Monthly Archives: March 2010

Busy, busy, busy!

And once again I just have to point out that time flies when you’re really busy! In my case, it seems to be flying a secret military super-jet :mrgreen: The past week’s been filled with work, work-related travel, more work, reading technical literature (for work), eating, sleeping and … well, that’s about it. My back is back to normal, at last! It still tends to hurt a little sometimes but it seems to be alright altogether.

Alright! And because I’ve been too lazy to upload pics for a while, here are some 😀

Lumbago

Awesome. I just started at my new comapny and everything’s going smoothly: great colleagues, interestig tasks, really cool working environment. Just today there’s an important kick-off meeting with my team and what happens to me? Lumbago!

Can’t believe it! It started yesterday morning with a stiff back and a little pain. It didn’t hurt so bad or feel extraordinarily, though, so I didn’t care too much about it and just ignored it.

This morning, however, the stiffness and the pain were still there but still, it wasn’t that bad. So I left the house and went to work normally. When I tried to change trains at Karlsplatz station, I suddenly wasn’t able to take another step! From one second to another, the whole lower back ignited in sheer agony. Somehow I manged to take a seat and flipped through my options: Going to work was not amongst them for I didn’t know how to ever stand up from that seat again so I called a colleague and reported sick leave for the day. Great, now I’m going to miss the first important meeting!! 🙁

Anyways, after calling the emergency hotline, they told me the address of an orthopedist close to my current location. I somehow managed to get there (but the distance that would’ve taken me less than a minute, normally, took me almost 15 minutes…) and finally received some shots to the back. Right now, I’m still lying there and waiting for the painkillers to kick in, eventually, so I can go home.

Duh. Piece of crap! Of course, it’s never the “right time” for such a thing but why on earth had this to happen TO-FUCKING-DAY?!? Not only am I going to miss the meeting I was looking forward to but also my being sick just directly after joining the company is just about the worst timing I could think of…

asciicasts.com

I just stumbled upon asciicasts.com, a cool site that has the goal of transporting the great railscasts.com episodes into plain text so it’s easier to run a full-text search on them. Another benefit is that it can provide translations to other languages, too! I contacted the webmaster a few days ago and will continue translating episodes into german and also set up a repository for coordinating the translation work at github. So if you’re into Ruby on Rails and you’d like to contribute to the community by simply translating a few episodes here and there, feel free to contact me on github or contact the webmaster of asciicasts.com!

These kinds of community-created additions to the rare high-quality tutorials or screencasts in the Ruby on Rails universe are vital! Rails 3 is going to be released somewhere in the near future and with it come lots of changes that many people might not know about.

Ooops, it’s 8 a.m. already… I’d better get up and hurry to my proper job and stop doing so much open-source crap :mrgreen: