OK, chances are reasonably good that you don't, because a lot of you were 8 or something when it came out. I'm talking about WIRED MAGAZINE, the most amazingly amazing thing to ever hit the newsstands. I was a teenager working at a multimedia lab at at a newspaper when it hit. It blew me away. Here it is in all its glory.

Yes, I played an "MMORPG" called MicroMUSE years before the term MMORPG was invented. I actually was messing around (believe it or not) on a VAX VMS system that I had access to because my father was a sort of associate associate professor. Then SunOS I think.

I think I shared with WIRED that I completely missed the boat on the Mosaic browser. I mean, I tried it, but there was nothing on the web to look at. Not even Yahoo! or a search engine. I didn't really get into it until Netscape came out.

But those old WIRED issues were pure magic. Mind expanding. A few years or two in they became boring and corporate, but initially reading it was like having your brain plugged directly into the heart of silicon valley & San Francisco crazy culture.

They always started out with multi-page picture spreads like this one:



What a glorious waste of pages!

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. It reads like it was written by an emu on acid, or maybe Douglas Adams's long-lost and insane brother. But anyway, it's a very enlightening (and light) book about ruby. I think it may have been intended for first-time programmers, but it's hard to say for sure. I find the pace is fine, and it's definitely expanding my mind and making me understand some of the different ruby syntax I've been seeing all last year.

Another thing that I missed somehow last year, is SCPlugin for Mac OS X. It's just like TortoiseSVN, except for Mac. Whoo hoo! I remember spending a lot of time last year looking for good SVN client for mac and not finding one (well, SmartSVN is survivable). I think at that point SCPlugin haven't quite made it to prime time yet. I looked again just now, and there it is.

By the way, I do all of my Rails work in oXygen. I realize that it's an XML editor primarily, and that everyone else uses TextMate but I don't like TextMate. It's too programmable. And the first time I installed it it took over every single file on my file system. oXygen is easy to use, has awesome XML/XHTML formatting tools, and I'm a dedicated CSS/XHTML hand coder.