(there was an accidental misnumbering here)
Or, the trials and tribulations of making Ye Olde Ancient P133 work again.
Our tale begins about 6 months ago or so. With my good comp at college, I wanted something to play around on when I was at home. And my old computer was still running, so I decided hey, let's use that. And Life Was Good. Then came the idea "Hey, let's put Win98 on it!" Oops. The problems involved in this were legion, of course. The monitor was a replacement for one that sort of...died a couple years ago, and the CD-ROM is a new one. Then there's the new hard drive I slaved in. Actually getting all of this required finding 6 or 7 sets of drivers, dinking around with the damn mouse driver of all things for half an hour, and then screwing around with a variety of video card and monitor drivers because I was stuck in 640x480 at 16 colors for no apparent reason. Finally got it working again, popped it into 1024x768 at high color, which is the normal resolution of the civilized world, and then sat back in relief at having made it work. Oh wait, the Zip drive. Crap.
*plugscrewscrewtightentightenplugarghthisisthe800threbootdiediedie* And then I was done, and Life Was Good Once More.
Then the hard drive blew. Again. Which is a story in and of itself. You see, the hard drive that blew was the third refurbished replacement of the original drive that I bought to slave to the original one that came with the computer. Western Digital, it is to be noticed, sucks. At one point in '97 I decided hey, 1.2gig HDs are small now. They used to be big, but they are now small. So I got myself a brand spanking new 3.2 gig Western Digital. And life was good, and I threw multitudes of everything remotely important and big except the OS on it. And then it died. So I got it replaced, because warranty rocks. Repeat process. Apparently after the second death they felt sorry enough for me that they replaced it with a refurbished 4 gig. Unfortunately my BIOS is so amazingly crappy that it doesn't recognize anything between 3.2 gigs and around 10 gigs. So I was stuck with a refurb 3.2. And then THAT died. Thus making me overly happy. Went and got the BIOS to not recognize it, and proceeded to load up the 1.2 again. Which meant putting AoK, Netscape, WinZip, ICQ, and Zmud on it. The HD is now almost full. Argh.
And the story continues with my loaning it out to a friend over the summer. I mean, I didn't need the damn thing at home. Of course when college started, I wanted it back, so back it came. Mostly covered in some brown glop that I don't want to think about. They keyboard was so filthy I had to take off the coverplate, which is still off. To make things even better, The power cords didn't make it back, so I had to pack mine home with me. YAY! But it gets better. Forgot to plug in the Zip, so no Zip. Oh well, I can live with that. Well, how about music? *pops in CD* What? It doesn't recognize the CD-ROM? Ack. Pop up control panel, dig around in the hardware. Sure enough, no CD-ROM. Well, I'll just have it detect it and do that. Run the really long find hardware thing. Nope. Doh. Well, crap, I guess I'll dig around in the BIOS. Nope. And then upon returning to Windows, it worked again. Lame.
Finally, my old mouse does not have a wheel. As the entire civilized world realizes by this point, the wheel in the center of the mouse is God's Gift to the Human Race. You can scroll up and down pages without moving your mouse all over hell and gone. But no. Oh well.
Fortunately, I get my new comp back tomorrow when I go home. I can hardly wait.
Today's topic: The Oregon State University Mathematics Department.
Sucks, quite frankly. I've said it, and I have friends who say the exact same thing. And my friends are and large engineering majors with A and B averages. You do the math (ok, ok, I know, that one was bad... ;)). To illustrate my point, let me give you my history with said department.
My first class was MTH 111, or College Algebra. The easy stuff. Linear equations, exponential equations, and the like. Well hell, I had just done this in HS, not to mention I had a pretty good teacher and an at least decent TA. I ended up getting like a B in the course.
