3G is an at&t myth

wired is conducting about satisfaction with 3g network coverage. here's how i feel about at&t's 3g "coverage":

except for the twenty or so minutes i spend reading the nyt on my daily commute, i have the 3g network turned off about 90% of the time. doing so reduces my dropped call rate by about 90% at my house, where reception is spotty. mind you, the coverage still stinks at my house, but at least i can talk on the phone without it sounding like an endless verizon commercial.

i'll call it the 90/90 rule. reduce 3g connectivity time by 90%, reduce dropped calls by 90%.

may 19, california special election

the endorsements of the publications i read seem to be all over the place, so that really gave no hint as to how i might lean. the text of the initiatives themselves is cryptic -- as always -- but i found the league of women voters guide to be clear and concise.

we all google for errors

so hopefully this one will save a ruby/rails newbie some time. i upgraded to rails 2.3.2 and started seeing a weird error when trying to start the console:

...../rubygems/requirerment.rb:150:in 'parse':ArgumentError:Illformed requirement ["~> 1.1.pre"]
...../rubygems/requirerment.rb:150:in 'parse':ArgumentError:Illformed requirement ["~> 1.1.pre"]
...../vendor/rails/railties/lib/console_with_helpers.rb:5:NameError: uninitialized constant ApplicationController

at first, i thought it was because i hadn't renamed application.rb to application_controller.rb (which is what rails 2.3.x looks for). but what it really was is that i hadn't updated rubygems from 1.3.1 to 1.3.2.

to fix, all i needed to do was run:

gem update --system