After much debate I decided to get the ReadyNAS NV+ with a single 500GB disk. It’s great so far. I even got ssh to work which means I have rsnapshot working (I can post details if necessary).

The problem is… I wouldn’t have needed rsnapshot at all if the CD they shipped me wasn’t cracked. I called Netgear (who is headquartered down the road, literally) and they said they can’t do anything and that I should call Newegg (the vendor) or call EMC the provider of the backup software (and my next door neighbor at work). Newegg could only give me a $25 credit which is fine, but as someone at my work pointed out… that’s not the same as a 5 seat Mac/Windows license for a backup software.

Of course… it’s impossible to hunt down an actual support email address for Netgear, so this might not get resolved.

FYI, Here’s some good links about readyNAS that I’ve found.

People keep asking me how things are going in CA.

They are going well.

Biking

I finally told myself I need to start biking more. So I biked to work… all the way (normally I bike to the Mountain View caltrain station and take a shuttle to my work). It was 8.6 miles of bike lanes everywhere.
I went this-a-way. I totally felt like a champion. There was a few scary parts, one where I had to cross over an on ramp. It wasn’t too bad. Then there was a scary part where I cross four lanes of traffic. See here. I made it in at about the same time I normally came in and I didn’t leave too much earlier.

Of course this really was nothing compared to yesterday when Katie and I met our friend Al at a halfway point in San Mateo… about 20 miles from our place (and his). That was quite a work out and a thrilling ride. There’s so much to see in the Bay Area on our bikes, it’s great and there are lanes everywhere.

Work

Work is fine. I work at Yahoo! on del.icio.us using the symfony framework. We’re really making it a great product that will not only look great, but perform well as we gain more and more users. When it launches I can tell you what I worked on :)

Now, we don’t get free food like Google does, but it’s fairly inexpensive. We do get free fountain soda and coffee. By free coffee, I mean its pretty much an inhouse coffee shop that’ll make whatever you want. Every now and then I treat myself to a frappé (which incidentally isn’t free, it’s $2.00).

Also, because people ask. Yes, I’m allowed to use GMail, Gtalk, Google Maps, etc, etc, etc. Yes, it’s Yahoo! and they do want you to use Yahoo! products, but if you happen to use a competitors product, oh well.

Home

Our apartment is slowly coming together. It helped that Katie doesn’t have a 9-5. We’ve got a couch, and although we’re not fully furnished, we have enough of our place ready to entertain guests.

Outside of Home

We’ve been rather busy. Whether it’s our good friend Katie Romportl Cook coming down from Sacramento, or other friends coming into town, or events in the city, or just hanging out with our friend Al… we’ve had a lot to do. We do a lot of biking, and we’re checking out meetup.com. It’s a lot of fun.

So one of the downsides to symfony is traversing the file system. Lately I’ve had to do this a lot so I decided to write some bash functions to make this easier. Here’s one I call goto which works as such:

`goto` filename.ext

Feel free to make this better, or if there exists a built-in that I know nothing about tell me about it.

Here’s the function:

goto () {
  FILE=`find . -iname $1|head -1`
  DIR=`dirname $FILE`
  cd $DIR
}

Update

I changed the function to take care of this syntax:

goto default/../actions.class.php (amongst other things) will now find app/frontend/modules/default/actions:

goto () {
    FORMATTED_STR=`echo $1|sed -e 's|/../|/*/|g'`
    FILE=`find . -ipath *${FORMATTED_STR}*|head -1`
    DIR=`dirname $FILE`
    cd $DIR
}

So watching Heroes has made me want to learn Japanese again. I’ve noticed that one difficult thing is using hiragana-only to learn Japanese. Here’s the same sentence that means The book is good:

1. hon wa ii desu.
2. ほんはいいです。
3. 本はいいです。

The problem for me isn’t the script, it’s the spaces. It’s very easy for me to read the first one and know that there’s different words.

The second example is in hiragana only. There’s no way of knowing (unless you know the language) what the different characters represent. It’s all one space-less sentence.

The third example is actually quite easy to read in comparison to the second. The kanji for book is easily recognized.

I’ve been doing the Rosetta Stone Japanese lessons and I go through the lessons three times. Once to just figure out what words are what and what is a part of speech, so Romanji (the first one) is best. Then I go through it to torture myself using hiragana. Then I use the kanji which are just symbols that represent things, thus making it easy to say, “oh yeah, that’s a book, that’s a tree, that’s an elephant” and immediately answer questions.

Katie and I are “officially” moving to California. A lot of people have been asking questions about this, so I’ll try to create a FAQ:

Why are you moving?

Short answer:

I got a job at Yahoo!/Delicious

Long answer:

I work on the symfony project a framework that makes building quality web sites easier. I will be contributing to this project in a way that is beneficial to Yahoo!. Furthermore, Katie and I are looking for an adventure. Moving out of our home in Minneapolis and into a new part of the country will be a big adjustment for us.

Where in California are you moving?

We are moving to the San Francisco Bay area. We will find a place when we arrive. We will likely be in Mountain View or if we can find some place affordable, the City of San Francisco.

When are you moving?

We are moving in early November. I start my job in mid-November.

That's really soon?

Yes! I know!

What will you do with your house?

We own a duplex, we'll rent out the half we live in. We're also finishing up our attic as I type. Initially our good friends Marc and Sadie will live here.

What about your cats?

We are not sure. They will eventually join us in California, but we are not sure if they will come with us right away in November, or later.

You're going to have a going away party?

Of course, just email me

What about your car/bikes?

Car is being shipped to CA. We bike a lot and intend to do so in California, so we'll be moving our bikes as well.

Are you excited?

Yes.

What is Katie going to do?

We will be getting an apartment that has a pool. I can only imagine she will spend her days making daiquiris sitting by the pool.

</dl>

[tags]css, yui, grids, table, layout[/tags]

layout: post title: “Inbox Zero: Dave Dash style” site: spindrop tags: [spindrop, gtd, pending, email, inbox-zero, zero, inbox] — [tags]inbox, zero, 0, inbox zero, gtd, email, pending, todo, gtd[/tags]

[tags]skype, usability[/tags]

[tags]JQuery, jq, javascript, js, JQuery Calendar, calendar, symfony, plugin[/tags]

I released a new symfony plugin today for the jQuery Calendar available via svn. Feel free to read about it on trac. This adds a clever calendar widget that can trigger events. Very handy for viewing an events calendar.

I’ll publish a link to this plugin in action in the following weeks. Enjoy.