If you’ve been keep­ing up with the US Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary, you’ve prob­a­bly heard what a piss-poor job ABC did con­duct­ing the Penn­syl­va­nia debate. It some­times floors me that Jon Stewart et al. often give more cred­i­ble news and com­men­tary than the major news out­lets. One of the more both­er­some bits to come out of the debate was ABC hand­pick­ing Nash McCabe for a voter ques­tion. It wasn’t so much her obvi­ous bias that both­ered me; another voter could always be inter­viewed to pro­vide a coun­ter­point (not that ABC did). What both­ered me was that her vote comes down to whether or not a can­di­date is will­ing to wear a lapel pin of the Amer­i­can flag. Some may think big deal, until you real­ize that she’s prob­a­bly not alone in how she makes polit­i­cal deci­sions. That some­how one’s appear­ance is a reflec­tion of one’s per­for­mance. That one’s patri­o­tism is mea­sured by how often you’re will­ing to dis­play the flag. That some­how sym­bols are greater than words and actions. (A Digg com­menter aptly ref­er­enced the scene from Office Space where Joanna quits because her man­ager hounds her about wear­ing flair despite being a pro­duc­tive employee.) It’s really depress­ing to think that peo­ple do make impor­tant deci­sions based on such triv­ial cri­te­ria. Just another exam­ple of why the US edu­ca­tion sys­tem needs improvement.

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One of my read­ers asked for a step-by-step set of instruc­tions to install MyGoogleCal2.php. My orig­i­nal posts for restyling Google Cal­en­dar did assume a cer­tain level of exper­tise. This should hope­fully help those who are still confused.

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After many false starts, I decided that I really needed to wrap my head around unit test­ing when writ­ing Rails appli­ca­tions. I more or less com­pleted a Rails 1.2.3 appli­ca­tion with­out any for­mal tests, and I would like to upgrade it to 2.0.2 and make it REST­ful in the process. At the same time, I’ve moved from a Win­dows devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment to a *nix one after installing Xubuntu on my lap­top (an old Com­paq Pre­sario). I’ve also switched from Cream to Emacs. Despite my Win­dows desk­top being more than twice as fast as my lap­top, I just could not stand not being in a true *nix envi­ron­ment. Too much of the Win­dows idio­syn­crasies got on my nerves. And my switch from Cream to Emacs was because I just didn’t like the insta­bil­ity of the hacks required to make Vim less of a modal edi­tor. If I tire of Emacs, I may try pure Vim instead, but I remem­ber installing Cream sim­ply because I didn’t like pure Vim to start with. So with these var­i­ous changes going on with my Rails pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment, I fig­ured it was an ideal time to learn to for­mally test my appli­ca­tions. Of course the first part is set­ting up the test­ing envi­ron­ment so that it is easy to use, stays out of your way, and is informative.

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I watch animé. That, Lego blocks, and video games are the three child­hood vices I never out­grew. It’s just that my hob­bies have matured along with me. I now pre­fer games that are rated M even though I still enjoy those that are rated E. I now pre­fer Tech­nic sets over LEGOLAND Space sets. I now pre­fer animé that deal with mature themes (e.g. Say­onara Zetsubou Sen­sei, Seirei no Moribito) over those that are juve­nile (Poke­mon). I wish more ani­mated shows in the US were more like those from Japan.

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