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[Nov. 4th, 2009|12:12 pm] |
This week's fail just keeps getting better. That assignment that's due Friday that I'd completed to a 10% level, because I'd thought it was worth that? It's actually worth 35%.
I probably shouldn't have checked this just before bed, because I then didn't get to sleep til after 1am, and woke up at 6:30.
So I'm tired, I'm stressed, I have a stomach ache, and I have work to do. Meanwhile, my head keeps hurting from the lack of sleep. Taking off my glasses helps, but then I can't actually see anything I'm supposed to be working on...
Grarggrgh.
-Mmaster |
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[Nov. 2nd, 2009|09:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  frustrated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Possibility, Lykke Li | ] |
Hooray hooray.
My enrolment for next year is currently screwed. A while back, they dropped one of the core subjects of my course, replacing it with a free elective.
Unfortunately, they've changed the administration system. The new system doesn't seem to know of the change. It's going "Oh. You need ITPS. I can't give you ITPS. Oh well!". I guess I'll have to go fight with uni bureaucracy again, I suppose, when I have time. ...Alternatively, I'll need to figure out where they've hidden the e-Request system in the new website. Of course, submitting an eRequest tends to require you know what you want to do, and I really don't.
In other topics of fail, Connor's got issues. Like, really bad issues. I turned on his screen this evening to be greeted by a parade of "This program has had an error and must be shut down." messages. I rebooted, he got to the desktop, and then crashed. Not just a blue screen of death, oh no. A corrupted blue screen of death. The text was all overlaying itself at random lines. He is now going through a boot-crash cycle every few minutes while I download a Live CD to try and save my data.
...My father claims it's a conspiracy. "Windows 7 came out last week, so this is Microsoft trying to convince you to upgrade." ...Hmm.
I was intending on spending this evening doing my data mining assignment, but I got a little distracted. Oops. I'll probably do a bit before I go to bed. I really can't do much more for Connor at the moment than make sure that there's a backup of everything. I have too many other worries on my plate right now.
The question also becomes refresh or replace. Connor's pretty decrepit, but I don't really use him that much any more. Chris thinks I should just stick with Mike, who also barely gets used, but Mike can't make use of a lot of Connor's hardware, like the surround speakers and the tape deck, and Mike has very few USB ports, to boot (even compared to Connor).
Why me?
-Mmaster
EDIT: To add to the list of complaints, trying to type on Bianca has been doing strange things to my wrists. It got to the point where I had to strap both wrists this afternoon. The fact that I only have one actual wrist brace meant the other was tied with a double-wrapped handkerchief. I went a bit overboard on the one with the actual brace, though - when I realised that my hand was turning blue, I decided it was probably time to loosen it a little. In some ways, the handkerchief's probably better, because it's hard to make it into a tourniquet one handed.
In possibly more promising news, I think it's just a software problem with Connor - he stayed up for a couple of hours running off the Puppy Linux live CD I made while I copied the essential data from the C:/ drive onto my secondary drive. (People talk about Ubuntu live CDs, but unless things have changed, they're terribly slow to boot compared to Puppy. Ubuntu probably makes a better permanent operating system (more packages, for starters), but Puppy is nice if you just want a quick alternative for whatever reason - if nothing else, the installer's a quarter of the size for a full GUI interface.) There were a few strange occurrences, - windows disappeared into the aether, and at one point the screen turned entirely black except for the semi-unresponsive taskbar - but I have a feeling those were more from Linux being glitchy than the hardware failing in some fundamental fashion.
The "Possibly more promising" stems from the fact that the prospect of re-constructing Connor fills me with little-to-no enthusiasm. I've uninstalled the apps that I could stand to lose and he's still unstable, which means it's a program I actually want. A fresh install of Windows takes me days. (Though hopefully it would be less so, this time, because the media files can stay on their current drive.) |
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| I got nothin'. |
[Oct. 22nd, 2009|02:19 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bemused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | I Will Follow You Into The Dark, Death Cab For Cutie | ] |
SMS's from Chris teach me things.
