A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of crossing the country to attend the jQuery conference in Boston. It was a unique opportunity for me. While we use jQuery extensively at work, I haven’t done much with it lately. However, since we have a few projects coming up that will be web focused, so it was a timely occurrence. I went with my good friend and coworker David (I’d link to his blog, but he doesn’t have one yet, cough) and another coworker, Erin, who had been to Boston before.

I couldn’t easily find information on this, so here’s a summary for those that go after me. A working example is in the sbt-scalatra-on-dotcloud branch of my fork of my friend’s sbt-scalatra-example project. If it gets merged in, I’ll update this post. The sbt-scalatra-example project combines two great technologies. The first is Scalatra, a super light-weight web framework for Scala that’s modeled after Ruby’s Sinatra. The second is the simple-build-tool (sbt), a tool for building Scala applications that’s more like rake (config file written in real programming language) than make or ant/maven (config file written in an abstract form).

I’m about to finish up my time here in beautiful North Carolina. The rental car is returned and I’m waiting for my plane to arrive and take me back to the west coast. It’s been a week chock full of great information. It’s a good thing that the conference was only three days long though, my brain is tired. It’s going to take a while to process all the new data I have, but here are three highlights:

I use these every single day: noremap <leader>ew :e <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "/" <CR> noremap <leader>es :sp <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "/" <CR> noremap <leader>ev :vsp <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "/" <CR> noremap <leader>et :tabe <C-R>=expand("%:p:h") . "/" <CR> These make it much easier to open files next to the file in the current buffer. For instance, if I run the command “vi /etc/puppet/manifests/modules/foo/bar.pp” and I need to edit a file in the same directory as bar.

I’m sick today. Well, that’s a bit of a misnomer. You see, I don’t get “sick.” I get miserable. Being sick for most people is being laid out in bed with a head full of snot, hacking and coughing and blowing through two boxes of kleenex. Not me. I get miserable. What this usually means is that my nose needs to be emptied on an hourly basis and I have less of an appetite and I usually get tired faster.

Today was a great day. Today Sara and I celebrated my birthday. She planned the whole thing out, so all I had to do was go along for the ride. After sleeping in till 10:30 (due to a late night up in Hollywood catching District 9 with some old friends), we ate a breakfast of waffles and bacon with pineapple and apple juice. We took our time and really enjoyed each other’s company.

Today was the last day of work for one of my co-workers. It’s weird to call him that, he was a friend for a long time before he was a co-worker, but it’s the co-working part of our relationship that’s coming to an end. We’ve worked together for more than three and a half years, and in that time, we were able to build some really cool stuff. We worked together so well that at one point, when we were the only two developers, we were routinely referred to as “Navid,” a portmanteau of our first names.

From this post on the venerable Joel on Software: Go to walkscore.com, and type in your address. What you’ll get is a score with detailed locations of common destinations within walking distance. My work got a 66. Where I went to college got a 72. And my current residence gets a 75. Walkability is one of the things that influenced us when we bought our home and why we like living in this area so much.

I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, so here goes… I’m lazy. I don’t like using my mouse very much. I don’t even like using my keyboard very much. In fact, if I could just think and have my computer react, I’d be happy as a clam. Well, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, so I find little ways to optimize my computer time and this utility helps out quite a bit.

So I’m going on a long vacation next week, and today was my last day of work for a little while. I’ve noticed a common theme among the days that precede a vacation. They’re usually fraught with a flurry of random tasks that all must be completed before the vacation can begin. There are also several trick workarounds and special procedures that need to be scripted or documented so that if this certain server or that random process were to crash, someone other than me would be able to get it back up and running without rousing me from my self induced slumber.

I seem to run into this problem every year. I guess my relationship with my dad is different from the one that most kids had. I didn’t wreak havoc on the house, sneak out late at night or throw big parties behind his back. Conversely, I don’t worship my dad, holding him in such high esteem that it’s as if he’s a deity of some kind, I and don’t have an overbearing urge to validate who I am when I give a gift.