Freaking out.

The edge of insanity is not clearly defined, but invisible. It’s hard to know when your about to break but sometimes it’s also clearly visible. I personally don’t know either of them. I can tell you this though, taking a step back doesn’t mean it helps, in some cases it feels more as if I am putting my back up against a wall and pushed into a corner. Generally the outcome of those type of situations aren’t good.

If anything, I need to learn to step to the side for now, need to clear my mind. Like a pressure cookers sensitivity, you can cook great things up to a point and if you push it beyond that, BOOM.

Learning and doing… I was reminded today.

I was reminded today by a friend that I had a quote a while back on twitter last year.

“The addiction of learning new things keeps me from accomplishing the current.”

It really does sum up a lot of my thoughts and how things happen. I love to learn new things, I love trying to new things. That is also the downfall is that it prevents me from finishing things that I had started earlier.

Oops, I should learn to stick with something till its complete.

Reference link to the post: https://twitter.com/#!/ericcasequin/status/66168190484488194

Fantastic Meal my mother made pre-wedding.

2 days before my wife and I got married, my mom prepared us a great meal, just revisiting old memories and posting them.

People who inspire me

I recently was thinking of the question, who inspires me here. Why, what is it they do that makes me think I can be a better me. There is simply one guy that above all else inspires me, Jesus.

Amongst others here on earth, alive or dead. I recently learned about the oldest marathon runner in the world. Fauja Singh, whom is 100 years old as of this post. Its amazing that he is what he is. I have little to say on the topic as I just have heard about it, but I think I am going to make it a point to start pointing out who I feel are inspiring people. On top of that, I will work on explaining why.

Fauja inspiration to me is that he is still kicking at 100 and quite the active runner. I mean, 6 hour marathons in his 90′s, thats amazing!

Coffee script and textmate

So I started using CoffeeScript recently which is very nice. I am very new to it and haven’t had any projects to try it out on yet. But because the way I am, I have to get things working the way I like things to work. That meant for me when I save a file, I want it to automatically compile each time.

I know that there is a watch that can be set on the files/directory etc. But I like files to be compiled on save a lot of the time.

So here is a quick snippet for Textmate to save your coffee script files.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# get file name
file = STDIN.read[/coffee: ([^*]+\.coffee)/, 1] || ENV["TM_FILEPATH"]

# run coffee command
system("coffee -c \"#{file}\" ")

I wont go into explaining how it works since I mainly stole it from a LESS compile command I had. I just modified it. Hope it works out for you.

My first big motorcycle ride.

So a few of us went out on August 7, 2011 on a motorcycle ride that had a scary moment for me and changed my perceptive on riding entirely, well at least changed the way ride. I have been riding for about 4 months now at this time.

We stared off in Redding California and headed to Redbluff California to meet up with the rest of the riders. From there our ride really started.

Our entire ride was like this: Redding to Redbluff to Platina to Hayfork and back to Redding. 171 miles. We left at 8am got back at 4pm.

The point in which I learned my my lesson and how I will ride was in between Placentia and Hayfork. The roads got quite windy at the top there and it seemed there was rubble every turn. I found my self attempting to keep up with the lead rider whom which was a more experienced rider then I. As I was riding and keeping up fairly well, I started to note the rocks all over the ground and was trying to ride around them, at one point one of the corners had more rocks then others and I was going a decent speed and tried to whip maneuver around them like I knew what I was doing. In doing so, I got nervous over braked and then hit my front brakes on top of it which washed out my turning and lead me to going straight. The harsh thing about this moment wasn’t that I lost the control a bit, it was the if I hadn’t slowed down enough after losing control I would of ended up driving or dropping my bike right off the cliff side. To top that off, it was on a very sharp blind corner on a fairly traffic heavy road which I had no idea if a car was coming around the corner.

I was happy to find my self corrected and back on the road riding again. I noted at that very moment the concept of “Ride your ride” which everyone was telling me to do that, and i thought I would just keep up, which is what I thought my ride was. No, it was riding for your level of experience, where you feel you’re comfortable, especially on turns where it matters. Knowing your bike is imperative to this ride. For the most part the rest of the ride was taken much slower and much more cautiously. I haven’t been scared like that in a very very long time, it was quite nerve wracking to say the least. Took a good hour or so before I stopped actually shaking.

I am glad to say though after doing the ride, I have told many people about it including some other very experienced riders that noted for this being my first ride I did great. One rider said this ride was more for a seasoned rider. This was my first ride that was longer then 30 miles in one trip. A bit of advice one rider told me is that if there is an object on the ground, look at it once and then don’t look again, if you focus on it you will be more likely to hit it.

Overall, it was an amazing experience. I have never seen this side of the world in a way, it joyous to see so many riders together, riding out as a team and how much respect was given to us on the road. I will for sure do this again but with the new knowledge I have gained. I just pray that every ride is safe and that I never repeat such a mistake.

Below is a map of our entire trip.

Link to google maps:
View Larger Map

Not choosing your own path

Often times in my life I find it easy to make a choice in which I feel benefits me. Most of the time, those choices never really end up being part of my future but they do set the ground and basicing idea which direction I would like to go.

Lately my focus is in programming languages, I am a PHP, JS, Jquery etc front end type developer mostly. Few years ago I was part of a the starting groups and interests of Ruby on Rails. Got the books, dove in strong and got a great idea on what I wanted next. The problem was I didn’t really have a good foundation in programming and the language was proving to be a bit confusing and difficult.

Since then I have worked with a team that has helped me grow in my understanding of programming. I really respect these guys and really appreciate what I have learned from them. And now that I have been with them, I have restarted the the pursuit of Ruby on Rails again which I am very pleased to say I understand much better with the help of my team.

What I realize is that I chose a path long ago, but it wasn’t ready for me. A new path was set that lead me to where I am now.

I really don’t think that what I wrote will make much sense, I will revise what I wrote above later, but I really wanted to put out what I was thinking just now and how I felt.

Check all your checkboxes in one click.

Nice little bit of code #mattfarina noted regarding checking all checkboxes quickly.

Just drag this link to your book mark bar and then you can click it when you need to check a bunch of checkboxes.

You can view the original snippet code at https://gist.github.com/942659 and below.

(function(d) {
  var input = d.getElementsByTagName('input');
  var i = input.length;

  while (i--) {
    if (input[i].type === 'checkbox') {
      input[i].setAttribute('checked', 'checked');
    }
  }
})(this.document);

Props goes to Nathan Smith (http://sonspring.com/) for writing the original snippet.

Geeky things

I love the fact that shiny objects to me are generally something that is very boring to most. Shiny could be the fact that I made my facebook profile image a QR code.

Its not original, and I got the idea off someone else’s facebook. I dont know who it was I seen it on though. hehe.

Well, if you got here from my QR code., hello and your just as geeky too!

I remember peeing on the babysitters head

For some reason I was just about to close shop today and get ready to go home and I remembered a time when I was being babysat by someone. I think it was my dad’s friend who was babysitting us. The details escape me, but the moment doesn’t. I remember very clearly my friend and I climbed up upon this van, I am assuming its either my dad’s van or his friends.

We then proceeded to wait for the nearest person to come by which turned out to be my friends dad. We then thought it would be funny to start peeing on that person. I can tell you we hit our mark fairly accurately. It was a glorious moment…

What followed that was a series of yells, threats, running and the eventual belting. It was so worth it to.

I tend to remember these kind fo things out of the blue and start laughing out loud for no apparent reason. People think I am either nuts or just crazy.