I got this letter from my pal Javier:

Dear englishspeaking friends

As you might have already heard, we’re planning a little roadtrip in may 2008 starting from Zürich to Odessa (Ukraine). We’ll be driving about 3000km in 10 days in a car that should cost less than CHF 500 (~ $425). The cars will be sold in Odessa and the profit will be donated to a local NGO.

Intrested in joining us? Write an email before the end october that contains the following information:

1. Teamname
2. First name, last name and email-address of every team member.

The maximum number of cars will be 20, so: First come, first served!

Gentlemen, start your engines!

Carlo, Duri and Javier

P.S.: Excuse our english, but it’s not our fault that your german sucks.

I’m consulting here in Winnipeg, Canada for a very cool dot.com. Teaching these developers Ruby on Rails is just too fun. They are Web Developers, mainly having used PHP, and like every great development shop, they’ve rolled their own tools for doing database access, managing the database (migrations), templating, deployment, etc. After teaching them the basics of Ruby on Rails and all these things that are built right in, they’re in love. I can’t wait to show them the built-in AJAX, testing, RESTful web-services, deployment, and all the other ruby-love and rails-goodness that I’ve come to love myself.

I certainly remember the day I fell in love with Ruby on Rails. Sigh.

If you’re a web developer doing web-stuff and you haven’t taken a look at Ruby on Rails, you’re missing out. Even learning a new framework (and language like Ruby) will expand your repertoire in your current language/framework of choice.

Did I mention I’m available for hire for consulting/training/project-kick-offs/development?

I’m back from the Annual RubyConf, held this year in Denver Colorado.  I had a blast.  It was nice to put a lot of faces to names (e-mails).

The talks were wide-ranging from “The History of Ruby” to “YARV Compliation” and all over the place in their scope and topics, from hard-core techno-babble to pontification on how open-source principles might apply to a free-spirited consulting company.

One of the speakers couldn’t make it, so RubyCentral opted to use the 45 minutes to do 9 five-minute “Lightning Talks.”  Derek and I signed up and presented the newest incarnation of Heartbeat, which demoed the live setup of an application for push-button deployment over the web using Capistrano.  We got a lot of great feedback, and some of the other lightning talks were amazing.

Overall, the conference had a great sense of comradarie around this thing we know and love called Ruby.  I can’t help but think that’s what it must have felt like during the first few Java conferences.  I can’t speculate on the exact nature of where Ruby’s going, but with “official” support to the Ruby Community and presentations from respective members of the Sun, Microsoft, and Apple camps, things are looking good.

My pal Bart’s TrainCheck just got put on Google Co-Op. Congrats Bart!

It took me a while to figure out what this Google Co-Op really was. It appears like the google services that appear on searches, now can be somewhat company/user provided based on matching search terms. It almost, to me, started to sound like tagging (do I hear “labeling”) somewhere in that massive schpeel of documentation they got going. I have yet to see the google version of tagging, but it’s kind of like that little chinese guy in a gang fight. He just sits there, not doing anything, but man oh man, when he does, you know it’s gunna be something cool.

Things are well — I just got back from snowboarding for the first time:

http://www.seebq.com/gallery2/v/denver

and we’re re-re-launching Meople: http://www.meople.net/ — this time it survived the “great ruby rewrite” [1]

In other news, Derek Haynes and I have found a way to make a lot of money, starting a company to promote a new sport: hand-tennis-ball. It’s like Tennis, but with no racquet, and of course team-dynamics and “flair” are integral parts of the game. It’s revolutionary, no doubt.

[1] Joel on Software pegged us good. He knows too much!

Let’s just get this straight. Jodi and I went on an extended business trip. That’s right, a fabulous business trip to Milan. It just so happens, we spent the first week working in Milan, and then the next week meandering on over to Rome, up the coast of Italy, and to Paris for a few days.

We hopped on a plane ….
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We made it to Italy. Jodi and I are here for the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milano. Basically, it’s like the International Contemporary (and non-contemporary) Furniture Fair that happens every year in NY, but of course, better.

We’re having a blast, and have already gotten in trouble with fashion and furniture shopping in the fashion and furniture capital of the world. Stay tuned for updates and blogging on the event, and some pictures, of course, lots of pictures….

ciao!

Sunday turned out to be Dangerous Animal day! With my 2 o’clock Sharks Board dissection on the plate, Sandy suggested we continue the theme, so she took me to a Crocodile farm and reptile museum. It was about 30 minutes out of Durban, near Umlali (pronounced Uhm-shlali). They apparently farm crocodiles, which means they had quite a lot of these fellas, around 50 or so that were 2-3 years old and thus ready to sell out to breeders themselves, and quite a few mature (large) ones that were laying around all over the place. They also had lots of baby crocs, and tons of incubating eggs in different areas.

We started off by walking …
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After waking up a bit late on Saturday morning, Sandy (our wonderful keeper) of the Gateway County Lodge invited me along with a fellow guest to visit a Natural Game Reserve, called Tala, about an hour out of Durban. I immediately said yes, and off we were, with a packed lunch and some borrowed binoculars. It was absolutely incredible.

Now, keep in mind, this is a game reserve ….
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The flight left Atlanta at 10:30am on Monday morning headed towards Johannesburg, South Africa (map). After a nice long (17 hour) journey, I arrived around 10:30am on Tuesday (Johannesburg is 7 hours ahead). I didn’t get much sleep on the plane (I never do), so I decided to try to power through the day. I met my contact, Carel from CommerceQuest SA at the Arrivals gate, and we had 2 hours to kill before our flight to Durban. I drank two cappuccinos, and we chatted about South Africa and such — I even learned a little bit of Afrikaans (one of the many languages spoken in South Africa). The flight to Durban was only an hour, on a small commuter plane. While Pretoria is the capital of South Africa, Johannesburg is the largest city, and Durban is known as a tourist destination. It’s on the coast, and it does have a down-town area, but it also definitely has a laid-back feeling to the city.

Upon arriving in Durban, …
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