Teaching one handed Ruby on Rails after an accident
Some may have wondered why there hasn’t been any new post here for quite a while. I had an accident four weeks ago and bruised my wrist and due to that I’m still trying to limit typing to a minimum.
Still life has to go on and so has to go on work as well. This week I’m teaching – one handed – an online class about Ruby on Rails. I hope to gain back my regular typing abilities soon so that I can do more things shortly. The hands are very important tools for programmers 
What happened? Well … As you know I own two Peruavian mares and as we want to work with them on the cattle farm in the near future I tried some roping. Unfortunately Topacio did confuse the wup-wup sound of the rope – the sound that you hear when the rope cuts through the air – with a whip and was fearing I might hit her. So she took off and ran for her life. In the process I got shaken off her back and landed on my hand. I wasn’t expecting that but then I learned from the breeder that they were using a whip sometimes in the past. To me that’s a terrible idea. It seems they have stopped that because the 5 years younger Diadema did show panic when hearing the same sound.
There is a set of pictures up on Flickr about the training program we have started since then. By now both mares are great horses for working cattle. We should have done that right from the start but as always … after the fact you are smarter
Building a transmitter over the weekend
This weekend we built a 12m antenna tower and another 6m pole with base and housing for batteries. This is to provide real highspeed Internet to the Altos del Maria project near Sora in Panama. People around here, including myself, have been suffering from slow and not very reliable Internet service for quite some time. Thanks to a cooperation with PaNetMa a better solution will be available by tomorrow.
Last week on Wednesday we got the permission from the owner of a strip of land on a nearby hill to build the tower. Then we quickly purchased the material and Luis and his brothers built the antenna tower while others dug holes for the foundation. On Saturday we had the basics done and on Sunday we erected the tower and poured the concrete for the foundation. Today the base for the wind turbine was poured and we started to build the housing for the batteries. By tomorrow this will be finished and sometime during the day of tomorrow PaNetMa will install their equipment.
I’m really excited to see this happening so quickly as I’ve just begun to teach an online training class and fast and reliable Internet is very important for that. With some luck I can use the new connection on Wednesday.
The pictures link to a set of 81 photos with all the details of this achievement. Building a transmitter on the top of a mountain with independent power generation in just three days is certainly a good job – don’t you think?
Test-driven introduction to Spring Framework
Today I started to teach a 5 day training course about Spring Framework. This is not the usual course though. It is based on test-driven development (TDD) and is taught online. I have 8 students distributed over the United States and I teach the course from my home in Panama up in the mountains. We’ve started today and I’m pretty sure that some student with a sharp ear has heard the birds chirping in the background. I think that’s kind of nice.
Thanks to my friends at Integrallis and Knowledge United for providing me the opportunity. I’m looking forward to teach this course frequently througout this year.
