Author: John Weathers

Hello WordPress!

/ John Weathers / 1 Comment

In the several months since I first started blogging, I have enjoyed using Mephisto. It’s a nice blogging tool and was a great way for me to play around with a bonafide Ruby on Rails application. However, thanks to my new job at a Rails shop, I will soon be getting all the Rails action that I need on a daily basis without any need for an alternative outlet.

In addition, I have found the almost complete lack of activity on the Mephisto website disconcerting. I understand that the developers of Mephisto are busy and that Mephisto is just a side project for them, so it’s not that I expect anything from them. It’s not as if I or other Mephisto users are paying them for the wonderful work that they do. At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable producing a growing body of blog posts here at the wrathful dove on a system that may simply stagnate should its developers lose interest in further development.

For this last reason, I have been toying with the idea for several months of switching my blogging software. I have considered Typo and WordPress on numerous occasions. WordPress seems the obvious standard by which other blogging software is judged and is a fine product, but every time that I considered moving to WordPress, I ran into a roadblock that I had constructed for myself: I wanted a playground for Rails development and so was committed to maintaining my blog in Ruby. Thus, instead of WordPress, I focused my attention on Typo.
Continue reading →

A New Job

/ John Weathers / Leave a comment

Most of my small group of readers are probably aware by now that I have tendered my resignation at NewEnergy Associates, the software company that I have worked for over the last nine years. My friends and family know that for many of those years I was deeply unsatisfied with my career path and with the work that I was doing. That all changed over the last three years, and I had finally found a place at NewEnergy where I was doing things that made a difference and where I enjoyed my work.

So for once, I wasn’t looking for another job because I was satisfied with the one I had.

Naturally, that is when opportunity came knocking on my door.

A friend of my wife put me into contact with the owner of a startup that was looking to hire a Rails developer and within two weeks of our initial contact, I made the decision to leave NewEnergy and join Systino to do Rails development work.

Working for a startup company will be both exciting and challenging, but that’s just part of the fun. On top of it, I will get to do the web development work that love and get to work with my favorite programming language Ruby. Finally, Systino is an Mac company and so I will be getting a nice new MacBook on which to develop.

Needless to say I am thrilled and can’t wait to get started next week.

In the mean time, today starts my last week with NewEnergy. In some ways, it is sad. I will miss the many wonderful people that I have come to know over nearly a decade, but this opportunity was something that I would always regret not taking and I think the time was right for a change.

Roy’s Hawaiian Fusion Cuisine

/ John Weathers / 4 Comments

Yesterday (September 7) was my five year wedding anniversary. Usually, my wife and I take a trip somewhere out of town for this occasion, but this year we decided to stay in town during our vacation with no plans in particular other than that we would eat dinner at a nice restaurant on the actual day of our anniversary. This is no small feat mind you as my wife suffers from celiac disease aka gluten-intolerance. Essentially, this means she cannot eat anything derived from wheat, rye, barley, or oats (usually) without getting really sick in her digestive system for days. So if you think about how much food out there involves bread, pasta, or just seasonings that involve wheat as a filler product, then you can start to imagine how annoying and hard it is to find places where we can safely eat worry free. Fortunately, there are more and more places that are gluten aware and a few that even offer gluten-free menus, but even then we have to worry about whether the staff is truly well-informed because we have often encountered staff who prepare a salad with croûtons and simply scoop them off when they see the note about gluten-free food thinking that this will suffice when it will not.

Over the last few years since her diagnosis, our restaurant choices have been pretty narrow as it’s such a pain to feel out a new place for safety and suitability, but in the last year we have had a new resource to turn to for guidance in the shape of the Atlanta Gluten Free Dining club. People share reviews there of places where they have successfully enjoyed gluten-free meals. So with our anniversary rapidly approaching and wishing to try someplace different, we consulted the group’s forum and found a few options including the one that we eventually settled upon: Roy’s.
Continue reading →