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Finally 24 hours with no fever and no fever reducing medications needed, my girl goes back to school tomorrow. And I go with her in the morning, I’m carving pumpkins for Kindergarten’s “Pumpkin Day”.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Derek Wyatt – has a bunch of videos about vim on vimeo. I’m sure he chose vimeo for obvious reasons. Short, entertaining and educational.
• eddorre – has another snow leopard rails setup. That’s on my list of things to do.

Woken up by congested daughter at 4am. Eldest daughter sick, stays home and remains home until “fever free for 24 hours without aid of fever reducing medications” (tomorrow at least). Sprint review for Iteration 0 and planning for Iteration 1. Long day.

Picked up another client today. He’s been burned by a few freelancers / contract developers and that’s left a bad taste in his mouth. Who can blame him? Unfortunately his story is pretty common based on the leads I’ve talked to.

Interesting tidbits from around the net

• MindMeister – Online, collaborative mind mapping. Pretty nice, and they have a community contributed set of maps you can download.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) – Amazon cloud flavored MySQL.
• 5 Free Ways to Bulletproof Your WordPress Site – Disturbing graphic but pretty good set of tips.
• Virtual Appoint – Another option for virtual assistants, US managers and offshore teams, pricing based on how many hours you buy. I’m getting close to needing something like this.
• VMware Fusion 3.0 – Didn’t 2.0 just come out a little while ago? Supports Windows 7. This is my goto virtualization solution on Mac.
• Rails + Google Analytics = easy goal tracking – Interesting trick using flash and a bit of javascript to track information on analytics.

I guess daily reviews don’t happen on the weekend. Spent most of it with the fam, watching my 5yo play soccer.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Freelance Contracts: Do’s And Don’ts – Some nice tips, usual “I’m not a lawyer” applies. Be nice to amortize this somehow so bootstrapped entrepreneurs/startups could get legal help when it matters and pay it back going forward.
• Browser size aware content scaling like Google images – apparently Google image search doesn’t show partial rows, news to me. Here’s how to do it.
• What Startups Are Really Like – It’s not all rockstars and ninjas?
• 20 Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Web Design – useful “common sense” tips, especially for non-design types like me to think about. “common sense” because that’s what all the comments complained about, weren’t to me though.
• The 1KB CSS Grid by Tyler Tate :: A simple, lightweight approach – another grid, this one flexible and lightweight.
• COLOURlovers :: Color Trends + Palettes – community driven color palette combinations for folks like me.
• Saw a link to find more folks to work with, if you need to partner for the next great idea: CollabFinder and Blellow (though Blellow looks like a ghost town).

Spent a lot of time playing system administrator today. Updated some servers, including my personal dev server and Redmine instance, wordpress on my blog, the works.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Heroku – Yeah, seriously late to the party on this one, so I’ll have to play with it on a side project or two. Definitely my sweet spot: cheap, looked after servers that I don’t have to worry about (oversimplification).
• LocaFollow – Find local twitterers (tweeters?). Still waiting for groups to roll to me on twitter, no love yet.

Today feels like hooking up to the firehose, and being the firehose, all at the same time. Standing up the new team development environment, filling out wiki bits on how we do things, getting ready for iteration 0 (which might have started today and I just haven’t told anyone yet). A big thanks to Sitaram Chamarty, gitolite author and tech support ninja. I ran into an interesting setup caused by:

• Lack of knowledge
• Multiple workstations, multiple gitolite servers which probably sparked him to write up how to deal with more complex ssh setups.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• 14 Simple Tips for Super Fast Web Browsing – Some tried and true tips but even I found a new bit or two to look at, and I think I’m pretty quick with a browser.
• Freedom – One of those “fall into the pit of success moments”, you recognize you have an issue so cut it off. I’ve used LeechBlock pretty effectively before, especially with a custom splash reminding your procrastinating self to get back to work.
• Pinboard – I’ve used delicious forever, but I’ve got to try an app tagged as “social bookmarking for introverts” and “antisocial bookmarking”. Follow my feed.
• LimeChat – over a week later and it’s still my new favorite IRC client on the mac.
• Mac Mini Colo – Yeah, you read that right. Second picture from the bottom, I’ve got space cleared out in my office just waiting for that.

Finally got the keys to the development server for the new contract. Spent a lot of tonight getting things set up (git, gitolite, ruby, rails, apache, passenger, redmine, an initial app skeleton).

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Unclutterer posted a tip on $4.99 versions of O’Reilly ebooks if you own the paper version.
• Rails in a Nutshell – Speaking of O’Reilly, this is the book in progress using the Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS)
• TUAW has a nice round up of all the new shiny in the Apple Store. New iMACs are really sweet, wouldn’t mind converting my wife to one and becoming a PC free household.
• Barnes & Noble also has a first look at nook, a new kindle 2 competitor. Highlights: expandable with SD card, AT&T whispernet and wifi, native PDF it looks like and based on Android.
• MailChimp has some email marketing benchmarks. Interesting because I’m doing a bit of research for an article. (Here’s another from MailerMailer)
• HiveLogic posted the Podcasting Equipment Guide (2009) – the Rode Podcaster Mic is on there, that’s my next upgrade for BDDCasts.

Kicked off the new project today. Dev server configuration/setup work tomorrow.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Configure Gmail IMAP accounts properly in Apple Mail and on the iPhone – mail.app has been puking all over itself for the last few days. Istvan pointed this out to me, and it makes a lot of sense. I also got a tip from #macosx to google around for “mail vacuum sqlite3″ and found an automator script to take care of that for me.
• Boson and IRB – Looks like another hirb type additions to IRB. Only glanced so don’t hold me to the hirb comparison if it’s truly off.
• Kill your signup form with rails – A discussion of using gradual engagement with ruby on rails and restful authentication.
• DateLine – Simple, clean, calendar bar.
• TDD and MacRuby – Nice to see that folks are doing TDD with MacRuby as well.
• Minimal Mac – found this from this writeup.

Pretty quiet day, calm before the storm tomorrow I guess. Quiet except for the cries and tears of Redskins fans morning yet another loss, this one at home. We [the Redskins] are the streak enders, just the wrong kinds of streaks.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Droid – Rumors appear to be true about Verizon, Motorola and Google coming together to make a killer phone. A few pics here.
• Pull out login system – Actually, it’s a really long name post, but that’s good enough. I think I’ve seen something very similar to this before. It’s PHP, but I’m guessing anyone interested should be able to port it over to their own framework/language.

Spent the day in a cold, wet Gettysburg for a fall festival for the girls. Carved pumpkins, dipped candles, got cold. Then had a great German meal. It was a good, but very long, day.

Amazingly the intertubes, blogsphere and other bits didn’t self destruct when I wasn’t around to check them. 350 unread items in NetNewsWire (lots of these are lead searches) and 30 unread emails.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

Didn’t really find much interesting today…

• URLAgg – A reminder that the RSS overload is bad, replacing it with a delicious habit is bad too, and I could hit URLAgg and get 80% of the content I would have looked at in the rest of my feeds.