Been a biut of a while since I posted. Not a whole heck of a lot to say. For those that are interested, here are the highlights of what’s going on in my life:

  • JB (Jelly Bean) is doing well. I felt the first kick this weekend! We had a doctor’s appointment on Friday morning for a quick sonogram and everything is going well. We still haven’t found out JB’s sex and don’t want to. We’re now at 21 weeks and looking solid. We need to get moving on refinishing the nursery.

  • As far as the house is concerned: work continues. I’ve been doing a lot of work on the yard lately, not so much inside. The bare patches in the back 40 are filling in nicely, and I planted 12 boxwoods along the front yard to give us a nice hedge which makes the front of the house look slightly less hideous. At least now it looks like someone cares. We got an estimate on painting the exterior and some parts of the interior, which we read and laughed over. We’ll do it ourselves and take a vacation for that amount of money.

    Laying the floor in the basement has really paid off – while we were watching the game last night, Beth mentioned that she really likes that room now, and that’s before repainting or finishing the baseboard heaters. It’s the job I’m proudest of so far.

  • The Red Sox dropped 2 out of 3 in the recent series with the Yankees, and it’s particularly painful because the win came as a result of monkey-boy (Alex Rodriguez) hitting a solo homer in the top of the 9th. Of course, that only puts the Yankees 12.5 games back from the Sox and 1 game ahead of the last-place Devil Rays, so no reason to start hand-wringing yet. Especially given how badly the Yankees fall apart when things go wrong. Second-place Toronto is 10.5 games back, so we still have a pretty nice cushion. And I know it’s still early, but I’d love a post-season without the Yankees. Far as the Yankees are concerned – as Yogi Berra once said: “It’s getting late awfully early”.

    Have I mentioned that the mlb.com site is not only miserably designed but painfully slow? Why is it still so hard for people to get websites reasonably well-done in this day and age?

  • Been learning Ruby in preparation of moving further into Rails (I did some quick test stuff with Rails and was pleased with the results). I’ve looked at some other web-development frameworks (most notably CakePHP) but I’ve noticed that none of them really made code easier to manage or resulted in fewer bugs or faster development time that my own home-grown framework.

    After years of developing in PHP, Ruby is a liberating. Even at the initial stages, the language is a joy to use and incredibly powerful. I look forward to eventually ditching PHP altogether and moving all my development to Ruby/Rails.

  • As an adjunct to the above, I’m pushing again to get Max and Lucas to learn programming. My experiment with Logo wasn’t terribly successful – I would need more time than they were willing to give to get them walking on their own with that language. However, I’ve found a great alternative teaching tool, based on Ruby: Hackety Hack. It should be released for the Mac this month, so Max, Lucas and I will all be learning Ruby at the same time.

  • Work is going great – I now have two major projects going on: adding mapping to the core application and extending functionality on the State House video servers. Reasonably interesting work, although I still get frustrated by the other small jobs that keep coming in and taking time away from these.