Ruby on Rails has gone one dot two with a slew of pleasure-inducing features. There’s a new love affair with HTTP and its RESTful style of architecture. And patching up of things with UTF-8. Including a promise not to break it’s multibyte characters again.

On top of those headliners, there’s some eight months worth of polish, glitter, and glitz. Making this one shiny release. If you’re into doing Rails, you should most definitely check this one out.

Oh, and while you’re at it, go have a look at the new Prototype site. It premiered along Prototype 1.5, which is included in Rails 1.2.

I tried to tell LinkedIn back in October that the relationship was over. That I wanted out. I was originally more than a little miffed when that turned out to require writing customer service, but only took a day or so to get a personal response from Michele at Customer Service telling me they got the message and I was gone.

Only I wasn’t. I kept getting those annoying invitations to join networks of people whom I’ve never met. After the third or fourth such invitation, I tried to login again and realized that indeed I hadn’t been deleted, despite the personal note from Michele.

So about a week ago, I tried to write customer service again and request that I be deleted from the system. This time there was no snappy reply and I’m still an active profile on LinkedIn.

Please guys, just lemme out. I’m not even interested in making a new big stink about how bad it is to have leaving the system be a customer service issue. I just really don’t want to get any more emails and I don’t want my profile in your system. Deal?

Just recently, we hired a new systems administrator named Mark. He lives in Virginia. That’s six hours off the GMT. One less than the current five guys in Chicago. Two less than Jamis in Idaho. So what?

He was the best of the candidates available, we’d be crazy not to pick him up, no? Well, apparently there are still plenty of “crazy” companies and hiring managers out there. People unwilling to pick the better candidate because of geography.

Jonathan gives us just one example in his an Open Letter to Job Board Advertisers. So I thought this would be a good occasion to get the excuses out there: Why are you not hiring remote workers?

UnSpun is a new service from Amazon that puts workers from the Mechanical Turk and the UnSpun community at work finding the top, best, favorite things in any category. It’s also a Ruby on Rails application sitting on the Amazon.com domain.

To be afforded that privilege at Amazon, you have to run the gauntlet of Amazon security and scalability requirements. Certainly not a trivial thing to do, but the Amazon Web Services team did it and now their Rails application is live.

How’s that for fueling the rumor engine.

With Ford and GM losing billions and millions respectively, one might think competition is turning the car game into one of slim pickings for profits. Not so, says Porsche, and posts profits of 2.7 billion dollars.

What’s their secret? One overarching design that’s been stable for 40 years and just three current lines: Cayenne, 911, Boxster/Cayman. That simple recipe has made Porsche the most profitable (per unit) car maker in the world.

They’re doing so well in fact, that this “little” sports-car maker has just increased its stake in the German giant VW to 30%. Not too shabby from a niche company that sold just ~2,500 cars in October for North America/Canada.

Nothing like waking up on a Monday to a threesome of good press. 37signals got featured in a video short on Apple.com and won a Chicago Innovation Award presented by the Sun-Times. On top of that, Jason and yours truly were featured in Crain’s Business 40 under 40 treat for the year.

You have to understand that when I say it’s over, it’s over. No, we can’t talk about this. No, I don’t want counseling. I want you to leave my life. Now. Not when you get around to it. It was what it was and now it’s gone. Let go.

(Yes, LinkedIn, I’m talking to you. The fact that you require me to contact support to close my profile is a disgrace. Why on earth would you want to invite more costly support requests? And why does this have to feel like a big drama break up?)

It’s a rare occurrence that I decide it’s absolutely must-have time for a new t-shirt. Come to think of it, it’s pretty rare I decide it’s must-have time for anything. Well, perhaps milk and detergent.

But most everything else I buy happens through accidental shopping. And spending two hours getting to and back from a mall is rarely a scenario that I consider worthwhile. Especially not since getting there often means getting disappointed that they didn’t have anything I wanted anyway. And it’s not just malls, but any congregation of shopping destinations clustered for accidental discovery.

So here’s what I’d like instead. I’d like for every brand in the world to get smart like Threadless. To put every product introduction on an RSS or Atom feed with big, beautiful pictures, and a straight link to BUY. Just like Threadless’ Weekly Announcements.

I’d love to be able to get a brief introduction to all new games from Xbox.com. New pictures from any Puma Speedcat color combinations. Highlights of new taste combinations from Naked Juice. Straight from the manufacturer.

Please. Help me help you. You want my money, I want your new good stuff. Let’s make it happen, m’kay?