Second class: MTH 241, Calculus for Management, Social Sciences, and Life. Or some other title like that. Business calculus, more or less. Taught by the worst teacher I have ever come in contact with. She was utterly inept at trying to get people to understand a damn thing, let alone calculus. Half the time her explanations to questions left the class more confused than when she started. I frankly don't remember anything about my TA. I ended up trying to learn it by myself, didn't go to class, and after encountering a couple of the Tests From Hell(tm), got a D- in the class and ended up on academic probation from the College of Business.
Third class: MTH 245, Math for Management, Social Sciences, and Life. Or something. Taught by the same loser teacher as before. This time, though, going to recetation was NOT required. So I skipped it. And I skipped class, and tried to learn it on my own (sometimes). I withdrew from the course halfway through.
Fourth class (current): MTH 241 again. New teacher. He's actually pretty good, as teachers go. I have less confidence in my TA, however. She tries, but doesn't quite do it. It's obvious that there's still a lot she doesn't know. And part of the problem, I think, is that A, the teacher is new, and B, he's trying to adapt from the material written by (yup) the heinous teacher from last year.
Which brings us to my main problem. The tests. They are hard. Sometimes, I think, unreasonably hard. Using tonight's test as an example, one problem got outright tossed after multitudes of errors were found in it. After being assured that there might be one optimization problem period on the test, I was faced with no less than three, each being harder than anything I remember from the book. The rest of the test was largely massively complicated derivatives of exponential/logarithmic equations, playing with e, and some other fun stuff. All of it far harder than I remembered from the book, INCLUDING the reccommended review problems.
And from my friends, I hear tales of alternately heinous profs that make everything too hard to imagine, or profs that are so easy you can ditch class the whole term and still get an A. I take some issue with that, considering that my entire future with the College of Business hinges upon my passing two classes.
Now let's compare to say, the Department of History, from whom I have taken 5 classes from 4 different professors. In each of them, the objectives were clearly presented to me, and I knew PRECISELY the questions that would be on the tests. In fact, I knew what I had to write my papers on weeks before I even had to do them. The professors were largely of high quality, and made things very clear and easy to understand. When I was tested, there was almost no variation. 4 of the profs used or use slight variations on a "write a paragraph on 3 out of 4 people/places/things and then write a single long essay on some topic like the Fall of Rome." One prof has used the format of a few multiple choice questions, and a massive take home paper. I will state again that it was made excruciatingly clear as to what would be on these tests. No surprises period. As opposed to my math tests, with the infamous optimization problems.
And on a final note, remember that heinous math teacher that did 241/245? Well, here's an interesting bit of info I picked up: She's the wife of the head of the department. I'll let you draw your own conclusions there.
In the aftermath(?) of Election Night.
I'm very tired right now. I was up until 2+ in the morning last night listening and tracking the elections. Very, very crazy night... I and a number of others were alternately clicking the refresh button on cnn.com and other places while talking in the Bush Won!!!! thread on AOKH OD. The vote now hinges on a couple of thousand people in Florida, and at one point it was down to 210 people. There are 210 people on my FLOOR practically.
Really amazing, huh? Really gives one a great sense of faith that your vote DOES count, that you DO matter. When 2,000 people in one state can elect the next president... yikes. I'm feeling very, very glad to have been able to vote in this one. What a first election, eh?
A few things about the night that I found entertaining:
Missouri elected a dead man to the Senate. No disrespect to the dead and all, and in fact I think it's pretty cool that people actually voted like that, but lol.
Hillary Clinton got elected to the Senate in New York. Again, lol.
Lieberman got elected to the Senate in Connetticut (and I know I spelled that wrong... ). Somebody's gonna be unhappy about that one, I'm sure.
It appears that Gore actually won the popular vote. Anybody else think the electoral college sucks?
I bet Jeb Bush is feeling really good right now.
In my listening to CNN's webcast of the night, I got to hear some of the reporters talking to themselves. There was an "Oh my God!" whisper when Carnahan (I think that's him) got elected in Missouri. One of the talking heads called himself a talking head. LOL. End result? Reminded me that reporters are people too. I forget that sometimes.
