I try to ride my bike most mornings, assuming it’s not pouring down rain. I ride on a trail that runs through my town, an abandoned railroad track that found a new purpose some years ago. It’s the same route most days, but it occured to me a few weeks ago that I really had no idea how far, or fast, I was riding. Being the nerd that I am, I decided to find a technology solution to this problem.

As the title of my blog implies, I’m a curious person. I like learning, and I’m addicted to keeping up on the latest news about things I’m interested in: programming, design, and the like. Sometimes I find it hard to keep up with it all. About a month ago, I discovered Prismatic, and it’s changed how I read the web.

I am a huge fan of coffee and over the years I have tried a lot of different means of preparing it. I currently own a french press, a drip maker, and a stovetop espresso pot. All of these make good coffee, with each having its own set of pros and cons. Last year, however, I discovered the best method for brewing coffee: the Aeropress.

If this then that is a cool new web site that helps you automate bits of your digital life by watching for events (the “if this” portion), and then taking an action (the “then that” portion). It lets you tie together the various sites and services that you use, allowing you to do even more with them.

My first computer was an Apple //c. 1985. I spent a lot of time on that computer. A lot. Probably an unhealthy amount.

Fog, in case you hadn’t heard of it, is a fantastic cloud computing library written in Ruby. It provides a unified interface to several popular cloud computing platforms, making it easy to use them in Ruby. It’s also modular, and support for new services can be added easily. It currently supports four types of cloud services: storage, compute, DNS, and CDN.

This morning I was looking for a way to handle incoming email in a web application (similar to the way Highrise and Evernote let you email things to a special email address and have them put into their system).

Here’s what I found.

A sampling of the cool things I found this week. Emacs, PostgreSQL, Tea, and more.

The new and shiny links I’ve found this week. CSS, cloud computing, Emacs, and more.

When budgets get tight, it can be difficult to provide adequate training for your staff. Over the last couple of years, I’ve found some ways to provide some training even in the face of a shrinking (or non-existent) budget.