Joshua Thorin Messer

I’ll explain that ^ later.

Last week my benevolent employer was kind enough to send me to Atlanta, Georgia for Big Nerd Ranch’s Ruby & Ruby on Rails Bootcamp. All I can say is “awesome”. I wish I’d paid for it myself so I could say it was the best money I’ve ever spent. If you’re interested in learning Rails, go right now and sign up for the one they’ve got early next year in Germany. If you’re interested in programming on OS X, or for the iPhone, I’m betting those classes are even better (if such a thing is possible), as Cocoa programming is their speciality.

I looked around a lot for Ruby training or Ruby on Rails training. There were lots of people I’ve never heard of doing Rails classes, many fewer doing pure Ruby classes, and then there was the Pragmatic fellows and Big Nerd Ranch. Unfortunately, the straight Ruby class seems to have disappeared from the Pragmatic Studio website. Plus, Big Nerd was going to teach me for seven whole days. And do it in the middle of nowhere so opportunities for distraction where practically nonexistent. It was a no-brainer.

Now, WTF is up with that spider!? Our esteemed Rails instructor Charles B. Quinn (seebq) (or Highgroove if you want his business address) was kind enough to point this Godzilla monster out on one of our daily walks at Historic Banning Mills. This thing was trying to act casual down by the river in the center of a web about 6’ across. I wish now I’d asked the fucker to hold a quarter so you can see how big it was. I’d estimate the body at about 4.5” long. Not the biggest spider evar, but by far the biggest scary-ass spiky yellow spider whose web I was within feet of walking right into. I may have screamed. I may have peed just a little bit.

This was only two tiny little days after Craig, a fellow student, came staggering palely into the lab one night brandishing iPhone photos of a snake that had taken up residence near the steps up to his cabin. Apparently snakes like warm pavement. A quick internet search revealed the identity of our herpetological neighbor: Copperhead. Apparently not an incredibly dangerous snake, but again much scarier than what I tend to see in Los Angeles. Coyotes, yes, snakes, not so much.