Noel Rappin Writes Here

I have a couple of upcoming conference and training appearances that I don’t think that I’ve mentioned on the blog before. March 16, I’ll be in Salt Lake City for Training Day, the day before the official start of MountainWestRubyConf. I’ll be doing a full day of training, the morning will be on Improving Your Ruby Skills, and the afternoon will be Getting Started with TDD in a Legacy Environment. You can get more details, including location and pricing at the MWRC site.

After a long time bouncing back and forth, I’ve come back to TextMate as my main editor. I realize that’s starting to sound almost old-school these days, but it still works the best for me. What I’ve come to realize about TextMate versus, say, Vim, or RubyMine is that a) this is a genuinely personal decision and different people are just more comfortable with some tools than other and b) it comes down to what each tool makes easy and how useful that is.

Among Others is an evocative, subtle, and mostly brilliant fantasy novel on the themes of dealing with loss, growing up, learning to live, and how amazing the new Heinlein novel is. People who grew up inhaling SF and fantasy books are, by and large, going to recognize themselves pretty strongly. Not surprisingly then, many SF writers who have reviewed the book on line have raved. I’ll rave too, with some quibbles that we’ll get to in a bit.

I suppose I should get this on the blog… Rails Test Prescriptions was sent to the printer yesterday, actually a couple of days ahead of the schedule that we’ve been on through the last stages of production. Here are the dates, as I understand them… The book is scheduled to leave the printer on Thursday, Feb 17, headed for bookstores and warehouses. I’d expect that you would probably see it in bookstores early the following week.