I like the products that furni has put together, though there’s something about naming each product after a professional skateboarder that doesn’t ride well with me (even though I try riding a skateboard weekly, and not just to get around but to get some thrashin’ in!) It’s sort of like naming all your company web servers after Greek and Roman mythological characters – it’s just too easy.

It’s interesting to note though that Jason Lee, the now famous actor, graces the solid beech/acrylic wall mounted face cloth holder and that Mike Vallely, once a, well, total asshole (but now turned nice guy) gets the solid beech/acrylic wall mounted toilet roll holder. Mark “gator” Rogowski, known for both his skateboarding skills and the fact that he’s now serving time for murdering his girlfriend has a clock named after him. Appropriately.

Update
Andre was quick to remember that fürni was the name of the furniture company in the movie Fight Club.

Either I’m really tired and just can’t get the juices flowing tonight, or I think that I may have found something seemingly elementary that Rails’ ActiveRecord can’t do easily or automatically. I say easily or automatically because after all, if I wanted to I could extend the ActiveRecord methods and do it myself, but that’d require some significant thought, and knowing me, I’d likely break something.

So here’s the situation that’s driving me into a wall.

I have two models, one called Instance, and the other User.

Instance represents a single discrete game in llor.nu. There are a bunch of other models (one of which I’ll get into) that look to Instance, including User. A User belongs to an Instance. There’s a column in the table called instance_id and the value in that column is the Instance that this user should be tied to.

So far, this is totally normal stuff.

When a User joins an Instance, they also have a bank account for that Instance called Account and Deeds and UserItems and so forth. This too is pretty normal stuff. User belongs to Instance, Accounts belongs to Instance, Deeds belong to User and Instance, and so on.

Here’s where it gets tricky. A User can choose to play in a different Instance. The instance_id field is set to the new id of the Instance. At this point you’re probably getting the idea of where I’m hitting some trouble. While my model relationships state that a User has one Account, it’s only true if there is one Instance. If there is more than one instance, then a User actually has more than one Account. If there’s more than one Account, I have no way of easily doing something like…

user.account

…and having it bring back the right Account, knowing which Instance the user is currently assigned to. The same problem exists for any model that belongs to a User.

Now I know there are tricks, like doing association extensions and such, but I’m not experienced enough with those tricks to feel like I have an easy solution. I’ve heard of some of the new association techniques in edge rails (like :through) but again, they’re too new to make sense to me yet.

If you’ve run into this kind of thing, what did you?

I want a belt mounted or helmet mounted device with some big speakers on it that “notices” my gestures, and plays a prearranged recorded sound when I perform the gesture.

It couldn’t be that hard to do – put RFID chips on each of your fingers and and key spots on your arms, and you too can be throwing fireballs at people Street Fighter style. You could program the device to recognize your gestures, and it would determine what gesture you were performing by the RFID chips’ proximity and arrangement compared to the device.

Despite the fact that you might be able to offend people much more effectively, the idea has practical purposes as well. Traffic cops could lead the blind across the street with specific audible signals. You could teach a dog more effectively with consistent audible commands coupled with visual cues. Maybe the guys who call tennis matches might like it. Badminton? Football.

Everyone other than myself in my immediate family has been struck with a mysterious 12 hour stomach flu that was intense and quite, well, productive in it’s efforts. That was until this morning when I took my turn on the roller coaster of microbial love.

As it turns out, I received the most personal email in a single day today than I think I ever had, and as a consequence of what’s surely an uncaring and impolite virus, I probably will be quite slow in responding to any of them.

Today is a special day. Not only is it my birthday, it’s the only birthday I’ll ever have where I’m 30 on the 30th. Happy birthday to me.

It’s pretty amazing that 10 years ago still seems pretty fresh in my mind, but then I get to thinking about all the things that have changed in 10 years. It’s pretty amazing. Here’s my quick list of observations:

1. The World Wide Web. I started working for an ISP 10 years ago, right when the idea of having a corporate web site was starting to become very desirable. I learned ColdFusion and database design that year, and was on fire with the power of web applications. Within a year or two, I started my own dotcom with friends.

2. The Internet Boom. At the age of 22 or so, a VC sat across the table from me and explained with a straight face that my company wasn’t a desirable investment opportunity because we were turning a profit. I’ve never trusted VCs since, and I’m forever grateful he didn’t put money in our company.

3. Columbine. The shootings at Columbine made me realize how deep my compassion for people suffering really was. I cried for the kids and the parents of that school for weeks, and even writing about this now brings back the pain.

4. September 11 and War. Who knew that following the boom times that there’d be two crashes of totally different kinds. September 11th changed me as a person. I rallied behind our country, forever a patriot. Since then, my political views have changed drastically. I have an intense distrust in the government. I become nearly ill when I tally up the freedoms that were earned by the founders of our country that are now under constant threat by our own government. Freedom is not fought and won by fighting a war based on faulty intelligence. Freedom is won by teaching people to love, honor, and respect their fellow man, and to respect and adhere to the Bill of Rights that our founders fought for.

