ITS ALIVE!

Finally! I managed to get my system up an running again! Hurrah for helpful friends and wise people on the net who create bootCDs for you to fiddle with your system with after the worst has happened.

Some things I have learned:

Windows can be really picky and stupid if your config files don't match exactly what it wants

I probably shouldn't have bothered backing everything up, because despite "imminent failure warnings, everything seems to be working fine on my end right now.

I think I reduce disk read error if I orientate my HD vertically - ie if I hold my laptop such that its at 90 degrees to the way its supposed to face. When I did that for a while (and did a lot of disk access - after all, you need to do disk access to back up a harddisk, right?), the alignment issue corrected itself.



Other good news: I managed to sign up for OR 221! Huzzah! Had to drop the hyper-impacted E190 to do it, though, so there's about zero chance of doing E190 next semester. Oh well, there's always the semester after, or Summer.

Also, whacked out my OR 162 project in double-quick time. Hooray for shell scripting in AMPL and other "working" languages. Yes it took the computer 5 minutes to do all 10000 iterations, but do I look like I care? *grin* At least I didn't have to type up all those iterations on my own!

NNNNNOOOOOOOO

My harddisk is dead. It crashed on Saturday not long after I wrote my last entry. Data is semi-recoverable, but every time I power up BIOS reminds me that HD failure is imminent. I just need it to spin long enough to back up (at bare minimum) my mail archives. If it hangs on a bit longer, I can save my applications and systems partitions. Am now glad that I partitioned my HDD for easy restore in case things went loco, but I was expecting a bad MBR or FAT table, not a disk head failure...

Depressing, but in either case, this is a "I won't be around" warning for any of you who expect to see me online.

Wish me luck!

Huh!

Well, worked a little, lived a little, died a little.
My code for the IEOR 162 project seems to be functioning fine after 2 hrs of work. This is amazing because writing crap from scratch in a semi-unknown language usually takes an incredible amount of time. I suspect its buggy but don't want to waste too much time checking the solution by hand. Will just occassionally glance at it and if inspiration hits me, that would be very good. ;P

The "vexing" problem in the research code? Well, tech support apparently mailed us a fix 3 hours before I found out what was wrong. Highly annoying, but I guess you can't learn unless you make mistakes. F was right in the sense that "these folks know their own code forward and backward and can probably pop the solution out in 5 seconds." I guess its just that I'm not usually willing to a) let a problem sit and b) bother other people with something I think I can fix myself... I guess I don't exactly have that sense of trust because 1)I'm a student and I do everything on my own and 2)the last times I had cause to rely on others they returned results which I wasn't too happy with (army and JC).

Made a midnight, on the spot change to my schedule for next semester again. If the system was managed by a real person s/he'd be smacking me for being so indecisive. Now the question is how to squeeze myself into the class I'm waitlisted for... I could ask for a leg up by a Profs I know, but that's both cheating (which I don't think I mind so much) and difficult (because at least one Prof has strongly advised against doing the very class I want to get into)

Looks like I'm off the hook for at least one assignment this weekend, so I can concentrate on the others. Huzzah! Have dinner planned for tonight, so I guess things are good. So now back to work...

Still Dead...

Or at least in the process of trying to stave off death. 6 assignments due over the next week. 2 days to do them. (so I can study for finals) Abysmal goof up on midterm means that I am more than sorely tempted to drop it. (thank goodness I can!) Research stuff going okay - had been slacking but in a dint of effort tonight I just solved a rather vexing (though certainly minor) problem. Go me.

Hate telebears season - I always go into a frenzy of "should I take this class? Should I change emphasis?" and such. Incredibly wasteful of time since I rarely act on my ideas. I guess I just treat my coursework like stats in gaming - something to be min-maxed to death...