Wrap-up of my first week at thoughtbot

Random thoughts about my first week as a developer at thoughtbot:

  • I have much to learn about design patterns. The GoF book will be my close friend for a while.
  • I know more about metaprogramming than I thought, I just needed the terminology.
  • Pairing is an amazing way to transfer knowledge and should be done frequently. I learned a ton during and after because I took notes and then researched and practiced concepts new to me.
  • thoughtbot invests a huge amount of time (and therefore money) improving the skills of its developers. It shows.
  • osx is a fine desktop environment, but the amount of crap you need to wade through to set it up as a ruby development environment (as compared to debian / ubuntu) is kind of hilarious. That said, it’s working fine now and it wasn’t particularly hard, it just didn’t feel “native” like it does on linux.  I could take or leave osx, but it’d be hard to stop using a retina display – text is absolutely gorgeous.
  • I don’t know what I’d do without homebrew.
  • thoughtbot dotfiles are great, and the vim set up was very similar to my own but with significant additional refinements. Use them.

S3:18 – Allegiance

Some annoying aliens kidnapped Picard, and he was smart. There was some annoying alien that thought they shouldn’t do anything, along with a crazy monster. There was also a Starfleet cadet that knew too much, and she turned out to be the meanie alien. They taught the aliens that they shouldn’t capture people after containing them in a purple containment circle thing. It was fine, nothing exciting. At the end it was funny because Dr. Crusher was looking funny at Picard.

S3:E17 – Sins of the Father

This is the one with Warf’s brother. Everyone thinks that Warf’s father betrayed the Klingon people. Warf lost because the Klingon Commander was hiding that the other mean Klingon’s father was the traitor.  Warf isn’t a Klingon any more, I bet that was probably hard because he can’t go back to his home planet again.

S3:E16 – The Offspring

This was a very sad episode, poor Data! His daughter died, I don’t get why they turned her off, what’s wrong with having emotions? The Star Fleet guy was like “It’s just a machine, it doesn’t have proper surroundings to learn stuff.”  She was malfunctioning and started to have emotions, he made her too good – and she used a contraction.

Google Nexus 7 16gb mini-review

My thoughts on the 16gb Google nexus 7 tablet after a few days using it – the short version: I love it. Buy one.

PROS:

  • Fast.
  • 3d performance is amazingly good.
  • High build quality and it feels great in your hands.
  • Great battery life.
  • Gorgeous screen.
  • Jellybean is a pleasure and evolutionary in all the right places.  I’ve not used ICS on a device I own so I admit some ignorance on when these improvements came to be.
    • The email client is VASTLY improved.
    • The calendar is SO much better than it was in gingerbread.
    • Mobile chrome kicks ass.
    • App switching, notifications, home screen shortcut features, the list goes on for improvements since gingerbread.
    • Jellybean netflix client (and many other apps) have pretty great feature improvements compared to their gingerbread counterparts.
  • It is trivial to open the device and do basic consumer-level repairs. You can replace the battery! I would imagine we’ll see aftermarket extended batteries soon.
  • Comfortable form factor.
  • Price – $250 with a $25 google play credit.

CONS:

  • No sdcard slot.
  • No flash support. I know, flash sucks, but some sites that render perfectly in mobile chrome lack features (games, video) because there’s no flash.
  • The built-in video player loses time sync sometimes, so it “forgets” where it is in a video it’s playing. I’m sure this’ll get resolved in a forthcoming update.
  • Lack of rear facing camera makes it slightly less “social.”
  • Not unlocked by default (but trivial to unlock manually).
  • I don’t like that the power button and volume rockers are on the same side, it’s easy to mistake them and turn off the device accidentally. This will go away as the device controls work their way into muscle memory.
  • No video out.
  • It takes a long time to charge, but it does have a pretty large battery.

RANDOM:

  • The GPS is very accurate and quick, but it’s not incredibly useful given the device is wifi-only. I’ve been wifi tethering it to my phone (thanks cyanogenmod!) and it makes a lot more sense to have an always-on connection.
  • This could be because I’m used to having screen protectors on my devices, but the touchscreen seems to be more sensitive and to have better “swipe-feel” after putting a skinomi screen protector on it.
  • The device is a portal to google’s services and would be far less useful without a google account.

CONCLUSION:

Honestly, I love it. 95 out of 100 – the cons are far outweighed by the pros especially in light of the price. I think this device will have a long, happy life in my tech arsenal.

S3:E15 – Yesterday’s Enterprise

This one was sort of confusing because I didn’t know why the ship changed, but then Daddy explained it to me. So the Enterprise had changed and was still at war with the Klingons because 22 years ago some ship didn’t save a Klingon base so the war continued. Yar was still alive! Yar went on to the older ship and umm I don’t know. I forget. She kissed one of the guys that was 22 years older than her, sort of weird. He shouldn’t been like 50 something, she was kissing an ancient person. Our Enterprise was darker, different uniforms, stuff like that. There was no Worf or Troi, poor Troi. I liked that episode a lot.

S3:E14 – A Matter of Perception

The starbase that Riker was going to to check out something waves exploded after he left. The scientist guy’s wife? and his assistant accused Riker of exploding the base. It was actually the scientist because he didn’t like Riker. I don’t need to add anything else, I don’t want to talk about this episode.

S3:E13 – Deja Q

That’s a funny name – “Deja Q.” So Q comes along again and says he lost all his powers. He’s really confused, he doesn’t know how to eat, he gets back pains, he thinks he can order people around. He’s pretty funny. Some aliens that didn’t like Q because he tormented them came along and were zapping him, destroying the ship. Q went out into a shuttle and aliens attacked him, but then another Q guy came along and gave Q back his powers because he said he was improving because of his selfless act. It was really funny because they were remarking at each other.

S3:E12 – The High Ground

It’s always with these rebel guys, these episodes. Crusher gets captured, these rebels are using teleportation thing that messes up their health. The leader wants Dr. Crusher to help them, but she says she can’t and gets mad at him. The rebel captures Picard and is going to kill him, then they find the spot and saves everybody. I liked that episode.

S3:E11 – The Hunted

That guy who had extreme strength, he’d been genetically altered. His instincts would kick in whenever he was in danger, flipping full grown men in the air. Then Troi was being friendly with the man and he didn’t like it. The Enterprise just said “Bye-bye. Your problem!” when the soldier guy got back on the planet.