Knitting Project: You Are The Chosen One

After participating in Seann McKeel's knitnotwar 1,o0o project by contributing 10 knit cranes, I had the pleasure of knitting a square for her new project: YOU ARE THE CHOSEN ONE.

In addition to creating a square to make up the phrase "You are the chosen one," participants were invited to share their thoughts on the theme. I contributed a pink T in stockinette on a red background in seed stitch--my first foray into knitting with two colors in a row--and the following statement:

I see "You are the chosen one" as a call to action. In a biological sense, it's literally true. The extreme unlikelihood that any one of us would come into being is mystical enough that significant change on a local, national, or global scale shouldn't be reserved for superheroes and prophesied saviors. In a celebrity-obsessed culture that seems to be run by a wealthy few, it's easy to forget that we are each special and capable of changing the world.

I am so happy Seann is bringing peace, collaboration, and craft together, and providing a larger purpose for my knitting than keeping my friends' hands and necks warm.

See photos of the project as it is assembled here.

The Ugly Underbelly of the Switch to Amazon RDS on Heroku

If you've decided to make the switch from Heroku's default PostgreSQL database to an Amazon RDS db, you may have come across this helpful article: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/amazon_rds

What that article doesn't tell you is:

1. You'll probably need to add the mysql2 gem to your Gemfile.
2. The newest version of the mysql2 gem won't work with Rails 3.0.x, so you'll need to do gem 'mysql2', '< 0.3'. The article may not tell you this, but the errors you'll see in the Heroku logs helpfully point this out.
3. Your DATABASE_URL Heroku config var should start with mysql2:// instead of mysql://.

Also, I find the Amazon console to be easier to use than the command line RDS tools Heroku's article steers you towards. The one pitfall is their IP address suggestion is wrong for adding CIDR/IP access to a security group.

However the taps gem the article recommends worked like a dream--albeit a dream interrupted by a brief nightmare that you don't have the mysql gem installed. Since I'm using OS X, that was as easy as

env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql.

If a recent survey I received from Heroku asking about my RDS usage is any indication, they may come out with a mysql database service themselves. On that day, I will celebrate, do some case insensitive searches and insert-or-updates, and celebrate some more.

Why I love using Path

Full disclosure here, I'm married to someone on the team, so I admittedly have more incentive to use and promote Path. But I think I'm being as impartial as possible here. (Trust me, I wouldn't promote everything my husband has worked on.) This also means I have months of experience as a beta tester, with family and friends who are using the app, and I know well how it fits into my life.

Watching the press reactions roll in, I've noticed that many articles seem to be missing the greatest things about the app. Here are the reasons I've come to love this app and depend on it daily.

1. I don't have to do anything extra to share photos with close friends.

This is a huge one. I've had a Flickr account for 5 years. I know, because that's when my latest photos are from. I have just a few albums on Facebook, and I rarely contribute new photos to them. It's not that I'm not taking photos I like or want to share with friends, it's just that I find it tedious to connect my phone to my laptop to sync, and then go back over events that are already in my past to pick photos from them. Path is what I use to take photos now instead of the built in camera app so it's no extra effort, and I'm sharing photos while they're still fresh. If I don't want to share a given photo, I mark it as private. Done!

2. I can tag photos right when I take them.

Another pain point with photos is the difficulty in organizing them. Like sharing, I find I want to tag things when I'm taking the photo, not days or weeks later when I finally get around to saving them to iPhoto. I really like having my photos organized and labelled accurately so I can look back over them.

3. It's simple.

This seems to be something that some of the tech writers out there are complaining about, but I don't mind that some standard social features like commenting aren't included. Path is still a new service, and they can always add features later. I'm excited to see what their take will be because I know it will be well thought out, and not just a clone of what's already out there. I'd much prefer a harmonious app with a reduced set of features to a feature-heavy hot mess.

