For the past year or so, I’ve been look­ing at finally get­ting an LCD mon­i­tor. 16ms response times or bet­ter with 16.7 mil­lion col­ors are becom­ing very com­mon. I’ve had the plea­sure of using a Dell Ultra­sharp and would not be unhappy with that acqui­si­tion. Unfor­tu­nately buy­ing a house on my income, though a worth­while invest­ment, has cer­tainly cut into my recre­ational funds. Yet there’s always a gap between what tech­nol­ogy I can afford ver­sus what tech­nol­ogy I would love to own.

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A typ­i­cal rails design pat­tern is to store object ids in ses­sion vari­ables rather than the objects them­selves. Objects can be unwieldy depend­ing on size, com­plex­ity, and asso­ci­a­tions. Ids on the the other hand are small, sleek, and more agile.

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I’ve never been a huge fan of MMOs. From a gamer’s per­spec­tive, the whole idea of a game with­out end is great in the­ory (like eat­ing pizza for the rest of your life), but sucks in prac­tice. That’s not to say it’s bad from the publisher’s point of view. In fact it’s quite lucra­tive. With­out an end (goal), there’s very lit­tle sense of accom­plish­ment built into MMOs. There’s no pay­off in the form of end-game cred­its and cutscenes for the time and money invested. So the player is forced to set goals for them­selves within the lim­its of the game. For example…

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Putting up a site for my posse was always on the back burner. Odd since my cur­rent pro­fes­sion is web devel­op­ment, one would think such a cre­ation would be birthed sooner than later. Yet as stu­dious, hard-working, cre­ative, and focused as the four of us can be, our nat­ural ten­dency is towards lazi­ness. Many an anec­dote will attest to that. Not that lazi­ness is a bad thing. Get­ting the most out of the least effort is noth­ing short of being effi­cient. And we should all strive to be more effi­cient. So in spite of said lazi­ness (and a need to jus­tify a siz­able expen­di­ture for a host­ing plan) I built our­selves a soap­box. So it begins…