In the past that would be no big deal, but now that I’ve been working in this business for the last eight months it just started gnawing at me, so I made a note to put in a data request to address this when I got home.

So then we just kind of went exploring, took Chevy Chase east and then North, eventually ran into Vedugo and headed south.  Ultimately we found a little place called “Two Guys from Italy” and had a fantastic lunch.  While there we were playing with the YPMobile again.  Tried looking up the restaurant we were in, found it (almost), found an old record with the wrong address.  Infuriating… So I tried doing a search for Italian Restaurants and right there at the top of the list “2 Guys from Italy” 0.0 miles away, with the correct address.  Apparently we aren’t doing numbers to words in our search algorithm’s.  One more thing for me to write up tomorrow and get turned over to our search team.

We are making great strides, it is just an on-going issue to scrub and clean data on 18 million plus businesses accross the US.

If you’re interested in some of our progress on issues like these check out our Beta Labs site.

If you have questions feel free to contact me.

This morning we had Matz’s Keymote – Reasons for Ruby, then in room one I’ve watched Greg Pollack’s presentation on scaling ruby, and am now watching Using Git in Ruby Applications by Scott Chacon. Interesting git for everything.

Trying to get a regional conference organizer’s meeting together tomorrow evening.

One more a link on the name change at YELLOWPAGES.COM know known as AT&T Interactive.

Been home about 90 minutes, in that time I helped my friends over at Rareview deploy Build 2.0 of their project management application Projecturf.com.  This is a different role for me, I am not involved with the development of the software, just sysadmin functionality on their servers, and their source code repository.  So they have been working on an update to the site since May, it was great to see it launch with as little effort as was required.

Only six more days until I have to jump on a plan for Oslo, Norway to record Smidig ’08.  It’ll be fun, just have to get my YPC team going on the next release before I head out next week.

If you’re interested hit YELLOWPAGES.COM, you have a one in 49 chance every time you hit the refresh button of getting a new variation on the home page.  Once you have a new variation you will be cookied and you’ll continue to get that page.  However we are only collecting users for a limited time.  (And no I don’t think me announcing this here will skew our numbers in any statistically significant way, if I did I wouldn’t post, but my blog has a fairly low readership level.)

Join Me at the Professional Ruby Voices That Matter Conference in Boston November 17 – 20!  I will be giving a 30-minutes presentation called “The Many Facets of Ruby at YELLOWPAGES.COM”, in which I’ll detail a number of different ways that we utilize ruby at YELLOWPAGES.COM. Our consumer site was relaunched in June of 2007 as a rails based application. In the 16 months since then, that decision has had a huge impact on our engineering group.

If you’re interested in the conference contact me and I’ll give you a discount code for registration. I would post it here, but it’s not readily accessible.

So tonight I started hacking… haven’t done much of that in a while, too busy wrapping my head around the trappings of managing an increasing team of developers at YELLOWPAGES.COM. So I got the latest rails, created a respository on my dreamhost account for SVN, and then realized… wait… why SVN? Why not git?

I have an account on github, so in an effort not to fall too far behind I went to install git:

port install git-core

-bash: port: command not found

Ah yes… this is not my personal Mac, it is my YPC Mac, MacPorts has not yet been installed. So I went out and got 1.60 of MacPorts… installed nice and easy, and started the git install. Well I forgot the amount of time required to install git on a pretty clean Mac. It’s still fetching bits and pieces, building ncurses as I type.

So tomorrow night I’ll actually through a basic site up on yafinr.randquist.us, and go from there.

My initial thoughts are to reverse engineer the functionality of yaf.net. I like the product, just don’t like moding it.

On another note I fired off quotations (some late) to RubyNation, “Voices that Matter: Professional Ruby Conference”, and the WindyCity Rails Conf.

We had a really good turn out… failed to actually count, guestimate 25+, a large contingency from LA Times, a large contingency from YELLOWPAGES.COM, and a decent number of people with other affiliations.

It was a good meet and greet.

Next month July 17th, 7:00 PM will be the second meeting hosted by YELLOWPAGES.COM in Glendale.

Check out the LARuby group on Yahoo Groups, if you are interested in participating in the mailing list.

After the first three days on the job I have to head to NYC to record Goruco 2008 as part of Confreaks.

Hope to see some of you there.