tis the saison?

trying le merle from north coast, tonight. nice, clean flavor. i love it when beer develops fruity flavor without any fruit. the cork smelled like champagne when it first came out.

absolutely loving the 8-bit invasion at work

manufacturing is dirty, does it have to be?

crazy bad pollution in china ever wonder why smog's worse there than here?

well, not so long ago, similar (but maybe not as concentrated) pollution was here. could it be that by leaving the manufacturing to the chinese, we're letting them do our dirty work? i really want to see us bring more "making" and manufacturing back to the united states, but we have to be able to do it in a manner that is not so destructive.

can our post-industrial-revolution (or whatever it's going to be called) please be based on manufacturing in the cleanest possible way? can the post-industrial-revolution's social mores be based on less consumption instead of the schlocky bullshit "ingenuity" being hocked by larry the cable guy in this commercial. 

there has to be some sort of balance to manufacturing and population centers. sure, you need critical mass to minimize the waste for some industries. this will cut down on transportation of raw materials or, at least, have shared services like railroads, power, and employees, but does all the crap have to be made in the same place far away from our homes? would we demand cleaner and smaller manufacturing if the plant was visible from our backyards? hell yes. would we buy things that last longer and are easier to repair, if the junkyar... er... recycling centers were right around the corner? yes, again (hopefully).

i don't know... it just feels as if we're propping up a shiny-gadget-driven manufacturing bubble that's going to pop like the american housing market. more things are being built for us to consume, but for them to be manufactured at a price that we're willing to pay, they can only be manufactured by cheap labor or with no environmental regulations--or worse, both.

can we keep manufacturing small to medium sized? can we keep our consumption that way too? it feels like multiple things need to shift on both the supply and demand side of things.

hiding in aisle 14 at t1

if you're going to wait until after 22:00 for your first beer

this is a good place to start.

disassembly!

when i was a kid i had a workbench and a set of tools. when it came to fixing stuff, i was ok. i kept bicycles, go karts, and an old motorcycle running, but the real fun of the workbench was disassembling stuff. i tore apart stuff like clock radios or whatever electrical gadgets were headed toward the garbage. well, when we decided to send a couple of old desktop computers to the recycler, i figured i'd pull the hard drives apart to show the kids. i kind of felt like a kid again, too.

not aero

file under: #doingItWrong

oak-aged yeti, so nice

enjoying a hugely flavored imperial stout. the oak hangs around after the finish, but it works well.

vim commands/functions to run cukes within vim

OK, I'm doing more rails work in vim, these days, so I'll be tossing more stupid vim tricks up here as I run into them.

The other day, I was moaning about cucumber and locations of step files, as it encourages (but doesn't depend upon) a file-naming convention. As such, step files can be hard to find. Anyway, as I'm kicking through a way to script a solution to that problem, I decided I wanted a way to run cukes from within vim.

I came up with two solutions:

1. one to run the whole file that's in the currently open buffer
2. one to run the scenario that starts on the line the cursor is on

To implement these, I'm using the very cool RunShellCommand function found here, which opens the results of the command in a scratch buffer in a new window.

I just added the following command definitions to my .vimrc:

command! Cuke call s:RunShellCommand('bundle exec cucumber ' .expand('%:p'))

command! CukeL call s:RunShellCommand('bundle exec cucumber ' .expand('%:p').':'.winline())  

I haven't mapped short commands with my <leader> yet as I'm not sure if I'll use this regularly, but it seemed helpful, so I thought I'd share. The drawback is that the execution time of cucumber is long, especially if it's a UI test, so it can take over your UI for a while, which is why I added CukeL, so I cold run just the current line. The cucumber overhead is still pretty high, so I may look into creating a modified RunShellCommand that forks the process, so you can continue working while you fire off the command.