John Borwick’s blog

I’m not in horrible shape, but my body is slowly slipping into a looser form as I work at a desk all day and drive everywhere I have to go. So, Lauren and I are pretending to learn tennis, and I am teaching myself about calories.

The first day, I realized I consumed 720 calories, at once, from orange juice.

Now I have learned how bad chips are for you. One of those 1.5 oz bags has like 200 calories in it! What’s up with that!

Conversely, “smart dogs”–tofu hot dogs–only have 35 calories per dog. They are by far the least bad for you, of any processed food I have found so far.

Don’t worry–I am still eating normally–but I am trying to drink water instead of soy milk or Pepsi or OJ, and I pay more attention to snacks.

Will Emigh just schooled me about “Alternate Reality Games” like ilovebees.com. Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a way to make people involved in a storyline using codes, mixed media (e.g. payphone calls, email, web, postcards), and puzzles. You, singly or collaboratively–depending on the ARG, learn the plot as you unlock new clues and get more hints from the game.

Will is working on an ARG for his master’s degree, but I’m pretty sure I would be breaking some ARG rule if I posted a link.

ilovebees.com was built to help hype Halo 2.

Learning Python and Dvorak at the same time is really disconcerting. The entire medium in which I work and think is being changed.

Already, my Dvorak is getting to the point where I can type without thinking about it. It’s like getting comfortable enough in a foreign language that you’re no longer translating–you’re just talking.

Python, not so much. I have a long way to go to learn how modules like “curses” work, and there’s not much help along the way. There are nowhere near the resources available for Perl: just check out the Google directory for Python to see what I mean.

Ever since Lauren and I tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard in 2003, I have been thinking about its layout in the back of my mind. When I read something, sometimes I will “type out” the sentences in my mind.

Recently I decided that enough was enough, and I should give the Dvorak another shot. I’m happy to say that, perhaps because of my strange semi-subconscious “mind exercises” over the years, I remembered a lot of the keyboard.

It’s been somewhat of an issue at work because it’s difficult to type passwords that you’ve muscle-memorized, I have a much lower WPM right now (perhaps 30-40 rather than 80-100) and I make a lot of errors.

But it’s fun: I have heard that doing stuff like this, where you are learning new things with both your hands, can help you in the event of a stroke. It’s going to be useful: Dvorak helps you with long-term ergonomic problems and can slightly increase your typing speed. It will also be eccentric, which perhaps is a plus.

So, Python is cool. Its many modules, like MySQL-python, are not cool. Compared to CPAN they stink. (No offense, developers! You are doing your best–just there aren’t as many Python hackers as Perl hackers.)

To interface with MySQL in Python with the “MySQL-Python” module is to use the MySQL C API. W00t.

I toyed with Jython, Python totally implemented in Java. It was pretty awesome to run Java from Jython, like

from java import awt
class SpamListener(awt.event.ActionListener):
    def actionPerformed(self,event):
        if event.getActionCommand() == "Spam":
            print 'Spam and eggs!'
f = awt.Frame("Subclassing Example")
b = awt.Button("Spam")
b.addActionListener(SpamListener())
f.add(b, "Center")
f.pack()
f.setVisible(1)

(taken from Subclassing Java Classes in Jython).

Jython is depressing too, though, because its last Python implementation was for version 2.1. Python’s on, like version 2.4 now. 2.1 came out a bunch of years ago.

I just finished The Tipping Point and Learning Python.

The Tipping Point was really interesting. It analyzes why some things get popular, and some things don’t. To an extent, the author just threw in lots of interesting studies. There were unifying ideas, however, and I would recommend it.

Learning Python told me that I could now put “Python” on my resume. It’s a VERY well-written book, that novice programmers and people with lots of experience can both process easily.

Word to the wise: don’t kill your (Mac OS X) “loginwindow” process. It kills your session, then respawns itself–sort of like you logged out and logged back in again really quickly.

A little while ago I instituted a cron script that sets entry_allow_comments=2 for entries older than 14 days. Well, until the site’s rebuilt, you people don’t know that you can’t comment until after you try to “post” the comment. I just added a script by “tima” that will rebuild the site every day: mt-rebuild.

I’ve written a few times about Chelsee’s in the blog, from before we had Bellsouth. I went back today to check it out; I felt a little guilty about not going more often because it’s so close.

What’s gotten better since 2003/2004: the espresso is drinkable now. Their hours are lots longer. The giant TV was on mute.

What’s not gotten better: their Internet goes down regularly. They do not play any music. They have noisy “toys” (e.g. dancing easter rabbit that sings at ca. 90db) that make everyone stare. There is no insulation so everything echoes like nobody’s business. They do not have free filtered water. They do not have a process for making suggestions and reviewing their responses to suggestions. There is very little seating.

Several people today were saying that they only go there because there is free internet. IMHO having interrupted internet is worse than not having internet. You have to think of wireless access like any other tech service: you need a certain degree of uptime or your users will rise against you.

Constructively implementing suggestions is the key. The best implementation of a suggestion box that I’ve seen was at Helios in Raleigh. They have a scrapbook where they put short responses to all suggestions. That is how Helios went from “ok” to AWESOME in less than a year.

Not having a process for suggestions is better than having a process that ignores suggestions. You have to understand that suggestions will be very negative at first, and improve over time as you implement the suggestions and show that you are trying to make your patrons happy.

Since I have my own headphones and don’t need internet access I will probably be going back to Helios… unless the espresso starts tasting like sour yogurt again.

Ur-: primitive, the first. For example, “Ur-Hamlet”. It’s like saying “archetypal.”

au pair (via google): a young foreigner who lives with a family in return for doing light housework. This was not in the OED–or rather, I couldn’t find it under “au” or “pair” in the OED.