sunspot cycles

I discovered that deep within the submenus of Photoshop CS is a tool called Photomerge for putting pictures together as a panorama. I put a couple rough panaoramas from my recent Oregon vacation together. The best part is that as long as you have Photoshop open you can smooth over the seams. I tried putting together a 360 degree panorama from La Jolla, and it looked like it was going to blend pretty well, but Photoshop complained about RAM and quit so I will mess with it tomorrow.

I also wrote a Java program that solves Sudoku puzzles. I needed the practice in Java and I wanted to see how hard it would be. The code is hideous but it can solve the last problem in my Sudoku book in 129,000 operations, which is a trifle for the computer. I guess the algorithm I made up isn't that bad after all.

The rest of today was spent playing Ratchet: Deadlocked and We Love Katamari, but I did register for ECE 417 so I can claim a little progress for the day. More jury duty tomorrow.

charged with battery, pt. II

I set aside some of the batteries my camera refused to run on and checked them with a DMM. They still have 1.5 volts on them. If anything this makes my problem more confusing. If I put them back in the camera they will work for a while again, but not if it's right after the camera refuses to take them. Maybe the batteries are heating up and the camera won't work until they're cool again?

charged with battery

My digital camera, while awesome in most respects, has recently developed a malfunction that causes it to use up batteries at an alarming rate. As in, they need replacing several times a day.

Even with this handicap I still managed to take quite a few good pictures in the past few days. My parents came out to visit me and I gave them a crash tour of Oregon as I have so far come to know it. The Columbia River Gorge was great. We were lucky to see Mount Hood because parts of it are on fire and this apparently presents difficulties for tourists. We also checked out the wine country to the north, and Newport to wrap things up. It was pretty cool overall.

gone fission

So today I got to apply an important grad student skill - raiding free stuff. Some prof retired and left a bunch of old books for people to take. This was last week sometime, but apparently not many people have bothered because there's still piles of them. I went through them today and got a bunch of good stuff. I found an instructor's solutions manual for Marion/Thornton and Halliday/Resnick, but they are 2 and 3 editions out of date respectively. I just like acquiring what used to be contraband - they have the answers to every single problem in the texts.

There was a lot of miscellaneous stuff too, like microcomputer manuals from the late 70's and early 80's, and some books on the nuclear arms race. I took a couple books that opposed Reagan's SDI. I also took a book called "The Discovery of Nuclear Fission" which looks very interesting because it has excerpts from the original research papers. That book is from 1971 though, I think it underplays Lise Meitner's role. I'm still looking forward to reading it

In other news, my dumbass neighbor moved out yesterday, so I'm pleased with that. I also went in for jury duty orientation and got assigned to the circuit court's grand jury. I have to go in two days a week for eight weeks and here about all the horrible stuff going on in the county, but at least it's not hard and it fits in my schedule. I even get a little bit of cash out of it, though that probably won't show up until early November.

hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore

Yeah, it's been a while since I posted anything here. That's because I haven't been doing a damn thing. It was nice. I'm back in Oregon now...not that I've suddenly started doing interesting things. I did get a notice that I've been selected for jury duty, we'll see how that goes. I start TAing again next week, or so I've been told. I haven't gotten any updates on that. I did write up a couple more movies I've seen recently. I guess that's about as much of a point this post is going to have.

norton liveupH8, pt. II

So naturally, when I fire up my computer this morning LiveUpdate got the one package that was giving me hell last night with no problem, and now my Norton is up to date. This is why I hate computers. They will break and then fix themselves for mysterious reasons, and no matter how long you've been working with them they will continue to break down in new and exciting ways. It just goes with the job. This is why happy techs scare me - either they have no idea what they're doing, or they've gone completely off the deep end. I'm glad I'm not a tech anymore.

norton liveupH8 (computers suck)

I repartitioned and reformatted my computer, and I spent the day trying to get everything installed again. I hate this part because entering serial numbers and install directories is tedious. And then there are the programs that just never work.

