I knew New York was going to be expensive. One thing I didn’t fully appreciate, though, is the amount of cash necessary to lease an apartment.
Let’s say you find a place for $2k/month. (This isn’t extravagent; it gets you a nice studio or decent one bedroom in a nice Manhattan neighborhood.) At [...]

Apartment hunting in Manhattan is crazy.
(Looks like I’ll be writing this in power paragraph style, like I learned in fourth grade.)
First of all, they have brokers: essentially real estate agents who charge up to 15% of the first years rent. And it’s hard to avoid one, especially to a newb like me.
Second, [...]

I’ve been in New York just under two weeks now. My thoughts:

I love the city. It is very walkable, the different neighborhoods have completely different feels, but most of all it has a real energy to it.
Jaywalking is expected
Drivers are more assertive. Honking is not frowned upon, and lanes in the road [...]

There are some cases where it makes sense to render a view outside of the context of a controller. For example, a Facebook app may keep a user’s profile FBML in a view and may want to handle the update asynchronously.
Here is a way to do that.
p = Person.find(:first)
v = ActionView::Base.new(Rails::Configuration.new.view_path)
# this view can [...]

I recently dug up some old pictures including the infamous gallon challenge: