Let’s pretend the year is 2007 and I have a close “friend” who is really excited about the upcoming 2010 World Cup. My friend is not too naive and realizes that airfare to Africa, lodging, tickets to the games, and Safaris are all very expensive. My friend has a little extra cash to save each month and with a three year time horizon he figures he can stow away a little money in a moderately aggressive mutual fund in order to take advantage of some growth opportunities.

Unfortunately for my friend the next two years would be some of the worst the world economy has ever seen. Like many people, my friend took a bath on his investments and his hopes and dreams of going to the World Cup went down the drain along with his money.

It’s too bad my friend didn’t keep better track of his investments. Perhaps if he had he could have pulled his money out of the stock market and salvaged his vacation. Since my friend is an avid Ruby lover I figured I’d help make sure he doesn’t end up in this situation ever again. That’s why I wrote GMoney, a RubyGem for interacting with the Google Finance API.

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Recently I added a Flickr photostream to the footer of the home page of this blog and I thought it would be cool to post an entry on how you can use jQuery and the Flickr API to do the same. Even if you’re not familiar with jQuery or the Flickr API it’s actually quite simple to accomplish this task.

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Hello and welcome to JustinSpradlin.com (formerly Fiascode.com). This is the personal technology blog and resume site for Justin Spradlin.

The last few weeks of 2009 were spent rewriting this site from the ground up. I hope you like the new design. Come back often for updates or subscribe to the feed to have the latest posts appear directly in your favorite RSS reader.

Happy New Year!

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