This friday was another landmark date for ECE 3042 with the second lecture exam. My performance on the first exam was merely average (worse than expected). I do think I did better this time though, everything kind of clicked nicely and I got done with plenty of time to spare. With the exam out of the way, I now have no further excuse to delay progress on the research paper.
Inexplicably, I also felt possessed to go ahead and install Linux at this time. I started with Mandrake. Mandrake installed without a hitch, but when XP reappeared without an intervening GRUB boot-loader I decided to try something else. I tried Debian next. Debian also installed fine and GRUB happily appears on reboot. For some reason, the first-time Debian setup would inexplicably hang so I scrapped that plan too. At this point I want to return to Windows for a bit, but my boot-loader was lacking an entry for Windows. I don’t actually know how to configure GRUB so I decided to just wipe it using the old fdisk /mbr trick (it worked back in 98, why not now?). To make a long story short, the DOS fdisk completely hosed my Master Boot Record. No GRUB, but no NT loader either. System recovery was postponed until normal working hours. The lesson for the day is to never use DOS fdisk with newer Windows installations.
I attended a nice guest talk hosted by HKN and Google from 11 AM to noon. One of the representatives from Google’s technical teams came to Tech to talk about Google and plug their team of technicians. Google has rather large datacenters so they understandly need a rather large team of IT professionals. They’re also a Linux outfit so that adds a little bit of specialization too. Regardless, I learned a few things and got free pizza and a T-shirt. The T-shirt is white, with the Google logo on the front and the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on the back. Neat.
I found myself with a fair amount of free time between classes and I did make further progress on my paper. Not fantastic progress, mind you, but some nonetheless.
I was pleased to note that the steps I have taken to get longer battery use out of the PowerBook did net appreciable gains. Just last week I found I could barely get an hour out of it with the careless settings I had used. I didn’t do anything uncommon.
- Set the processor speed to “Reduced”
- Turned down the backlight to about half intensity
- Disabled AirPort when I didn’t need it
Recitation was cancelled for this week (cause for celebration, indeed). I spent most of the morning trying to make some more progress on my paper and slides. I translated an illustration into Visio and then into PowerPoint, but that was about it. I’m still not satisfied with the rate at which things are going. Next week is going to be terribly hectic.
I went to the library after Japanese to pick up some offline sources and ended up walking away empty handed. Two of the articles weren’t in English (go figure) and the librarian couldn’t locate the other one.
Work continues on and off for the research paper, as I’m sure it will through next Monday. I have plenty of sources to work with but extracting the information I want has proved daunting. Many of the papers are very narrowly focused on a specific aspect of topic I’m researching and go into much more technical detail than I feel I need for this assignment. I’ll be quite glad when it’s all done.
I finished “Saiyuki,” Vol. 1 Vol. 1. “Gasaraki” also starts to get interesting around the end of the third DVD.
