TimShadel.com

A couple months back I had a job change that took me out of state and brought my family back to where many of our extended family members live. We’ve been staying with my gracious in-laws for that time, looking for a place of our own. It looks like everything’s likely to go through at [...]

Today a confluence of dissimilar events brought me to this post. A decade ago, today, I asked my sweet wife to marry me. I must have tricked her well, because she consented. We’ll be celebrating tonight, and I think of all the hard work it’s taken on both our parts to come to this place. [...]

The month of September has flown by, and I’ve had my hands covered with Ruby work of late. In the process, I’ve needed to tweak some great projects like Starling, Webistrano and xmpp4r-simple. These projects are definitely maturing, and it’s been great to get under the hood to see how they tick, and see where [...]

No, I don’t plan to buy one tonight…though it’s quite tempting. I do plan to try to find a store where I can see it in person.

We’re in the process of looking for another strong Java developer to join our team at my day job. If you’re interested in working for one of the top 100 best places to work in IT, drop me a line. (Psst. I also prefer it if you know another language.)

With this week’s T-Shirt Tuesday, we’ve launched our first t-shirt for kids. Don’t forget, you can subscribe to the CodeSmack blog to hear about our featured (read discounted!!) shirts and the stories behind some of them.

I setup a Campfire account for my RailsConf 2007 visit. Guest access is on, so come on over. It’s a free basic account now, but if more people come I’ll try to upgrade it as needed (if it gets big I’ll post a donation link). So come on by and chat. May 17 Morning Tutorials [...]

In a couple hours I’ll be catching a plane to Portland to attend RailsConf 2007. I’m stoked to hear the presentations, and talk to others that are using Rails every day. It’s gonna be a great Ruby feast, to be sure. If you want to meet up, contact me through my website or just look [...]

CodeSmack: Announcing T-Shirt Tuesdays 1. We will design new shirts and release them on Tuesdays 2. We will sometimes feature existing t-shirt designs 3. We will discount the t-shirts featured on Tuesday until the next Tuesday Head on over and see this week’s newest designs and featured shirts, including one of my new favorite designs: [...]

We are pleased to unveil to you, codesmack.com, home of the funniest programmer t-shirts. We have over 15 different designs that can be paired with different shirt/color combinations to dress you out in style. Our designs try to bring humor to the IT world, promote good programing practices and add a little good natured smack [...]

I’ve been silent again. I know, it’s not what I intended at the beginning of the year. It’s just that it’s so much fun to go off and build stuff. I get sucked into all sorts of side projects outside work that are interesting and time consuming (not to mention time spent with the fam [...]

For 2007, I’ve decided to make a few subtle changes to the way I blog and podcast. Less Java, more other stuff. Less rigor, more direct. More personal. Less Java, more other stuff. I don’t find that Java captures my main set of interests any more. I’m going to talk more broadly in both my [...]

OK. Now that the little one’s affording me a bit more sleep, I’ve finally gotten around to fixing my podcast. I took the cheap way out — I simply moved back to WordPress. I didn’t find that my experience with Typo was all that compelling. I had to rework my permalinks, migrate the content (comments [...]

On October 5th, our second child was born. She’s been home with us for only a few days now, and she’s just beautiful. I imagine that I’ll be spending more time with her and the fam and less time sleeping in the near future. This is the stuff life is made for.

Yeah. I’m way behind the times here, but Peter from the Ruby Inside blog announced the $100 Ruby Blogging Contest winners last week. And I got lucky enough to win the $15 second prize. True to his word, a little PayPal message came floating my way not long afterward. Thanks Peter! I think the real [...]

I’m in the middle of moving my blog from WordPress 2 to Typo 4. I’ve got the articles imported, and the migration script took care of that part. It also grabbed the categories I had and turned them into tags — too bad I wasn’t using WP categories; I was using Jerome’s Keywords. So now [...]

If I hadn’t been so swamped this past week I may have noticed the $100 Contest for Ruby Blogging. I looks like they have some great entries so far. Too bad I’m a bit late to enter myself.

One of the things I’ve done to clean things up as I’ve been dusting the cobwebs off my blog, is to move all of my MP3 content to archive.org and explicitly license it under one of the Creative Commons licenses. When I did that, they even created a landing page for my content. Kinda cool. [...]

With 19 GB of bandwidth served in just 20 days (thanks for listening to my podcast, everyone), I’m glad I’ve switched providers. I converted my site over to the new ISP at the beginning of the month, and things have gone quite well. I’ve got a new WordPress installation (that I absolutely LOVE), my old [...]