Bills are starting to come in as August nears a close. Titus has passed rent and utility management onto me, so I get to learn all about the joys therein. Comcast has already screwed up by hitting us with a $44 charge for “unreturned equipment” on a cable modem that they did pick up. Well, I’m trying to get it cleared up now.
At the same time, I’ve turned to Microsoft Money to help me manage all the new bills and payments. The number of options is daunting at first, but I feel like I’m starting to get a hang of it. Money looks like it has some neat features, like expense tracking and reporting, that will come in handy.
I’ve also got some money earmarked for investment that has been idling away for far too long now. Investing has always daunted me, even more so following the market volatility in the past five years, and I’ve been putting this off for a few years now. But I also know that idle money isn’t good, so I’m finally trying to get enough of a feel for things to start putting my money somewhere. I’ve gathered a list of stocks to look at and I’ve also started looking at options with mutual funds. The plan is to get something going within the next week or two.
I paid my second visit to Georgia Tech’s Career Services department to seek guidance on building my résumé in preparation for my upcoming job hunt. I met with recruiting manager Cindy Jordan and we went over a recent revision of my resume together. The most significant ideas to come out of the session were that I needed to restate my objective and expand on my work experience. The rest was along the lines of “format this” and “fix that.” The session was helpful, nonetheless.
After further testing, I’ve noticed some interesting things about my corruption issues:
- DOS RAR within Windows works
- WinRAR from safe mode works
So this would suggest some kind of bizarre software interaction. I should also note that I have done testing with a host of other compression programs and the same issues exist, so it’s not just WinRAR. I’ve begun preparing to reinstall Windows. It seems like a good time with the recent release of Windows XP SP2. I even found a cool program called nLite that will take care of slipstreaming the Service Pack for me.
My mysterious data corruption bug has resurfaced. When I extract very large files from compressed formats (e.g., RAR, 7Z, GZ, etc.) the file comes out corrupt almost without fail. I get a different checksum each time I do it. I had this problem before, but reinstalling Windows seemed to help last time.
This is a classic example of how I spend far too much time dealing with stupid stuff.
Some background: I wanted to do a clean install of Cygwin to remove unneeded packages—again, unnecessary, but why not? Removal is simple enough, just delete the Cygwin directory and a few registry keys. My attempts to delete said directory are greeted with generic Access is denied errors. Okay, so the files aren’t in use. In fact, they are just shortcuts (.lnk files). A quick Google search reveals KB320081 on the Microsoft Knowledge Base. I obtained the subinacl tool as directed, but I opted to go with the full Windows 2003 Resource Kit instead of the stand-alone tool. The caveat, of course, is that the version packaged with the Resource Kit will not work with XP (at least not with my configuration). After much wasted energy, I discovered that the stand-alone version of the subinacl tool is more up-to-date and it does indeed work.
So if you’re having trouble with subinacl, check which version you have by running the command without arguments. Like so:
C:\>subinacl
SubInAcl version 5.2.3790.1180
...
The version that comes with the Resource Kit is 4.0.1.1604 and it will give you no love (or useful diagnostic output).
