WontonBlog

Payoff, however meager

There are times when I seriously wonder if I picked the right major. Besides a few notable exceptions, most EECS people piss me off. Programming is fun and all, but after solving a particular problem in some amazing, insightful way, no one will understand or care. Its the epitome of thankless jobs in that respect. You can never tell non-CSers your accomplishments in any meaningful way. Of course, it does have its advantages, which became blatently apparant today… Mundane details linked below.

I went to the Campus Band concert on Sunday. I got hit with a violent wave of nostalgia for my band days, but I’m still glad they’re over. The band was great. Good job Katie.

School is hell. I’ve crammed so much time and work into the last week its insane, thanks largely to a certain EECS group partner who was miles away from pulling his own weight. The sad thing is how far I am from being done. I’ve still got math assignments, part of a program, 2 EECS exams on Thursday (beginning at 8 am on North Campus, god help me), and the real killer, 4 hours of math exams starting at 8 am on Monday. It really makes it blatently clear why I’m so ready to be out of here and at my new job.

If you’re looking for some new music, check out this site. They keep charts of indie bands, and you can download almost all of the top songs for free right from the site. Some of the music is damn good. Here are a few I’ve liked, in no particular order.

Here’s hoping my 2 weeks at home aren’t a complete disaster.

Brandy made this awesome picture after a conversation we had. Damn thats cool.

Warning, a healthy amount of boring mildly-technical crap follows.

My computer was freaking out. After running for about 5 minutes, nearly everything would cease to function. Explorer would crash, and no processes could be terminated by the task manager. The only ways to shut it down were attached to the front of the case. It was not a pretty sight. It immediately struck me as a hardware issue, although its been a long time since I reinstalled windows, and I figured that might take care of it too. I wasn’t sure though, and the last thing I wanted to do if it was a hardware problem was reinstall windows, as then the chances of me having anything close to a working computer for the rest of the semester were slim to none. So I kept messing with things. New drivers, virus scanning, error checking, etc. I was unable to error check one of my hard drives, and I got some weird error message. It so happened that the drive in question was my newest, so I doubted that it could possibly be the problem. That made me think back to all the causes of hard drive problems I’ve had, and the single most common issue is with the IDE cables. Already-long story made not-so-short, I swapped out the IDE cable to the new hard drive with one of the many many cables I have literally lying around in my closet, and voila! My computer works again, sparing me the days upon days of anger and frustration I would otherwise have suffered through.

Thanks, years of antisocial behavior, curiousity, and computing.