My new workplace takes coffee seriously and the Saeco Magic super automatic coffee machine is our tool of choice. It only took a few days before I wanted a machine of my own. I was a bit too cheap to spring for a super automatic, so I settled for a Capresso Ultima semi-automatic machine.

A good choice. I have to grind my own beans and turn the crank to discard old grounds, but the results are just what the doctor ordered - lattes and crema coffee in the comfort of home. Recommended.

Today, in For Better or for Worse, the Pattersons are fantasizing about passing the house on to Mike and Deanna. When I look back at my childhood, there is only one place that I consider home - our house in Colorado where I lived from the age of 8 until I graduated from college.

There’s no place like home. Years back, my brother bought our childhood home from my dad. And visiting him always brings back memories. The neighborhood hasn’t really changed that much. It’s not conducive to californication and there are still neighbors who go way back.

I hope that Mike and Deanna get the house. It would bring the Pattersons full circle. And there is something very special about being both grown up and back home all at once.

Hmmm, I may need to take a trip to Columbia University. The Quintessential Ellery Queen will be on view through June 30 at the Butler Library. Back when I was in my mystery phase, Ellery Queen and Nero Wolfe were my detectives of choice. Mysteries have mostly dropped off my reading list, but every now and then I’ll swing by the library and spend some time with Ellery or Archie.

Trivialists should note that Jim Hutton (Ellery in The Adventures of Ellery Queen) and his son Tim (Archie in A Nero Wolfe Mystery) had nice runs as my favorite detectives on TV. With all the cable stations that I get, one would think that they would show up every now and then.

PS: QED (Queen’s Experiments in Detection) was a collection of Ellery Queen short stories.

Dave Winer turns 50 and all he wants is some more flow to climb a few notches on the Technorati list. It’s the least I can do. DaveNet was a favorite read for many years and a key factor in my finally becoming a blogger.

I was okay when the Broncos traded their first round pick to Washington. I bought into the weak draft story. But as Aaron Rodgers‘ day went into free fall, I started warming up my second guesses. And you’d be reading them if he fell just one more spot. Because I think that the Mastermind could have done good things with Rodgers.

The Mastermind ended up with 3 corners, Clarett, an offensive guard and a kicker. His track record with defensive backs doesn’t give me a good feeling about this draft. And while I like Clarett’s talent, I worry about the baggage he comes with. I hope that I’m wrong, but I’m afraid that I’m right - I’m not expecting much from this draft.

Inquiring minds may want to know, but I’ve elected to keep my working life and blogging life separate. I will divulge that I’ve got a easy 5 mile commute, that work is progressing nicely, and that a determined Googler might find something around the fourth page of search results.

Growing up, sports put ABC on my radar screen. The Wide World of Sports brought events that I had never seen before into my home and Monday Night Football on ABC was an event. Colorado had the perfect time zone - a 7pm start that allowed a normal dinner and a 10-ish end that allowed a good night’s sleep. Every Monday, I’d park myself in front of the tube and grind out some homework.

The Wide World of Sports is long gone and now Monday Night Football moves to ESPN for the 2006 season. I rarely watch Monday Night Football now that I’m on the east coast. But it’s going to be strange to see ABC without it.

I’ve rejoined the ranks of the fully employed. Posting will be sporadic until I have established a new reading/writing routine.

I’ve been waiting for a live CD linux for the powerbook. And thanks to Simon Willison, I’ve found one:

The Ubuntu community have released Hoary Hedgehog, otherwise known as Ubuntu 5.04. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu yet, it’s an excellent Linux distribution based on Debian with a strong focus on desktop usability. …

Best of all, Ubuntu has a Live CD similar to Knoppix which allows you to try out the distribution without installing a thing - just drop the live CD in to the drive on a x86 PC [or Apple PowerPC or AMD64 PC] and reboot.

My only issue so far is the lack of support for my Airport wireless card.

22 Apr: I don’t expect Airport support anytime soon. Apple pushes it off to Broadcom and Broadcom pushes it off to FCC. No reason to expect things to change.

Rails and FastCGI are a going concern on my PowerBook.

I started with the FastCGI on OSX wiki page.

Next, I patched my Ruby-FastCGI installation. Your setup my vary, but I applied the patches to my /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fcgi-0.8.5 directory.

Finally, I modified .htaccess in my rails application’s public directory to use dispatch.fcgi rather than dispatch.cgi. That didn’t take, as the dispatch.fci distributed in Rails version 0.11.0 references RAILS_ROOT before it has been defined. This can be fixed by upgrading to 0.11.1 or by copying line 3 from dispatch.cgi to dispatch.fcgi.

And Presto, Chango - I have a working FastCGI Rails application to work with. Sweet.