Hunting The Muse

Clients coming out of my

Clients coming out of my ears right now... none are for an extraordinary rate, but it seems as if I'm officially at the point where if they asked me to do more I'd have to push back - I appear to be booked up through August.

Here is some of the

Here is some of the strangest spam I have yet received:

Hello, If you are a time traveler or alien and or in possession of government or alien technology I need your help! My entire life and health has been messed with by evil beings! If you have access to the carbon copy replica model #50 3000 series, the dimensional warp, temporal reversion or something similar please reply! I simply need the safest method of transferring my consciousness to my younger self with my current mind/memory. I need an advanced time traveler to work with who can help me, I would prefer someone with access to teleportation as well as a variety different types of time travel. This is not a joke! I am serious! Please send a separate email to me at: Dragonball03@aol.com if you can help! Thanks

Court rejects Pledge of

Court rejects Pledge of Allegiance - "A profession that we are a nation 'under God' is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation 'under Jesus,' a nation 'under Vishnu,' a nation 'under Zeus,' or a nation 'under no god,' because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion." - Judge Alfred T. Goodwin

I sorta liked saying the Pledge in grade school. But that is still one kick-ass quote.

I've been blogging for

I've been blogging for a while and I've also been reading discussion groups for a while - whether web-based or usenet.

There's one concept, though, that I think the internet would be GREAT for, that we haven't seen a great medium for yet. And that's Making Progress.

What the hell do I mean? Well, for instance. One of the newsgroups I am reading is rec.arts.int-fiction . They discuss interactive fiction - the old infocom game. There's a lot of academic interest in the area. A piece of interactive fiction isn't quite a video game, isn't quite a MUD, isn't quite virtual reality, isn't quite a book. So what is it?

Someone on that group asked that question recently - asking if it were possible for them to come up with an actual definition of interactive fiction. Some people tried, more people brought up flaws, argued points, argued subpoints...

What, I ask you, are the chances that over the course of that conversation, everyone will actually hash out a definition of interactive fiction? That they'll pull together the parts they all agree on, separate out the parts they don't agree on, and integrate it into one slimmed-down document?

From my experience reading internet discussions, I'd say just about nil. Usually what it takes is one insanely dedicated reader to pull together everyone else's points and journal them. And that just ain't efficient. What usually happens is either everyone agrees on something and then they all go home, leaving that thing to wither and die, orphaned in the ether, or, two groups of people argue a point endlessly until they get bored or distracted by something else - again leaving the discussion point to wither. And often times in the course of these discussions many points just get abandoned.

They're archived, sure, but how interesting is that? When we are researching a point or a concept, We go back and find discussions to find the information, not to find all the personalities having their little side arguments or reinforcing their view that Something Has To Be Done.

I'd argue that archived discussions are not the best form for the information uncovered in those discussions. It's the prose before the poetry, it's the scrawled notes before an outline. What's needed instead is a living document that self-evolves - without the burden being placed on one person that painstakingly reviews every point to make sure everything is represented clearly.

Right now it looks like the closest answer to this is Wiki. Wiki is a system where someone opens up their webpage so that anyone can edit it. People come in, edit information, add new information, delete information, and the web page can be set so that all revisions are saved in case something gets corrupted.

But there are problems - what about pulling in new sources of information? And who decides what level of detail to go into? And how do you guard against entirely irrelevant additions?

Blogs frustrate me because while it is hard to find archived information, it is even harder to find packages of archived information. For the thoughts that have only been disseminated via blogs, it's already starting to feel like I have to put together a puzzle every day to find them. This will grow exponentially in the future.

But a blog combined with a wiki.... that's a possibility. What if at the end of every blog entry, I had an "integrate me" link? Or perhaps only at the bottom of entries I specifically wanted to catalog? Then either I or perhaps anyone could integrate them - the next screen would be a checklist of categories, perhaps - multiple categories could be chosen.

And then perhaps each of those categories could be a wiki. A living document, but always being fed with unprocessed bits of information. Little todo items for people to respond to. Someone could read the living document, read an unprocessed bit of information, and edit the living document to integrate the unprocessed bit of information - and then that bit would disappear from the unprocessed list.

So a blog entry could be wiki'd. And people reading a blog entry could go to the wiki's it got integrated into.

