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After witnessing morning muffin robbery in a nearby cafe, Josh and I took a nice stroll around Williamsburg this morning. For a few blocks the view is clear across the river and will stay that way as the area is to be turned into a park (with residential high-rises to the north and south). We walked past some very quiet industrial buildings and north until all the shop names and signs turn to Polish.

We wandered into the aftermath of a house fire attended to by at least a dozen fire trucks. Most of the damage seemed to have been inflicted by the fire-crews though, who appeared to be slowly tearing the first and second floor apartments to pieces. There must have been a fire inside the walls.

We had dinner at a local restaurant called monkey town who have a back room where video art is projected onto large screens that cover all four walls - not a great piece showing but pretty cool nonetheless.

As usual my proper camera has suddenly run out of juice (I suspect there is something wrong with it) so I'm just using my camera phone until I get some more batteries. The quality isn't too bad (I have a k750i with a supposedly 2 megapixel camera) and it's nice to carry a camera in your pocket. I would like to figure out how to turn the fake shutter sound off though...

I am in New York! Until the end of the month, prototyping for a possible 'big' project that Josh has been thinking about for a while now. We are staying beneath the Institute for the Future of the Book and trying to produce something that will hopefully be of use to them and us. It's going quite well even though it is easy to get distracted by all the great stuff here in New York - for the project's sake, it's lucky we're not in Manhattan. Instead we are in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with a view across the river. Williamsburg has a great atmosphere and great access to Manhattan via the L train. I think on Friday we're going to check out the opening of the new Manhattan Apple Store - I'd like to see the new MacBooks.

An amazing video of FedEx planes avoiding a storm and another of all FedEx flights in the US over 24 hours.

Just ran into a problem using the file column plugin and Capistrano (formerly Switchtower). As others have found out, by default, file_column saves files under public/... but the public directory is replaced every time you run rake remote:deploy. I got around the problem by specifying some extra configuration in my models that use file column:

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class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
  file_column :image, :root_path =>
      File.join(RAILS_ROOT, "public/system"),
      :web_root => 'system/'

Capistrano always symlinks public/system to my-app/shared/system which isn't touched between releases. And when developing locally, file_column simple creates a directory public/system. You'll want to add 'system' to 'svn:ignores' in the 'public' directory.