John Borwick’s blog

It has been a very very long time since I have posted on here. I have been rather busy with class and Yardsale, my friend’s senior design project. I’m a “virtual employee,” which is a neat way to get CSC credit without actually having to attend class! I also have been working on starting up the site “DigitalBurrito,” roughly a blog site for us CSC fiends who live in our apartment or are close friends of us. It’s running Drupal a content management system that is fairly flexible, or so it seems. It is opensource, and not restricted to blog-only (a feature I was looking hard for) and it has a table-free accessible theme.

The site is still in development, and we will be adding stuff as fast as we can, or it may just stagnate, but there are a lot of contributors so I doubt that that will occur. I will still post here.

I have been fooling around with Pure Data a lot lately. It is a fascinating audio-oriented graphical dataflow programming language, created by Miller Puckette of Max/MSP fame, but published under the GPL. It has a fascinating community associated with it, and they are very eager to implement new functionality. It’s pretty dang leet.

anyway, that about brings us up to date. Rock on, party people.

I just called them, they said an engineer was coming Thursday and we should get written permission from our landlord.

This reminds me of the old “pass-through” system that most big companies use. If someone is scheduled to do something, and it doesn’t happen for some reason, they just assume that it’s taken care of–until you call them.

The contractor who came more than two weeks ago said that Time Warner would call us.

I broke an expensive laptop that doesn’t even belong to me! In case anyone is considering buying a Dell, make sure you get the Complete Care warranty package, so that even if it is your fault, they will fix it for free. This is because Dell laptops have a logo that is fastened on with a pin-style fastener through the display backing. This means that if you drop your backpack and the laptop gets squished between two large books, the logo fastener will push through the front of the display, shattering the glass.

I need to buy my own laptop I think, but I have no money, and now I have even less since I need to pay off this most recent fsck-up of mine. As far as PC laptops go, can anyone recommend? I am looking for thin, built-in wireless and decent battery life. The speed is unimportant as long as it is over 1GHz. On the other hand, if someone can point me at a used but still warranteed G4 Apple laptop, I may consider that as well. I just can’t justify the expense of a brand new apple laptop.

Anyway, keep on r0×0ring.