Dan Mayer's Blog

The entire country of honduras smells like a back yard barbq. I am not
kidding it smells just like our back yard while we were grilling.
There are fields on fire all over and such so it smell like camping.

Crazy.

Power has gone out multiple times always to my amusment. I guess the wet season has started so it is raining a lot but we are having a fairly awsome time. I will write more about the experience sometime soon likely after returning.

I am back from Honduras safe and sound. I will try to do a couple different write ups and post a bunch of pictures soon, but for now I have a bunch of things to catch up with.

I will have photos tomorrow, but no one may care, because Steve did an amazing job covering the bachelor party on this episode of UVNU check it out.

My roommate made a great post on rails testing so I thought I would share that here.

Testing faster in ruby on rails.

A really cool video that Dom sent me Sunday, October 22, 2006 9:30 PM, that I just got around to watching now. Thanks Dom.

A man draws with incredible accuracy an entire city from memory. I wish I had a memory that could even touch this.

I used to have a system where if I wanted to respond to an email but I was busy I would put a star on it to deffer that email to be responded to later. Well I got really bad at that and had 357 un responded to emails that I had considered important enough to respond to. So I started going through them yesterday. I am now down to 130 emails to deal with, with the oldest ones ranging in at Nov 12, 2006 5:52 PM.

Yippie for progress and trying to add a bit more organization to my life.

One thing I kept thinking while in Honduras was how I have way to much shit. I just own far to many things and they are bothering me, consuming my thoughts, time, money, and mind. So I am trying to reduce the number of things I have to think about or deal with, and getting on top of the things I want to be thinking about and paying attention to.

Today I bought a bunch of little notebooks to carry around so I can write things down when ever I think of them. I started a labeling system in my email for faster archiving and retrieval. I bought some file boxes and file folders, and cleaned through some various junk.

Also after months the lovable little Roomba has finally been fixed and is back on its merry way of slowing cleaning the whole house.

After being gone for so long Ben and I are also on a catch up with reviewing energy drinks marathon and have been getting 2 or 3 reviews up a day.

Sadly with all that other chores and server switching headaches I haven't touched a single line of code for our primary project. Soon with a bunch of other business related stuff out of the way, hopefully we can get back on our primary goal soon. We did get our first alpha release out to a select small few who are testing and commenting on the current system, not a bad little milestone to reach I guess.

Oh yeah a pretty picture from Honduras...

I am starting to go crazy from all of the social networks and managing all of them. I guess it is a good way to keep in touch with some old friends, meet some new people, but I don't really use them much anymore. I am trying to be a little better about managing my accounts and growing my network. Mostly I am trying to focus on growing my network of more professional relationships. I guess it might help sometime down the road while pitching our idea, looking for help, or just generally promoting our project.

Social Networks drive me nuts because this is the list of networks I have been on.

Friendster (not active)
Orkut (not active)
Myspace (active)
LinkedIn (active)
Facebook (active)

I most recently joined Facebook because it was my girlfriends network of choice and where she was posting all her pictures online, so if I wanted to see her pictures I pretty much had to get an account.

Anyways I am probably forgetting some others I was a part of at some point or another, but perhaps I have fallen out of the young internet early adopter stage of my life because I don't really get the point of all these sites, perhaps it is just a easy way to blog and link up to all your friends with out having to know anything about managing a website. Oh well so that is my little rant about to many social networks and trying to keep them all up to date as they are all in various states of decay I am sure.

What is everyone listening to these days, leave recommendations, I need new music!

Lately I feel my music has been getting stale, listening to the same things over and over, and hardly hearing anything new. The only new music I hear is radio crap that I hear while briefly driving around in my car (I don't have a CD player!). I can't really even recall the last time I added new music onto my MP3 player. I still haven't taken the time to recover my old music collection from a unconnected hard drive. So in the next week as I try to sort through my music, delete, organize, rename, and create some new play lists, I also want to discover some new music.

I recently met a girl through Ben and his WashU connections and she had a bunch of musical suggestions mostly saying I need to check out some the the original rock greats:

• Flaming Lips
• Dylan
• Joni Mitchell
• Beatles (after finally loving the genius of the Love album might have to check out some originals)
• The Who
• David Bowie

Another friend recommended that I check out Muse, which I have found pretty good an interesting.

I also created a new music category, which has some of my older posts on music.

So please all of you out there write a comment and recommend a band of two for me to give a quick listen to...

Doing a bunch of business law/banking stuff which is boring

Waiting for my laptop to come in the mail

Finished catching up on my emails

Reading and in various stages of completion of 5 books
(2 business, 2 programming, 1 non fiction for fun)

Forcing myself to memorize the spelling of entrepreneur, since I want to use it so often and continually forget how to spell it

not using "."s

Forcing myself to memorize the house number and Ben's number as I realized the only phone number I know with out my phone is my mother's home number

Helping play negotiator for some lame friends

Finally working towards beating Zelda

Killing you softly with my song

I find myself using the assert_select a lot while doing testing and rails. I have had to keep looking up different examples depending on the situation. I have found that this page seems to have most everything I need when I can't remember it off the top of my head.

Rails assert select examples

I just posted quick review of Mavericks at Work over at the Pretheory blog. This means I am down to currently only 4 books, most of which have less than a hundred pages less. I am really looking forward to finishing off this group of books, so I can get my head into some new stuff. I expect to finish another one by the end of the day. If your interested in business and entrepreneur books our blog has started to put up a growing list of recommendations.

Book review of Mavericks at Work

Three Cups of Tea - One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time.

This true story motivates you and makes you wish you were doing more for others in the world. It also goes into detail and the root causes of terrorism and fighting it with education and economic development, instead of only with weapons and war. I think the strongest part of this book are the examples that show how education empowered the people so much in ways that they always wanted to use that education to help their people. It shows how knowledge and understanding can spread peace at a time when there is so much deception between what is going on with governments and there people.

The quick summary of this book is that Greg Mortenson made an attempt to climb K2 on of the hardest peaks to summit. He failed and almost died on the way back down. Finding himself separated from his group and wondering in the frozen wilderness, he stumbled of the path only to find another one that led to a remote village that wasn't even on the map. The village nursed the sick Mortenson back to health and returned him safely to the base camp he was originally attempting to find. Mortenson after seeing the poverty and struggles of the mountain village promises to return and help them. Ever since he has been building schools all across the middle east, that educate and don't teach any religion.

The story takes awhile to get moving and the author twiddles on and on about every little person that is somehow helps in the process, but it is still pretty powerful and moving to see what one man has started. So if you want some alternative views of how to help improve foreign relations between the world and the US, this book is a good place to start. If you want an inspiring story about a flawed man giving his best, I would recommend this book.