<< February 25, 2008 >>
some followups

off the grid: well last thursday came and went without a ring from the rcn guy, until the evening when my landlord called to ask if i'd done anything with the cable; theirs was off. i told her that i had canceled it, and this latest bout of idiocy was just another reason for that action.

you see, last summer, in order to save some money between hockey seasons, i tried to set up what those in the industry call a "seasonal disconnect." this means that, while you are on vacation, or not watching tv, or whatever, they won't charge you, and i was assured there'd be no reconnection fee when i restored service in the fall. i guess i never wrote about it here, but basically every month i called rcn asking why there was a new $300 charge for unreturned cable cards, and was given a $300 credit. they were a little dumb, or something, because in the end, with all the credits, i don't think i even paid for my internet service, plus the tv worked all summer.

all throughout this, my landlords downstairs kept having their cable turned off. the lines for our units come to the house in different places, and for whatever reason the service guys don't know which is which. so, when i canceled my cable two weeks ago, i tried to insist that the guy contact me when he came to turn it off, so that they didn't do the wrong one. so i had to get up realy friday and wait four hours until the guy finally showed up at 12:15 (he was supposed to be there by 11).

the reception on my antenna works even better after i adjusted it a little and moved my airport. the internet service is pretty ok; there are problems when i'm playing to an express and trying to download something, and i don't know how to fix that.

awful vpn software: also, after ditching rcn, my vpn connections now stay up forever, instead of being disconnected every 45-90 minutes. i downloaded an iso (7 hours, umm, this isn't fios) in one shot! amazing.

whew, next!

Gom: while it has not gotten as much attention as i may have hoped for, i am increasingly convinced that it is awesome. i spent much of the weekend finally getting support for "native" GObject property access and signal connection. that is, you can do widget.title = "footitle!" instead of via the dom api widget.setAttribute ("title", "footitle!").

i also wasted a ton of time writing unit tests that will always pass for the code that converts GValues to jsvals. i did find one or two bugs, so it was well worth it, but i don't think the tests are good enough. it's a start, at least, and thinking of some cases to break it won't be difficult.

unless some unforeseen social happenings develop, i hope to get a much more useful release out next weekend, after merging the dom and JSObject-based attribute and event code. will it be awesome enough to get someone on a planet to link to it? only time will tell.

and, finally.

the atlantic article: call me simple, but i'd choose hardwood doors over air conditioning, having cupboards, or ice-free stairs any day.

the election: the debate sketch was terrible, but the milkshake one was really great. i need to go watch it again. but without that stupid ad at the beginning. grr!