In an “oldie but a goodie” article, David Cain writes Does Your Story Have This Common Weakness?
Basically he is talking about deus ex machina and how it is not just found in literature, but also within the very lives that we live. Mainly, that we can end up living our lives waiting for something to happen instead of actively working to get things done.
At least that is what I got out of it. I’ll leave you to read the whole article and judge for yourself.
Joy, or “Just Wait?” by Katie Wetherbee is maybe the best thing I have read about parenting and being parents in a long time.
I can only hope that I bring that same joy to new parents when they talk to me in the future. This was the one paragraph that grabbed me and describes parenthood in a nutshell:
Of course, now that my kids are teenagers, I know the truth. Parenting is complicated; it’s wonderful and challenging. Exhausting and gut wrenching. Heart warming and heart breaking.
I just finished worked through the newest version of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial and feel like I have a much better handle on Rails 3.2. I do recommend it to get people up-and-running on some of the latest things in Rails.
However, I think that my favorite part of Rails 3 is one of the most hated: Bundler. It really just made things so much easier for me.
But I’m crazy, so don’t worry.
When we bought our house over a year ago, we knew that the plumbing was going to need an overhaul. The galvanized pipes a both in terrible shape and the wrong size for the house as well. The sheer number of Ts that they used in different areas to add fixtures is alarming.
You get the idea.
One thing I was not expecting was to have no outdoor water. Sadly, due to them not draining the pipes sufficiently, the outdoor cooper pipe burst at an elbow, leaving us with no outdoor water.
It is hard to try and grow grass during a drought with no outdoor water. Ours did not.
So, with two projects in the horizon I ordered the first bit of tools and materials a for this huge and ongoing project. I will be switching everything from galvanized steel and copper to PEX tubing. While I will not be running individual lines to every level, I will probably use a number of smaller manifolds to keep a more constant pressure around the house.
We are fortunate that most of the plumbing is relatively accessible. Besides the second floor bathroom, everything else I can easily get at from the basement with no demo needed. I will also be working in stages, using transition pieces in order to by myself time and keep water flowing to the rest of the house.
The “opening shots” of this battle will be adding a new frost-free sillcock so that we have outdoor water again. Hopefully all of the needed supplies will be here this week and the project will go smoothly.
Otherwise, this could get very interesting very fast.
Lots of ridiculous stuff over the weekend about Readability that I had already known about for quite some time. Go ahead and checkout Twitter and search for Readability if you really want to get down a rat hole.
Regardless, I think there are some major things that haven’t been brought up with the recent outrage over how links were handled within Readability.
Almost every single defense of Readability comes back to the fact that they are offering to pay publishers. However, they just removed any sort of restriction on their service that would have required people to pay to use their service. So … what about those people who are not paying a thing for Readability? Are they going to pay publishers for the people who are not paying anything to use their service?
Match that with the fact that it sounds like Readability will just keep any unclaimed money after a year and you DO have problems and no matter how “good” those guys are, there are issues here.
I think there would be fewer issues if these two things happened:
There is still the issue of collecting money on behalf of publishers who might not want to have a relationship with a third part like Readability, but who cares as long as you are making money … right?
Readability has obviously prostrated themselves to the almighty “get all of the eyeballs and make money later” business model by copying Instapaper after initially working with Marco in the past (but who really cares) and then dropping their entry price to “free” because they are flush with money, so let’s not pretend that they are some kind of white knight in armor for the publishers of the web.
They’re trying to do one thing: make money.