Blizzo :: The Morgan Blog

A couple of weeks ago Mason got to go on an impromptu day trip with Grandma Susie to Disneyland. He had a great time and brought back a present for Madeleine. During discussion around the event I told my mom that I didn’t really remember my trip to Disneyland for some reason, which is strange since I usually have very detailed memories about my childhood. A couple of days ago she called me and told me that it was her turn to go on the trip (it’s sort of a lottery thing at her work) and she wanted to take me. So my mom and I are headed to Disneyland next Wednesday, and I couldn’t be more excited. I will tell you all about it and share photos when I return!

I haven’t written much about my personal life on this blog. Oh sure, I toss out the editorial and observation, but those are largely external. A couple of months ago, I realized that I was, well… sort of dead inside. That isn’t to say that I was depressed or that there was nothing good in my life. It’s just that I started to remember a time in my youth where I was full of fire and determination, and how the years of reality and obligation quenched it, little by little, until all that was left was one of those little eternal flame type thingys that you see in front of important peoples burial sites.

This realization has given me the opportunity to reassess my life. I am actively trying to be more appreciative of the people around me, like my amazing wife and my adorable little munchkins. My cat is even getting more drive by pettings on my way in and out of the house. It was in this new outlook that I attended the caucus for my precinct last night. I have never attended a caucus before, I’m not really sure why. But with two strong candidates and what I believe to be a very pivotal election, I thought it would be better to get involved earlier in the process.

I stood for Obama at the caucus. I was really on the fence, but when it comes down to it I just want some new blood in the oval office. We have had 19 years of Clinton and Bush Presidents. If Hillary is elected that will push it to 23 years, 27 if she ends up serving two terms, which seems to be the trend. All that said, if Hillary ends up as the candidate in the election, I won’t have a problem supporting her.

After the vote was taken at the caucus they asked for volunteers to act as delegates. I raised my hand and I was chosen. I am excited about taking a more active role in politics and in my community. Then they announced that they needed a new precinct chairperson. I looked at Amy and she nodded. My hand went up. I am now a precinct chairperson, which means I will be meeting with the precinct captains and helping organize their activities, getting people out to vote, etc. I tried to find some information about what this role really means and I found a document by the Sarpy County Republican Party (Not that I am a republican, but I think that hardly matters).

I am excited to be part of the process this year. I hope you are too.

For years now I have been happily sipping from the same transparent green nalgene bottle. Last week, however, a co-worker told me that there is evidence that drinking from those kinds of bottles can be bad for you. He was right! To be fair, evidence doesn’t seem to be totally conclusive, but still it freaked me out a little bit. Googling around the jury still seems to be out.

So being freaked out, and having found at least some credible evidence that this might be true, I am giving up my happy, lime green bottle that has been good to me for so many years. I went to the REI superstore downtown and was surprised at how small their selection was. I spoke to an employee and he was very helpful, pointing me to a Klean Kanteen, which is not as pretty as my nalgene, but is 100% stainless steel (that means no nickel). I plunked down $20, which also seems ridiculous, and now I am breaking it in.

Do you think I am being too reactionary? Buying into conspiracy theories? Just generally nuts? Maybe… but I’ll let you take that gamble with your own health.

I was outside scraping ice off the windows of my 89′ Buick Century this morning when I saw Reuben. I was vaguely aware that he was walking towards me, but unsure of his destination, I didn’t take much notice. Eventually he got in conversational range and I was forced to turn and face him.

Now, before I tell you about Reuben I should tell you about my neighborhood. In less than two years we have: had our car broken into 3 times; had our shed broken into and our bikes, ladder, and miscellaneous tools stolen; seen homeless people loaded into the drunk tank; seen a car evade the police by jumping a curb; and more. That said, our neighborhood isn’t really a BAD place, but it merits caution. Thus begin my internal psychological dialog:

“Careful, who knows what this guy wants”
“Shut up, you’re being paranoid”
“I bet hes going to ask you for money, he wouldn’t rob you in broad daylight like this”
“You’re only saying that because he’s black”
“How dare you accuse me of being racist!”
“Well, if he were an old white man you wouldn’t say that”
“Well, OK, maybe you’re right. Let’s see what he wants…”

Reuben was older, wearing a plaid knit newsboy hat, some sort of synthetic brown pants that were impervious to stains or wrinkles, and a couple of layered jackets. He seemed friendly and I said hello. He asked me for a ride to Kaiser, his car had broken down and he was late for a Doctors appointment.

“He seems nice, I want to help him”
“Maybe he’ll pull a gun on you when you get into the car”
“He is NOT going to pull a GUN”
“Well, you should hide your wallet just in case, you have a lot of cash right now”
“Fine, I’ll hide my wallet, sheesh”
“And ask him a few questions first, like where his broken down car is and stuff”
“OK, OK”

So I asked Reuben where he lived, which he shared, and where his car was, which he pointed out to me at the end of the block. Taking him to the Doctor would mean I would be late to work. Oh well, thats OK. I told him to stand back, I wanted to pull the car out so he could get in the passenger side without trudging through a snowbank. He stood back and I got in the car. To my shame, I took my wallet out of my pocket and hit it under the floor mat in the back seat. I pulled out into the street and waited for him to come to the passenger side door. He had some trouble with it, my doors are old and heavy, so I gave it a nudge and it popped open. Reuben grabbed the door handle and I saw his hand shaking.

