Journal entries in 'Miscellaneous' for August, 2005

I've never been very good at following that rule. Often, when I run out of things to read, I will walk into a bookstore and pick up a book that has an interesting cover and take it home. Surprisingly, it hasn't failed me yet.

Well, until now, that is.

For a few months now I've had one of these random purchases laying around. It's called Signals, by Kevin D. Randle. I finally gave it a try today, and man is it bad. The plot itself is kind of interesting, if somewhat cliché: SETI detects signals from some object fifty light years away and headed towards Earth, and the world rushes to figure out how to deal with the possibility of alien visitors.

But the writing. Oh, the writing. It sounds like the work of a ninth grader. I didn't get more than two pages into the book before deciding to write this entry.

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For the last month or two I've been toying with Ruby On Rails, a web application framework based on the Ruby programming language. It seems like a very cool way to build web applications; coding is much easier and actually fun, and maintenance should be simpler. It's cool enough that I'm actually considering rewriting the blog and photo gallery in Rails.

Originally I figured I'd just reimplement the existing setup so that, aside from some possible URL changes, most visitors wouldn't even notice the difference. But as long as I'm rewriting things from scratch, I'm considering rethinking the photo gallery's layout.

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