Robby on Rails

During the summer of 2005, I wrote a post that listed several coffee shops in Portland, Oregon that I found to be really good places to work on your laptop at. I’ve gotten bored with my regulars and have recently begun to look for new places to venture to.

Pier Coffee is in a weird part of Portland that is somewhat isolated due to the train tracks that will block you in when a long train is moving through town. It’s a very short walk from Allison’s place and they have Oregon Chai, which has become my replacement for drinking coffee. The chairs in Pier Coffee are very comfortable and they have an electrical outlet at most of their tables. When you get bored, you can walk over and play darts, or get a glass of wine. The wireless works really well and when it’s not raining, you can sit out front and overlook the train tracks and downtown, while hacking on your laptop. Pier Coffee is what I would consider an easy place for me to feel productive. There usually isn’t too many people here and I believe most of the customers are from the two condo complexes next to it. The staff is very friendly and their music tastes aren’t annoying.

Backspace is about a half block from the PLANET ARGON office. They don’t serve Oregon Chai, so I usually only get a tea, a viso, or a hot cocoa while there. They have a few tables and couches and I haven’t found this a good place to be productive. It’s a good place to have a short meeting with a coworker though. Music tastes are better here than most places, and they have a food menu now that caters to my vegetarian diet. There are a few electrical outlets, but the seats near them are often occupied.

Three Lions Bakery is about a block from the PLANET ARGON office. They do have Oregon Chai, so I stop by here often in the morning to get my fix. Not many electrical outlets, so your visits are usually not very long. They have a few sandwiches that are quite good. This is a good place to stop by if you’re in the mood to work for about a hour and have some chai and an excellent (and freshly baked) cookie.

If you’re in Portland and have some recommendations, please do share. I’m looking for a few places that are open later in the evening.

During my recent trip to London, I plugged my mobile phone charger into my UK power adapter and it blew the charger… leaving me across the world with no charger for my phone. It didn’t matter much because I couldn’t get coverage with my service with Verizon Wireless. My second two-year contract with them came up a few months ago… so I am now considering leaving them for something else. After four years… I would grade them a B+. I’ve always liked their web tools and since all of my close family and girlfriends family has used Verizon… the in-network calls have always been free. The coverage is generally good within the states… however, lack of international plans doesn’t work out well with my recent and upcoming travel plans for work. Also, I need to sneak my way over to the Nokia phones as one of our projects requires that it work with opera mini and the mobile version of mozilla. So… I’d like to test the application first hand. ;-)

Since you have all been so helpful in the past with open questions… who do you have mobile service through?

I would like to get the following:

• java-enabled for mini opera, ssh client!, etc…
• camera-not-so-important but useful
• bluetooth for getting an internet connection and sharing to my laptop while on the road
• lots of text messaging/email (server notices…)
• ability to use phone internationally
• wifi?

Who do you use and why do you like them (or not)?

Thanks!

I’m leaving for London tomorrow. Thank you all for your responses to my travel security questions. I really appreciate it. :-)

I’m going to be getting in on Wednesday afternoon and am going to try to meet up with people at PizzaOnRails.

Thurs-Fri is RailsConf fun… but I haven’t figured out what I will be doing over the weekend. I’m leaving for New York on Tuesday.

Does anybody know of any good vegetarian places that I should go out of my way to try in London? Interested in hanging out and talking shop? Email me! :-)

My fiance keeps pointing out how annoying it is to see science grouped with technology on the Google News site. (see Sci/Tech)

Why is this annoying? Well… take a look at the following screenshot.

What doesn’t seem like it belongs in this list?

If you guessed, “Dwarf dinosaur fossil found in Germany”... you guessed right!

I wish that they had just a Science category as I hardly see how this needs to be grouped with news about Nintendo or new voip phone applications.

Some people have habits that are hard to break. Mine is that I tend to pick up books off of our bookshelf…okay…90% of the books are my fiances… but I’ll take one and just open it and start reading. The problem with this is that I really don’t make (or find) enough time to start at the beginning and finish each book. I often end up just opening up to a random section and reading a few pages until I realize that I’m totally lost or until I find something interesting to think more about. Occasionally… I finish the book.

One such book that I am reading is Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, which was written in 1973. The topic of the book? “Economics as if People Mattered.”

The other day I read a section about developing nations, which has always been a topic of interest to me. I’m going to take a step away from the topic of the book and extract something that the author said that caught my interest.

“We tend to think of development, not in terms of evolution, but in terms of creation.”

When I read this… I know that this isn’t referencing application development but development of third-world nations… however it got me thinking. Is it our tendency to try and plan things the whole way through so that we can follow through and create the definitive and ideal solution in one try? This is exactly how some development processes work. Gather requirements, develop one monolithic plan, and implement it. This process can take a half of a year to several… depending on the size of the company. Perhaps there is very little difference between the three year project and the three month, except the smaller team and lapse of time. Could it be that when we admit that we know that requirements will change over time and if we take an iterative approach that we will be better prepared and more open to change?

...and perhaps the following quote could be applied to the topic of good usability...

“An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods. . . .” - E.F. Schumacher

Development should be an evolutionary process… and real people should be where we focus our attention to.

...what are your thoughts?

And now for a long overdue announcement! Peat Bakke officially joined the PLANET ARGON core team back in February as our Project Director, and started working with us as a satellite developer in late 2005. As a growing development company, we quickly learned the value of having a dedicated project director. Not only does it help keep the intermingling of projects organized here at PLANET ARGON HQ, but-and maybe more importantly-it also gives our clients a single point of contact. We may be a small team, but that doesn’t mean that all of us get the chance to be intimate with each and every project. That’s Peat’s job, and we sure are glad to have him on board. Be sure to check out his blog at peat dot org to keep up on his thoughts regarding Rails, project management, business development, and his devotion to index cards.

Learn more about the PLANET ARGON core team.