Rubymoticons

   A few days ago, I was demonstrating injection of a symbol, to perform a series of subtractions in an array, and noticed a familiar pattern of characters.  That inspired a bit more investigation.  So now I present some basic Rubymoticons:

[].inject(  :-)
{}[         :-]
->() {      :-}

   These are perfectly valid Ruby code, and evaluate to nil, nil, and a lambda.

   Of course, the nose is easily substitutable, and noseless ones can use any mouth they please... but what about changing the eyes, or the mouth on full-size ones, and additional adornments?  Let's see how creative you can get, especially in as few characters as possible on either side.  Put some new Rubymoticons in the comments.

Sie mögen mich! Sie wirklich mögen mich!

   Andy Newton, over at In Search of the Tempestuous Sea, has just nominated me for this award:

   According to the terms of the award, I must now:

1. Paste the image on my blog.  (See above.)


2. Link back to the blogger who gave me the award.  (See further above.)


3. Pick my five favorite blogs with less than 200 followers, and leave a comment on their blog to let them know they have received the award.
   
      Hmmmm, let me think.  Dang, this is harder than I thought!  Practically all the blogs I read have at least 200 followers, or are from big enough names that they probably do.  Most of the rest don't say, so I'll ass-u-me not, just to make it easy.  And nominating Andy's other blog, Bus Error, where he expounds on technical topics, would be too obvious.  So here we go, in no particular order:


• Joe Klemmer's My Unknown Blog (which maybe now will become known), mostly on political news and cutting-edge science.


• Lesley Slepner's Talking with our Aging Relatives, which has proven useful as a source of information... and as a place to vent.


• Naresh Jain's Managed Chaos, mainly about agile software development.  This might have too many readers, but it doesn't say, so I'm counting it.  He's probably a big name in India, seeing as his last several posts have been about organizing the Agile India conference.


• Bryan Liles' Smarticus, explained by its subtitle: "code – video – mac – lifehack" (the code being mainly Ruby these days).


• Taryn somebody's (she doesn't reveal her last name) Ruby-Coloured Glasses.  They have a serious U surplus in England, doncha know.  Britain has to make use of those leftover U's from Wales somehow....


• And as an extra special bonus, no I'm not going to officially nominate my other blogs, but I'd appreciate if you'd check them out.  See the sidebar.


4. Hope that the five blogs chosen will keep spreading the love and pass it on to five more blogs.

   So there you have it.  Or rather, them.  Go check 'em out, including my nominator, even though they're not all on technical topics like I explore here.