classes for next semester

if i can get into LIN 321L:

http://www.utacm.org/scheduler/scourse.py?show=34330&show=58030&show=38635&show=15815&sem=sp2007
else:

http://www.utacm.org/scheduler/scourse.py?show=15810&show=58030&show=38655&sem=sp2007

+ lower level linguistics?

Dell Tech support (of DOOM!!)

<rant length=”entire post”>

I’ve had my Dell Inspiron 600m laptop for 2 years and a few months now, so its not so surprising that the hardware would start to crap out (I’m not even counting the HardDrive, that has already been replaced 2 times if i recall). This time though, the computer would just hard-lock. No mouse, no sound, no reaction to power, lidswitch or anything. Obviously not a harddrive problem, since i’m seeing the same symptom in both windows and linux. Being under full ‘customer care’ warranty I called them up. The first guy used the remote connect tool they have to try to install some drivers. The computer crashes in linux too. Its not my windows drivers genius. Guy number one tells me he need to look something up, and that he’ll call back in 10 minutes. Total time on the phone so far: 1 hour. I waited around for two hours, but still no call so the next day I called dell back. Another full hour waiting through hold and then explaining what had happened before. This guy decides it might be a hardware problem, but is suspicious about this foreign thing called linux, and thinks that “somehow, I’m not sure how, they might be interfering”. Dell would have some major bad publicity if they refused to fix hardware because linux was installed, so that option kinda faded out, and he decided to do a harddrive check. The low-level scan that takes for friggen ever, an hour spent running the check, but of course its clean. I was ready to get of the phone, it was 1am my time by then, but he wanted me to try swapping the memory module from slot a to slot b, and agreed that if it worked in slot b, then it must be a motherboard problem and they would replace it. He would call me back tomorrow and see if it had crashed The call lasted 2 hours. Tomorrow’s call never came so I called them back the day after, at least I had a case number this time. presumably the new guy could see what had happened and give me a new motherboard (2 days and no crashes). But this idiot wanted to start with drivers again, then decided to ‘clear my temporary files’ that might have caused it to crash. And it took me 40 minutes to get off hold and finally talk to him. He didn’t seem to understand what was going on until we were just chatting at each other rather than using the phone (he couldn’t understand me and i couldn’t understand him). An hour later he agreed to give me my motherboard as the guy previously had promised. Total time spent on the phone: 4 hours, and 45 minutes in 3 calls. I hate dell tech support.

</rant>

a history through pictures

Time to catch up again. Classes are more manageable after I finished helping Lin’s grad student with the pointer analysis stuff. Robotics still tries to eat up all my days, but I’ve been doing well in the projects. Unfortunately I’m not looking forward to the test in Robotics tomorrow, I’ve seen last year’s midterm, and its a lot of math.. and i never took the Differential Equations pre-req. Really I just need to memorize all the models and controller types… and pray they don’t have Kalman filters on the test. EE316 is boring as always, but i’m making progress. I just had a Operating Systems test that I felt pretty good about, even though it was a tough exam.

Heres some good news: I got a bike! Heres some bad news: my bike was stolen! all within the course of a week. stuipd lock.

On the recreational front, the planned camping trip was dismissed due to a high forcast of ambivalence and homework from both House RiO and House Cedar. Too bad too, since the weather was an amazing 65 degrees. This week its rainy and a little warmer. We were welcoming the cold weather over here at my apartement since we’ve mostly been without A/C last few weeks. We’ve managed by opening windows on the cooler days, but the computer room stays a stuffy 10 degrees hotter than anything else.

Last week I made it to the Baylor game for a little school spirit. Looks like thats the only game i’ll be going to since we couldn’t get tickets to the A&M v UT game. Oh well, plans are to watch it at my aunt’s house on her big screen. Or if worse comes to worse my college could beat my brother’s college on our not-so-big-screen tv.

I think i’ve finally managed to wrangle in the roomates on kitchen usage. It has stayed clean for a full 48 hours now (by clean I mean it doesn’t have dirty dishes staking up in the sink, and no containers left out). Now if i can only get all the dishes back into the kitchen after they are done using them rather than leaving them lying around the computers.

I finally found a good full-sized trackball mouse (rather than the thumb-balls) at the goodwill computer store. I had to download a driver for it to work, and mouse was poorly labed as to who made it, but 30 minutes later my pointer is flying across the screen at my fingertips.

thats all for now kids, come back next time to witness the Halloween adventures of batman and robin ;-)