In an interesting episode, the heads talked to a Hollywood guy, who said something to the effect that "You couldn't sell this as a script in Hollywood, it's too wierd."
And that, as they say, is that. My first election night, my first presidential election. And I have no idea if my guy is gonna win. Exciting. Hillarious. Exhausting, even. I dunno if I'm gonna stay up long enough to make it to class at this rate.
Or something like that. I suppose this could have easily gone in my last rant, but I didn't feel like it. Indulge me or something.
Today's topic: The Encyclopedia Oregonia, otherwise known as the Oregon Voter's Pamphlet. Although calling it a pamphlet is something of an understatement. Volume 1 (the measures) is 400 pages long. Volume 2 (people) is more to the tune of 20 or 30.
The ballot itself was 2 pages front and back with people and measures. One for the people, one for the measures. That's like the biggest thing I've seen yet. Yikes.
But back to the book. There are something like 11 different proposed constitutional amendments for the state constitution. Plus a bunch of taxes and things, campaign finance reform, plus the infamous measure 9. The book gives the full measure text, an explanatory statement for those who can't read legalese (and measure 6(?) in particular is something like 5 pages long...), and then various arguments for/against. A few things I found funny:
In the measure 9 for section, like 5 of the for arguments (the first 5, no less) were taken up by a single guy blasting the measure and the people who sponsored it. And he made up little organizations for himself like Special Righteousness Committee. Funny, although I'm not sure that the voter's pamphlet should be used like that. If you want to say something against the measure, do it in the against section...
All in all though, I LIKE the voter's pamphlet. Usefull tool. I also like vote by mail elections (which this one was).
Anybody been missing these? Today's topics: Marius gets in a political debate and Marius goes to the opthomoligist (anybody know how to spell that?).
Let's see... politics first. For starters, I didn't recieve my ballot to vote with. This, you understand is baaaad (sheep impression time). So I walked the 10 odd blocks down to the courthouse to get it. And yes, I have a car, and I could have driven. I felt like walking for some reason. I fear that there might well be something wrong with me now.
The other political thing was a very long (like 3 hours) debate with a friend over A, who to vote for president, and B, Oregon's Measure 9. Without going into details (I will if anybody cares... ), it was very long, very...informative, and very fun. Worth repeating on occasion. You might try it some time. Just make sure you're good friends. I definitely learned something about something.
Now we get to the part that I know you've ALL been waiting for: What the hell IS an opthomoligist, anybody, other than a word that nobody has any idea how to spell correctly, sort of like Czechoslovakia and the like? The answer is, of course, an eye doctor. My trips always involve such joyous things as lots of eyedrops, pressure checks, lots of eyedrops, sitting in dark rooms, lots of eyedrops, very bright lights, lots of eyedrops, chasing the doc's finger around, lots of eyedrops, and looking at that damn little balloon picture in the machine. Oh yeah, and lots of eyedrops. I got a grand total of 4 different kinds this trip (up from 3 last trip!). One for the pressure check, one to numb my eyes for the pressure check, one to dilate my eyes, and one more because he felt like it or something. And let me tell you, I HATE eyedrops (but I'm sure you had no idea). They pretty much have to jam my eyes open to get the drops in. And we won't even talk about the little thing they use to check pressure. I also got to sit in that dark room for a while, and ended up walking out with my eyes tweaked out beyond belief. Had to wear shades for a couple hours, plus everything looked like my glasses were covered in yellow saran wrap or something.
The upshot of this, of course, is that I am now VERY tired. Loss of sleep, stress... well hell, I'm not gonna be awake, now am I? My eyes are in pain just thinking about it. On the plus side, I had some great pizza, played the new Bond for N64 (I honestly like PD better though), and watched Rules of Engagement (good movie). Fun, fun, fun. (And I don't even have a T-bird to take away. Buahahahaha!)