Having been a long time Apple proponent, migration back into the world of the Commodity-Driven PC has been a bit awkward.

I opted for my most recent purchase to be a Dell Small Business system; for Dell’s prices are great, and I’ve aways had excellent luck with the DSB enviornment.

^{Yet another brilliant mind, destroyed by an idiot.}

Yes, the damage above was done by a ‘certified technician.’

Long story short, after calling both Dell, and QualXServe, on August 10th, I did get a replacement LCD, and a replacement lid. The laptop STILL didn’t work right , so I contacted Dell.

On August 21st, I had in my hands a brand new Inspiron 6400. Yes, Dell sent me a NEW laptop – and IT WORKS! No clusters of dead pixels, no random lockups, and the wireless does not turn itself off on a whim.

Dell has taken care of this problem professionally, and probably about as fast as I could hope. I’m satisfied.

I was searching for a small quantity of 4/3A batteries to rebuild a dead nicad battery pack in a laptop that’s not worth $50, so I’m surely not going to pay $100 to have someone else solder some wires for me.. the battery pack’s system is fine; the nicads are just 8 years old, and toast.

I stumbled across the yellowest web page made in the last eight years. There was an interesting article on the whole ‘getting free power’ thing, from both a scientific, and blatantly english stand:

”...20 mA at 48 volts is about one watt. Here in Utah we pay about $.07 per kilowatt-hour. So by tapping power from the phone line you could save seven cents in 1000 hours, or 41 days. Now you are sticking-it-to-the-man to the tune of 61 cents per year. “

Given these numbers (it’s $0.08 here), it’d still take about 150 years to get $100 worth of “free” electricity.

NewsRadio, the funniest American TV show ever to be produced (that was chock full of Canadians), has finally seen Season 4 to DVD. It’s a ‘thinking Man’s Seinfeld,’ but actually funny.

Well, aside from documenting your code, as we all know is a sure sign of failure, the practice of doing really bizarre things in an effort to save CPU and disk cycles.. Observe a bit of internal notes for my currently-in-progress project (This one’s in PHP, so don’t sneer too loudly; you might hurt my feelings):

// QUICK SYNOPSIS:
//————————-
// RAM: $gl[‘data’][$localid][$var]
// DB: schema->table->myid (pri index)->var

// CONFUSING PARTS:
//————————-
// ‘myid’ is a struct in the database that is an ‘auto increment’ field for the entry.
// ‘localid’ is the ID assigned to the array at the time of loading into memory.
// The whole system is based around the concept of the dynamic ‘localid’,
// except when editing or removing entries, as it will have to talk directly to
// the database, unless placed into the queue for later removal; in this
// case, it will be written into the ‘later’ queue, and processed at the time specified.
// All subroutines may be called with either data for ‘localid’, or the ‘myid’
// system; myid variables are implictly passed, where ‘localid’ are indrect
// references, except in the case of reusable functions, such as imported
// functions DB, HTTP, encryption, display, which don’t need access to
// this information in the first place!

// INTERESTING PARTS:
//————————-
// $gl – Global Variable Array
// $var – Local Variables Array
// $db – All DB related variables here; NEVER expose!
//————————-
// $gl[‘data’] contains the database as read into memory.
// $gl[‘count’] contains the count of how many records are in the database.

// SPECIAL NOTES (OR BUGS):
//————————-
// Uses the new OOP version of my DB shim, which I’ve only rewritten for
// mysqli() and mysql() support; sqlite and postgres have not
// been re-implemented, yet, so don’t try to use them; it will fail.
// Admin interface is raw; has caused outbreak of giardia; do not eat.

If you’ve read thus far, here’s some fun things: It has a fully internal captcha system that only requires libgd w/ jpeg support; uses it’s own dictionary and encryption methods (which are self referencing and 7 bit compatible for bridging over any protocol you might want (XML, XML-RPC, HTTP, uh.. carrier pigeon?), despite any state of initial data), has a non-AJAX/BUZZWORD self-referential link system where it can (will) do many things within a single process (sorry, I still require you to click a submit button; it’s just my way), and contains it’s own socket code and HTTP/1.1 compliant POST/GET retrieval system for use explicitly with url fopen purposely disabled. (However, there’s not much I can do if you don’t have the ability to create, or connect to a socket.)

Oh, yeah, the whole project is under 30k right now, including the abstraction layers – BUT, I’m currently rewriting the admin interface. After prototyping, I decided I needed something better.

I think it’s waaay past time for bed.

Karsten Obarski, the father of computer assisted sequenced music, is 41 ^{or 46} today. ^{(Somebody has their dates wrong!)}

Telephone still has one of the best sequences I can think of. I spent I don’t know how much time decoding MOD15 and later, MOD31 formats.. and here, 20 years after your creation, I’m still enjoying them. If not for you, Mr. Obarski, I’d probably would have spent far less time on computers.