Still letting it tumble around in my head.... hrm.... hrm.....

Is The FBI Doing Enough

Is The FBI Doing Enough To Prevent The July 19th Attacks?

awright! My health insurance got

awright! My health insurance got approved. :) The rate is so much better than Cobra, which would have gone up another $150/month on July 1st. It was tight, but I pleaded with them and they expedited the process. So I'm saving myself about $300/month now!

For all the grousing

For all the grousing and procrastinating and dragging of feet that I do about programming... when I sit down to do it, I really do enjoy it. I have to remember that.

It'd just be nice if after 90 minutes of debugging I could go over to my baby grand piano and play a Chopin Nocturne or something. That would be so nice.

If I had a piano... I would learn a few pieces. There are two Rachmaninoff preludes I want to learn - G# minor (even though every piano student already knows it, I never quite got around to it) and G major. (Sorry, don't have the opus numbers on hand.)

I'd also want to learn Chopin's Berceuse. I have plenty of further-out Chopin goals once I get my fingers back (ultimately leading to the fourth Ballade), but Berceuse would be a good start.

For a technical challenge (neighbors willing), there's a couple of good Prokofiev pieces I would want. Including his third sonata in A minor, the one that starts with all the E major chords.

And as for Baroque or classical? Well, I'm never all that motivated to learn anything Classical. I'd be content to burn all of Mozart's piano sonatas and just stick to enjoying his stuff that isn't piano solo. But Baroque... I want to learn the G minor Prelude & Fugue from book II of the WTC. That Fugue is just overwhelmingly intense and I don't think I'd ever be able to do justice to the passion that gets in my blood when I imagine myself into it. And most people don't know it, but Scarlatti has some extremely cool pieces. They are all short but with very intense personality. Little soul shards. I'd learn four or five of those.

Finally, I'd want to actually learn the three piano pieces I've written. I've never actually learned two of them entirely properly. Actually, one of them is badly written enough that it is probably impossible to learn effectively, but I should at least try.

Okay, that'll have to do in lieu of practicing. Guess I'll go do some more programming now.

Every once in a while

Every once in a while I get back into a phase of being fascinated by interactive fiction. I liked Infocom games a lot when I was in Junior High. My favorite game was Sorceror, sequel to Enchanter, probably because it was the only one I solved all by myself, without the hint book. Now there's a whole community out there that writes their own text adventure games, many of which are better (or at least more artistic) than the games that Infocom wrote. And there are authorship systems. That's what gets me intrigued from time to time. I start to come up with ideas of games to write. You can find games (and interpreters to play them) at The IF Archive

So Damon (aka Peter)

So Damon (aka Peter) was picked to be part of this big new Apple marketing campaign, the "Switch" campaign.

I've already seen him on TV once, the first commercial after a break in the 4th round of the US Open. Friends have seen him quite a few times.

And there's reaction, too - mostly positive, but with one hilariously notable exception. Check out the roasting that Pete gets at the hands of The Register. He got the bitchy David Spade treatment.

He and I are also doing a team blog over at blogspot called Mac OS X: The Search for OS Canaan. Since he had an above average knowledge of windows systems and I had an above average knowledge of linux systems, and we're both making the switch, we thought it would be a good idea. Looks like the readership is picking up a bit - thanks to both the commercial and to Ev linking to it.

Overall my switch is going well. There have been a couple of places where I've made it harder than it really has to be. But I've already retired one of my laptops and soon I might be able to retire a second one as well (both old, both mostly broken).

So I sort of

So I sort of ran out of gas before I really finished moving. This happens every time I move - there's always a few boxes that I never quite get around to unpacking. I feel sort of grumpy about what they represent - a bunch of areas of my life that don't quite fit anywhere, that were left unresolved, but still are enough a part of me that I can't just throw them away.

And I just thought of the perfect word for them. They are barnacles. They were all things that were free-floating, things I was enthusiastic about at inception. And it felt like they were enthusiastic about me, as well - they spoke to me and inspired me. Now that time has passed and they are older, they just sort of stick to me, like how a barnacle sticks to the hull of a boat.

Step back, zoom out. Psychically, I've been feeling stuck. Not unhappy, and I've definitely got a feeling of progression in my life, which is nice - at least in terms of my freelancing. But growing... evolving... I'm not so sure about that. I talked to a good friend recently and he said that when that happens to him, it's usually because he's spread too thin.

