the ryan king

You may have noticed that the previous entry looked a bit different than others. If you look under the hood, you’ll see that its marked up with the xFolk microformat.

xFolk is just a way to do stuff like del.icio.us in a more distributed way.

Many of my short little posts end up on del.icio.us, instead of this blog, but I would like to change that. At the same time, I still want my stuff tagged in del.icio.us, for easier searching.

So, I’ve written a 66-line ruby script that will read my blog, parse out the xFolk and post it to del.icio.us. I’ll release it for others to use soon-ish.

Why you should buy Apple computers, a short story.

The last three days I slept little, spending the majority of my time writing an application for one of the courses I’m taking this semester. I got finished up with it yesterday afternoon and headed to class to demo it.

As I was pulling my laptop out of my bag in class, I dropped it.

Hard.

No, no, not hard like that time you dropped it a few inches onto carpet– hard like landing right on the corner on a hard desk. Oh, and not hard like a wood desk– hard like a stone countertop.

Surprisingly the computer seemed to work fine, except for one thing– it couldn’t seem to find the Airport card. Ouch.

I was able to get through the demo by plugging in via ethernet (I know, it made me feel dirty, too), but needed a fix, and quick!

I’d bought the laptop at CompUSA in November 2004, along with a 3 year warranty. So, I headed to CompUSA this morning to see about getting it fixed. Bottom line– leaving it there and maybe the guy’d get to it today. Fuck that.

So, I walked one block down to the Apple Store, signed up for the genius bar, waited 30 minutes and got it fixed on the spot, for free (turns out the Airport card had just gotten jarred out of the slot, coulda fixed it myself).

I realized then– I’m gonna do business with specialists. Apple specializes in Apple. CompUSA specializes in nothing. Apple does more with less.