Dia en el Parque

Today is El Dia de Andalucia... so everything is closed and everyone is out in mass to enjoy the warm weather. Last I checked it was 68 (but very sunny). Since things are closed, I logged my hours for work in the park today on a bench. I'm speaking in the past tense because I only have 15 mins left.

In about an hour in a half Kathy and I catch the train for Malaga. It should be a fairly relaxing ride with a short stop in Bobadilla to change trains. I won't be taking my computer (or really anything electronic) with me, but I hope to waste about 30 mins a day checking email in the bus station in downtown Malaga, and I'll most likely blog there as well.

Been reading a lot of stuff over at news.ycombinator.com today. I like the site, as it functions equivalently to Reddit.com, but stays focused on technical and cultural articles related to startup websites. Since I am trying to be in that crowd, it's nice to immerse myself in it.

I have also been actively trying to ignore the outside world. I get too bogged down in reading news and blogs about news and financial news... and just generally news. Really knowing what is going on in the news changes my daily life not one bit, so why should I waste hours a day on it?

I wish I had my Rails books here with me. If I knew what box they ended up in, I'd have my mom send them over. Oh well, when I'm connected to the web I can find stuff just as fast (if not faster), but the books would come in handy at home.

In other news, my financial situation dramatically improved today because my supplimental paycheck finally appeared. Yay for having money!

Gauntlet

So I almost never see Bob, John, or Mark online anymore... so I am calling you out. Not like you need to sleep/work/do things during the middle of the day when I am on... you sacrifice your careers and education for me! (Not really.)

Today I worked more on my gentoo install... did some stuff for AJLA... and finished downloading the magic images. Also went 7 and 1 with Skeleton King in DotA. Right now I'm installing newest firefox...

Not much time left, just wanted to get an entry in for the day. Ben comes to visit Saturday... so that is exciting. I'm going to spend my weekend hardcore studying for the test on Monday. Hasta luego!

Survivalism

"I've got my violence in hi-def ultra-realism... All a part of this great nation..."

Ahhh, motivation music.

So the free wireless at the library was mysteriously absent today. Oh sure, the library's wireless was still there, but it has serious issues that make doing anything productive impossible. The network I was using belongs to someone else... I just happen to be able to see it from within the library.

So now I'm at the pay place. Reliable fast connection, but costs me about $1.60/hr. Oh well, have to spend money to make money.

Today I got a basic RJS action working. RJS is very neat, but took me forever to find the documentation and a decent howto. I'll explain more later... back I go...

Sunny Day

Today has been a particularly sunny day. So much so that I had to find shade in order to see my screen. For those that don't know, on Sundays my only internet option is to sit outside the Library in the park and use the wireless. Normally it is overcast and I can see well enough... but today is bright. It's like 60... only downside is that it's also windy. I can't wait for summer.

Yesterday we went with the school to Sevilla... where we spent the morning going on tours of stuff I have already seen. I understand much more spanish this time around though, so I actually understood the stories about the things we saw. Among other things, I saw Christopher Colombus' tomb, the building that was once in charge of the entire New World (adminstrative building for the colonies under Spanish control), and a Palace where several important moments in history happened (Christopher Colombus and Magellan were given permission to set sail, Franco assumed power at the end of the Spanish Civil War, King Ferdinand died... etc. Also learned that the dollar symbol ($) originated from the royal seal used by King Carlos V... two pillars representing the Pillars of Heracles, and a squiggly line representing the wind of the Atlantic.

The highlight of the day for me was spending about 3 hours lounging on the banks of the River Guadalquivir under a full sun and 75 degree temps. Was actually warm enough that I bought some ice cream. Kathy and I just took in the sun and talked... was a relaxing afternoon. Think everyone else divided their time between the Cruzcampo Brewery and shopping. Cruzcampo is like the Spanish Budweiser... and the Brewery apparently gives out all you can drink beer and ham on the tour.

While here I have found that I really have no desire whatsoever to go out to bars or clubs. It's strange, because that stuff is supposed to be fun... but I find that all I want to talk about is Magic, programming, DotA, grammar, and finance... you know, nerdy things that don't usually play well at bars full of American college kids. I kinda feel like I'm in High School again, insofar as I prefer to be antisocial and do nerdy things. Oh well, that is probably a good thing as far as productivity is concerned.

Other cool news is that a project named ActiveMerchant has sprung up in the Rails community to automate handling payment gateways. I'll obviously have to read up more on it when I get that far, but at least it should speed up the PayPal integration.

Anyway, it's getting cloudy and cold now, so I'm going back to my apartment. Adios!

