Families you know that group of wonderful people who truly love you and will help you with everything. Well families can be great, however one of the hardest things to realise in particular if you have a great family is that their advise is almost never good news for you.

Don’t get me wrong there are definitely exceptions and I’m not saying in any way that you should dislike your family. But just as with anyone else in the world you need to know and understand their true motivations before you listen to advise.

Here in lies the problem. Family and with that include spouse and really long close friends will almost always have a selfish motive with you. That is fine, being selfish is great. However to succeed you also need to be selfish. If you realise and understand this you can decipher much advise that family members sling at you.

The things that entrepreners do essentially boil down to taking risks that others don’t. These risks could for example be:

• Dropping out of school
• Emigrating
• Moving to another part of the country
• Quitting your job
• Working 24/7 without any real promise of an outcome

We had a great meeting yesterday of the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade. David Black was here and DHH turned up for a surprise visit.

Besides the regular beer drinking and networking there were a few short talks:

• Thomas talked about RailsConf Europe
• Olle did his HTTP verbs and rails
• DHH did a great demo of the whole new world of resources in Rails
• Morten talked about JRuby
• I talked about Crypto in Rails

Good fun was had by all.

For anyone in Copenhagen today I will be giving a short talk today about the use of Crypto and in particular my EzCrypto library today at Copenhagen.rb.

After the meeting I will post my PDF presentation.

As if Geoffrey Grosenbachs excellent Nuby on Rails blog and soothing voice on the Rails Podcast he has launched a great new business idea with PeepCode.

PeepCode is a monthly series of very high quality screen casts aimed probably mainly at rails developers. Each one costs $9 and is sold via Lulu. It really is a fabulous idea and with Geoffrey’s usual top funky style is brilliantly executed.

I bought the TextMate Basics for Rails screen cast as I know I have only scratched the surface of it. To be honest I also wanted to give something back to Geoffrey as his blog, podcast and funky plugins are always incredibly useful.

So in the first part of it he covered all the basic stuff in TextMate, that I’m ashamed to say I never was aware of. I’m going to have to go through it again to make it stick.

There is also great in-depth coverage in how to customize TextMate to follow your own usage patterns and environment using custom snippets and commands. I knew most of these already, but I really like Geoffrey’s approach to covering it. He’s persuaded me to immediately create my own bundle and add to it as I go along. It really is very easy todo and also very powerful.

I wish him lots of luck with this project. It really is a great twist on selling content.

I’m just back from a 1 month investigative journey to Buenos Aires (BA) in Argentina. The main purpose was to check out the suitability of the city and country as a temporary business base. I have been recommending for a while now the idea of Bootstrapping your business Globally as a temporary and fun way of cutting costs.

Many foreigners are moving to Argentina at the moment. In particular Americans are arriving in droves. I have no numbers to back this up, but I think BA and Panama are the two favorite destinations for Americans moving to Latin America at the moment. In BA the immigrants tend to be younger and in Panama a bit older.