The Bark Blog

If you were to write up a master list of everything you wanted to accomplish in life, how many items would you come up with? Five? Ten? How about forty-three? 43Things is a fun little web site that encourages you to list your 43 top goals and share them with 150-thousand pseudo strangers. Stuff like, “Visit London” and “Save someone’s life”…and let’s not forget “Learn the Napoleon Dynamite dance”. It keeps track of how many other people share your goals and lets you surf from list to list. For example, check out the list for “make a documentary film”.

I haven’t set up an account yet, but I do like the idea. The site also has a nice Cool Factor, since it’s implemented in my new favorite programming language Ruby using my new favorite web framework Ruby on Rails.

Computer programming is like any other career: you have to give it a kick in the John Henry every once in awhile to keep it interesting, otherwise you risk boredom, stagnation, or worse. That’s how Java feels lately. It has lost its luster, its challenging crackle. The initial discovery and adventure has been buried in a paradoxical swamp of rote boilerplate coding and dizzying Enterprise Specifications.

Time for a change of pace.

My first breath of fresh life recently was Apple’s Cocoa Toolkit for developing native Mac OS X applications, using the Objective-C programming language. So far so good, but it’s a huge code library with tons of great tools, and it only works on modern Apple systems. Great for my hobby projects, but it doesn’t really help me at my day job.

Enter the Ruby Programming Language, a fully object-oriented scripting language with solid cross platform support (OS X, Windows, UNIX) and a wealth of built-in libraries. I’ve just scratched the surface, but it does seem to light up that special spark that I’ve been missing from Java lately. A change of pace will really help fire me up again at work, and shake off those creeping doldrums. Let’s hope!

Saw Lowen & Navarro last night at the Fine Line. It was a great show in its own right, but was also a sadly poignant event. Eric Lowen has been battling with ALS, which doesn’t mix well with the hard life of touring. This tour will probably be their last. On the up-side, Eric seems to be in good spirits and still has excellent guitar chops.

But speaking of Art and Science, I was very surprised and impressed by the tech setup they have. You can toss down $15 before the show, and they will burn you a copy (Science) of the entire show (Art) to take home that night. Simple and obvious in hindsight, yet still cutting edge. Haven’t listened to the CDs yet, so I don’t know how good the sound quality is (nor if it includes their traditional unplugged encore). I expect good things, though.