One of my favorite places to wake up is at my mom's house. I wake up to a gentle breeze drifting in from the window over the bed, some birds chirping in the yard, other birds hooting, and the dog walking around the yard with her tags jingling. Sometimes there's the undertone of a plane flying overhead or kids in the next yard over, but more likely the sounds are just nature.

It almost feels like a beach house in Hawaii, without the humidity.

It is a most wonderful place to wake up in. One of my favorites.

My task list before my cfObjective talk. That first one is crucial. The second one I had to do multiple times.

I'm staring at this handle on this zipbar on this playground in this park.

I'm staring at it, trying to figure out, IF I SHOULD TRY IT.

I'm staring at it, and I don't know if I should try it. Last time didn't start well. Last time, it ended with injuries. There was laughter in the middle.

I stare at it.

I ponder.

And then, I take a picture, put away my camera, reach up, grab tight with both hands, and push.

So, in interviewing for a job as a front end developer (awwwwwwwww yisssssssssss, automate all the things front end!), I ended up excited about a company that uses Rails (and Ruby) as their application framework. When I was asked, "How would you feel about never writing another line of code in PHP?" I responded, "I'd be okay with it." Languages are ways to communicate, with PHP being just one dialect. If I need to learn how to speak Ruby, *shrug* If the people are awesome, hand me the Ruby book.

Right, the Ruby book.

I'm heading through "Agile Web Development with Rails 4," as it was recommended by the director of engineering at the company. The contents indicate that it's a reasonable introduction to Ruby, which is great. Fortunately for me, I took Chookie's suggestion of problems from Project Euler to play around with languages. I'm currently solving my problems in PHP, JavaScript, Python and Ruby, so that Ruby isn't a blocker on the learning.

Great.

Except I have to say, the length of time it took me to get to this screen:

was stupidly too long.

Seriously, this file exists:

bash-3.2$ more /usr/bin/rails 
#!/bin/sh
echo 'Rails is not currently installed on this system. To get the latest version, simply type:'
echo
echo '    $ sudo gem install rails'
echo
echo 'You can then rerun your "rails" command.'

I really want to ask who thought having this was a good idea, when THIS is the correct response on every single flavor of *nix I can think of:

bash-3.2$ rails
bash: rails: command not found

I'm really glad I know what I'm doing on the command line, because the "oh, just run it with sudo before the command" really doesn't cut it. Really.

Hey, how about those PATH variables?

Right.

Okay, fine now. All set with the demo app. Hello, localhost:3000 (groan! that port will stay around maybe 2 chapters in, and then it's back to my numbering scheme).