The VCR gem is really handy for testing calls to external web services, such as AWS commands made through Fog. You make your call for real once and VCR records a new “cassette” of the request and response. Subsequent calls use the cassette, so VCR plays back the response it recorded instead of actually reaching out and touching the external service. It’s good for testing how your own program makes requests and how it handles the responses it gets back. I recently had a need for similar functionality but with command line tools. Namely, the ec2-cmd script for importing an instance into Amazon.

Over the course of a little less than a week, I migrated this blog from WordPress 3.8 to Jekyll. I used WordPress for years, probably since 2005 or 2006 when I switched away from Movable Type. I finally decided I wanted something more lightweight than WordPress, and in particular I wanted a blog that would load faster. Jekyll gives me both of those. The part that took the longest to migrate was customizing the new layout, based on Dbyll, and formatting the code examples in my posts.

Last week, T-Mobile announced they’d pay your Early Termination Fee to switch from another carrier to T-Mobile. I had been thinking about trying out an Android phone for a while, and the Nexus was my top pick. I couldn’t have a Nexus on Verizon because of GSM/CDMA crap, and I wasn’t about to go back to AT&T since I left them in disgust for Verizon a year back. The T-Mobile deal was my ticket off of Verizon, which was a decent carrier if expensive, and into the Android world. The next day, I went out and swapped my iPhone 4S for a Nexus 5. I’ve been keeping notes in Evernote on my new phone about how the experiences differ.