A couple of good articles about customer service: Seth Godin’s Starting Over With Customer Service and Joel Spolsky’s Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service.

So it turns out it’s hard to find the time to sort through hundreds of photos while you’re on vacation. Kerri and I had a great time in D.C. and I took a bunch of great pictures. More details soon!

Kerri and I are leaving tomorrow morning for a wonderful four days and four nights in our nation’s capital. I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures and post them here and on Flickr as the week(end) progresses. Wish us luck!

Of course, how could I miss a chance to break out my favorite DC related picture?

Kerri and I went to New Hampshire this past weekend for Owen’s birthday. We gave him framed prints of three photos that I happen to be particularly happy with.

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I printed them with Flickr’s “order prints” function and they came out very nice. Be warned that, if your photo is not the same aspect ratio as the size you order, they will mercilessly center crop the picture. So crop before you order or use a photo developing lab that won’t crop.

It irks me that the first search result for “emacs markdown mode” is a todo list that includes a “someday I’ll make a markdown.el” item. Grumble grumble.

Over the past, oh, year and a half or so, I’ve followed the rapid ascension of Ruby on Rails to the top of the web development heap. In the process I read a lot of blog entries, a lot of “Hello World!” introductory articles and a lot of best practice documents. A big part of the thinking behind Rails is Test Driven Development (TDD) – the idea that you should write automated tests before writing code to make sure that a) you know what the code is supposed to do before you write it and b) once the code is working there is a quick, easy way to make sure it keeps working as you further develop your application.

I never really had a chance to try TDD until recently. I started working on a project at work that isn’t part of any of our old projects – I got to start something brand new. So I set out to use TDD from the start and I must say that it’s going quite well. Writing the tests is forcing me to think carefully about the interfaces of my classes and to separate the project into more atomic parts than I might otherwise.

I’m using JUnit and have an Ant build file set up so that the default target depends on my unit tests. I can see very quickly if a change I make to the code makes things work or not. I don’t have to mash together a driver program to exercise my work and then throw it away once it finally works. Sure, I write code to test, and that’s analogous to a driver program, but the key is that the test will stick around after I’m finished with it for the time being and the work that I do to test my work for correctness won’t need to be repeated by someone else when the program needs to evolve. The tests make nice example usages too.

I’m a convert.

I very much recommend The Sarah Silverman Program.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, is pirating his own book.

So, Typo can do automatic Amazon links. Like this one for Freaks and Geeks, which I’m watching now. It’s a fantastic show.

I’ve been holding off posting about the “Bomb Scare” in Boston yesterday because I wanted to see what Bruce Schneier would say about it. Most of the time he articulates my position on these sorts of things much better than I could. Schneier just posted his reaction. The first sentence of his post is “The story is almost too funny to write about seriously.”

Thankfully, the folks who the Boston Police arrested have the right attitude: