I miss travelling too! I live near English countryside, so long walks either in the woods or the riverside makes it less terrible. Ofcourse, travelling has a different kind of excitement, which is hard to replace, sadly.
IMO you should learn ruby and rails framework at the same time. The knowledge of ruby will help you gain a deeper understanding of rails inner workings like the use of method_missing, concept of self and so on. I would recommend The Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan. The Pragmatic Programmer's book Programming Ruby is quite good as well.
I normally change the technology I am working in and move to something else or just pick a random topic and read about it as much as I can and then as matthew said do a blog post on it. For example: State machines and Ragel state machine compiler.
One good example of that would be Pandora. I only found out few months ago through amazing venture voice podcast that the idea was conceived about a decade ago.
Yeah, but I am just assuming that after a transition period they would stop using your name. But you should never burn your bridges...so be patient and if they do not do anything about it then politely approach them. I would say a month is enough...but then did you not have a handover period that should have taken care of this issue.
You could actually debate the Mac pricing and you would find numerous articles on it.
Anyhow, I switched to Mac recently and I don't think there are any downsides. You can still run Windows using VM seamlessly only if you want to do some windows dependant development.
Go with "About us" or "Learn more". It should explain in clear, concise way what exactly the service does. I would go with some sort of pictorial flow-chart sort of thing..where if I sign-up --> I get <something>. You know what I mean.
I like the design but then again it is not clear what the service does. As a new start-up it is of prime importance to make that first impression otherwise you will have a lot of one-time visitors.
It looks like some kind of social networking sort of thing but not exactly clear and I would not want to go through the sign up process unless I know it is of some interest. So, your first job is to get me to sign up and then go from there.
Work on the UI...and you need to simplify the language in some sort of Elevator style pitch. No one would spend time in looking for what it does...and how it stands I had to spend a bit of time. So, Kaizan
Sounds awesome to me... I wonder what would we all IDE autocompletion slaves do. I actually had to once write an entire grails project in EditPlus. No auto completion or fancy refactoring of IntelliJ just because the company would not spend the money. Is Joel listening?