If, like me, you sometimes wish that your favorite app’s keyboard shortcuts were implemented differently, give Unsanity’s Menu Master a try. There are other, free ways to modify menus, but nothing could be simpler than hovering over a menu in any app and pressing your preferred shortcut. Worth the $10.

And speaking of Kung Fu. Please see Kung Fu Hustle. Yes, it’s silly and completely over the top. It’s also an absolute blast from start to finish. Roger Ebert sums it up nicely:

“When I saw it at Sundance, I wrote that it was ‘like Jackie Chan and Buster Keaton meet Quentin Tarantino and Bugs Bunny.’ You see how worked up you can get, watching a movie like this.”–Roger Ebert

I’ve been quiet about Ruby on Rails - reluctantly, suspiciously quiet. Why, because everyone else is making so much noise there’s not much else for me to say. I will sum up: After several months and several “real” projects, it completely rocks. Just listen to me say, “Woah, I’m never touching PHP/ASP/ColdFusion again - ever.” a dozen times a day and it becomes obvious that Rails is an absolute joy to use.

What about adoption in the marketplace? Who cares!? If I were looking to have an application built and heard a potential vendor’s developers raving and giggling about their new favorite framework, I’d hire them without even knowing its name.

A favorite quote (the author of which I’ve forgotten),

“Ruby on Rails is astounding. Using it is like watching a kung-fu movie, where a dozen bad-ass frameworks prepare to beat up the little newcomer only to be handed their asses in a variety of imaginative ways.”

Have you ever been in a meeting that was going long and someone started doing fancy tricks with their pen? You know, spinning it around their thumb or flipping it back and forth without any apparent hand movement? Well I have, and it’s always made me envious. I should be able to to that, but never have been able to figure out how. Enter Pentrix.com. (via Lifehacker)

I’d never heard of Once-a-month cooking but it sounds like a great idea.

Jess mentioned today that I haven’t written about or posted photos of her in a while. Well I hate to disappoint, so here’s a rare one from this past weekend. Yep, that’s a dress she’s wearing.

I love the Oblique Strategies cards and keep meaning to buy them. With the new Oblique Strategies widget I may not need to.

“Into the impossible”

My lawn sucks - what remains of it. The result of Oak trees, dogs and neglect, I’m now left with several greenish clumps helping to break up the otherwise unfettered expanse of dirt and weeds.

I water, mow, and pay too much for a service which, as far as I can tell, comes around once every 6 weeks or so just to stick a small sign in my front yard and an invoice in my mailbox.

Apparently, I’ve been doing it all wrong. At least according to this article from richsoil.com.

Seven Blunders of the World

1. Wealth without work

2. Pleasure without conscience

3. Knowledge without character

4. Commerce without morality

5. Science without humanity

6. Worship without sacrifice

7. Politics without principle

–Gandhi

This here blog has been running Typo for some time now. It also proxies Apache to Lighttpd and uses FastCGI. A lot of this is fairly new and I’ve run into a few snags, as you may have noticed.

I track the main line of Typo via Subversion and tonight just ran svn up without much thought. Ooops. Seems Typo 2.5 is out and there’s much new goodness. After a couple hours getting the database working again (The Rails “migrate” feature is great, except when it sucks) I’m back up and running. I created a theme which will look familiar and things are all peachy now.

By the way, Typo rocks. This is not only due to nifty features and buttloads of AJAX goodness, but also that since it’s written in Rails I can just jump right in and find the code I’m looking for and modify it easily. It’s fun!