Well, that's definitely something I'm susceptible to. But how do you get out of that? It's those damn barnacles again. You have to start cutting things out of your life. You have to be ruthless. Or, you have to let old promises fall away. I don't like that, ever.

So I guess that's my next challenge... to figure out how to streamline things and build up energy again, without being a totally unreliable jerk.

Then maybe I can unpack those last few boxes...

Bush being stupid has been

Bush being stupid has been drilled into my head so thoroughly that every time I see something that seems vaguely related I just have to start laughing. Check out this quote from when Bush called the soccer team's coach before today's match:

"The country is really proud of the team. A lot of people that don't know anything about soccer, like me, are all excited and pulling for you."

Not that I can fault anyone who doesn't know anything about soccer. Well, yes I can. But wouldn't you think he'd be sensitive about that characterization of him by now?

And I had a great

And I had a great time watching USA beat Mexico today. :) I'm glad I got cable.

I ended up having a

I ended up having a pretty stressful close of the week. You've probably seen me blogging about this alumni organization I've been involved with - it's of my old singing group. I was the first proper alumni - since I co-founded the group, I was one of the oldest members and I was the first to leave. So I took it upon myself to get the alumni group moving again after it had falling into somewhat a state of disrepair. Pete has been helping me since he sang with me in the group. Anyway, in some ways we waited a bit longer than we probably should have, because it turns out there are some challenges with the current members. We ended up getting a frustrating email from them criticizing our efforts, which I took kind of personally. I spent the weekend trying to improve the situation. We'll find out this week what the effect was...

I am now blogging from

I am now blogging from my iBook, using BlogBot via an OS X chat application called Fire. Whee! I am documenting my system migration efforts over on OS X Canaan (see sidebar for blog link), so you can follow along there if you want. :)

I think Peter should buy

I think Peter should buy this. Granted, I could because I technically have a dvd player now in my NEW IBOOK, but it would look so much better on his entertainment system. Also, the entire second season of Buffy is now available on dvd for under fifty bucks!

Well, all the "second tier"

Well, all the "second tier" priorities that I had put off to take care of the move finally started hitting me with a vengeance today. I got a couple of them taken care of... one of those times when I wish I could temporarily clone myself... delegate to myself. Sometimes while I love Life, I hate life. It's so annoying!

I had a lull

I had a lull in my freelancing schedule this week. I've been pretty busy lately providing software consulting and programming to mid-sized businesses. Right now I'm doing:

• A perl-based intranet with an oracle database backend to provide several document management and database reports to a very large team of bank employees. The system handles authentication, different access levels, and also dynamic creation of pdf and excel spreadsheets so they can receive their reports in a variety of formats.
• A php-based portal tool to enable a large number (tens of thousands) of musicians to market themselves through a home-page-creation wizard. It's basically a website builder with lots of forms to help them do the easy stuff like upload images, choose different layout styles, etc. It uses MySQL as the backend database
• Maintaining my own java-servlet based creative writing technology - it is on a private site now but it will relaunch. It uses postgresql as the backend.
• Setting up my new webhosting service for business clients. I will be their contact for adding new services to their websites.
• Various web-services hacking, from XML-RPC to RSS.

What I'm hoping to land is one more recurring gig either with a DIY project interested in self-publishing, music, web payments, or anything else that helps the "little guy" be creative, or, something to keep my programming muscles toned on larger-scale projects, preferably a multi-tier java-based project. Stuff similar to what I'm already doing is always welcome, though.

If you know of anything, write siffert at museworld dot com.

All of a sudden I've

All of a sudden I've heard of a kind of tattoo that only lasts four years, after which I guess it disappears, and I am seriously intrigued. I'd love to do something like that to make a deep promise to myself, but yet not have to worry about regretting it in forty years when I'm a completely hateful cynic.

I got my iBook. :)

I got my iBook. :) 12.1", 700Mhz

Doing more research on why

Doing more research on why there's a split in RSS versions - an old message from Dave Winer shows a bit of frustration with the whole thing, although for some reason I'm wondering if he's being the intractable one here. I've heard a lot about RDF as an open standard and I now have two really good reasons to learn it - MusicBrainz uses it too. The problem is, the learning curve is very high. Even smart developers after they've learned it say as much. So Dave has a good point in saying that RSS 0.9x is easier. He makes the point that it's simpler and easier to use. But the thing is, most of his RSS users probably don't even understand 0.9x - so why would they care which standard was implemented in the backend?