5. Marriage, Kids. It’s hard to sum up what kind of change this has on a person because you’re so busy and in the thick of it that you hardly have time to reflect. Mostly I wonder what I could have possibly done with all the free time pre-kids, and feel guilty for not getting more done during that time. To say kids motivate you to do good is an understatement of monumental proportions.

6. Technology. Holy cow, a lot has happened in 10 years. Less than ten years ago, I got my first mobile phone and it was the size of a brick. No one else carried them. Simply talking on one would get your sneers or stares as people were either disgusted by your display of gratuitous technology use or curious about how a young 20 something could afford to use one. I couldn’t afford not to at the time.

And video games. 10 years ago I had Quake, which was the bleeding edge at the time. I fired up the original the other night and compared it to the latest Doom title and was amazed out how inaccurate my memories of the game were (and how terrifying the newest Doom is, like for real scary).

I shudder to think what my children will be playing at the age of 20.

7. Katrina. Whether this one will last in my memories is still yet to be seen, but up until Katrina I had a certain amount of faith in the ability for organizations like FEMA to organize and do what’s right in the wake of such a disaster. No longer will I ever assume that any authority will be able to help me in a similar case. I’m not some crazy anti government radical. If my house is destroyed, I won’t expect for a second that there’s anyone who can help me but me.

Taking the good with the bad, the past 10 years have been good. The growth and understanding I’ve gained are great, and having a bit more maturity under the belt certainly helps. I certainly know more now than ten years ago about what’s important in life, and that tied with my hunger to create and make fun things is a good combo. I’m looking forward to the next 10.

So it comes as no surprise that Matt found out the back story on the dancing guy video I linked to last week by checking out Jason’s site. It’s great to find the guy’s site, but embarrassing to know I could have learned about it sooner from Jason (who I’ve met several times, and who’s site I used to read all the time).

You know life is good when a few pounds of beef jerky of many varieties is delivered to your door by UPS, along with a “Cowboy Breakfast”, complete with all the fixings. To the sender of said gift, thank you, and also, we’re gonna cook up that Cowboy Breakfast on Christmas morning.

I’ve always felt like I had a good understanding of how the human eye, monitors, and printers, each have their own gamut of colors that they can see or reproduce. This article does a pretty good job with just the diagrams alone – the big rainbow blob is what your eyes can see (generally speaking) and the shapes within the blob are what that monitor or printer are capable of reproducing.

Regarding the gamut of the human eye, I’ve always know it to vary wildly from person to person. I think for the most part, we all see a lot of colors in the same way, but it’s always been obvious that with some colors, everyone seems them slightly differently. I have nothing to back it up except my own personal experience, but I get the idea that people see greens differently. I’ve known people in my life who were just stoked on certain combos of yellow that I thought were hideous, and I know that I personally am quite fond of Cadmium Yellow (while I know others aren’t).

And then there’s the age old question of how any one can figure this kind of stuff out. How is it that my red is similar or the same as your red, and that my red isn’t bright green? It’s all in the cones. The cones of the eyes respond with similar electrical responses for similar colors, and in fact contain pigments that help respond to specific colors as the pigments absorb specific wavelengths of visible light. So red will always respond with a “red” sort of charge, as will green, blue, etc. How the human brain decodes that and how the owner of said brain perceives the color is probably difficult to figure out.

It’s this kind pondering that would keep me quite for hours as a kid.

There was also the challenge of trying to think of nothing at all. Trying to comprehend nothing. Not universe, no planets, nothing. I think at around the age of 5 all I could think of was a desolate planet without even dinosaurs, but as my thoughts matured, I began to realize that if I could fully comprehend what nothing meant, I’d probably cease to exist along with everything else. Like the time traveler who sees a past version of himself fast to face, and the universe explodes.

Last night I woke up with a new one to work on. I read somewhere that “globally, every hour is a business hour.” I wasn’t gonna let them slip that past me, so I’ve been thinking about it. Taken figuratively it makes perfect sense. Everyone is conducting business everywhere, by phone, internet, in person, all the time. But taken literally, is it possible that it’s not possible?

If we say that “business hours” are 9:00AM to 5:00PM, are there areas in the world where during that window of 8 hours there’s no population*? If you picture the globe and visualize the 8 hour window as a traveling slice on the surface representing that window, does it ever span empty gaps of the Pacific ocean where it’s assumed that the population is either very low or nonexistent. I don’t have an answer, but it’s compelling to think that if we’re strict about what business hours mean that there might be a time when the Earth is given some relief from the constantly busy humans crawling all over it.

• I understand that having a population of zero is probably a pretty big contributor to a lack of business being conducted. Which doesn’t help you gain faith in how I think, I’m sure.

As strange as it is to see this man dance over and over again, I have a deep and profound jealousy for his ability to do the dance over and over again.

I don’t yet understand why, but sometimes when I restart my G5, the color settings get totally messed up when the computer comes back online. Has anyone else had color profiles completely destroyed, gamma tweaked out of shape, or font smoothing suddenly turned to crap on OS X after restart? It’s supremely aggravating.