4. My photos are backed up when I take them.

As I mentioned earlier, I don't connect my phone with my laptop to sync that often, so it's a small comfort to know that if it were lost or stolen, I wouldn't lose my un-synced photos. Plus, I'm not that great about backing up photos that make it to my computer's hard drive, and it's not hard to imagine scenarios where I'd lose my phone and laptop simultaneously. I know there are other ways to back up my photos, but they require some effort to set up. And did I mention I'm lazy?

5. It encourages me take note of good moments.

I find that I snap many more photos now that they're shared with my friends. A delicious meal, a particularly beautiful day, a cute position my dog is sleeping in, it's all stuff I'm more apt to capture now that my photos are going somewhere meaningful.

I've used photo sharing services for years, and I even implemented photo sharing for a social networking company that I used to work at. I know how hard it is to get it right, and I feel like Path may finally have done it.

Hail Heroku! Welcome Thingerling.com!

I praised github a couple of posts back for how easy it was to get started. Well, Heroku was just as easy to set up. I put up my new company website Thingerling.com yesterday in just a couple of hours. And most of that was spent learning to use Rails and "designing" the page template, which is super bare bones, but I like to think it has a casual elegance. And it was all totally free, given that I already have a github account and a domain name!

Perhaps this was overkill for a static website, but hopefully I'll be doing something a little more fun with it at some point. Plus, did I mention dead simple and totally free?

Knitting Project: Baby Slipper Sandals

I finally completed the sandals I was knitting for my new niece last night. They knit up pretty quickly, even with all the turning and picking up stitches. The thing that took the longest was sewing on the last button!

They're from the Baby Cashmerino book by Debbie Bliss. I opted for a similar, machine washable yarn instead of Baby Cashmerino, as exquisite as those colors are. Still, this pink is cute enough.

Now my niece just needs to age a bit to grow into them. And it would be great if her right foot happens to end up slightly longer than her left.

The wonders of github

I had the pleasure of setting up a repository with github. Never have I seen version control be so easy and downright friendly! I was able to set it up in something like ten minutes, maybe less, and I didn't even have git installed going into it. I don't even want to think about how many headaches I would have to have dealt with to get a subversion repository up and running.

It came highly recommended, but I had no inkling that it would be so streamlined. It even builds a short list of steps--dynamically, using the email address and project name you entered--so it's a no brainer to follow along. I, too, would highly recommend it for anyone looking for an easy solution for version control hosting. And now that Xcode 4 will have support for git built in (and some pretty sweet diff tools), it should be a headache-free solution in the long run, too.

All this may even make version control so easy that it's fun. Almost.

All-important first post!

I've mulled over what would provide the impetus for a first post, and I haven't come up with anything good. I did consider talking about my trip to the Sasquatch! Festival, but couldn't get it together to write anything up in a timely fashion. And now my reflections on seeing Pavement are hazy at best, and of dubious interest to others.

But I've decided to soldier on, here, and break up that first post gravitas here so I can get on to the real posting.

Just so I don't have a post totally devoid of content--I'm hoping to keep the navel gazing to a minimum, although yes, this is a blog, so it may creep in now and then--I will tell a quick story. The name of this blog originated from a domain name I purchased a few years back with the intent of making a google maps overlay that gave you the least hilly walking routes around San Francisco. Unfortunately I only got to the initial step of looking for sources of elevation data before losing momentum. Since then, google has added walking direction support, and I can dream that some day they will have an option for avoiding hills. In the meantime, knowing the wiggle, and perfecting my own Mission-to-Noe Valley wigglette (Valencia-23rd-Chattanooga-24th) has kept me relatively perspiration-free.

Having named the project "Lazy San Franciscan", never completing it seems to be the expected result. And luckily, it's a name that could describe me, as well. Though I have an achiever streak in me, I also have a wicked lazy streak, which I like to talk up as being efficiency-minded. The focus of the project is arguably similarly conflicted in that a truly lazy person would most often opt not to walk. Only lazy achievers like myself would have been interested, so maybe it's for the best that I'm opting to repurpose this name, and hopefully it will be an appropriate title for my musings.