Ultimately I agree on one thing though. It shouldn't have been named RSS 1.0. That just made the whole thing needlessly confusing.

Ha! My buddy Pete is

Ha! My buddy Pete is on TV! Go to Apple.com and hit the "Switch" Tab.

Right now I'm averaging about

Right now I'm averaging about 17 billable hours per week.

I don't have tv yet.

I don't have tv yet. But I'm watching on matchcast, and we just scored on korea! 1-0 USA!

ArmedLiberal has an essay on

ArmedLiberal has an essay on the good points of guns. It's reasoned, well-thought-out, calm, and I disagree with it strongly and can't quite form my argument yet. I'll think about it.

I did a bit

I did a bit more RSS research tonight. I am mostly focusing on Peerkat. It seems to have most of what I want - my two biggest criticisms of it were that it didn't support all versions of RSS, and that it was tedious adding new fields. However, I found a couple of things to temper that.

By default, Peerkat only supports RSS 1.0 . In a bizarre situation, however, development of the 0.9x line of RSS seems to continue even after 1.0 was solidified. Since 1.0 isn't backwards compatible to 0.9x, it means that readers have to support both lines.

RSS 0.9x is really up to about 0.94 now, at least if you want to be bleeding edge. Dave's feed is 0.94 right now. There's been a semi-aborted attempt at 0.93, but most Radio Userland feeds are 0.92 right now, including Matt's and Peter's.

So it's a roadblock. However, Peerkat depends on something called Orchard, and while the default installation of Peerkat only supports 1.0, a newer version of Orchard-Python evidently supports 0.9x .

Secondly, there is a nifty Peerkat Utility that could let me easily subscribe to a Radio Userland feed without having the type the information in.

If it all works, I've got the makings of a system that I want - the ability to pull in multiple links, the ability to categorize them, delete them, and send them on to my own aggregated RSS feed. I can write a cron script to publish it to my website so others can read it. It's pretty close to what I wrote about last week. It looks like a lot of people were already (mostly) doing what I mused about, but obviously it still isn't as easy as it could be...

Case in point: there's one last problem for me - while, after installing the Orchard upgrade, I can get Peerkat to work with 0.91 feeds, I just can't yet seem to get it to work with 0.92 feeds, which includes almost all of the Radio Userland blog feeds. I have a posting in to the mailing list to see if I'm doing something wrong. I'll follow up here later with the results.

I saw Focus last night.

I saw Focus last night. Really great ending. It had a cool ending, one that at first made you think the protagonist was compromising himself, but which was really accepting a deeper truth.

Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table

Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table - note that none of them support "RSS Aggregation".

After the whole A.I. online

After the whole A.I. online game thing, I thought the idea of Majestic was pretty cool. Well, I think this is cooler. Too bad it probably isn't true.

Ha! I just rediscovered some

Ha! I just rediscovered some of my own music! I like All Aboard. I need to get a piano, drum, and tin whistle part into there and re-sing it. It's got a good vibe to it! Yay me. :-)

A buddy of mine from

A buddy of mine from In The Buff has a new composition, a setting of Frost's "Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening" - it's pretty good!

Navajo Code Talking in the

Navajo Code Talking in the war.

Here's an example of news

Here's an example of news being forwarded around in the backchannels, while not through regular american corporate media. This German article, which I can't read, details Bush asking the president of Brazil if Brazil has blacks too. Rice set him straight, the pres of Brazil said that it was clear that Bush was "merely an apprentice" or something.

The new new economy -

The new new economy - Oof.

I noticed today that my

I noticed today that my browsing habits have changed - usually I check email first and then check msnbc, salon, slashdot, and aintitcoolnews (all .com). Today I checked email, then checked my blog sidebar links. Other bloggers are my first desired news source now. That's significant.

Morbus Iff, creator of AmphetaDesk

Morbus Iff, creator of AmphetaDesk wrote me about yesterday's whinge:

The "trash items from AmphetaDesk" is in the works. It won't be in the next version (available soon), but will probably make it by 1.0. There are multiple ways we're planning: "delete item if seen X times", "delete item if X days old" and "delete item cos I've been asked to".

