My purchase of a laptop justified itself today when the RAM in my tower exploded and lost me about six hours’ worth of work. Bad RAM! Literally, bad RAM! It would have cost me another day and a half if I didn’t have the little white rectangle on which I’m typing this. Cost-benefit ratio so far is about 9:2. At least it’s tax-deductible.
Category: Stress
How to write this post.
- Your package has finally arrived. Open it. It is a refurbished MacBook!
- Boot it up to see if it works. It does! Have Maria show you neat tricks in OS X.
- Snip open the mylar packets of RAM and new hard drive that you bought to make this thing more than a toy. Crack the case and immediately fall prey to the shit hell middle screw of death.
- Break Maria’s screwdriver trying to get it out. Yes, the screwdriver. Don’t even scratch the screw.
- Become very irritable and take it out on the dog. Buy more screwdrivers and, in a fit of bad decision-making, WD-40.
- Screw will suddenly decide to pop out about six hours later. Replace hard drive and RAM. Upgrade mood.
- Reinstall OS X. Install Boot Camp. Try to set up partition for Windows.
- You have erased OS X! GOTO 7
- Obtain Microsoft Windows™ XP Professional patented encrypto-mathic secure Protectivation Key™ by advanced method of asking a couple dudes.
- Install Windows. Accompany Maria to hospital (she is working; note that in current state of health she should possibly be a resident). Find Wifi. Post.
- Profit!
I have whiplash now! Great! Dammit! This is from about eight seconds of headbanging during “Blister in the Sun” at Erin and Stephen’s wedding. I used to be able to dance like that for hours, and now my limit is less than eight seconds.
I guess having ruined my spinal column in college is worth some cred. Maybe.
HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA
At work, we have this client we pay for data. The client likes to know that only humans are seeing this data, presumably because they are stupid and bill by the hour rather than the byte (and maybe because of HIPAA, whatever). My employer likes to have computers get the data for the humans, so we can stop paying the humans to do extremely tedious copying work. This is why I have spent a significant amount of my time over the last year creating and maintaining a kludgy application that gets the data by pretending to be human. It can trick another computer, but you would probably not be fooled.
As of this weekend, the client in question deployed a whole new method of connectivity: a tiny embedded custom applet that works okay for humans, but doesn’t have the features necessary for our kludgy impersonator. They disabled the old connection, of course.
This is why my boss and I spent two hours, this morning, trying to hack in to a system we are paying to access.
I need a new job.
Ninety minutes later, I still don’t feel well
I gave blood for the first time at GSP, which was, hideously, almost seven years ago. I haven’t gone a year without donating since then. At my current job, I’ve given at all but one (I was sick) of our company-wide blood drives, which happen every two and a half months. I’m fairly experienced at these things. I always prep with lots of water, and I eat a decent lunch, sans french fries.
But dammit, it keeps getting worse. I used to get nervous and shaky, so I started bringing my CD player along, and that helped. Then I started getting light-headed and hot at the snack canteen; last time I had to lie down with my feet on a box and drink nasty Powerade. Today I took twice as long as usual, so they had to reseat the needle–a new and disturbing experience–and I didn’t even make it off the donation table before I almost passed out. Giving blood sucks!
Not gonna stop, though.
I’m dumb
Oh, duh, Apache rewrite rules. Um. (Now I just have to learn how to write them.)
I need PHP to go up one level of a directory, then go back down several more, to include a file. I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve been getting around it by using a URL instead of a path; now Dreamhost is turning off the option of using URLs in include statements, for (good) security reasons, so I can’t do that anymore.
I also absolutely can’t find a way to do it the path way. It won’t work with an absolute path from the root directory, nor from the highest web-accessible directory (I’m in a Linux / Apache environment, if you hadn’t guessed). I can’t use ..s to ratchet up, or do any other kind of relative movement I can think of. Does anyone know how to get what I want?
Actually, Lisa, I think you’re the only PHP programmer who reads this, so maybe I should have just emailed you. But I might be wrong.
Update 0224 hrs: Never mind. I found out how to do it, but it doesn’t help, since I need to have Apache parse the file (a NewsBruiser portal CGI, if you hadn’t guessed) before I grab it, and an internal include obviously doesn’t do that. I’ll have to use the curl library, once I figure out what it is.
And I know I’m a bad programmer for going with this setup in the first place, but I had the choice of frames, meta refreshes or dumping a load on PHP, and it was rocks and frying pans all over.
It occurs to me that I really don’t care about my GPA. This is literally the first time in my life, or at least in my living memory, I’ve been able to say that. I was always ashamed of my Cs in Handwriting, and since fourth grade I’ve been straining for As (and, since junior year of high school, usually getting Bs). Right now I want to get through my two classes, finish a project and graduate. All that matters is passing.
Of course, that project may be the lurker below. I had a solid setup with a professor at the beginning of the semester; it sounded like work I’d enjoy, and there was even compensation involved. All we had to do was wait for the company that wanted the code to sign off on the contract.
It’s March 10. Guess whether they’ve done so. Guess also whether the aforementioned professor appears to care, beyond a little guilt.
I’m going in tomorrow to talk to my advisor and find out what I need to do to get the DBCAC site approved as my final project. It’s for a nonprofit organization, and the work is easily as complicated as what I would have been doing otherwise; I’ll even write a paper about it if they want one. The quiet assumption is that MS students get a rubber stamp on their project requirement by building a professor’s resume, but I tried that and it didn’t happen. I’m not going to let someone else’s short attention span keep me here another semester. School has ceased to interest me, and I’m going to be finished in May, one way or another.
In addition to Caitlan’s car, which (after its acrobatics last Wednesday) is totalled, Ian’s car is now a danger to drive; he’ll probably have to sell it for parts. Regarding Mom’s van, the mechanic told her to keep driving it for what time it had left, then leave it wherever it broke down.
Jon and Amanda, on their way to Tennessee for Christmas, skidded on ice and ran head-on into a truck. They’re okay, but the car is gone, and Amanda’s collarbone is broken.
It has been a bad December for cars, and for my family; but I am shaken by how much worse it could have been.
A year ago I was writing about the earthquake in Bam. I thought an earthquake death toll of around 50,000 was the worst I’d see in my lifetime. I was wrong, of course.
Update 2330 hrs: And my grandparents flipped their truck on ice on their way to Florida for Christmas. They are also miraculously okay, and also currently without transportation.
Things of which I am tired
- No money
- Not finishing projects I start
- School
- The damn backspace key acting like the Back button on every browser whenever you accidentally defocus a text box, dammit, who the fuck thought that up you assholes
At least I’m done with school as of last night. One more semester, I hope, if I passed Performance Evaluation (yes, yes, course title replete with irony &c).