Blizzo :: The Morgan Blog

I am very excited to announce that I will be a presenter at RailsConf 2007! My colleagues and I at Vonage submitted a handful of abstracts and two of them were accepted. My topic will be “RESTful Modeling and ActiveRecord”. As soon as I have more details I will post them here. See you there!

Last week on a whim I decided to switch hosting companies for my website.  For the last few years I have been with Hostdime who, initially, offered an amazing package for an amazing price.  However, they have not kept up with the times, and at this point would not even support PHP5, let alone Ruby on Rails, so on a referral from Stephen Becker I have moved to Dreamhost.  I would not say the transition has been painless, but the problems I have encountered were resolved quickly via e-mail.  Dreamhost offers a ton of space and bandwidth, as well as up to date versions of the things that matter.

Due to my overwhelming brilliance I wiped out my database backup of this blog during the transition.  Thanks to Google’s cached pages I was able to retrieve all of the posts and put them back in here, but the dates will all have to be edited manually in the database to tighten things up.  Anything with a date of 1/1/01 is a restored post with an incorrect date, hopefully they won’t last long.

I have some new projects up my sleeve and I will share them with you as thy progress.  It should be fun!

For anyone that doesn’t know, my grandmother Miriam Shapiro passed away last week. She and my grandfather, Sam Shapiro, have always been an inspiration to me. They were amazing people. For archival purposes, here is her obituary, photo, and the contents of the speech that I gave at her funeral.

Deseret Morning News Obituary

Contents of Obituary:

Miriam Shapiro

Miriam O. Shapiro 1918 ~ 2007 Our beloved mother, Miriam Oliner Shapiro, born March 14, 1918, died Jan. 3, 2007 at St. Joseph’s Villa, where she had been a resident for the past eight and a half years. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of Jake and Rose Oliner. Miriam graduated from South High School in 1935 and was a graduate of the Class of 1939 Holy Cross School of Nursing. After graduation she practiced nursing at the Fort Douglas Hospital during World War II. On June 29, 1941, Miriam married the love of her life, Sam Shapiro. They both enjoyed their lives together for 61 years. Sam and Miriam were owners and worked together for 40 years at the Eagle Company, a successful commercial uniform and bowling shirt distributorship. After retirement from the Eagle Company, Miriam volunteered as a Pink Lady at the Salt Lake Regional Medical Center where she was known as the “Cookie Lady” for providing her wonderful homemade chocolate chip cookies to the doctors, nurses and staff and also to her family, neighbors and friends. Miriam is survived by her children, Patti Shapiro, Denver, CO, Heidi (Richard) Weinsoft, Salt Lake City, UT and Gary Shapiro, Jerome, AZ, her sister Frances (Kalman) Sherman, Hendersonville, NC, sister-in-law, Marion Sher, Salt Lake City, UT, eight grandchildren, and 16 great grandchildren. Preceded in death by her husband, Sam. Miriam was a long standing member of Congregation Kol Ami. The family would like to express their sincere thanks and gratitude to the countless nurses and caregivers on One East at St. Joseph’s Villa who so willingly and diligently provided wonderful care to our mother, Miriam. Funeral services will be held at 12:00 noon, Friday January 5th at Evans & Early Mortuary, 574 E. 100 So. Interment, Montefiore Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to Congregation Kol Ami, 2425 Heritage Way, Salt Lake City, UT 84109, St. Joseph’s Villa, 451 Bishop Federal Lane, Salt Lake City, UT 84115 or charity of choice.
Published in the Deseret News on 1/5/2007.

My Funeral Speech:

I knew that today I would want to stand before our family and friends and try to share some of my thoughts, and allow you to see Miriam through my eyes. At first, I was disappointed because the only memories that floated to the surface were archetypal grandmotherly images that seemed a little too cliché.

But after some reflection, I realize that not everyone is so fortunate. I took for granted this person who so effortlessly granted comfort, and warmth. I remember the bottomless candy dishes, how she would take me to the department store downtown and get me a balloon, the butterfly shaped jell-o with fruit cocktail I liked so much, and of course the cookies. No one ever stops talking about the cookies.

I know that for the rest of my life, I will always have those pleasant moments to reflect upon, and take comfort in; which is a legacy worth celebrating.

Today, i do not mourn the death of my grandmother, but take comfort in the knowledge that she has been reunited with Sam. May everyone be so lucky to have a person like Miriam in their lives, granting security and comfort in times of doubt, and knowing that they were loved unconditionally. Grandma, go now and begin your everlasting journey, and know that you will always be here with us, in our hearts and memories.

