terror_firma

Yesterday, Maggie and I went to the animal shelter to foster an dog. We expected to just meet her and have an interview, but we ended up taking her anyway. Her name is Kelly and she's a four-year old beagle. She was recently hit by a car and her former owners signed her over to the shelter rather than pay the medical bills.



Despite her broken leg, Kelly is very active. She managed to pee on our carpet in five places last night while we weren't watching. Today, she's been much better behaved, so I expect (hope) that it was just nerves.

We're used to larger dogs, but there are certain advantages to the beagle size. Our backyard has a short fence, so a larger dog would be able to jump it easily. Kelly is also small enough that she's easy to carry (which we've had to do a couple of times because of her leg) and she's not overwhelming when sitting on your lap.

They expect that she'll be healed and ready for adoption by the time we leave for Christmas, so the timing should work out well.

We'll just have to see if we're ready to give her up at that point.

Maggie and I closed on the house today, which is a bit crazy. I might have more to say now, since not only will I have house stuff to talk about but for once I'm working on a project that isn't totally secret! Well, not anymore, anyway.

However, today I am posting for very practical reasons. Maggie finished putting our invitations together, so we're going to start sending them out to people ASAP. That means I need your latest contact info if I don't already have it (if you got your save the date card in the mail, you should be good). Drop me a line at will at greecouple.com and I'll make sure you get it!

Congratulations to all the other couples who've gotten married recently (or are about to get married)! I hope the after-wedding is more fun than planning the wedding. :)

Our latest game is now out in the wild, and you all should play M.I.L.O.. It's in the Jay is Games design competition (the theme was UPGRADE), so you'll see a little "vote for this game" link underneath the game (on the right, next to the screenshot). You should play it and (hopefully) vote for it. It does require that you donate at least $1 via Paypal (to minimize ballot stuffing), but that money goes directly to the authors of the game (that's us!), which is very cool.

While you're there, you should check out some of the other games in the competition too. While obviously not as awesome as M.I.L.O., there are some good ones.

Let me know what you think! Kudos to anyone who beats all 15 levels!

Okay, so I'm actually a couple of days late on this, but I've been sick.

It's still relevant, though. The game that we wrote for the fourth JayisGames (JiG) competition is a finalist! This was actually the first time that they had so many entrants that they had to winnow them down before the audience voting. This means that there are two dozen great games just waiting for some love.

The audience voting is pretty interesting. Basically, you use Paypal to give money to JiG and tell Jay which games you're voting for (and how much of your money goes to each). You have to donate at least a dollar to vote and you can't vote more than once for a game, no matter how much money you donate. All of the money you donate, though, is given directly to the games you voted for! It's a great way to support a game that you enjoy.

I encourage you to take a moment and vote for your favorites, because there are a lot of good games in there. Entropic Space is the very last on the list, so it's right on the way to the submit button once you're ready. :)

Enjoy the games and help support indie game design!

It's actually been a couple of weeks since we made the sushi, but I've been too busy to get my pictures up (mostly with Entropic Space). But with a burst energy probably provided by sleeping in and then taking a nap, I have posted a few of my favorite sushi pictures for all to enjoy!

Basically, it was lots of fun and incredibly good. We had enough rice to make four rolls and we ended up eating three. I ate the fourth the next day and it was still great cold. We played around with ingredients a little, but our favorites were sweet omelette (thanks, Amy!) with peas and fried sweet potato. Less popular ingredients were the red bell pepper (we didn't cook them, so they overpowered everything else) and the daikon radish (same deal, although earthy instead of spicy).

Thanks for your suggestions! We've got the materials, so we'll probably make sushi again. And this time, we'll start earlier. You might be able to tell in the pictures that the rice is a little sticky and wet. That's because we took it off the heat early and, even worse, didn't let it cool 100% before eating.

Overall, though, definitely a successful culinary experiment.