Insert Witty Title

So this was a whirlwind week in class. I didn't even go Monday (sick) and today (Friday) we just played scrabble and talked, and we still got more done this week than I think any other week I've experienced here. Hardcore reviewed las frases adverbiales and did a lot of writing for conversation. Also got a complete explanation of accent marks. A lot to study and keep track of for the test (in about 10 days), but I feel up for the challenge.

Worked more on the magic site today. Didn't do anything incredibly special, but made lots of little changes to what I have. I played with script.aculo.us (AJAX framework built upon prototype... which is another AJAX framework) for a bit to do something that I ended up solving with pure CSS. At least I got a bit of time playing with it... since I will soon be using it quite a bit I think.

Big find of the day was a group dedicated to archiving hi-res images of all magic cards. They are organized enough to release torrent files and a program to automatically update the images as new scans become available. While I have a script that is already pulling the images from another site, I queued up the torrent anyway, just to have the really hi-res ones available at some point. For now I'm not going to worry about images past the point of having something there to display.

I have a basic user login setup working (thanks to acts_as_authenticated), but it definitely will need more work at some point. As long as it works well enough so I can start (probably Sunday) on the idea of collections... which I'll just hash out enough to get to the root problem of defining shopping baskets and doing the price matching. Once I get the basic matching working to satisfaction, I get to backtrack and flesh out everything ad infinitum...

Once that basic feature set is up and running... Should be able to pretty it up with a real design and go live with first version... but I'm getting ahead of myself... we are talking months of work... especially since I'm slowed down by dividing my time with school, and the lack of internet for the majority of the day.

On that note, I will hopefully be getting a 1mb/256k connection in my apartment in about three weeks or so. I just have a feeling it won't go as smoothly as that though. It is a WiMax connection, which means a guy has to come install some kind of antenna and router in our apartment. They haven't given me an installation appointment yet, and we are never home, so hopefully they give me some notice so I can be there to let the guy in. It would be really nice to have though, as I could work at my leisure in my own place... not to mention do my AJLA work for free.

Speaking of AJLA, that is becoming a real distraction as well. I keep going back and forth about working there. On the one hand, it's easy work that pays $21/hr, with benefits (for $95/mo pretax), and they let me work 20 hrs a week telecommuting. Sounds like the perfect job. I make enough to live comfortably and devote the majority of my time to my own ideas. On the other hand, I just have no drive to actually do the work, and I feel bad being less than productive. It looms constantly in my mind because I know things need to get done, but I'd rather be working with rails. I just don't know whether improving my mental situation is worth throwing away said perfect financial situation. If I didn't work there, I'd have to work somewhere, since I, like most people, need money to eat. But, working a non-programming job has the benefits of allowing me to focus on one project... trying to continually context switch between AJLA and rails is difficult.

On the other hand, it's really only an issue because I have 6 hours of internet a day, and devoting four of them to AJLA is a downer. If I wasn't going to school in the morning, that'd free up a lot of time to devote to both... and if I had internet in my apartment, I'd likewise have more time. So, I'm hoping this lurch is a temporary one that will solve itself when I get the WiMax connection. Of course, when I get back to Kansas, it'd be nice to not have to find a job, and there I won't have school taking up time.

Anyway, that is my brain dump for now. More tomorrow I'm sure. Nos Vemos.

Tres Semanas

So I kinda haven't been blogging. Oops.

I've been in Ronda a little over three weeks now, and am settling into a routine. I wake up at 8, shower and eat a sandwich and yogurt, go to class from 9am to 2pm, eat a big lunch, do household chores, get on the internet from 4ish to 9ish, then eat dinner, do homework, and sleep. It's actually kind of nice. I sleep a solid 9 hours a night but I feel like I have a ton of free time each day. I think it's because I actually wake up semi-earlyish, instead of at 11 or noon like I was in Lawrence.

I have once again been working on the Magic site. I wrote scripts to automate the scraping of several card databases for card info and pictures. I have all the card info loaded now, and am about a quarter of the way through downloading the pictures. I also switched the templating to HAML, instead of ERb... it's much cleaner and faster to write. Only thing that bothers me is there seems to be a lack of flexibility to do some things. Not sure if I'm going to just write helpers for everything or try to modify HAML a bit to do what I want. The problem I am having is conditionally outputting tags. I don't like putting html in the helpers because it seems like that should be in the view templates. However, I am timid about patching HAML myself, because frankly I'm not that good at ruby yet. For now I am avoiding doing any fancy design, because I tend to get bogged down in it (since I'm not a designer per se).

I was thinking last night that when I return to the states, I'm going to try and work from 9am to 2pm so I can maintain this same schedule. I really like it. Op, class time!