Right now.

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I read an article today in one of my feeds about a new material developed that will bring "printable circuitry" closer to a reality. In a nutshell, printable circuitry means you could literally print out circuits using some kind of magical "circuit printer", resulting in much smaller electronics. The advantages of this would be that Apple can now make the iPhone even smaller and more expensive.

Anyway the point of me writing about this is how most of the article went entirely over my head. Here are a few quotes from the intro paragraphs:

The n-type semiconducting polymers have proven to be one of the biggest challenges, and some have raised the prospect that matching current p-type polymer performance wasn't even possible due to the nature of how polymer bonding influences the formation of electron holes and free electrons. A new paper, however, describes an n-type polymer with excellent electrical and processing characteristics and its use to form fully functional polymer transistors, produced entirely by printing.

Okay.

The polymer being used is the dauntingly-named poly{[N,N9-bis(2-octyldodecyl)-naphthalene-1,4,5,8-bis(dicarboximide)-2,6-diyl]-alt-5,59-(2,29-bithiophene)}, which, naturally, one gets from reacting N,N9-dialkyl-2,6-dibromonaphthalene-1,4,5,8-bis(dicarboximide) with 5,59-bis(trimethylstannyl)-2,29-dithiophene.

Naturally.

I am glad there are people out there who figure this stuff out and can understand it, because I don't.

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There are some problems that I encounter from time to time that make me say to myself: "Somebody must have figured out an easy way to do this by now", and most of the time I am right. There are times, though, where no matter how hard I search, the solution always evades me. Today was almost one of those times.

I found a great deal on a Acer Aspire One netbook, so I couldn't help myself from buying it with some accumulated Christmas money. The only problem was that it came with Linux and I really had no desire to figure it out. I might leave that challenge for another day. I told myself I'll just format it and install Windows XP, no problem. It doesn't have a CD drive, but you can boot the setup files from a USB disk, right?

Hours of Googling resulted in several completely over complicated guides on how to create a bootable USB disk, and I was beginning to think that I would have to buy an external CD-ROM, or at least find somebody that owned one. It wasn't until later today that somebody pointed me towards a handy little application, oddly enough, called WinSetupFromUSB. The nice folks that made it basically packaged up all the complicated steps in creating a bootable USB disk into a simple application with a GUI. By following this guide, I was able to create my bootable setup disk in just a few minutes.

Now here I am, writing to you on my fresh installation of Windows XP. On my brand new netbook. In bed.

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It's been a while, but Jerktowne has finally been finished. Prop-a-lops to Billie for whipping that up today.

So send all the jerks you know to Jerktowne.

Jan 17, 2010 Update: This site has been down for a while :(

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If you haven't noticed, I've been compiling all my online activities into one general news feed that appears on my home page, but I couldn't find anywhere that let me view my favorite YouTube videos as an RSS or Atom feed. Until now. I found this handy link while looking through the developer's guide for the Youtube API:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/your_youtube_username/favorites

It's not listed anywhere on the YouTube feeds page, and I couldn't find it posted on any blogs or other sites either. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but now I'm happy.

I also had a hard time coming up with a past tense verb meaning "to favorite". I would use "favorited", but it's not a real word and that bothers me. I'd also use "loved" but I am already using it for my Last.fm loved tracks. So I settled on "liked", but I am not entirely happy with it. It'll have to do for now until I think of a better word to use, or somebody recommends one that I like.

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