Category Archives: Meta

My blog sidebar buzz widget seems to have died at the beginning of the month, and stays dead even if regenerated (some problem with the API?). It is all server-side magic, borrowed from buzzcounter.net, so it isn’t easily fixable, even if I wanted to deal with javascript. You can follow my buzz postings from my google profile at http://www.google.com/profiles/PAPPPmAc, I’m just going to theme swap back to the one that didn’t support the buzz widget, and put that URL in the link menu.

I’m aware the new theming and layout looks just a hair above “terrible;” I want to get a Buzz feed on here to better integrate my social media-ing, and the “Kubrik” theme I’ve been using won’t cooperate. When I get the chance I hope to sit down with some of the flatpress themes and a text editor so I can get something reasonably attractive going with buzz displaying between the header and posts (which will involve making the top bar work and scale…), but I despise that kind of web development, and don’t really have time to sit down and make it happen right now.

So I failed to feel like blogging for about a month there, which is what I was afraid would happen when I started this little project. That said, I think I’m going to try to resume, as overall I have enjoyed keeping the blog. A quick listing of blogworthy things I failed to post in the last month or so:

* I put some pictures from DorkbotLex #5 up on flickr.

* Some of my fellow EE gradstudents who are into guns finally got me to go to a range with them a couple times. Guns are fun. More thoughts on this in a separate post.

* One of my groupmates had his master’s defense(I wish I had a link to the thesis, but it doesn’t appear to be online), and did a really excellent job of it. For those not familiar with the process, at the end of a graduate degree you have to explain how great you are to a group of faculty, via a presentation of your research; an audience is allowed for the majority of the presentation. A large portion of the attendees went to lunch afterward, and it felt kind of kind of like having cackling old relatives pulling the “Your next” routine at a wedding, not so much for finishing the degree, but because the department rather regularly seems to have need of a native English speaker who did their undergrad at UK and stuck around for gradschool to talk to guests, and I am now the obvious choice.

* I pulled apart a dead Apple Airport Express I was given the other day. Apple Ultrasonically Welds the damn things shut, so getting into it is something of an adventure. Most of the other attempts I found online suggest a hacksaw in the seam, or drilling into the board above the internal power connections, I went with cutting the seam with a utility knife heated with a torch and had good luck. Once inside, I was greeted with one of the more impressive component failures I’ve ever encountered, in what is probably an inductor on the power board. Apparently cases like this can usually be fixed by tossing the power board and connecting 3 and 5 volts to the appropriate leads; I haven’t done it yet (No 3V regulators on hand), but probably will just to play with it.

Hopefully this is the first of a batch of new and interesting posts.