Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

New Pants, Please

Yesterday star­ted badly, inas­much as I woke up at 9.30, sat down at my PC, and found that it had rebooted dur­ing the night. That alone isn’t so abnor­mal — once before Windows Update decided that an update it was apply­ing needed a restart *right* *now*, and so rebooted the machine, but I’d dis­abled that option since. So I log in, and I find that I have no sound. Programs that use sound record­ing (like Skype) are giv­ing errors. There do not appear to be any sound devices present on the machine.

Shit.

I reboot; noth­ing. I rein­stall sound drivers; still nothing.

Shit.

I then hap­pen to glance through the win­dow in my case, and note that the chip­set cool­ing fan and heat­sink is rest­ing peace­fully on the case floor, thor­oughly detached from the chip it is sup­posed to be chilling.

Fuck.

Cue the fast­est shut­down oper­a­tion in recent his­tory.
I pop open the case and gingerly feel around. I touch the chip in ques­tion, and it’s cool. This is the first good sign, but it goes unnoticed in the gen­eral panic. I curse the bas­tard who designed the cooler (an Akasa AK-210 with a pretty blue LED); for think­ing that a fan and heat­sink could be secured on to a ver­tical chip with only a sticker. I try stick­ing the cooler back on. It stays, until I hit the power but­ton, when the infin­ites­im­ally small jolt of the fan spring­ing into life causes it to detach from the chip once again. I start try­ing to think of ways to attach it. Eventually I decide to try to loc­ate some thermal paste, curs­ing the fact that all my hard­ware bits and bobs are at home. I walk over to Lazer Lizard — what passes for a com­puter shop on cam­pus. I ask the cash­ier, “this may be a long shot, but do you have any thermal paste?” I receive a strange look. “It’s a sort of goo,” I offer, but no, she responds, they don’t.

Walking back, I real­ise that lay­ing the PC on its side will prob­ably work, as the cooler will just sit on the chip, unen­cumbered by grav­ity. Once home, I do this, and it’s work­ing fine so far. Plus all my cool LEDs are pro­jec­ted sky­wards, which looks sweeter than before. After boot­ing up, the sound was work­ing again (it was that chip), so I can only assume that the main­board shuts the chip off if it gets too hot on boot. No last­ing dam­age, thank fuck.

A Good Start

Yesterday was dead­line day for CS118 Coursework 1 (Java). I got mine fin­ished on Sunday night, and sub­mit­ted with the nifty online system.

The course­work centred around the Warwick Maze envir­on­ment, which provides a graph­ical maze and the hooks needed to inter­act with it. Our part was to cre­ate a series of increas­ingly com­plex con­trol­ler mod­ules for the robot.

The mark­ing method was refresh­ingly per­sonal — once I showed up at my allot­ted slot, I sat down with one of the post­grad tutors, and we went through each exer­cise in the course­work. He looked through my code; I told him why I’d done cer­tain things the way I had, and how the com­plic­ated bits worked. Then he ticked off vari­ous cri­teria on his mark­ing sheet. It took about 5 minutes in total, and I ended up with 135/135 :-D. This after get­ting soaked in the rain, and hav­ing major PC trouble (which will be covered in another post :-)), it was an upshot to a day that star­ted poorly.

RTF EULA

An amus­ing little piece from TG Daily cov­er­ing some scary and/or comic clauses in vari­ous soft­ware End User License Agreements (EULAs).

Impulse Buying

So, my first accom­plish­ment this morn­ing has been… to buy a uni­cycle! :-D

Yesterday after­noon me and Vicky went over to the Union to get some ingredi­ents (and some cough drugs for me :-() and in the piazza there were a whole load of people doing vari­ous circus-type things, like jug­gling, diablo’ing, and cru­cially, unicycle-riding. I couldn’t bring myself to have a go there and then (I didn’t have the right shoes on, of course :-P), but I looked on eBay this morn­ing and lo! only £40 inc. P&P. Who could resist?

Oh shh. Thanks to the won­ders of e-banking, it doesn’t feel like real money. And that’s what matters!

New Peacefire Web Proxy

A mes­sage went out on the Peacefire mail­ing list this morn­ing, announ­cing a new pub­lic “Circumventor” site at stupidcensorship.com. The site is run­ning CGIProxy, which I’ve found to be a decent bit of kit, so all the down­trod­den stu­dents in need of uncensored web access should give this a go.