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.