’s certainly more complicated to work with and I don’t believe it suits the hobbyist needs that I’m tendering. Perhaps a successful app will get the nod for a migration. And then there’s the new challenger as well – Google’s App Engine. It sounds really appealing, and I especially like the document-based datastore and the rigid simplicity on offer. I have to echo a warning, however, that moving away from Google’s platform may be difficult, and vendor lock-in could definitely be an issue. That, and I’d have to learn Python.

Anything for Babies

My good friend is participating in this year’s March for Babies on April 19th.

From Wikipedia:

March for Babies is held in 1,100 communities across the nation. Every year, 7 million compassionate people, including 20,000 company and family teams as well as national sponsors, participate. The event has raised more than $1.7 billion since 1970 to bring the March of Dimes closer to the day when all babies are born healthy and full term.

Proceeds help fund research to prevent premature births, birth defects and infant mortality. Every year, more than half a million babies are born prematurely and more than 120,000 are born with serious birth defects in the United States.

So please, donate today.

Muxtape

Great site. Hope they dodge the powers that be.

And check out my killer mix :)

Toys

A Kottke post had me thinking tonight…

Indeed, the nostalgic toys of my youth were rather plain. I loved Legos, still do, and one of my earliest crushing memories involved carrying the fully-built Lego castle down the stairs only to trip and dash the thing to a million little pieces. I may have cried. But at least the castle was never re-assembled and an infinite troupe of strange craft emerged from my mind instead.

I also had an unhealthy obsession with teddy bears and stuffed animals.

I have no idea, however, what I played with as a baby. There was a much revered and sucked-upon baby blanket, and some anecdotal evidence that I befriended a towel and a clothes basket, but not much else.

Now that I have a daughter, toys have taken on a new significance and I’ve found myself thinking about their appropriateness and long-term effects. The deep fear, of course, is that I’ll give her the wrong things – toys that make her stupid or dull or dumb or worse. Surely this is largely irrational, but there are literally schools of thought about such things, and it doesn’t help that the baby industry preys upon these fears and expertly exploits them.

Kottke’s comments about trash-as-toys definitely has some resonance. I love buying my daughter toys, but I haven’t failed to notice that many of her favorites are already sitting around – the remote control, bottles of water, my glasses, a half empty box of Ricola lozenges. Many of the brighter, super baby engineered toys are already gathering dust.

And finally, to end this meandering diatribe, a rant: don’t buy musical baby toys. Forget the music mobile. Don’t bother. It all sounds like crap. I can’t stand to listen to such tinny ever-repeating garbage and I’m positive that my daughter would much prefer real songs or real singing from real voices or at least a decent pair of speakers. There are two important exceptions, however: 1) musical instruments; and 2) this thing:

The Playskool Made for Me MP3 player is wicked awesome. Yes, it’s bright and colorful and has twinkling lights and may overstimulate your little one into high heaven. But… it sounds great and let’s you play your own songs and after a deluge of terrible baby music and awful baby musical devices… it’s a damn Rolls Royce.