Yes, we’re looking to expand our team with a well-rounded web application engineer.

Your motivation and willingness to learn shines. Your communication and presentation skills put you at ease when interacting with clients. Your attention to detail shows in the quality of your work. You have experience with and enthusiasm for working productively with Ruby on Rails and other established technologies to create innovative b2c applications. If we’re describing you, keep reading!

As the third member of our team, you would be joining us in our personable, downtown San Francisco office less than a block from the MUNI/BART. We’re not full-time telecommuters here, but we do enjoy flexible hours surrounding core times. If this sounds like your kind of team, then we want to hear from you.

If you’re interested, get in touch, and we’ll be quick to respond if we think there’s a good fit.

I’ll admit it. I knew about Ruby long before I knew about Rails, I was introduced way back when, when Ruby was still young and there weren’t any books about it. But, I didn’t take it very seriously, and I probably missed a ground-floor opportunity to be a bigger part of the Ruby community, which would probably have been great for my career. Alas, hindsight is 20/20.

So, in the spirit of watching for the next big thing, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to the nascent Io Language. It’s been around awhile, but it’s really starting to come into its own. They have some impressive screenshots of their already-working GUI kit, they already have fairly fast accelerated math computation, and their syntax (or complete lack thereof) is starkly beautiful. Even Matz, creator of Ruby, recommended Io as a new and upcoming language to learn.

It’s a testament to the global reach of the Internet that I’m posting this entry while navigating the Amazon. Not the online mega-store, but the very real mega-river running through Northern Brazil.

Ubiquitous connectivity only underscores that the age of global communication does not lessen the extremities of inequality. Yesterday we touched ground at the collective trading post for five local villages. These people most likely had not, and perhaps would never, make daily use of a computer, much less kill time surfing online for the latest Web 2.0 shopping experience.

These villagers are probably akin to a great majority of people in the world. And this perspective shows just how microscopic our Internetwork’ed world, the world in which constantly changing “everything,” really is.

So, like everyone else in the internet, I’ve been trying Flock out. And it’s neat, I like it! It’s everything I wish Firefox would be… Literally.

Courtesy of Mint, I noticed that a visitor had recently read this site in Spanish courtesy of Google Language Tools. I was curious as to what the Spanish speaking world was getting and checked out what the translated page looked like myself.

I was pleasantly surprised to find this:

As you can see, Google decided to bold the middle phrase “de encargo” (custom), rather than “E-negocio” (E-Business), the word bolded in the original English version of this site:

In this case, the position of the bold styling was more important than the actual word originally bolded, which somehow Google’s Language Tool’s knew. Nifty!