My first attempt at learning Ruby on Rails has been thwarted by the latest release of Ruby on  Rails v2.1.  The book I was reading “Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications” published by Sitepoint was written very well but outdated.  The version in the book is 1.2.3.   I was excited about learning to create my own Digg site.  I guess that is why Sitepoint was giving away free copies.  I looked into purchasing the updated version called Simply Rails 2, but after looking through the forums, this edition had some problems too.

I found a much better book called “Agile Web Development with Rails” third edition.  The first edition is among the best selling programming books in the world and won a Jolt award for best technical book.  The print version doesn’t some out until October 2008, but you can download a .pdf version now.  You will recieve updated .pdf versions as the book is revised.    I hope this book turns out to be as good as the reviews.

Not only are they funny, but they actually teach you Photoshop techniques.

Tysen and I went out to McDowell Mountain Regional Park last night for the monthly Mountain Bike in the Moonlight ride. Organized by Maricopa County Parks and Recreation, the ride took place on the 15.4 mile Pemberton Trail. The turnout was amazing! 88 mountain bikers showed up on a day when the temperature reached 110. It proves that there are still hardcore mountain bikers out there.

The ride starts at 7:30 and everyone needs to be off the trail by 9:30. It is not a guided ride. You can start whenever you want, between 7:30 and 8:30 pm. It was a whole different experience riding Pemberton at night. I can’t wait until next month!

Firefox wants to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. There has been 1,250,843 pledges worldwide at the time of this writing

All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy.

The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Join the community and this effort by pledging today.

I finished my Web Design Portfolio, but I am still working on the Photography section.

I am testing out how posts look on my new WordPress Theme I designed. So, I adding another post about random things.

Starting to learn Ruby on Rails tonight, until ADD got the better of me and I created this blog, I was surfing some competitors web sites and saw their blog.

Ruby on Rails seems like it will be somewhat easy to figure out. I just need to find the time to learn new things, keep up with my website design work, spend time with the family and ride my bike. The book I am reading Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications seems to be very good. We’ll see how it goes.

I started riding my bike to work this week. Even though it is about 100 degrees out, I really enjoy it. I learned 2 things on my first day. Don’t ride your bike to work in the shirt you are going to wear for the day, and don’t forget your hard drive at home. I got to work with my shirt wet from sweat and no hard drive for my computer. I use a slide out tray for my hard drive, so I can take it back and forth to work and home. So, I had to turn around and go get it. I had to hurry, because I had a meeting in an hour. Luckily, it is only 4 miles back to home and takes 15 minutes on my mountain bike.

What is really amazing, is that it only takes 6 minutes longer to ride my bike than drive in my car. I really want to keep this up, considering the price of gas, doing a little part in saving the environment and the feeling of getting some excercise. Not sure how easy it will be when it gets to be over 110. I would encourage every one to ride your bike to work for a week. You might really enjoy it and keep doing it.

My first post to my first blog. I finally got around to designing and coding a WordPress website. The site is widget ready. Making it widget ready was very important. I see so many WordPress themes out there that aren’t widget ready. Why make a Word Press website not widget ready? It took a while to figure out the theme anatomy, but not too difficult. There is a wealth of documentation on the WordPress website. I also followed the code in the default theme. Looking through good code really made it easier. The website isn’t completely customized yet, but I am happy with how it has turned out so far. I’m sure I’ll find things to tweak here and there.

That wasn’t so bad. Blogging could be fun. I didn’t think I had anything to write about. Now, I can think of lots of things to write about.