Norton is one of these. After installing, it needs dozens of update files from the internet and every time I have to reinstall it, LiveUpdate seems to say "That update there. You can't have that." and it refuses to install that part no matter how many times I try. Symantec's only advice is to uninstall and reinstall Norton, but I've done that three times now and it don't work. I think it has something to do with installing the WinXP service pack before updating Norton. I hate how everything needs to be installed in a certain order and if you do it differently it will make your life miserable.

Of course, Norton couldn't have the show to itself. My iPod also crashed. Again. I managed to fight with it long enough to get it wiped/restored (thank you Apple for making it so I have to erase the whole thing every time I have to fix it), but the iPod has to be hooked up to the AC power supply to reboot and work again. And of course I left that cable in Oregon, because you can just charge it by USB.

I'd like to point out that to make the iPod get recognized by the computer so I could wipe it, I had to strike it against the desk. Physical violence makes technology work better.

I also forgot to back up the saved passwords for my fingerprint scanner, so now I don't remember how to get into anything. So far I've managed to get back into my online credit card statement and this.

Fortunately, one thing that does work is Generals: Zero Hour, because after fighting with computer crap all day I need to blow a lot of stuff up to chill out. Once this all gets sorted out it will be good. My new drive has over 150GB free and my 120GB drive is still empty (though untested) - I will have no shortage of storage space for a long time.

but i still can't focus on anything

It looks like my new 300GB external drive will show up on Tuesday rather than tomorrow as I'd hoped. I really want to get working on my computer. I had a panic moment this morning when my computer hung while booting, but I found the culprit was my stupid iPod which had locked up (now what are the odds of that?) and was causing my computer to do the same when it turned on the USB ports. I've kept my current external drive off most of the time because I don't want to taunt it.

I finally watched Bullitt tonight. It was ok. The car chase scene was pretty good though. I wrote up some more movie and game reviews and put them on my MSU site.

drives

Computer work is not progressing as planned. As I was backing up data from my internal drive to the external, I found the external drive is kind of on the fritz and is resisting any treatments I have to offer. The only thing I can think of to remedy it is a reformat...which is exactly the sort of thing I don't want to hear, because there's not really anywhere for my data to be now if both of my drives need work.

So I'm looking at getting a new, proper external drive. I can get a 300GB drive for only around $120. Combine that with my current 200GB and I'd have half a terabyte of data storage. I would have way more space than I need...at least for the moment.

Then I might have another 80GB on top of that, from my old desktop. It apparently suffered a power surge that let the motherboard's magic smoke out. I wouldn't really have any use for that drive though. Basically I have to determine if that computer would be worth rebuilding, or if it should just be salvaged for parts.

In other news, it's good to be back in Michigan and my polymorphic head cold is all but over.

contents under pressure

I arrived in Detroit at an ungodly hour this morning in bad shape but still in one piece. Recently I've been suffering a sort of head cold that changes its symptoms every day. Presumably only an illness as polymorphic as this could make it past my robust immune system. On Saturday I had a sore throat, stuffy nose and addled brain, on Sunday this had turned into a runny nose and a lack of energy. And today? Sinus pressure and I lost my voice for a little while. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

The sinus pressure, combined with some ham-fisted cabin pressure control on the behalf of a Northwest Airlines crew, caused me some grief during the final approach to Detroit. I had horrible earaches for the last 15 minutes before touchdown and even a bit of shooting pain in my forehead. And then my ears didn't pop when I got off the plane. In fact they didn't pop until I got home an hour later, sat in the hot tub and set about purposefully trying to mess with the pressures in my head. I got it mostly right and then gradually equilibrated over the rest of the day. Flying on a plane should not require that you recalibrate your head afterwards.

One of the first orders of business once I regain my health and coherence is to reformat my computer, which has gone over a year on one installation of Windows. I broke some stuff quite a few months ago and it's kind of jury-rigged together at the moment.

So yeah, I'm back in Michigan for a few weeks. So if anyone else is around, drop me a line and I'll see when I can swipe some wheels.