Kerplunk

A little over four years ago, I bought my laptop from Mike; it was about a year old at the time. Throughout the years, I have become more and more dependent upon it as I have grown accustomed to not having to isolate myself in a computer room to do my computing, which is why it is with great sadness that I report that it is currently sitting in several pieces on my computer desk.

You see, through what could only be identified as a series of unfortunate events, it took two (TWO!) hard falls a couple days ago, one on its side and one straight down onto it's non shock-absorbing feet. The first produced an instant power off (and permanently removed the little hook that latches the screen shut), the second produced a hard freeze, and some combination appears to have aced at least the hard drive. (Any I/O intensive task produces so many errors that the filesystem forces itself into read-only mode.) Through various diagnostics it was detemined that the drive is definitely shot; the only way to know if any other damage was sustained is to get the new drive in and see what happens.

The good news is that a replacement cost $45.99 and is actually a decent upgrade from 30G to 40G and from 4200 RPM to 5400 RPM, and that it doesn't look like I'll have to replace the entire machine quite yet. The bad news is that the last Gentoo install CD that worked for the thing (it only has an external CD-ROM drive that live cds have trouble using) was Gentoo 1.2 and is about four years old. I have no idea if I can find that disk, so I might end up having to do something wacky like putting the drive in an enclosure and cross-compiling the base system onto it. We'll see.

Again!

Today was my Networking midterm. (Brief side note: most comfortable I ever felt after leaving a TenEyck midterm.) And wouldn't you know it, Dr. TenEyck himself caught a group of students talking to each other during the test. Being his typical I-don't-want-any-trouble self he just went over and moved told them they needed to spread out and placed them in empty areas of the room so they couldn't just cheat with their new neighbors.

Frankly, I'm floored. Two tests, two days apart, two groups of students caught and one more that I didn't make a stink about, plus the group at the beginning of the year on that quiz. This is a Masters program at a Real College; things like this should not be happening.

All I have to say is I'm not letting all this get swept under the rug. Details to follow.


P.S. Zipper just took down a yellow jacket. Not sure how a yellow jacket got in the house but she got it before I could get something to kill it with. Of course then she tried to eat it but I got it away from her before she could.

P.P.S. Man, Blogger has been down a while; took me forever to get this thing posted. They had a scheduled outage today but it was supposed to be over at 6:30 Eastern. I had to backdate this thing just to make "today" still mean the same thing.

Righteous Anger

Alright is everybody ready for a lot of swearing? Okay good.

Today I had a mid-term in my Automata class. The professor is Dr. Hayes, a nice old lady that is by far the most (well really only) paranoid professor when it comes to cheating. We can't wear hoods up or hats with brims forward so she can see our faces, we have to sit so that everybody has empty desks to their left and right, things like that. This, folks, is foreshadowing.

So I'd been working on the test for maybe an hour, finished most of the problems but number six had an especially tricky ending so I was doing a bit of the stare at it until you magically come up with it thing, and I heard some whispering. That in itself wasn't surprising; people ask questions of the teacher all the time during a mid-term. But when my voyuerism got the better of me and I looked to see who was asking, nobody was up there. Then I heard a little more and realized it was coming from my right. I looked over that way to see which idiot was talking to themselves and maybe shoot a glare, and realized that nobody was talking to themselves. It was two Indian students talking to each other! The eternal optimist in me waited to see what they were saying, hoping it was in English. I immediately caught "0, 1, 2, 3..." which just happened to be the top row of a prove on countability from the test.

My immediate response was to say out loud, "Oh come on," while staring right at them. Both heads whipped around, eyes wide open. A very fleeting thought of "Should I make a scene? Yea I'm gonna make a scene," went through my head and I slammed my pen down and stormed up to the front of the room. Some poor shy kid had just started asking Hayes a question; he almost had a heart attack when he saw me charging at him. She just brushed him aside and looked at me. So I said to her, Dr. Hayes, a tenured professor at Marist College, "I put up with this shit during the quizzes but this is a fucking test and I'm sick of it." As you may have guessed, she was not quite sure how to respond to that. So I just point at them, and more or less yell, "Those two, the last two in this column, they're cheating. They're talking about the test. That's bullshit." Without any further explanation, I went back to my desk and continued working on number six, fuming.

She talked to them, and from what I caught I think they tried to pass it off as talking to themselves, but it was quite clear by the way the both of them were leaning into each other that that's complete horseshit. I fully intend to follow up on this, because she's pretty forgiving with things and I don't want her to try and sweep it under the rug.

And then get this. Ten minutes later, directly to my left, TWO MORE FUCKING KIDS talking about the test. I shot a glare that one of them caught, but decided I didn't want to look like the little boy who cried wolf because nobody would believe that they were stupid enough to cheat right after I caught the other two doing it.

I mean, what the fuck? I had heard a couple of rumors about graduate students cheating before but until my previously documented experience with it in the quizzes I didn't necessarily believe it and was willing to give the benefit of the doubt and now this. I mean, two separate groups in the same test, even after one of them got caught!? That's just unbelievable. And who knows how much of it went on in the parts of the room I couldn't hear.

In all of my college career, I have only known of one instance of excessive unapproved collaboration, and it was on a bullshit assignment that was well beyond the other Java II classes so I saw it as them leveling the playing field, but I have never actually witnessed or even heard of any of the graduate students cheating during a test or quiz. I'm told that the thought process is that everyone should do well so there's nothing wrong with it; I say fuck that, this class has a god damned curve and if part of the class is ensuring they all get better grades then it's making me look bad for being honest. It's like freakin steroids in baseball.

Okay, time to go take a chill pill and get some rest. Insert standard rant disclaimer here.

Thanks, Congress.

Today I got an email from PokerRoom, my online poker site, about the new US restrictions regarding online gambling. To summarize, on October 25th I'll lose my ability to deposit real money, on November 6th I'll lose my ability to play in real money games. They're leaving the ability to withdraw forever, but I only have $23.33 in there right now so I'm kind of tempted to play a couple $10 tourneys in the last two weeks. The payouts for those are high enough to make a withdrawal worth it if I do well in one and if I don't then oh well I'm still way up anyway.

That said, this is horseshit. Obviously I'm not mad at PokerRoom, they're just playing the cards they've been dealt (groan...) but I am mad at the idiots who feel the need to pass this law. I mean, how exactly does this make America better or safer? Anybody with a gambling addiction still has a million other ways to lose their house, and people who just enjoy the occasion poker game but don't feel like getting a home game together are out of luck.

I see online gambling as the new marijuana. It's illegal because some old guys decided that it was A Bad Thing, yet many other things that are just as harmful are legal because those old guys make money off of taxing it. The alcohol and cigarettes versus marijuana debate is almost identical to legal casinos versus online gambling. The only real difference is that one side was declared illegal while the other fell into the "you shouldn't do this but we can't stop you" category, with no convincing arguments with regards to why.

P.S. I guess I don't actually know if the government taxes casinos, which slightly weakens my argument if it turns out to not be the case, but not by much.