Note to self: Do not leave a duffel bag lying by the heater in the bedroom for a span of several months. Very Bad Things will happen when one does this. Like parts of the bag turning from black to a strange orange-ish shade. Or one of the handles literally falling off.

Seriously, what was I thinking here? I swear, I have no common sense sometimes.

At least the bag is still un-warped enough to actually close…

Ooh. From the Global Nerdy blog, found via del.icio.us: The free PowerPoint 2007 viewer includes the six new font families designed for Windows Vista. It can be downloaded from Microsoft’s site here.

Nice. Particularly given that the installer is a self-extracting .cab that can also be extracted on Mac OS and Linux, and indeed, there’s nothing in the license that prevents an installation of the fonts on those operating systems. ::switches his default monospaced font to Consolas::

My self-esteem had been going down a bit with all the stress from class assignments, but I’ve just had it restored.

I just ported a genetic algorithm from JGAP to GAlib in approximately five hours, having barely even looked at the GAlib code before this afternoon.

(For the curious, this was not merely as a personal challenge, though it sort of ended up being one in the end; it was because the program, a grueling gamut of 1023 different values for a variable in the objective function, run 10 times each, under 1440 different combinations of GA parameters— yes, that’s 14,731,200 executions of the algorithm— was going much slower than I had anticipated.)

Edited 2006/02/24: Why the heck did I type ‘jgap.org’ for the link to that package? I knew the site was hosted at SourceForge. Thanks to Silon for pointing out that mistake…

Edited further to add: Just for completeness’ sake, I figured out why I typed the link wrong originally. The package in which JGAP’s classes are contained is named org.jgap, which would imply that the developers owned the domain jgap.org, according to Java package naming conventions. Except that they don’t. Now I’m wondering why they chose that package name…

Here is the actual text of one of those stock spams that managed to slip past my spam filter. Marvel at the utter ridiculousness that comes from this spammer trying, I can only assume, to avoid spam filters. Note that I’m not trying to actually promote the stock mentioned here; in fact, if anyone actually buys stock based on a message that looks like this, I seriously pity that person.

(more…)

OK, so the Jeopardy! contestant test was being held on Jeopardy’s web site at 8:00 tonight.

So I logged in 30 minutes ahead of time, just like they suggested, and left the window for it in the background so that I could come back to it when it was actually time to start.

Yep, you guessed it… by the time 8:00 actually struck, I totally forgot I even had the window open. By the time I remembered I was supposed to be taking the test, it was already over.

I am such a scatterbrain… -_-;;

My PowerBook has returned to me, now with working power.

I am happy.

I just got the new power adapter in.

The problem was not the power adapter.

It’s the laptop. >_<;;

Edited 7:57pm to add: This bodes well. The power inlet is on a separate board from the motherboard on PowerBooks, so it will probably only be necessary for Apple to replace that particular board.

Normally, I try to make at least one update to the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame every year. However, in part due to circumstances beyond my control (namely, my laptop’s power cord power input shorting out), I was unable to do my typical end-of-year update this year, and was too busy during the rest of the year to do any substantial updating.

Here’s to better luck in 2007… I’ll try to get an update posted as soon as I have a working laptop.

As it turns out, the local reseller doesn’t actually do Apple warranty work… so if I did get my computer serviced there, it’d cost $70 an hour, while I’m still under AppleCare. (I would have just gone to an Apple store if it weren’t two hours to the nearest one!)

So I called Apple instead, and they think the issue is indeed the power adapter (and that the replacement adapter I got yesterday, which turned out to be a third-party product, is a dud). So they’re shipping me a new official adapter and letting me ship back the old one.

Hopefully this one will work. And either way, I get a new adapter out of it.

More to come once I get the new adapter shipped…

Uh-oh. It’s worse than I thought. Though I’m sure my laptop’s power cord was beginning to short out, that’s not the sole problem; even with a new adapter, the computer’s still not wanting to charge.

Guess I’m taking it into the service center tomorrow…

The good news, at least, is that the motherboard still seems OK— booting off of what little battery power there is produces the familiar Mac startup sound before the system quickly powers off.