For those who don't know, Rails Rumble was a 48-hour programming contest where teams of 1-4 built and deployed web applications using Ruby on Rails. It's the new version of last year's Rails Day, which was 24-hours but didn't require deployment. Rails Day 2006 had some hiccups as well as some serious judging problems (it took almost 4 months for juding to finish). However, Rory and I enjoyed Rails Day, so we decided to try Rails Rumble.

Here's what I liked about them, and why I generally enjoyed them both:

1. Working in groups is fun

2. It's cool to see what other people can do

3. It really stretches your programming muscles to do everything so fast

4. It doesn't have to be perfect, so it's easier to experiment

And here's why I won't be participating in 2008. These require a little more explanation.

1. It was poorly organized

The organizers only expected about 50 teams, even though 150 teams signed up for Rails Day last year (170 signed up this year), which led to slow-downs. Also, some things (like the voting changes) were only mentioned on IRC, making it difficult to know what was going on. They were also late to start the initial signup and voting, although those weren't big problems

2. 48 hours is too long

Working so hard for an entire weekend meant I was pretty worthless on Monday. I also had to bail on some other commitments (partly because the contest was announced late; see above). The only reason I've heard to keep it 48 hours is to keep deployment in the contest. Deployment doesn't seem like it should be a big part of the contest. Nobody had an application that just didn't run, so it wasn't a differentiator. The organizers have said that they think it's important to show people that Rails can be deployed easily, but the contest doesn't really address that (since we were given much nicer hosting than most people who have trouble deploying Rails).

3. The judging system was poor

Last year, voting was done by a set of judges who also looked at the code. This year, people could sign up to become judges and then rank applications on a 1-5 scale in four categories. Basically, that just makes it a popularity contest. After voting was done, the organizers decided to toss out anyone who voted all 5s on a single application (which was a poorly thought-out and communicated decision; see above) to address this. Of course, that doesn't stop people from voting all 5s on one app and all 1s for the rest. A better system would have pre-defined judges or use the Jay is Games system where casting a vote requires a donation towards that application. However, the organizers don't seem to feel that voting was a problem, so they probably won't change it significantly.


4. The rules reward "useful" applications, which stifles creativity

Almost all of the winning applications are just copies of existing applications (although well-done). In fact, the winning application is a recipe site, which is a common tutorial topic for Rails (some of you may remember the Kitchen Knight, which was my own take on it). I'd much rather see some crazy applications than yet another checkbook application, but that's not what the scoring system rewards.

Overall, congratulations to everyone who entered and good luck to the organizers next year! Just don't expect to see me there.

I have a problem and I think you folks can help. Friday evening, Maggie took me to the SLT business meeting/dinner/silent auction. The food was very good, as were the speakers, and I got to see two different bald eagles! They're really, really big. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera (after all, what sort of pictures could there be at a dinner...).

Maggie and I have been talking about making sushi for a while. I almost got one of those hobby books on sushi, but it seemed overkill to get a booklet AND a DVD on making sushi. It seemed like a sign when, down at the end of the tables, there was a sushi kit up for bid. I ended up winning it, so we have all the basic making of sushi (plus, for some reason, a risotto spoon).

Here's the problem. I don't have much experience with sushi, so I need to know what your favorite fillings are. We figure we can make about 6 rolls. So far, we have some Japanese radish, some normal radish, and carrots. Surely there must be more delicious things that go into sushi.

I'd prefer vegetarian ideas, but if all of you sushi fans out there know of something incredible, by all means share it with the world (and by world, I mean my LJ)!

( What does sushi look like before it's sushi? )

So now is the time to register and then vote for us!

This goes double for those of you who are currently beating me in Dungeons & Day Traders.

Now that I've had time to 1) sleep and 2) detox, I think I can talk a little more coherently about the RailsRumble experience.
( The RailsRumble experience )

And with that, Rails Rumble 2007 comes to a close.

Except that it doesn't! In fact, there will be judging starting Wednesday and running for a couple of days.

So you should check out our team profile, play some Dungeons & Day Traders and then vote for us! Or someone else, I guess, but D&DT is obviously the best. It has a duck!