I had an unusually good day today.
School's ripping out its old "Tandberg Educational Language Lab" from the '70s to make way for a new computerized system. As such, anybody that wants the equipment (headsets, audio cassette decks, and a control unit) is free to take it with permission from the Modern Language department. Today I picked up a headset; it uses an RJ-11 head instead of a stereo or mini-stereo head, so provided the two use the same signal I should be able to create an adapter with ease. If not, another trip to Radio Shack. Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can get a tape deck or two and possibly the control unit, which I'm sure I can put to some sort of use. It looks like it'd make a great audio switch for when I finally
go digital.
There was a Microsoft PR person (if I'm not mistaken, he had a substantial role in application deployment) speaking at school today. In addition to answering a lingering question about device interoperability that I've had for quite some time without using some strange general answer such as, "Oh, that'll be part of the .NET Framework 5.0!" I also took in a good deal of info from the questions posed by the rest of the Computer Science AP class. I can safely say, though, that information wasn't the most valuable thing I walked away from the chat with. Quite the contrary, this is:
I won a free copy of Windows Vista Ultimate by answering some tech-related trivia correctly. The questions posed were a joke, in my opinion: "Who designed the Linux kernel?" (Linus Torvalds), "Who is the only co-founder of Microsoft that has since left the company?" (Paul Allen), and "What company bought out VMware?" (EMC), for example. It gets better: we get the chance to tour the Microsoft campus in Cambridge, MA, whenever it's convenient.
There were a number of "shenanigans" at this meeting, of course. Someone asked about Microsoft's stance on "Free, open-source software", to which the response went something like, "There is no such thing as free open source software, since a customer ends up buying through a commercial distributor that charges extra for support." He supposedly went as far as to pull out a copy of the GNU GPL and begin reading it to himself. There were also questions asked as to software piracy ("We're working on it in developing countries, where it's a problem.") and DRM ("DRM is
good for the consumer!"). When I received my copy of Vista Ultimate, I immediately pretended to begin installing it on my 386 laptop: "Oh, sweet, I'm installing this right now! Hmm, I don't seem to have an optical drive here, is there any chance I can get an image of this DVD on 3343 floppies? After all, it runs on a 386,
right?"
Last but definitely not least, my laptop came back today! It's working perfectly, and as something of an added perk, it doesn't heat up nearly as much as it used to. According to HP, the entire mainboard had been replaced (as I figured would be the case), and they were nice enough to give me back my RAM and CPU when they did so. They were also nice enough to leave my
bumper sticker intact.