Ryan's Journal

I helped Judy make a webpage for her VLSI class. She said:

wohoo!! haha i want to show my mom now

Highlight of my Sunday. Actually, I did some rapid work on comparing the latest Mozilla to Netscape 4.78, I should probably track the things which Netscape barfs on. I should also bug the MIT system monkeys to upgrade Mozilla, since the version everybody uses by default doesn't seem to have float support in CSS. Anyways.

Wired's been doing a series on why people love Apple computers so much, and a psychologist claims it's "brand community," not just brand loyalty. There's a set of people who come with the brand to identify and band together with. It seems to be a symptom of consumer culture. Sometimes I get the feeling people from churches have the same sort of "brand community" mentality. It's not a matter of whether or not they hold true to the faith, but more that they happen to favor their particular place of worship above any other viable alternatives. Maybe there's another component to it too since you see the same type of behavior to an extreme when it comes to comparing educational or childhood backgrounds, like some dip behind me at a concert at MIT who kept on saying "Cornell" while someone from BU spoke, or defensive (offensive?) Canadians living in America. I'm thinking of exploring the issue within the wider context of the Church in North America, or rather, the Church as immersed in a consumer-oriented culture. Cindy Lin, this is partly your fault.

I've blown about $300 on various hard drives trying to get my laptop to work, and I've now diagnosed the problem as somewhere between the motherboard and the hard disk controller. As I'm quite sure I can't boot a laptop from an external drive, it's time to find another laptop. I was thinking of buying a used TiBook... I question its power as a development machine. I think I'm immune to becoming an Apple fanatic anyways. Operating systems, programming languages, and brands in general aren't worth fighting for.

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