That leaves me plenty of time to work on day-job stuff.

This morning will be spent debugging the print job, figuring out what’s up with the barcodes (yay font substitution and rasterization).

After that, it’s off to the races where I can finally sit down and get some real-world work done.

BTW: Westin Hotels are lame – when you buy wireless (yes, after you spend $200 a night on a room, they make you buy your fucking wireless), you buy it for one machine, not your whole room. So I had to jury rig my machine to share the wireless over ethernet to Derek’s machine (yea, we’re sharing a room – another awesome thing).

Overall, the experience this time has been less than impressive so far.

Here’s the rundown:

• Former mayor of an Alaskan town of 1000 people – no foreign policy experience.
• She (yes, she) wants to overturn Roe v. Wade – the supreme court case that said that women have the right to choose. How can anyone, let alone a woman, think that they can decide what all other women can and cannot do with their own bodies.
• Her husband works for British Petroleum.  Good one, there…
• She wants to fight against calling Polar Bears an endangered species.
• Sarah Palin is under investigation by the Alaska state legislature.  Wow!
• And, to top it off, she wants to teach Creationism in school … as in the Bible.  Don’t get me wrong, I was raised religious, but intelligent people know that they are allegories, and not to be taken strictly literally.  Also, has any Republican ever heard of a little term I like to call Separation of Church and State?  I’m pretty sure it’s in this little-heard-of-by-republicans document called the Constitution of The United States.  Read it, bitches.

</rant>

By that definition, those programmable remotes all ship bricked – they don’t perform any useful function until you program them for your TV. Clearly, however, they are not bricked.  They still work, all you have to do is program them.  

Similarly, by this definition, any device that requires battery power, but has no batteries is bricked.  But those devices aren’t bricked – add batteries again, and you’re back in business.

Bricked is a special term, not to be used lightly, or without understanding its meaning.

A little education goes a long way.

Definition: Bricked – Adjective.  Bricked means the device will no longer power on, due to some irreparably misconfigured hardware or firmware or a fried (e.g., permanently destroyed) internal component. Bricked is only slightly different than destroyed (e.g., physically smashed with a sledge hammer), in that is is theoretically possible to ressurect the device, but you god damned better have a JTAG device or soldering iron or other hardware debugging device to load new firmware/components back on it (and even then, it’s really only a 50/50 chance you’ll ever see it boot up again).  

Usage: “I’m sorry, Bob, the firmware flash for your embedded device failed halfway through, and now it wont even boot up.  The damn things bricked, and without a JTAG board to restore the bits, it’ll never function again.”

Basically, if you’ve never had an electrical engineering class, or developed embedded firmware, you probably shouldn’t be using the word “bricked” in casual conversation.

If your iPhone doesn’t let you use it without activating, that is not bricked.   

That’s locked.

That’s you (or AT&T) being an idiot.

Unless you’re flashing firmware on a device, and it never boots up again, don’t say your device is bricked.

All the original Burnout’s had it, and it was always the hit whenever I went over to a friend’s house who had an Xbox.

But no, they decided Xbox Live only multiplayer was a better idea.  If I had known that , I would never have bought it…