“Man, we are such jerks”
“Totally”

I started driving to Kaiser and we made small talk. He told me that he worked for Gates Rubber for 20 years, fixing flat tires and replacing dead batteries for their vehicle fleet. We spoke about the best way to get to the Kaiser parking lot, though I had decided to head for the front door. He kept wanting me to drop him off far away so as not to inconvenience me. At one point I asked him his name, since he hadn’t told me yet, and I told him mine. We shook hands, and then he told me, again, that he worked for Gates Rubber for 20 years. Reuben also told me he was 82 years old. I found that hard to believe, but I have always had a hard time judging ages. I like to think of everyone as ageless, living forever, so age shouldn’t matter. Someday maybe.

I dropped Reuben off after making sure he had someone he could call for a ride home, and wished him luck. I still don’t know if I should feel good about myself for helping him out, or bad for thinking the worst. I wonder how many people wrestle with their subconscious like this. I guess that will give me something to think about for a while. All in all, not a bad start for a Thursday.

Some time ago I designed a cool new theme for my website, but then never got around to implementing it. The theme I was using before was fine, but it wasn’t very pretty. Anyway, I saw this Dilectio theme one on Smashing Magazine and it was orangish, which I love, and clean. Hopefully I will have some more time to write as my life calms down from the move/holidays/new job/etc.

ContactBook, the application I spent the majority of my time at Vonage working on, is finally seeing the light of day.

It is only available to Vonage customers, and even then only a select few for the early release. If you are a Vonage customer and you know me, let me know and I might be able to help get you access… maybe.

Essentially it is an online contact management system, nothing new there. But it layers outgoing calling features on top of it, like:

• Click to Call: Lets you initiate phone calls from the web
• Group Calling: Think of it as a party line, you and up to five friends can chat together, with a super awesome web based control panel
• Call Blast: Record a message and send it out to a whole bunch of people. Like those annoying political phone calls you get, but from you.

I also know quite a bit about whats coming up, and it should be pretty cool. Features are waiting in line to be added to this application, so keep checking back for changes.

Oh my gosh, a blog post!

I realize posts have been sparse these days, but it has been a crazy couple of months. I am settling into my new job here at OpenLogic and am pleased to tell you all things are going well. I work with very bright people, and the atmosphere is positive and results oriented. I am starting my 4th week today, and it looks like code I have written will be in production before the end of the month.

Things at home are starting to resemble normal life already. There are no more boxes upstairs and the basement is functional, if not a little crowded. Amy is staying at home with the kids for now, and that has been a big adjustment for them. All in all things are going really well, and I am happy to be back in Colorado.

The only other thing I thought I would mention is that we bought a real Chistmas tree this year. We got rid of our fake one during the move to NJ, and bought IKEA’s Charlie Brown fake tree (OK, thats not what it was called, but it might as well have been) while we were there. Through the years my appreciation of Christmas has varied from love to loathe, but this year I am excited to see the house decorated and the kids excited. Mason has been cutting pictures out of catalogs and newspaper ads for his Santa list. I keep reminding him that Santa doesn’t bring everything you ask for, just a few things. He nods his head condescendingly, knowing I have no idea how this works, and cuts out more pictures.

I will try to blog more regularly now that life is getting a little more routine. To those in Jersey, I miss you all, but I sure don’t miss Jersey ;).

Despite a blog post about doing a look and feel upgrade on my site, I haven’t gotten around to it yet. My excuse for today will be “holw cow things have been busy”. IN addition to gearing up for the project I have been working on at Vonage to go into live beta status, I have also been wrapping things up as I have taken a new job. Yes, it’s true. As much as I have enjoyed my stay in New Jersey (no really, I said that with a straight face, it’s not that bad) I am heading back to Colorado.

Random Vonage Peeps: Group Photo

I have taken a position with OpenLogic in Broomfield, Colorado and will be moving back to my house in Denver next week. It is a senior developer position working with, surprise, Ruby on Rails on their new tool OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX). I am excited about the company and the opportunity, but leaving Vonage is a little bittersweet. I met a lot of great people there, and I am hoping those relationships will survive the test of time.

There is more to write about here, most of it non-geek related, but I will wait until I have settled in Denver before blogging again.

As the time nears for one of my applications to move towards general release, performance is the concern of the day. There are still bugs to fix, visual indiscretions to … discrete, etc. My good man Becker got some profiling code into the application, but I found the results difficult to read through. Last week I attended Ruby East and caught a nice presentation by Ezra Zygmuntowicz of Engine Yard regarding Ruby performance and optimization. During the presentation, he showed a bit of code he includes in his applications to make wrapping select blocks of code for profiling easier. He was nice enough to share his code with me, and allow me to present it here for all of you.

Where does the code go?
Well, you can put it anywhere really. For my quick and dirty testing I put it at the bottom of RAILS_APP/config/environment.rb, but you could just as easily put it in it’s own file in your RAILS_APP/lib directory, or any number of other options.

OK, now how do I use it?
All you have to do to use the profiler is wrap whatever block of code you want to profile in __profile__

Now what do I do?
An HTML file will be created in RAILS_APP/log/something.html. Where something is the string that you passed to the __profile__ call when you wrapped it around your code. In my example the file would have been called “monkey_profile.html”. Pop it open in your favorite browser and take a look.

This is confusing, what do all these numbers mean?
I don’t know. Really, I don’t. I am rather new to profiling, so I can’t really explain the generated report with any accuracy. Take a look at the ruby-prof docs, or find someone who knows about profilers in general and ask them to explain it to you. If you are a profiling genius, or you know of any good online resources for getting useful information out of ruby-prof reports, please let me know.

Happy profiling.

If only an irrational fear of clowns could explain away my insomnia. Faced with allergies, a bad cold and various life stresses, I only got two hours of sleep last night. Today, when I try to nap, my thoughts ricochet against the walls of my brain and keep me from resting. If I don’t get some sleep soon, it won’t be safe for me to drive to the Ruby East conference tomorrow that I have been looking forward to.

I have never had this happen before, any suggestions?