At Railscamp7 in Canberra, Australia, I gave a presentation called “Vim ♥’s You (Why you should love vim, too).” I should have called it something like “80 reasons to switch to vim and wonder why you’ve lived without it for so long.” That might have gotten more non-vimmers to come to the talk.
If you’re looking to give Vim a try, you might find my list of common keyboard commands helpful.
A while ago, I snapped a few shots from our roof here in Kirribilli and stitched them into a panorama.
You should really look at the full-res image, (link is on the flickr photo page) but it’s 15megs, so you’ll have to wait a few secs for all the pixels to download.
From right to left, you start by looking South, where the opera house is, and end up looking East at the left side of the image. If you could see past the small bit of land in the distance to the East, you’d be looking at the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Usually you just see pictures of the harbor bridge and the opera house, but, really, there’s much more to Sydney.
It’s 5:45AM here on my second day in Sydney and I’m wide awake thanks to jet lag. I woke up around 4:00 and tried to fall back asleep to no avail. So, I thought I’d at least get out of bed and start working on a blog post. OK, to sum up so far…
The flight out here was actually pretty nice. It all started with a very cute gal checking us in to our V Australia flight at LAX. Margaret and I had four heavy bags to check, and we knew we’d have to pay $100 each because we were over the weight limits, but Danielle, the super nice V Australia employee didn’t charge us anything! Maybe it’s because I mentioned we were moving, or because I smiled a lot, or because V Australia is a new airline and they’re just trying to make everyone write nice blog posts about them right now. Whatever the case may be, we walked away happy and impressed. Thanks, Danielle!
The flight itself was, of course, long. But V Australia has a great entertainment system, even in the economy class, and we had our choice of plenty of movies to watch including some new releases that I had actually ripped onto my laptop to watch on the plane (hah!). Margie watched Twilight (her review: “pretty bad”) and the new The Day The Earth Stood Still (“better than Twilight”) and I watched Vicky Christina Barcelona (my review: not really a comedy, 3/5 stars). But mostly, we slept. I think we probably got around eight hours of sleep in total, which was pretty nice. It’s funny how, when flying internationally, you wake up, realize you have four and a half hours to go, and think “Hey, that’s not long at all!”
And so, eventually, we landed. Clearing customs was a breeze and Jack, my new boss, was waiting to pick us up and drive us to our temporary apartment. Jack even gave us a little driving tour around the neighborhood we’re staying in, called Mosman, in North Sydney. After the tour, Jack went off to the office, leaving Margie and I to explore Mosman on our own, after two much needed showers, of course.
Scenery-wise, Mosman feels a little like the Pacific Palisades near Malibu, California, in that there’s lots of trees, quiet streets, and some really beautiful houses with amazing views of the harbor. We were pretty hungry, so we stopped at one of the first restaurants we came across, Oodles of Noodles, an asian noodle house, where we had, yes, some pretty good noodles. The prices were a bit on the high side, at around A$12 for a big bowl of noodles that would probably cost $9 back in NYC (note that the first price is in Aussie dollars and the second is in US dollars; so, comparably, they’re about equal, but with regards to local income levels, etc, I still think A$12 is a bit much for noodles. I don’t yet know if prices are high here because Mosman is a pretty nice suburb, or if food is just generally more expensive here, or some combination of the two; I’ll collect some more data and report back later. More on expensive food in a minute, though.
After lunch, we took a short walk around the neighborhood, then went to the local food stores to buy some basics to take back to the apartment. Mosman’s main street (I think), Military Road, features specialty stores like a butcher, a cheese shop, fruit and veggie stores, etc. There are smaller and larger supermarkets here as well, from what I understand, but I think it’s cool that the smaller guys have a chance, too. The most surprisingly expensive food item we bought, were a bunch of bananas, which cost us $8, if I remember correctly; the same bunch would have sold for $2 in the US. So, OK, lesson learned: bananas are obviously imported.
Once we were sufficiently loaded up with some food basics, and luxurious bananas, we dropped the food off at our apartment and set out again for a short walk down to Mosman Bay. But, this is starting to feel like a boorishly long post now, so I’ll save details about that walk for another post.
G’Day!
One of the cooler projects I’ve worked on at Tutor.com was the creation of a simple content management system (CMS) to power our public website. For years, our website had no CMS capabilities. When someone wanted something changed, they asked a developer to change it. And then they usually waited a week for it to get done.
As our company grew, we were creating more pages on the site and making more copy edits than ever before, and it became clear that we were finally ready to integrate some sort of CMS into the site. We evaluated a ton of CMSes out there before deciding that we didn’t need a whole lot of fancy functionality and that we could probably write our own CMS to suit our needs pretty easily. As it turns out, we were right. We built a simple CMS in-house, and it’s been powering our website for many months now with no real hiccups.
To share a little about how we went about it, I put together a short white paper about the Tutor.com CMS describing the architectural design decisions we made, the implementation challenges we faced, and the solutions we came up with. Want to learn more? Read the PDF.
See for yourself.
Today at lunch, my co-workers and I were discussing the disappointing news from Apple that they won’t allow third-party apps to be installed on iPhone, to which I exclaimed:
Not allowing you to download software onto the iPhone is like having an untouchable supermodel living in your bedroom!
Yes, Laetitia Casta is still my favorite.
I was there at the opening of Apple’s new 5th Ave retail store. They recorded a timelapse video of all the poor blokes waiting in line (like me). And yes, because I’m so nerdy, I downloaded the movie and found the frames that Abel and I are captured in.
Ok, update: I ordered a new gaming box, and I should have it by the end of the month. I can’t wait to play Half-Life 2!
To keep me busy until then, because it’s Spring and it’s driving me crazy that I can’t ID all the bird calls I’m hearing in the park, I’ve ordered Birding by Ear and it’s companion More Birding by Ear, which I should have in two days thanks to Amazon. Yes, I’m soo many different kinds of nerd it’s crazy, I know.
I fly to San Diego this Sunday for E-Tech. It’ll be my first time at the conference, and I’m really super stoked to go. I’ll get to hang with lots of nerd friends and hopefully fill my head with cool new ideas to keep me awake at night.
I’ll probably be posting all of my notes, either live-ish or at the end of my trip. Stay tuned.
