John Borwick's blog

You Are A: Pony!

Who doesn’t love a pony? You are one of these miniature horses, renown for your beauty and desired by many. … Continue Reading

Somewhere, recently, I read the term “lede” in the course of an article, which some web pages define as “the lead paragraph of a story, spelled phonetically so it’s not confused with ‘lead’ the weighting between lines or with the metal ‘lead.’”

The funny thing is, the only relevant entry in the OED is “lede: obsolete variant of lead.” That usually means that ‘lede’ is extremely old and not worth talking about. See also Random House’s word of the day for 2000/11/28. Random House says
The spelling “lede” was not invented by journalists. This spelling … Continue Reading

YES I REALLY DID IT

—–BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK—–
Version: 3.1
GCS d+(–) s++: a- C++$>+ UBLA++++$ P+++$ L++$
E(+)$ W+++ N o K–? w !O M+>$ !V PS+++ PE– Y++
PGP++ t+ !5 X !R tv+ b DI+ D G>– e++ h— r++ y?
——END GEEK CODE BLOCK——

I just got an article called “System Automation with PXE, Kickstart, and Cfengine” published in the October 2005 issue of SysAdmin magazine. We just got it in the mail today at work!

Lauren and I got two kittens: Fred and Emma! They are really cute! Fred and Emma are brother and sister, and were born on July 1 2005. We got them last Wednesday, September 7 2005.

One point Neal Stephenson makes in The Baroque Cycle is that people from (Western) Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries used the term “Christendom” to refer to Europe, rather than Europe.

I like the term “Christendom.” It gives me a better idea of what most people in the West are thinking about when they use like “the West”, “First-World countries,” and “developed nations.”

It could make the news a lot more obvious: “Christendom gave $100m to tsunami victims,” for example. Christendom is running out of oil.

Please check out this Amazon list of books about ninjas.

Lauren’s mom introduced me to sudoku puzzles. While away from the Internet I wanted to write a Python program to solve the puzzles. My program is VERY EXTREMELY slow, and I even made it slower while writing it. 80% of the computational time (according to the “profile” module) is spent copying the Sudoku object in the “solution” method.

Now that I’ve got the Internet again, I can see the hundreds of google search results for “python sudoku”.

I’m reading Quicksilver, the first in Neal Stephenson’s 2000 page “Baroque Cycle” trilogy. Historical fiction isn’t really my thing, but I’m off work all this week and I thought I could use a challenge.

Rock the Block is occurring once again in downtown Winston-Salem. Please go to the website: the bobblehead people there scare me.