For example, I never knew that "desauve" was an alternate spelling for "déjà vu".
...WTF?
-Mmaster |
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[Sep. 29th, 2009|03:23 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Queen Is Dead, The Smiths | ] |
*snorts*
I just received an email offering to do over the ACS webpage or something.
The final line is
"P.S - This is the email sent by the individual and not by a robot. If do not wish to receive further emails, kindly reply back with the subject as Unsubscribe."
...That doesn't sound at *all* like a bot, does it?
-Mmaster |
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[Sep. 16th, 2009|03:23 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Don't Stop Believing, Glee | ] |
In the database tables I'm migrating, "UK" means "Unknown".
One of the departments listed is "USA", and there's no map as to what it translates to.
...It's vaguely entertaining to map "USA" to "UK". Most people think it's the other way around.
-Mmaster |
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[Sep. 8th, 2009|11:25 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  confused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Your Man, Smash Mouth | ] |
I was searching my email for a message Aman had sent me. Apparently it went to spam.
...I was moderately disturbed by the spam titles, though. More so than usual.
Hot Obama's Fantasies
*boggles*
-Mmaster |
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[Sep. 1st, 2009|02:38 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Mother And Child Reunion, Me First And The Gimme Gimmes | ] |
Has the definition of "Comma Separated Value" changed while I wasn't looking?
It seems that Excel interprets CSV files as tab delimited by default, even though I can't see any uses of tabs in the entire document.
Sigh...
-Mmaster |
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| Don't worry, I renamed it "@StringLength". |
[Aug. 26th, 2009|04:18 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Callisto, Tom Smith | ] |
Naming an integer variable "@MagicNumber" is probably a bad idea, right?
-Mmaster |
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[Aug. 11th, 2009|11:25 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  blah | ] |
| [ | music |
| | We Are Not Alone, Karla DeVito | ] |
Access is... uh... interesting. I don't think I've heard of anyone else use "-1" as the default value for "True", though I suppose it's just a creative interpretation of "0 is false, everything else is true"...
-Mmaster |
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[Jul. 14th, 2009|05:20 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Blog Like It's The End Of The World, Tom Smith | ] |
Whoo, Uni results are apparently out early. They're supposed to be released tomorrow.
Results:
Database Programming: 85 (High Distinction)
Project Management: 75 (Distinction)
Photography, of course, hasn't finished, so its results haven't been released.
I calculated a quick overall average for subjects I've taken thus far, which amounts to a high credit (73-74.5, depending on whether SDP counts as one subject or two) but not quite a distinction.
I'm pretty happy with that. Not sure if I deserve it, but that's a worry for another day.
-Mmaster |
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| Round and round and round it goes... |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|04:47 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sick | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Adelaide, Old 97s | ] |
Skype's help is made of fail.
I've been told to set up call forwarding to my mobile while Fabian's away. Which I don't know how to do. So, I went to the help files.
Start with http://www.skype.com/intl/en/allfeatures/callforwarding/, Click "How do I activate call forwarding?", get redirected to https://support.skype.com/.
...Gee, thanks guys.
-Mmaster |
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[Jun. 22nd, 2009|03:25 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The King Of Wishful Thinking, New Found Glory | ] |
Amusement! I was checking the syntax of VBA's constants, and this was the first link to come up:
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=285380
"Is there any way that I can change a constant in VBA?"
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
-Mmaster |
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[Jun. 5th, 2009|03:26 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Sunshine, Evermore | ] |
Whoo, my numbers now agree with each other.
They may or may not be the right numbers, but at least they're now the same numbers!
-Mmaster |
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[Jun. 2nd, 2009|05:16 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Gates, Da Vinci's Notebook | ] |
Conversation between Chris and Selphie the other day:
Selphie: I've been listening to Alice Cooper a lot lately.
Chris: Is she a singer, is she?
-Mmaster |
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[Apr. 4th, 2009|11:07 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Best Of Me, The Starting Line | ] |
Firefox (or possibly Google Docs) discriminates!
