One of the things that I picked up in SXSW is that Ruby is not just the three-legged wonder cat that Jane and I took care of for a bunch of months last year (the world's third most fantastic cat, behind Tiny Scola and Sarah Scola, R.I.P). I tell you, that cat may have been absent one functional leg, but damn was he was fast and agile. He'd scoot from the kitchen through the living room up the stairs and all you'd see was a shmear of orange. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Anyway, seems like every other panel at SXSW had a mention of the Ruby programming language that powers the Ruby on Rails framework, upon which are built some of the most progressive web apps out there, like Basecamp and 43 Things.

Because I like learning new things and I dislike not knowing things that seem both interesting and powerful, I'm gonna try to learn how to build something, anything, using Ruby on Rails. I've started with this tutorial but it's been slow going so far. Before I get too deep into it, if anybody has any ideas of a better way to go about it, by all means leave them in the comments.