Better Living Through Introspection

Just in case I don’t make it down to the tidal basin this year, I’ve finally scanned and uploaded some slides from the 2004 cherry blossoms.

Got an extra ten grand just lying around? Why not adopt a portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. Ridiculous. But, I’m excited that the re-opening is just around the corner.

On a side note, wanna take bets on who actually says “I’m going to the Reynolds Center” versus “I’m going to the National Portrait Gallery”? The things money can buy. I don’t know who this Donald Reynolds guy is, he’s got a lot of things named after him.

Now, I’m not going to discuss the details of this movie until it’s out, because that simply wouldn’t be fair to the rest of you in the world who didn’t get to see a sneak preview of it tonight…but, I will say this: if I could have a nickel for every time a movie reviewer (pro or otherwise) labels this movie as thought-provoking, I’ll be a bazillionaire by…oh, Friday night. Also, Natalie, I’m waiting for you to text me. I’m online.

By now, if you know the slightest bit about open source web development, you’ve heard of Ruby and it’s super-hyped framework, Ruby on Rails. You might even be sick of it — or, like me, you might be attempting to embrace it while at the same time trying to maintain a guilt-free love for PHP.

If you’re having doubts about the future of PHP, don’t worry too much. While I can only see Ruby continuing to grow in popularity in the web development community, I wouldn’t be overly concerned with the possibility that it might eclipse PHP. Partly, this might seem like wishful thinking; but, not entirely. For example, Zend recently announced that it would be releasing a PHP framework — and, a week ago they did just that, cleverly naming it the Zend Framework. It looks promising. And, while a project of this scope was surely in the works for some time, I think there’s a perceived threat of Ruby on Rails chipping away at the PHP community of developers that might have prompted Zend to get their act together…Admittedly, this is pure conjecture, but I’m pretty sure you’ll agree that for now anyway, Ruby is good for PHP.

New from the director of Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre (starring Jack Black). Nachooooooooooooooooo!