Edward Benson

Nice Suits

Tue, 20 May 2008 22:13:06 -0400

I’m not one for particularly expensive clothing, but I just tried on a Hugo Boss suit and daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

"Very soon we EHMs discovered that we did not need to wait for countries to nationalize oil fields as..."

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:27:24 -0400

“Very soon we EHMs discovered that we did not need to wait for countries to nationalize oil fields as an excuse to manipulate their politics. We turned the World Bank, the IMF, and other “multinational” institutions into colonizing tools. We negotiated lucrative deals dor U.S. corporations, established “free” trade agreements that blatantly served our exporters at the expense of those in the Third World, and burdened other contries with unmanageable debts. In effect, we created surrogate governments that appeared to represent their people but in reality were our servants. Some of the earliest examples: Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, and Israel.”

- John Perkins
The Secret History of the American Empire
p. 166-167

I’m not big on Tokyo, but this made me really miss Japan.

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:41:00 -0400

I’m not big on Tokyo, but this made me really miss Japan.

"After that flight, the Dalai Lama invited our group to his home in Dharmasala, India. Following a..."

Mon, 12 May 2008 08:14:00 -0400

“After that flight, the Dalai Lama invited our group to his home in Dharmasala, India. Following a cordial greeting, he said something that seemed most unusual, given his position as the leader of a spiritual movement. “Don’t become a Buddhist. The world doesn’t need more Buddhists. Do practice compassion. The world needs more compassion.””

- John Perkins
The Secret History of the American Empire
Page 65

"The plane deposited us on a mud runway deep in the forest. A cluster of Shuar men were assembled at..."

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:20:00 -0400

“

The plane deposited us on a mud runway deep in the forest. A cluster of Shuar men were assembled at the edge of the clearing. They looked pretty much as I remembered them—muscular, buff, laughing, happy people, except now they wore old T-shirts and Dacron shorts the missionaries insisted they use to combat the sin of nudity.

As they unloaded supplies that had arrived with us, an old man approached me. When I announced my interest in helping his people save their jungle from destruction he reminded me that my culture, not his, was causing the problems.
“The world is as you dream it,” he dolt me. “Your people dreamed of huge factories, tall buildings, as many cars as there are raindrops in this river. Now you begin to see that your dream is a nightmare.”

I asked what I could do to help.

“That’s simple,” he replied. “All you have to do is change the dream…You need only plant a different seed, teach your children to dream new dreams.”

”

- John Perkins
The Secret History of the American Empire
page 108

Book to Print!

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:51:00 -0400

Ah, the fresh smell of paper pulp! An unexpected box in the mail containing twenty copies of The Art of Rails can mean only one thing — the book has gone to print!

For the sake of getting things done, only two observations:

- I really need to finish up this W. Web story, but I’ve been dragging my feet ever since I ended up starting a war!

- All of the Wrox authors really need to get together and make a pact to send in menacing pictures for their book covers. That way the book store can place the Wrox books across the isles from each other and it will look like different topics in computer science are staring each other down.

We have destroyed the land. And now we destroy the seas.

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:35:06 -0500

We have destroyed the land. And now we destroy the seas.

Something is wrong here

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 02:15:00 -0500

Something is wrong here

Video

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:43:21 -0500

Declaring Something Doesn't Make It True

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:38:34 -0500

(see Peter Overby quote below)

What really puts a bad taste in my mouth is the way in which the Clinton campaign doesn’t see reality as the summation of past actions, but rather as a marketing campaign that can be whatever they pay money to brand. “Oh, now the voters want something new now? That’s OK! Yesterday we were the voice of experience, but today we’ll be the voice of the outsider!”

What was it that George Orwell write about? Memory holes?

Leaders act to to lead and speak to inspire, not speak to market and market to win.

A campaign so blatantly built around “winning the presidency” rather than “leading the country” is not one that deserves the White House.

"Although New York Sen. Hillary Clinton won the largest states and collected slightly more delegates..."

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:32:22 -0500

“

Although New York Sen. Hillary Clinton won the largest states and collected slightly more delegates than Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in the Democrats’ Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses on Feb. 5, her presidential campaign spent the rest of the week repositioning her as a kind of underdog…

This week, Clinton and her advisers declared that Obama is the “establishment” candidate….

It’s hard to exaggerate the distance between Clinton’s previous image and her new underdog image.

”

- Peter Overby
NPR News, 8 Feb 2008

Introduction for the Art of Rails

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:28:00 -0500

There is a certain state of mind, a certain transient condition that arises, where everything seems to resonate and effort becomes effortless. Athletes call it being in the zone, some others call it flow. Flow has nothing to do with triumph or accomplishment; it isn’t the product of your labors. Flow is the merging of a watchmaker and his watch or an artist and her paints.

The dot com bust was a confusing time for web development, but rising from the burst dreams of instant wealth, something strange and exciting happened. The web development community as a whole reached a kind of flow. In a world filled with duct-tape solutions and proprietary formats, suddenly web developers were clamoring for standards compliance, for elegance and simplicity. And it wasn’t just to fend off browser compatibility issues, but because the code looked beautiful.

Through the fits and starts, the competing ideas, and the explosion of development frameworks that followed, an identity began to emerge. This identity is as much a philosophical statement about what the web could be as it is a technical one about how to accomplish those goals. This identity is still emerging, and there are still many problems to be solved, but one thing is now certain: web application development has come of age as a rich discipline of programming that stands up on its own.

Ruby on Rails is just one part of this much larger story taking place, but in many ways it is the symbol of this coming of age. Rails challenged the web development community to rethink what it meant to build a web application. It provided an entire application ecosystem when most developers were embedding their code inside HTML files. It made unit testing not only easy, but cool, at a time when debugging web applications was, at best, a black art. It introduced a new generation of web developers to the ideas of meta-programming and domain-specific languages. And most of all, it found the voice of the change that was taking place: that the web provides a natural and elegant architecture on which to write applications if only we can create the right metaphors to harness it.

"One part of the Clinton mystique maintains: Deep down journalists think she’s a political..."

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 07:05:00 -0500

“One part of the Clinton mystique maintains: Deep down journalists think she’s a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched. Prince Yusupov served him cupcakes laced with cyanide, emptied a revolver, clubbed him, tied him up and threw him in a frozen river. When he floated to the surface they found he’d tried to claw his way from under the ice. That is how reporters see Hillary.”

- Peggy Noonan
8 Feb 2008, Wall Street Journal

Mobile post test

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:06:44 -0500

Mobile post test

Book edits are killing me

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:18:00 -0500