(Alternatively, I am incapable of spelling; but I don't think that's the case in this instance.)
...And now back to work.
-Mmaster
PS: Yes, I know that sentence doesn't make sense. It's being edited.
EDIT: Argh. I'd forgotten I write essays the way I write blog posts. Sigh. |
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[Apr. 3rd, 2009|10:44 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Happiness, The Fray | ] |
Chris and I are planning on getting out of Sydney for a couple of days over Easter.
So I went to Last Minute to find a place to stay. Found a decent deal ($120 per night on a public holiday), and went to click "Book".
Their system is made of fail. Apparently they didn't think to include error handling for if you enter spaces in the fields, just put a message at the top saying "Don't do it".
So the first time I clicked "Submit", I got Java machine errors from here to next week.
So I went back to the booking page, re-entered the details sans spaces, and clicked "Submit" again.
This time, I received an error along the lines of "Hotel fail credit card fail". Since I had no idea what that meant, but whatever it was, the booking had not been made, I went to WotIf instead - which had the same deal and no problems with strange things like spaces. It was willing to make the booking with no complaints...
Hooray stability!
-Mmaster |
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[Mar. 31st, 2009|08:50 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Private Helicopter, Harvey Danger | ] |
You might remember some months ago, I made a comment about the shininess of GridMove.
I just made my own grid for the work machine. Being unwilling to join the GridMove forums right now, you guys get to hear about it instead. I'm not sure how well it works, but it works the way I had anticipated, so...
The grid has two implemented configurations:
* 1/2, 1/2, 1/2, 1/2
* 1/3, 2/3, 2/3, 1/3
Of course, you can maximise a window on one screen, or use a combination of halves and thirds between the two screens.
To use the halves, you drop it in the top half screen. To use thirds, you drop it in the bottom half of the screen. It's not quite as intuitive as the grids where the trigger covers the entire panel area, but it seems to work.
If you want to try it out, the grid is here. Of course, you'll need to install GridMove first.
-Mmaster
EDIT: I found I was using the thirds more than the halves for most applications, so I created a second version. It works in exactly the same way, except that you drop on the top half of the screen for thirds and the bottom half for halves. |
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[Mar. 27th, 2009|02:50 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | F**ked Up Kid, Mest | ] |
"Hi, Mum. Do you remember when I last had a tetanus shot?"
...Just what every mother wants to hear as the opener of a phone call from the son she hasn't seen in a day or two...
-Mmaster |
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[Mar. 16th, 2009|09:49 am] |
| [ | music |
| | The Tension and the Terror, Straylight Run | ] |
A guy wandered into the office, trying to sell print services.
When we told him that no, we didn't need it, since we barely ever print anything, he continued to try and give us a flyer.
When he finally did wander off, he still left one of the flyers on the water cooler.
Recycle bin time!
-Mmaster |
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[Mar. 13th, 2009|03:02 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  dorky | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, The Pogues | ] |
I can't quite grok the logic.
I asked this of Ryan Heise back in first year, and I'm not sure he got what I was on about. I'm talking about it in the context of files as email attachments in my example, but general search could be interesting as well.
Is it possible to search for, say, emails that have at least one attachment of a filetype other than x? To exclude a file with a name of x from being counted towards the results?
The example that is springing to mind is if I wanted to search for mail that had attachments. Now, Nathan always signs emails he sends with a digital signiature - by attaching a file to the e-mail. I have no interest in the signiature file, so I'd like that excluded from my "has:attachment" search.
So far, so easy. "has:attachment -filename:[signiature]".
But then, imagine he added an extra file to his email - maybe an image illustrating a point he was making. Suddenly, I do want the email to appear in my search results - the new file is interesting; but at the same time, I don't really want to sift through hundreds of signiature files to get to the one file of interest.
I know that in text files, this probably wouldn't be too difficult a problem - a regex could probably be knocked together fairly quickly to identify 'x' where not 'xy'. But in situations like the one I've outlined above, I wonder if there's any way to do so...
-Mmaster |
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