Not to Brag or Anything...

Yeah. My internet is fast.

Randomocity

It's snowing it seems and I barely have an internet connection...

And wondering if things done will be for the greater or good or will cause more pain. Time will tell I suppose.

Also, when the robot revolution begins, I think we all know who to blame for enabling them to rise up; Eli Whitney and John hall... well they are credited with interchangeable parts, but according to Wikipedia it was the idea of Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, from France. So when robots strike back, you can blame the French for interchangeable parts.

That and the Montgolfier brothers invented the Hot Air Balloon. Quite interesting.

Dell Annoys Me

I may have mentioned in weeks previous that I have my sister's laptop cause it has been having all sorts of blue screen errors. Basically it was random errors that I think had to do with Norton and the memory. Anywhat they sent some replacement parts to her and I got them this weekend to install so the errors stop. Now it won't turn on. The blue lights flash for ten or so seconds and then turn off.

The annoying thing is that I was hung up on five times yesterday in trying to get the next step, in getting the laptop shipped to the warehouse. Apparently that's not in the warranty though and they're sending a tech to re-install the motherboard soon.

So you all know, don't buy refurbished Dell. They're hunks of junk.

Awkwardness Squared

You know how you have days where you just feel awkward, that anything and everything you do is awkwardly intensified by all normal expectations? Well without giving any awkward details to really implicate myself or cause others to pity or fear me by the sheer amount of awkward that was exhibited (I'm pretty sure if awkward could be tapped into as a fuel source, there would be no energy problems for the next twenty years); I'll just say that last night was one of those nights.

To those who may have seen my awkward fumbling; I apologize. There was no good reason for it.

And in other news, I don't like Dell at the moment. Not at all.

My sister is currently attending Snow college and got a lot of grants and school loans, insomuch that she (through our Father) bought a Dell laptop. Now about two or three weeks ago it started intermittently giving the blue screen of death and shutting down. Well the first logical thing to do was to scan for viruses and do a system rollback. After that happened, it still occurred, always randomly, and it hasn't stayed on the screen long enough to really see what it says.
Anywhat, after that we tried re-imaging the laptop back to factory conditions, thinking that would work. It didn't. As it didn't seem to be the operating system, and inexplicably lacking the operating system cd, we connected with Dell online. The online tech looked at some files, some debugger files and concluded that we should re-image the laptop. Again.
So we do it, and the problem happens again. This time we call, through a series of calls and annoying procedures just to get to an agent, to see what else they would recommend and to get them to send us the Operating System CD; which after tremendous hassle they did.

So with the Operating System CD that we got last Tuesday we tried reformatting the hard drive (well, there were two partitions, one for the OS and one for everything else), doing this over the phone with my sister. That didn't work, she still got the blue screen errors. Not to mention problems my sister had with installing the drivers, but that isn't exactly Dell's fault...

Now my family drove down to Ephraim, picking me up along the way to celebrate my sister's birthday (she's now 19. *Sigh* They grow up so quickly) and so while down there I reformatted the hard drive, deleted the small partition so everything is together (and hoping that doesn't invalidate her warranty) reinstalled windows and ran 'chkdsk /r' to check to see if the hard drive is the problem. Nothing popped up. So I installed the drivers. And it gave me the error again.

So now I am downloading some debugger utility to see what the dump file says and if nothing else, calling Dell and doing some major complaining.

So yeah, I am not pleased with Dell. Not pleased at all.

A Glimpse From Out Under the Rock

I mentioned last week that I will be under the figurative rock, right? (Cause being under a real rock would just hurt.)

Anyways, to give you all some idea at what I am doing this week, let me give you an overview.
Monday: Start my CS 142 test, a programming test. I need to design, implement and test a Java program, and use this program with predetermined criteria, together with user input, to determine a score for up to four prospective contractors. I need to report the contractor with the highest score, his score, the maximum score that could be obtained and his percentage. Provide at the end a closing statement.
Bonus points go if I report the other builders too, descending in order of highest to least score, report the best contractor on each criterion and if I decide to make it a Gui, which gets me more points but takes more time. Without the Gui I may take four to six hours to do this. Add two to three more hours for the Graphical User Interface.
That is due tomorrow by 6 pm.
Tomorrow I have due a Personal Narrative that needs to be edited and extended. Not to mention a math assignment (which will be done quickly enough) and homework due by midnight for my other computer science class about low level programming procedures that I barely understand.
Wednesday another math assignment, as usual, is due. Thursday is a lab for the low level programming test which can take up to five hours since I barely have any idea what I am doing. It doesn't help that I have plans Thursday night to go bowling.
On Friday I have another Math assignment due, but also Friday is the last day to take the low level CS test which runs all week. Good news is that it us multiple choice, the bad news is that I still don't know what I am doing.
But also starting Friday and going until Tuesday is my Math 112 test. I am lucky enough not to have that to do concurrently with everything else.

So, if I do update, it is because I am tired of all the work and stressed out a tad. Or maybe I will be feeling lazy and procrastinative? I hope not.

After the test I may post a snippet of the code, just so you can see what I wrote. I'd do it now, but I don't want to take the chance of a TA seeing my blog and thinking I am helping others out or cheating. Not that he would know who I am though... But I would rather not take chances.

Hope you all have a less busy week than me!
Tra la la!

Tickets begone!

Ok, the tickets have been claimed.

In the meantime, I suffer from all the pizza I ate last night. It caused me to dream that I was the Home Alone kid and tried to fake out the baddies by pretending that I was from some gang and that the baddies were muscling in on the gang's territory. Very weird.

I also have to search for USB port drivers to see if that will get a 5+ year old computer's usb port to work. Maybe I'll just buy a USB pci card for $20, it might be easier. I just wish I knew the model of the computer to know for sure.