Its never too late to pursue your passion!

I saw Larry on American Idol last night. Sixty-two years old, break dancing, standing in front of America singing “Pants on the Ground,” a rap about kids who wear their pants too low. I warn you. The rap is addictive.

“I have a horrible feeling this song will be a hit,”
– Simon Cowell.

Green Tape

Croton on Hudson took a step forward to revitalize the Harmon District, an area hit particularly hard by the recession. The village board approved a resolution to rezone the Harmon district, a first step toward enabling entrepreneurs to build profitable retail space with rental units. The Mayor (Leo Wiegman) also announced a new “green tape” initiative.

Green Tape?

Its the antithesis of Red Tape. Green Tape is his word for process re-engineering, removing extra layers of red tape, streamlining local government. The title is catchy. It calls to mind other green initiatives, conserving natural resources, preserving our environment.

We all spend a lot of our waking hours at work, in our towns, working with people. Green Tape. We need more of it, conserving one of life’s most precious resources — time.

My wife and I saw “It Might Get Loud” last week. Fabulous movie. If you’re a guitarist, and many of us are, you can’t miss this.

The quintessential moment for me was a scene with Jimmy Page, listening to “The Rambler” in his music library. Jimmy leans back, emits a huge, white grin, and laughs as he strums his air guitar along with the reverb effect on the antique recording. Jimmy loves what he does, its the creative spark, the constant need to create. The edge talks about spending hours tweaking machinery, just to “get the equipment to sound like what’s in my head.”

True coding is just that. If you’ve got the bug, its hard to let go. Your mind is constantly racing with ideas, your fingers eager to type, wanting to bend, contort, twist the Mac until it produces software that makes your ideas come alive.

“Just like I see it in my head..”

Years ago I participated in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and was lucky enough to win a place in the final 40. Back then, we’d get a trip to Washington, DC, where we met Ted Kennedy, the President, nobel laureates, the National Science Foundation, and more. But we never had Conan O’Brien!

Conan O’Brien recently visited the latest version of this competition, the Intel Science Talent Search, in Reno Nevada. His version of science involves a cocktail, a slot machine, trash talking nerds, and a product to block see-through cameras. Check it out, starting at 6 minutes and 30 seconds (6:30).

Scott Raymond’s “Ajax on Rails” contains a nifty trick for form fields, following the Rails mantra of DRY and convention over configuration. Creating a field with an associated label, error checking, and formatting is as simple as

   <%= f.text_field :phone %>

This produces a label using the humanized “Phone: “, a <div> for holding validation errors, an input tag, and appropriate field values. Here’s a complete form using Scott’s hackery from page 298:

<%# See +standard_form+ in application_helper.rb %>
  <%= f.text_field :name %>
  <%= f.date_select :start_date, :label => "First Call" %>
  <%= f.date_select :end_date, :label => "Last Call" %>
  <%= f.text_field :phone %>
  <%= f.text_field :email %>
  <%= f.text_area :body, :label => "Notes" %>
  <%= standard_submit %>
<% end %>

Scott’s magic is embodied in a form helper, LabelingFormBuilder. For yucks, I Googled in search of a Rails plugin by that name. I stumbled across labeling_form_builder from Seth Rasmussen. I peeked at the license. Seth cracked me up. Only in open source can you get away with this (words bleeped):

           DO WHAT THE F**K YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                   Version 2, December 2004

Copyright (C) 2007-2008 Seth Thomas Rasmussen

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.

           DO WHAT THE F**K YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
  TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

 0. You just DO WHAT THE F**K YOU WANT TO.