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.