Posted by marshall Mon, 29 Mar 2004 19:00:00 GMT
The weekend before last (March 19-21) we went down to Mexico with a group from our church. I joined a group of guys building a house for a family, while Lara helped paint a schoolhouse. We drove down to Ensenada on Friday evening, worked on Saturday, and came back Sunday afternoon following a brief visit to La Bufadora.
Read more...Posted by marshall Wed, 17 Mar 2004 19:00:00 GMT
I've started messing around with the Ruby programming language lately. So far I really like it -- much more than any language I've used in recent memory. It takes the best things about Smalltalk, Python, and Perl, and mixes them together into a wonderfully elegant, highly productive, truly object-oriented syntax, with lots of helpful built-in modules. It's probably going to be the language I use for shell scripts from now on, at the very least. Unfortunately, it's not that popular yet outside of Japan, and the cross-platform graphical user interface libraries for it are still immature.
A few links:
irb doesn't have readline support, though, which means it can't do command line editing and completion. Follow these instructions to update to the latest version and fix this.Just for kicks, I took a little Java program I had written a while back to compare weather reports and re-wrote it in Ruby. It went from over 370 lines in Java down to around 130 lines in Ruby. A 65% decrease in size! What's more, the Ruby version is easier to read and modify. Amazing stuff.
Posted by marshall Wed, 17 Mar 2004 19:00:00 GMT
This past weekend was most enjoyable. On Friday evening, Lara joined a couple of friends to get free facial makeovers at a makeup place in Downtown Disney. I hadn't been to the Disneyland area in a while, so I tagged along to see what it was like. I visited the Lego Store and checked out the life-size Lego Darth Vader (complete with sound effects!), and then we all met up to go to the House of Blues for dinner, which was a first for all of us. The food was excellent. All throughout the evening, our friends were talking about all the things Disneyland does throughout the year, and extolling the virtues of the Disneyland Annual Pass. We're very tempted.
On Saturday, we went with Jim and Regina Manley to Mount San Jacinto in Palm Springs. We rode the tram up into the mountains, which was quite the experience since the floor of the tram rotates as the car ascends/descends. Once we reached the top, we explored some of the mountain trails. We didn't get very far, though; unlike the 80-degree summerlike climate in Palm Springs, the mountains had knee-deep snow covering the easy trails, and much deeper snow covering the more difficult ones. Still, we quite enjoyed trudging through the snow...and then leaving it behind to go home. We returned to the Manleys' house for an enchilada dinner, and then they came over to our apartment to watch What's Up Doc? on the big screen.
Not content with visiting Anaheim and Palm Springs in a weekend, on Sunday afternoon we drove down to Newport Beach Fashion Island, where we dined at my new favorite restaurant, the El Torito Grill. Fresh tortillas with honey butter...chocolate espresso creme brulee...mmmmm. We walked around the ceilingless mall a bit, checking out the huge goldfish and all the people walking their dogs, and then headed back to Redlands...but not before Lara fell in love with the iPod Mini at the Apple Store.
On Sunday evening we had our 20somethings "Odd Groups". Lara is leading a cooking group this month, and I'm enjoying a C. S. Lewis study group. There are some folks in the group that have worked at the C. S. Lewis Foundation located here in Redlands, which makes it all the more interesting.
One might think we'd want to take a rest after a busy weekend of driving around, but no. This coming weekend we're headed to Mexico to help build a loft house. ¡Vamos!
Posted by marshall Fri, 05 Mar 2004 19:00:00 GMT
Curse you, Caramel deLites! You call to me with your almost-realistic product photography, you assure me that no one will know, you capture me. I struggle to resist, but ... but ... just one more!
Hello, my name is Marshall, and I am a Caramel deLite addict. You may know them as Samoas. It depends on the manufacturer that your local Girl Scouts have chosen.
You can eat your Thin Mints, you can hold up your peanut butter patty Tagalongs, but my heart belongs to only one. And now please excuse me, I hear a box calling my name.
