Chesterville, ON

I'm out of town on business. I'm currently in the little town of Chesterville in Ontario, Canada. It's a beautiful place and I'm loving it. There's lots of agriculture and farms here, but it's all under about 4 inches of snow right now. As you might imagine, the weather is a bit cold... OK it's really cold. There is snow and ice everywhere and the wind is pretty brisk at times. Luckily I'm indoors most of the time and don't have to deal with it. The apartment that I'm staying in is upstairs from the office that I'm working in. Therefore, the only time I go outside is when I want to run and when I go out for lunch/dinner.

Here's where Chesterville is located:

View Larger Map

I landed early Tuesday morning and have been treated like a prince since my arrival. My host, Birket, is a wonderful host and has taken me to lots of fun events. As soon as I landed, he immediately took me to a great restaurant for lunch where he knew the owners and we got top notch service with some amazing food. I was a special guest at his rotary club meeting. I have got to enjoy the company of some pretty amazing locals. I even got to experience Canadian pub life (hockey et al) two nights in a row. Last night I enjoyed some Mexican cooking classes at his pub and that was extremely fun. I've enjoyed some fine cuisines at various local restaurants. Everybody here has been so hospitable.

The scenery up here is amazing as well. Yesterday I took a 4.5 mile run along the frozen highway and it was a beautiful run. Kind of technical due to all the ice and frozen slush, but beautiful none-the-less. I took off out the door around 4:15 pm and the sun was setting on the horizon. It looked like the entire western sky was on fire. Unfortunately I had no camera, so you'll just have to take my word for it. The weather was "butt-cold" and I had a frozen ice-stache on my upper lip to go with my red nose and red cheeks. I think some of the drivers thought I was crazy, but I really enjoyed the run. I do plan to get in some miles tomorrow before my flight home if time permits... We'll see.

Tonight I went to a nice restaurant with Raymond (an old friend from my Virginia trip last spring) and we had a great evening together. When I got back to the apartment, I had a lot of time to myself, so I dialed up Jennifer on Skype and we've been talking for the last hour or so. We caught up on the weeks events. Apparently we had a showing on our house today. I liked the way that worked out because I didn't have to be there to do any of the cleaning. :) We're pretty sure it will fall through and our contract is up with our realtor in the next week or two. Looks like we ain't goin nowhere. No worries. We'll make it work.

So I have a flight back to the states tomorrow and I'm pretty excited to get back to a normal schedule. The last month or so has been absolutely crazy. Lots of holidays followed by lots of travel. My goal is to get back to the basics and catch up on some projects I've been putting off too long (talking about you Pop!). :)

Here's what I'm looking forward to this weekend:

Jennifer and Lizzie <3

Writers Block...?

Last month was the first month in all of my blogging history where I did not post something to my blog. Believe it or not, it felt like a huge deal to me. It proved to me that blogging isn't part of my weekly tasks anymore. I used to read blogs at least once a week. I don't even do that anymore. I've not read a friends blog post in... months. :( I'm honestly not sure when I stopped reading blogs. I think it happened slowly as more and more social networking sites started taking over the internet. I mean with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and everything else right now, the internet has just gotten too damn chaotic. Who wants to read big ass posts about something anymore. Most people just focus on the "now" with Facebook updates, Tweets, etc...

I have some new goals for 2012, so I'm sure I'll be posting about them shortly. I'd like to try the 100 miler again, I'd also like to build up a project that I've been putting off for WAAAAAY too long. I have a few new websites that I'm managing, but they are in their infant stages right now.

Right now, I have a full plate and all time spent on the computer is occupied by work or learning. I've simply not allocated any more time for writing anymore.

A Vague JQuery Template Error

I have been getting an error in JQuery Template, and it's one of those errors that is impossible to debug. It's an issue that can only be fixed by intricately checking your code line by line, character by character. Here is the vague error that I'm getting:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token return

Actually, here is the full "stack trace" (if that's what you want to call it) of the error:

I get no js compiler errors or anything, I just get this javascript error when I click on a radio button, but nothing more. My page loads correctly with no problem otherwise. Because of this fact, I was forced to inspect my code over and over and over and over... I removed code, I added code. I reworked my html a few times as well, but still got the error every time. I was literally going in circles trying everything.

The problem? I had an extra jQuery template tag in the very bottom of my script like this:

{{/if}}

At one point I tried combining both states into a single template using {{if}} {{else}} {{/if}}, but then gave up on that idea... Clearly I missed the closing tag and then never bothered to look at the bottom of my script tag when things didn't work. I'ts kind of insane that so much time was wasted on such a silly oversight on my part... Oh the whoa's of a programmer. Back to the grind.

Ruby On Rails Fan

OK, so I've been going through the online Ruby On Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl for the last few weeks in my spare time, and I'm a better programmer because of it. I've not taken any shortcuts and have learned quite a lot. The whole Model / View / Controller aspect of it came pretty easy to me since I'm a full-time ASP.NET MVC developer in my day job. Server side tags, module level variables, and helper modules are shared concepts from the ASP.NET MVC world (which I think they stole from RoR, but...). I'm really liking my new hobby.

I've learned quite a few tricks that make Ruby on Rails much more pleasing to work with than ASP.NET MVC. Namely, I like the built-in gem utilities (package manager for Ruby on Rails), I also like the command line utilities for defining database schemas, generating test records, and auto generating oodles of code. There are so many gems that work together to support testing controllers, models, and views on the fly as you code. I always thought of Unit Testing as a good thing, but it always felt like I was forcing myself to learn / practice TDD. I just never quite "got it"; when I would write unit tests I felt good about it, but as new features come into my project it is very easy to just code my projects without writing unit tests for every little thing. With Ruby on Rails, however, it feels very natural and is almost required due to the dynamic nature of the language. RSpec makes creating tests a breeze.

I'm currently hosting a few Ruby on Rails projects on Heroku, and even doing this is brain-dead easy. I literally auto-generated a Rails project from the command line, and then used the Heroku gem to "git push" my code to Heroku. It does the rest and builds my project and deploys it for the world to see.

Just the other night, I bought a domain and plan to run my very own Ruby on Rails project... I won't give away the domain name yet, but know that I'll be making a big deal of it within the next few months. In short, I love Ruby on Rails and everything that goes with it, including Vim (with rails.vim), Git, Autotest (with Growl), Spork, TDD, and everything else). I can now say that I'm a ASP.NET MVC developer by day / Ruby on Rails developer by night.

Fun!!

Testing the 'A' key

I came up with this while trying to test if I still had static electricity inside my board:

an alpha alligator almost ate annies apples after alfred asked again and again.

Figured I'd share it in case anybody else needs to test their 'a' key. :) Truthfully, I made it up on the fly, and impressed myself so much that I had to share it.