Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

iPod Touch Repair
May 16, 2012

iPodLCD.jpgLast Girl Scout Cookie Season, Riley was out with Berta and Abby at one of the tables they had set up to sell cookies near Acme. He had taken his iPod Touch with him to keep him occupied, and it was doing a good job. As they were cleaning up, he accidentally dropped it on the sidewalk and cracked the screen.

Obviously, Riley was upset because his iPod was broken, and Berta wasn’t inclined to buy another one, since we had gotten the pair of them at a deep discount that was unlikely to happen again. I suggested repair as a possibility, having had friends repair iPhones and the like, so we started down this long road.

Non-Event Events
May 15, 2012

calendar.jpgLooking at the calendar on my phone, which is connected to several Google calendars, I see a mess of events. There are things that are scheduled for specific times of day, and there are things that are scheduled for “all day”. That’s what’s bugging me today, the “all day event”.

There are some events that really are “all day”. For example, there are some trips that we’re taking that encompass the whole day. But other events, like birthdays and “last day of school”, are not really “all day”. They’re kind of milestone markers; this is the day this happens, but it’s not something that will keep you busy all day, just something of note.

Notebook Travel Power
May 14, 2012

charger.jpgI travel with my notebook, probably not as much as many people do, but enough. One of the heaviest things in my notebook bag is the notebook charger. For whatever reason over the years, the design of notebook chargers has not improved at all.

I have been using a Targus travel charger for a while now, which fulfills a couple of my specific wish-list criteria concerning chargers, but not all:

My First Philly Startup Weekend
April 24, 2012

Philly Startup WeekendLast Friday night was the start of my first Startup Weekend, and I didn’t know quite what to expect. In fact, the logistics of getting me into the city from the suburbs for such long days had me thinking I should just give up my ticket. But I manged to wrangle accommodations down the street from the University of the Arts where the building was held, and arrived just in time to join those gathering for pre-event drinks and snacks.

I grabbed my badge from the table and started talking to people. If you know me at all, you’re already thinking I’m making stuff up – I am not usually so social. But Startup Weekend, unlike most other events, is not an event that you attend passively. You interact with other people or you don’t experience it. Within the first 20 minutes of the event, I met and had great conversations with two people who went on to form teams that won second and third place!

Technical Books Are Broken
April 09, 2012

Write Your Own Adventure ProgramsOn a family trip to the Computer Museum in Boston I convinced my parents to buy me a copy of Write Your Own Adventure Programs for Your Microcomputer, since I was an Infocom junkie and had been writing my own “adventure programs” for some time already. I think this was my first technical book, and it was the first technical book that I met with disappointment.

I’m not sure how I picked up programming prior to books. Probably a combination of experimentation and entering programs from magazines. Unlike the other few kids I knew who also had computers, I didn’t spend a lot of time playing games. I mostly wrote code. Technical manuals that helped with this were rare.