"I need to print out a 350-page Linux guide. Can I do that here?" --random student
"I can't really recommend that." --Ardith
"So, if I were to print out, say, 50 pages a day, would that be ok?" --random student
"Yeah, nobody should complain about that too much." --Ardith
Er... Sharon may live to regret this. My sister Sharon, that is. Who has her blog here.
I seem to have picked up the cold that is currently traveling around campus.
I shall now do homework and study for my test with a background of loud music to distract me from the fact that my throat hurts and my nose hates me.
Thank you for visiting, and have a nice day.
I'm slightly bitter. I can no longer ssh into my computer from the labs. I'd call and complain to IT, except for the fact that I work for IT. So I'd be calling and complaining to myself. Which would be pointless. I do that enough already as it is.
In other news, I got a box of apples and random assorted articles from my mother. The apples were good. In fact, I should have eaten one this morning. What was I thinking?
My computer's back up, thanks to this drive. And by 'up', I mean 'I have Debian installed'. I haven't decided which strains of Windows to put on it yet. But I should do that pretty soon. Before I have to do my MicroCap (take a good look; I hate the program like the plague) related homework.
And now I should quit goofing around and finish that paper that's due this afternoon.
Today, for your general entertainment, I am going to write a paper in Microsoft Word. This is not something I normally do, but I am forced to today because my computer is still down. And all the computers in the labs have Word. Obviously.
The writing of a paper in itself is not entertaining. Me taking notes on the experience is. So here goes:
1) It is entirely too difficult to find the place to change the line spacing. This is because it is no longer in the menu system anywhere.
Yes, that's right. No, I have not decided to start typing in Ardith's Secret Language, in which 'no longer...anywhere' really means 'somewhere sort of handy where it used to be.' This particular function is nowhere to be found in any of the menus or dialog boxes. Instead, it is only accessible from a little icon, a design move which I find very disturbing. Did they ever think about what would happen if one turned all the little icons off?
I think people like me who actually like using the menus are being discriminated against. I should demand a refund. Except that I only paid for this copy of Office indirectly.
2) The little note that pops up in the taskbar saying "Help make Office better!" is extremely annoying. And by extremely annoying, I mean Oh-great-there's-another-little-popup-for-me-to-ignore.
3) Some of the dialog boxes have become Annoying Right-Hand Side Search an Online Microsoft Database Panes. Including Help. Which is all well and good, except for the fact that it scrunches my paper. I don't like that.
I've finished one entire sentence of my paper. I'm so proud of myself. *grin*
4) The constant green lines under my more creative sentence structures are also annoying. If I wanted it to check my grammar, I'd tell it to.
*goes to shut that particular 'feature' off and thus annoy the next person to use this machine*
*distracts self by reading /.*
Looky! It seems all my conspiracy theories are well-founded. Surely this strange effect is due to the very large fishnet currently being cast around the solar system.
Ah. I have discovered a new answer to the age-old question, "Who are you?"
"I don't know. I lost my bio and 8x10 glossy during my last special-ops mission."
*distracts self by going to read ProfQuotes*
"I'm a 60's kid. I believe what goes around comes around. I believe if you lie to me, someday you will be walking across central campus and a plane at thirty thousand feet will lose a wheel and turn you into a grease spot. Don't lie to me." -- Dr. Stuart, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.
Paper Completion Status: 1.3 out of 3 pages.
Time Elapsed: 1 hour.
*distracts self with reasons to hunt down a used iPAQ*
Paper Completion Status: 2 out of 3 pages.
Time Elapsed: 1.5 hours.
*insert lengthy typing session here*
Okay, almost 3 pages in 2 hours. That's close enough.
See, once upon a time, in the days of yore, you used to be able to rely on kernels with even minor version numbers to be fairly stable.
In other words, they wouldn't corrupt your filesystem.
Last night, I was installing a new kernel version, trying to get my Nvidia drivers to play happily with OpenGL again. Kernel 2.6.8, to be exact. I rebooted, and everything seemed to be working fine. I compiled the lastest version of the drivers, and everything still seemed to be working fine. At least until X crashed really hard; hard enough to force me to reboot the computer. After that reboot, it took a hard power-cycle for the BIOS to recognize that I had a harddrive again. Then another couple of reboots for LILO to remember that it really was installed in the master boot record. Then it finally started booting, only for fsck to check the drive 5 times in a row, finding about 20 gazillion errors everytime.
Yeah. That's when I gave my Linux install up as a lost cause, and found my Debian net install cd. I was actually to get most of my data off the partition; we'll see how much is actually usable in a day or two.
Whoops. My pretty little OpenGL screensaver is making X crash. Apparently it is time to download the latest Nvidia drivers again.
And then proceed to compile them. And hunt down the kernel source directory. And feed the install script several other random bits of information, all of which I have to find singly, after re-running the install script. And then if I'm lucky, X doesn't crash on startup.
But the results are so pretty...
....but no. It doesn't work.
*sigh*
*begins downloading kernel upgrade*
Busy week. I've been to almost all my classes at least once, so I now know sort of what they're going to be like:
Intro to Microprocessors - Lots of work. Probably a lot of fun, but lots of work nonetheless. Low-level interfacing with Motorola processors.
Numerical Analysis - Hah. Another math class. Could be fun, though. I'll know more about that in a week or so.
Software Engineering - This class is going to take over my life. I can see the headlines now: "Female College Student Found In Large Pile of Programming Project Documentation: Death By Asphyxiation Successfully Averted." My group's project is part of one of the regular engineering Senior Projects, so the pressure to actually produce something useful is going to be there. At the same time, we're mostly starting from scratch, so the likelihood of getting past the design stage is very, very small. Especially since it involves image processing and recognition from a camera mounted on a helicopter.
Electronics Lab - Yeah, this is the class I dropped last year. Because I had 18 hours then. Now I only have 16, so the workload should be more feasible.
World Literature through Film - This one will be loads of fun. We get to watch a lot of movies, and read a lot. And there's really only one major project.
Greek Manuscripts of the New Testament - Also loads of fun, and since it's a one-hour class, shouldn't be too much work, either.
I haven't decided whether to run screaming off into the night, or to be happy about the schedule. Time will tell.
In Other News, I went to the STOMP, the big beginning-of-school-student-organization bash. And I climbed at 32' climbing wall. I was quite proud of myself. It was a lot of fun, and definitely something I need to do more often.
*sigh*
Except that school has started, and I have no time. I won't even be able to get to the library when I want to.
Oh, well. Life goes on.