last night a dj saved my life

(not from a broken heart.)

took a stealthy weekend sabatical to the brew city 2 weekends ago (preceeding labor day) and got a shitton of great music from michael.  started digging into it:

• stunt rock - been looking for an album by him on/off for a while...ever since finding the song sampling tom cruise's wang rant from born on the fourth of july in high school junior year..."BIG FUCKING ERECT PENIS!"
• japancakes cover of my bloody valentine's landmark loveless
• bersarin quartett - the kind of stuff you can play at work and no one can complain about, but is still interesting enough to amuse
• general elektriks - french poppy hip hop that mashes and genre-bends so often you can't help but enjoy 
• mudy on the sakuban - J-mathrock...further evidence of japan's superiority
• pivot - australian post-rock/electronic/wtf act worth downloading no matter what your approach...like most kids on warp, they will challenge and enrich you for listening
• finally, an electro dance-rock group called "bad dudes" whose album "eat drugs" had me the moment i read the path on the fileserver...but then i listened and rocked out even harder....
• reading a review of their album linked me to an awesome podcast of this dubstep/AWESOME duo called modeselektor (named after vintage roland gear), who i have been simply consuming...
• and the peerless track "idiot" by james holden on a modeselektor mixcd got me into his shit too

anyway, i realized tonight that i only blog when i'm depressed, and that must mean the last 6 months (!) was awesome.  and it was.

i am now quasi-officially (enough) a sysadmin instead of a pacs admin, but this is really code for the fact that i am doing development and projects most of the time (and now am tier-1 for escalation from the pacs team).

overall this transition has been fantastic.  i really enjoy most all of what i do and i'm still on call, just in a different way.  our senior sysadmin jacked out for a month when his wife had twins (dude is serious about redundancy), and this has solidified my position and xp so he can be free/less stressed and i can mature as well.

plus i conned one of my best friends into moving out here and getting a job with us and our combined income allows us to live in a sky palace (pics coming soon).

so if i only blog when i'm depressed, why am i here when painting such a rosy picture of things since i last ranted?  i've been forced into rails development...so onto my rails list of reasons its driving me insane:

• wtf does the FixedNum type have date/time methods?!  i realize its very cute to be able to say time = 2.months.ago, but seriously wtf is stuff like that doing in the default namespace?
• the MVC religion (like OOP) is so dogmatic in forcing convention over common sense that it can be frustrating...i feel that having conditionals in display logic (e.g. don't show if null) is entirely kosher, but i am wrong...a hack non-existant helper class is clearly the right place to put things that don't square with M, V, or C
• the whole dual symantecs of models versus the actual table they represent points out the flaws of the ORM philosophy...i am continually tempted to find_by_sql the whole damn set of things i need out of protest
• i love the idea of writing MyTable.users(usr).window(datea,dateb).constraint(x) with named scopes, but other than messing around in the console, (which is verboten since testing and CI and agile philosophy are also bound into the RoR way) is this really cleaner or easier to maintain?  tbd
• as a python fan, its probably hypocritical to say i don't mind the whitespace restrictions it imposes but loathe ending blocks with end
• the cute pluralization games with table names irks me forever...combining this gripe with the named scope thing and the terminology nonsense leads me to believe a lot of this test-driven development methodology and solipsistic naming "magic" is because the core users/developers make a lot of hip web 2.0 apps with rails, not integrating with business intelligence or legacy systems to visualize data (or do anything using data not generated by user input on a web page)
• when i google docs for python (or C++ or javascript, i get lots of links from python.org and such...i get links to railscasts and screencasts with RoR.  not even the pickaxe or rails api docs show up on page 1 of google.  combining this with a weird dns/filtering problem on our network that delays google dns resolution by about a minute and you get a frustrated dude

i've done a lot of programming in college and in the last 2 years.  i've gotten my SQL powers up past novice level and can write a mean python script, but i'm not a web developer.  jumping into ruby for the first time while also learning the beast that is rails has been hellacious...especially with deadlines and the attitude that learning is best achieved through struggling instead of pair programming (due to limited resources with other developers).

anyway, like the AVGN, i'm back and i'm pissed.

ps - if you like the internet and shit, check out chrome and ubiquity.