recent distractions

• I got arrested as #7 of the first 29 people arrested at Occupy Nashville. The charge was "Criminal Trespass", a class C misdemeanor. The night Magistrate refused to let us be booked. The Tennessee Highway Patrol illegally held us and issued us illegal citations. The ACLU filed suit in Federal Court and we were immediately granted an injunction against Governor Bill Haslam and the State of Tennessee to stop the illegal arrests, which were in violation of both the US and TN Constitutions. These days I volunteer in various capacities in support of Occupy Nashville.
• I practice vipassana meditation regularly (1-3 hours a day). If I'm lucky I also do yoga daily as well.
• I will be speaking at Madison Ruby on August 18-20, in Madison, WI.
• I help when I can with bits and pieces of the Ruby Hoedown which is returning again to Nashville, August 26-27 -- attendance is FREE.
• I am running the Pledge Nothing campaign to help Save WRVU (Vanderbilt University's 60-year old student-run FM radio station).
• I got interviewed on "Life of the Freelancer" about OG Consulting, developing Ruby on Rails, etc.
• I'm the organizer of NashDL's "brown bag book club" lunches (domain-driven design, followed by "7 languages in 7 weeks", followed by "SICP").
• My neighbors and I (successfully, so far) fought a road abandonment / rezoning in our neighborhood.
• You can right-arrow through my Railsconf 2010 talk slides, all about (domain-driven) refactoring and rescuing large production applications.
• Work continues on making whiskey_disk ("for embarrassingly fast deployments") into the best capistrano / vlad replacement, as well as the best way to manage deployed apps without having developers involved. You can right-arrow through my whiskey_disk talk slides or through some more recent, but shorter, whiskey_disk lightning talk slides from the 2010 Ruby Hoedown.
• I've been occasionally working on Larry - the first name in configuration - trying to improve this tool to help automate our hosting business (with lots of help from websages and puppet).
• ParchMay Farm Center is still online, just tucked away under parchmay.rickbradley.com Also, bingo cards are still online -- bells bend bingo and art crawl bingo