Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


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Like my brownhouse:
   actually climb up the tree
Monday, June 12 2006

setting: Woodland Hills, California

I worked all day on wild and crazy Ajax code, figuring out how an extremely asynchronous page gets built and then making changes to insert bits of business logic that had been neglected. In the process I made a Javascript function that can actually climb up the HTML DOM tree to figure out what <TR> tag a given DIV is contained within and then set it to invisible, making the row in the table vanish dynamically. I don't have to know anything about that <TR> at all.
The work was going well but at a certain point I had to knock it off for want of completely fresh air, the kind I've been reliably finding in the nearby Starbucks.

As you may have forgotten, the other night I accidentally left my digital camera and MP3 player behind in Al's truck, and eventually he'll be contracting with one of those mega-freighters that can't fit through the Panama canal to return it to me. I haven't been missing the camera but I'd grown dependent on the MP3 player for my walking-around-bleakest-suburbia soundtrack. I'd been listening mostly to Low, Lake Trout, and The Standard. So today I walked to Target and bought another MP3 player, rationalizing that I can give it to Gretchen when I get back to Hurley. This particular model was made by RCA and was about the size of a book of matches, but a little thicker. Somehow inside that volume there was room not only for a tiny LCD display and necessary electronics and buttons, but also for both a single triple-A battery and an SD flash memory slot. It was advertised as being a 512 Megabyte device, but I didn't know whether or not this required me to first buy a 512 Meg SD card. It's very common for such things to be obscured on the packaging only to be revealed once you tear it open. So I bought it and tore it open in the parking lot. The 512 Megabytes was built-in and the SD slot was for expansion: the best of both worlds. It almost never happens these days for me to find that what I bought is actually better than I thought; even the portable Canon printer I bought for Gretchen a couple weeks ago comes without a USB cord (in an effort to add a few coins to the razor-thin margin).
The interface for the RCA MP3 player is weak, with an annoying delay as you flip backwards and forwards between songs. But it makes up for this with its tiny size, expandability, and use of standard accessories. [I'd tell you what the model is but it's not on either the Target or RCA site and I don't have it handy.]


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?060612

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