Today is my 3rd wedding anniversary. It has been very hard to be away from my girl for the last 3 months, but I get to see her tonight and I am very excited. On October 4th Amy, Mason and Madeleine will make the trip to join me permanently and I am thrilled. We have a nice little rental in Piscataway and Amy has some good job prospects, and it looks like we have a couple of strong candidates for renters for the house in Denver. Hopefully things will get back to normal soon for our family, and Amy can actually start getting some sleep. Thank you for everything you do for me Amy!

$1.25 chuck of fatI assume I will continue to do horrible things, so I may as well start numbering them. Last night I went out to dinner with Devon and Becker from work, and I noticed a large pie-slice-shaped piece of fat left untouched on his plate (pictured here). I told him I would give him a quarter to eat it which, surprisingly, he considered. Devon tossed in a dollar, bringing the total to $1.25 and making Devon equally as bad as I am and Becker, despite all good sense, agreed to do it.

He described it as disgusting, and chewy, and told us there was a hard rubbery spot in the center that took quite a while to get down, then he had to close his eyes and breathe slowly for a moment to keep it from coming back up. We salute you Becker, well done.

I was able to upgrade to WordPress 2.0 without too much trouble. I had to install some plugins in both the new and old WordPress software to do a WordPress to WordPress import, but otherwise it was fine. The default theme doesnt stretch, which makes code samles look somewhat horrible, so I opted for this basic one instead and thyen just changed some color values in the CSS. I have a theme that I designed that I want to integrate, but I will have to find the time, so for now this is going to have to do.

I am primarily a Ruby on Rails developer now, but even before that I had began to leverage Prototype into my PHP applications to make UI design easier. One of the things that bugs me about the Prototype library is that if you load an element with the default CSS ‘display’ value of ‘none’, you have to use the hide/show functions to toggle it’s display. That means finding some way to conditionally determine the state and choose which function to call. Who has time for that? Not me, enter my little addition to Protype toggleDisplay:

I entered this code in directly between “toggle:” and “hide:” in “Object.extend”, around line 860. This was done in Prototype version 1.4.0.

Man, I need a better code highlighting formatting widget thingy. I guess I should upgrade this old and busted installation of WordPress to Version 2. I’ll do that now!

I have a tendency to dislike ambiguity, which is a problem because English is full of it. I was reminded today of a theory I developed when I was young. I think I was only about 10 when I conceived this, but it has stood the test of time. The impetus for this theory, I believe, was the sharing of candy. Some grubby handed youth would ask “Can I have some?” and then undoubtedly be unsatisfied with the “some” that I shared. Therefore, the following translation table was created:

A couple is obviously two, for the definition is quite clear, the other values are derived by the numbers of letters in the word, which I noticed as an increasing pattern as words of greater length were used for quantity. When poled independently, several people confirmed the order of these words above, if not the specific quantity mapping.

It seems like a small thing, but these sorts of things are quite valuable. In fact, Bacon (Francis, not Kevin) referred to such barriers to communication as the “Idols of the Marketplace”. After all, didn’t your mother tell you not to worship false idols? Eh? Eh? Also, I suspect this personal quirk of mine might be why I dislike acronyms so much, at least colloquial acronyms (VI = “Village Inn”, knock it off Devon)

I recently switched to Gaim so that I could slim down to only having one IM client running. I hate having too many icons in my system tray. I’m a little OCD that way. One of the features that is lacking in Gaim that is present in Yahoo! Messenger is the “report spam” button. When I would get solicitations from bots I would click the spam button and that was that. Now I don’t have a spam button, so today when I received such a message I decided to talk to the bot and see how long it would talk back. I’m not sure what category this falls under, but “review” seems appropriate somehow. Anyway, here is our conversation:

Warning: Explict Content
Read the rest of this entry »

10957/365 = 30

Thats right, today is my 30th birthday. My 20’s are officially behind me like so many whispered dreams of youth. I have had trouble sleeping the past few days in anticipation of this event, which is really… silly. If our society used a base 8 number system instead of base 10 then I would have another two years before I hit this youth-ending milestone. So my right brain shuns the idea of this arbitrary date having more meaning than any other, but my left brain has never been one to back down from a challenge.

My 30th birthday is ushered in with all the fanfare of going to the DMV. My family is far away in Colorado and I have work on my desk to keep my head on fire for weeks to come. Maybe next year I’ll throw a big party… at Baskin-Robbins.