Cool!

So, I use Mozilla as

So, I use Mozilla as my browser. On my linux box. And I noticed they were having about 150 worldwide parties when 1.0 was released. And I thought it sounded cool. Satellite parties, all in different cities, all going on at the same time. Neat. So I thought I'd check to see if there was on in Oregon. And I found it. And I was happy. And I went to go read about it. And I don't know if I want to go now. I mean, maybe it's just me, but doesn't the Oregon Mozilla 1.0 Party just sound like the geekiest party ever? I mean other parties are going to have award-winning techno DJs and flashing lights. But these guys are going to do a demo of Mozilla on the Sony Playstation.

Some of you excellent people

Some of you excellent people that are reading my blog have got to start getting blogs of your own so I can link to you, so you can link to me, and so I can be famous. I want to be your fearless leader. Tell you every day what I have for lunch. It will be Thunder-Thumbs all over again.

Ralph Nader Goes Insane -

Ralph Nader Goes Insane - this is for real. Granted, I didn't see the game.

I'm starting to get frustrated

I'm starting to get frustrated about RSS and syndication. What I wrote what I wrote, I just wanted to be able to find news easily and then make it so people that trust me would find it too. There are two parts to this process.

Finding the news: Well, right now I browse. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Easy, unless you're looking for a particular kind of fish. It's also easy if you know exactly what you are looking for. But with news, you don't. You just find stuff where after you read it you realize how much you wanted to read it. That's the grail here.

So browsing sucks for this purpose. Feeds work better. I choose categories I care about, OR I choose news sources (people) whose views I respect. That about covers it.

But right now, finding and reading news feeds sucks! There's a couple of websites like News Is Free that give you a web interface, but it just feels clunky - and who wants to go through the added effort to visit a website just to visit other websites? There are these newsfeed aggregator services that you can download and run, but they just feel kind of unavailable - download, run, connect to your own secret webserver on a special port... Peerkat is one, AmphetaDesk is another - they are okay, but they get overwhelming fast. Peerkat because adding new feeds is tedious, AmphetaDesk because there isn't a way to trash the articles when you're done with them. And then there's the whole second part of this...

Syndicating The News: Say I find an article in my research that I think should get more distribution - I want to filter it into my own outgoing news feed that other folks are subscribing to. The only bits of software I know of so far that can kind of do this are Peerkat and Radio Userland. Radio is pretty cool and I might actually start using it soon (once I get my Mac). But it still is missing what I think the grail is...

I just want it to be easy! Some sort of plugin I can just install into my browser. Something that'll show me my new news, let me delete them as I read them like an email inbox, let me arrange them how I want, and let me republish my favorites. It will notice duplicates, it will put 'em together, and it will let me Big-Fat-Publish-Button them into my own feed that will automatically be noticed and seen by someone else that subscribes to my feed just the same as I subscribe to other feeds.

I *don't* want to have to go to another url on another port. I don't want to have to install my own separate web server, I don't want to have to install an entire new software suite to make this work - I just want it to drop into my normal workflow.

So I think the answer is Mozilla. Writing a mozilla plugin through mozdev.org . But if there's another answer that is easier, I want to hear it.

Who's that looking for info

Who's that looking for info on Vagabond Blues? Write siffert at this domain if you want.

So, I met Sophia today.

So, I met Sophia today. Less than a day old. I see comments that other people give - "Oh, she's so gorgeous! I'm so happy for you!" and I wonder what other more complicated feelings they have when they say that, because it sure is more detailed than that for me.

They say that in moments of death, sometimes people's lives flash before their eyes. I found myself wishing that I could envision her life unfolding in her moment of new life. And of course, it doesn't - but what is strange is that the fact that it doesn't is what feels significant. It is such a mystery, so inscrutable - and in a way, almost obstinate. Like the universe is taunting you a bit - here's a life, here's a complete unlimited tree; a span of possibilities - and this life has made no choices yet that prune that tree. And she's just sitting there, trying to figure out how to make her eyes work. I mean, it's irreverent. And incredibly cute. I mean, all that potential - the potential power combined with the fragility, the wonderings of how one tiny little upcoming choice that kid makes could alter her future paths forever... and that kid has the nerve to just sit there and be cute. Maybe she's just taunting the universe right back. Which teaches something, I feel. Teaches that maybe there isn't so much pressure on making the right choices, maybe there isn't so much pressure on doing things the right way, maybe there isn't so much riding on following the "correct" paths in life. Because if before it all starts this kid can just sit there and busy herself with figuring out how her eyes work, how her fingers move, what the hell happens with her ass every few hours... maybe all those other feelings of weight and responsibility aren't all that all-encompassing. Maybe they're not such a big deal after all.

