Three till Seven

I found SimCity Plus on sale on Origin for $20 last week. I checked on Reddit if it was worth it and was told that with the inclusion of the Cities of Tomorrow expansion, which came with the Plus version, it was. I bought it and was super excited to try it because I’ve been really enjoying Tropico 4 and wanted to experience the new SimCity.

I was excited to see the Jekyll turns 2.0.0 blog post announcing built-in support for CoffeeScript and SASS. I updated 3till7 and my portfolio to use the latest Jekyll. This in turn meant I did away with my custom plugins for compiling CoffeeScript and LESS, and moved from LESS to SASS. Here on 3till7, I stopped using the Jekyll Asset Pipeline to compile my assets and produce a combined, minified file. Using imports in my .scss files was sufficient for me CSS-wise, and my one CoffeeScript file is small enough that I don’t care it isn’t minified. I actually haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Jekyll 2 supports JavaScript minification like you can do with your SASS.

It was the middle of the night. I was surrounded by four shirtless men bearing torches and deadpan expressions. One of them threw raw chicken breasts at me and told me to eat them, or they’d kill me. Maybe they’re being nice I thought. Maybe they can see I’m hungry and they’re trying to save me. So I ate a chicken breast and immediately began vomiting–I had been poisoned!

The VCR gem is really handy for testing calls to external web services, such as AWS commands made through Fog. You make your call for real once and VCR records a new “cassette” of the request and response. Subsequent calls use the cassette, so VCR plays back the response it recorded instead of actually reaching out and touching the external service. It’s good for testing how your own program makes requests and how it handles the responses it gets back. I recently had a need for similar functionality but with command line tools. Namely, the ec2-cmd script for importing an instance into Amazon.

Over the course of a little less than a week, I migrated this blog from WordPress 3.8 to Jekyll. I used WordPress for years, probably since 2005 or 2006 when I switched away from Movable Type. I finally decided I wanted something more lightweight than WordPress, and in particular I wanted a blog that would load faster. Jekyll gives me both of those. The part that took the longest to migrate was customizing the new layout, based on Dbyll, and formatting the code examples in my posts.

Last week, T-Mobile announced they’d pay your Early Termination Fee to switch from another carrier to T-Mobile. I had been thinking about trying out an Android phone for a while, and the Nexus was my top pick. I couldn’t have a Nexus on Verizon because of GSM/CDMA crap, and I wasn’t about to go back to AT&T since I left them in disgust for Verizon a year back. The T-Mobile deal was my ticket off of Verizon, which was a decent carrier if expensive, and into the Android world. The next day, I went out and swapped my iPhone 4S for a Nexus 5. I’ve been keeping notes in Evernote on my new phone about how the experiences differ.

An AngularJS and Sinatra app that allows you to turn your weekly listening history on Last.fm into Rdio playlists. It connects with your Rdio account to create the playlists for you.