John Borwick's blog

I created a nomic based on PerlNomic written in Python, and announced it on the PerlNomic discussion forums. I put the latest version (0.02b) in my projects folder.

I wrote a framework for a typing tutor, which you can download as Typer-0.01. The only cool thing about it is the OO-ness of it; you can inherit from a Lesson to create your own (randomly-generated) typing lesson. I created DictLesson, which picks 50 words matching the letters you specify from /usr/share/dict/words. I want to create GuttLesson, a lesson that finds sentences with only letters you want from Project Guttenburg.
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I have been playing this dumb game since Friday, when Will pointed it out to me. Basically, it’s a game about creating the rules for the game, and the rules are written in Perl. You submit a proposal (Perl code), and if it gets a majority of favorable votes it gets EXECUTED. There are thus lots of

open PATCH, “patch -p1 |”; print PATCH <<_END_PATCH_
statements.
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Lauren and my iTunes became corrupt at the same time. When you opened iTunes, ALL the text looked like Hebrew with strange blocks in places. We installed The Iceman’s Apple Garamond fonts, but I don’t see how that broke anything.
After deleting all the caches, and trying EVERY sysadmin trick I know (ls -lart), I started disabling fonts via the Font Book.
It turns out that a (corrupt?) second copy of Lucida Grande got put in /Library/Fonts. By removing it, everything went back to normal.

The News and Observer reports that The Pirate Captain won with 59% of the student vote, in a runoff election. The best quote is
“He doesn’t really have any issues,” said senior Alissa Tompkins, who voted for Quick [the opponent]. “All his quotes in the paper were in pirate language that doesn’t make any sense.”
The fact that it doesn’t make sense is really most of the point. Truth bae told, the Pirate Captain does have some good issues in his Plank, though:

• Expand The Cargo Lines (buses)
• Create a Crew of all 5 Colleges in Raleigh (I … Continue Reading
  

freshmeat.net has a few Dvorak typing tutors. My favorite of the ones I’ve tried is dvorakng, a curses-based program that keeps stats on what keys you miss the most.

Mike Rollins, a guy I work with, let me have his old fancy Dvorak-labeled keyboard. This is like the most ergonomic keyboard ever. Each hand sits in a little bowl of keys. You can reprogram the keys to do different things. There is no normal backspace key: you hit it with your thumb instead.

I don’t think I’m going to keep using it, though, because … Continue Reading

So, this is a little embarassing, but I recently started shopping at Express for Men. Which is in the mall.

I’m not really a “mall” kind of guy, but I do like clothes that look nice and don’t fall apart. I also think the “French cuff” is awesome. You can be sitting down somewhere and then put your hand to your face and blam there’s a cufflink.

Well, today I went in and got an Express credit card, which gives you a 15% discount on your first day’s purchases. I also used a 20% off coupon. … Continue Reading