Anyway, I'm sitting there thinking all of that and it's not even my kid. So I'm definitely not thinking stuff like, "Oh, she's adorable!" (even though she is) and "Oh, I'm so happy for you!" (even though of course I am). It's just a lot more to chew on than that. And since it gets me thinking so much, about these things that feel important, I wonder what everyone else thinks too. If they even are thinking, that is. I'm sure they must be, though...

Correction: 6:28 pm

Correction: 6:28 pm

Pete and Kira's daughter Sophia

Pete and Kira's daughter Sophia Jordan Wright was born at 6:45 PM on Tuesday, June 4th, 2002. 7 lbs, 14 oz. congratulations, you guys. :)

I think Peter and Kira

I think Peter and Kira are having their first kid right........ NOW.

Well, I skipped a week

Well, I skipped a week for the health report. Had a good week two weeks ago, although you can see what moving did to my finances last week. Actually, the blue line will probably get shifted around a bit as I recalculate my expenses, but I don't want to do that yet. Overall though, I met my May expenses and made up some ground besides.

I have two friends that

I have two friends that are trying to upgrade to Blogger Pro, while Blogger just doesn't want to let them do that. Maybe Ev needs an assistant. :)

I am sooooo tired. I

I am sooooo tired. I was moving my office around this afternoon and evening, and then I had to do work for both of my regular clients by tomorrow morning. I think this is the last of my move-blameable delayed priorities though. Now I have to go get 5 hours sleep and make it to a client's office before noon.

Question - if the US

Question - if the US Soccer Team won the world cup, would it be a bigger deal than when the US Hockey Team won gold in the 1980 Olympics? I haven't decided yet.

In terms of culture, I'd say that soccer in other nations has more storied momentum than Russia and Finland had for hockey in 1980. It's an older sport and a richer tradition.

And the US Team certainly isn't expected to win it all. I haven't seen any articles where the coach or players even dare to say that they think they might have a chance. It would certainly be a huge story. They're 250-1 underdogs, and they probably have less chance than that.

But compared to Lake Placid? I don't know. Maybe if the Taliban had a soccer team favored to win it all, but they don't. And we've got pro players, it's not a bunch of hand-picked amateurs.

So I guess my preliminary opinion is that it wouldn't be as big of a deal as Lake Placid, at least not inside of the US borders. Outside, however, I think the level of shock in the rest of the world would far exceed what happened in Lake Placid.

I think this is the

I think this is the handheld computer I want. Here's a synopsis.

This guy has written a

This guy has written a pretty cool script that has hints on how to implement part of what I was talking about.

Ahhh... so nice to have

Ahhh... so nice to have my home network set up again. Once again I am in bed, on my linux laptop, with my wireless ethernet.

The office is a mess right now - I haven't yet been able to figure out how to arrange my desk - I am all right with considering cord length, outlet placement, desk length, and room geometry - but two friends are talking a lot of feng shui smack to me and once I mix that variable in everything ends up confusing. On the one hand, the energy flow puts me in a position of domain power. On the other hand, the nearest outlet is hooked up to the light switch. Culture wars, aauuuugh!!

I bought this black computer

I bought this black computer case for my first computer - a windows 3.1 box - back in 1992. I still have it. It's been through two new motherboards, and right now it's a pentium 350mhz. Anyway, I just blew out the components for the first time ever with compressed air.

It actually turned the air in the room grey.

So I hear that the

So I hear that the Hello Kitty folks are corporate whores. They'll brand anything. I found that out from a friend that wanted a Hello Kitty vibrator for her birthday. Then I found out there is an entire Hello Kitty subculture. Which led some people to not only note the existence of, but to actually attempt to recreate, by making a home-brewed version of, the Pink Hello Kitty Laptop