Dr. Wingnut

The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

A young man from Minnesota moves to Florida and goes to a big “everything under one roof” department store looking for a job.

The Manager says, “Do you have any sales experience?”

The kid says “Yeah. I was a salesman back in Minnesota.”

Well, the boss liked the kid and gave him the job.  “You start tomorrow.  I’ll come down after we close and see how you did.”

His first day on the job was rough, but he got through it.  After the store was locked up, the boss came down. “How many customers bought something from you today?”

The kid says “One”.

The boss says “Just One?  Our sales people average 20 to 30 customers a day.  How much was the sale for?”

The kid says “$101,237.65″.

The boss says “$101,237.65?  What the heck did you sell?”

The kid says, “First, I sold him a small fish hook.  Then I sold him a medium fishhook.  Then I sold him a larger fishhook.  Then I sold him a new fishing rod.  Then I asked him where he was going fishing and he said down the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat, so we went down to the boat department and I sold him a twin engine Chris Craft.  Then he said he didn’t think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him that 4×4 Expedition.”

The boss said, “A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a boat and a truck?”

The kid said “No, the guy came in here to buy Tampons for his wife, and I said, ‘Dude, your weekend’s shot, you should go fishing.”

Last night I went to my second Ruby Users of Minnesota meeting at the Loring Park Dunn Brothers.  Seems like a nice bunch.  Here’s what I learned about:

• There was a discussion about using Simply RESTful in rails applications.  This technique uses all the transaction methods of the HTTP protocol instead of passing every CRUD action through a POST or GET transaction, it attempts to use the correct transaction for the action, eg. Create => POST, Retrieve => GET, Update =>PUT, Delete => DELETE.  This is a good article: What’s New in Edge Rails: Simply RESTful Support – And How to Use It.  There was also something at Icon Buffet that was discussed, but I can’t seem to find it today.
• The Mac heads seem to be using Textmate as their development editor of choice, but I have a license for BBEdit and haven’t figured out all it can do, so I won’t be switching just yet.  Maybe when I get an Intel based Mac I can run Multi-Edit in a parallels virtual machine on the desktop.
• There was a demo for a system management software application where the presenter (sorry I forgot your name) said that he was running code blocks out of the database.  Yippee!  Just like what you could do with Clipper.
• Then in another presentation of an application for managing youth sports teams the discusstion turned to javascript and a Rails plugin for managing Unobtrusive Javascript called script.aculo.us

This should be quite enough to chew on as I continue working on the PickAxe book.

We had no idea that this [the Internet] would turn into a global and public infrastructure.

You can call it any number of things: “equipment lifecycle”, “asset turnover” or even just “Hey, get rid of the crappy old thing already.”  But the upshot is the same, clearing desk and rack space of old equipment to make room for sparkling new hardware … Fortunately, there are more places to put that old stuff besides the dumpster out back [Which is now illegal in many places, Ed].  Key among these is donation.  Not only do you get the fuzzy Good Samaritan feeling, you can also get a tax write-off.

Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible.

There are four stages of denial:

1. It won’t happen.
2. If it does happen, it won’t happen to me.
3. If it does happen to me, it won’t be that bad.
4. If it happens to me and it’s bad, there’s nothing I can do to stop it anyway.