I've had a hell of a week.
I drove through the night on Sunday to get back to Rochester for my classes on Monday, playing my favorite game " Where's that road?" from the New York State line to my house. Hurray for snow snow, ice, fog, sleet, and large trucks! I got a little bit of sleep and went to my classes. Monday night I attempted to put the new memory I was given into my main computer. It didn't work. But the memory wasn't the problem, that would have been far too simple. The memory controller on the motherboard had flaked out over break, and none of the memory was working. Even what had worked for the last 3 years in it! Of course it took all my free time for about 2 days to figure out what the real problem was. And of course, motherboards for my processor and memory type are not made anymore. Fortunately the Good Sir Andrew was able to find one online that was still being sold (although not stilll being manufactured) and took the PC133 SDRAM that I had. I ordered it, a new processor, and heatsink/fan. Meanwhile I spent the week working on homework, papers, and preparing for a midterm and a practicum. Little food or sleep was enjoyed. I did get to play with my new keyboard (122 keys and a card reader) and watch a couple of James Bond films though, which was my present to myself once I got done with classes for the week. The new hardware arrived yesterday afternoon and I have been working on it since to get everything up and running. Having a working computer is a good thing. A few hours ago everything except the temperature sensors was working. Then, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to upgrade some packages on Gentoo Linux and my mouse stopped working properly. Not that I upgraded any packages that should have affected it of course. So I am still fooling with it trying to get everything to behave so I'll have a working system on which to do the royalmetricfuckton of Oracle and JDBC work I have to do. Blah!
In other news, its -11F outside right now, snowing lightly, with a good 8-12 inches of snow covering everything. I intended to go shopping yesterday morning, but when I noticed how cold it was (-2F then) I decided I could wait another day. Looks like I probably won't head out today either. Having ones breath freeze and fall to the ground is not a good thing.
I did have a wonderful time in Louisville over break though! I saw tons of people, some of which I had not seen in over 3 years and had presumed dead. I attended a Christmas party at Emily Nall and David's house that was great fun. Emily had prepared tons of different types of cookies, brownies, gingerbread, and ciders for us. And some quite good cheeses, crackers, and soups. I am surprised I didn't slip into a diabetic coma that evening. It was very good to see people having a good time together and to chat with Emily, David, Beth, Stephanie, Max, Robbie, etc. I even saw Cassie briefly, but she seemed a little frightened and stayed in a different room than most of the people for most of the night.
Carolyn had a wonderful New Years Eve Party! I showed up late when I said I'd be early, broke the paring knife I gave her for Christmas in half while making a vegetable tray, observed people get quite sick, watched people put scuff marks on Carolyn's walls and three holes in them, and got sick myself. But it was a fun party! There were over 40 people there at one point, in a two bedroom house. Everyone seemed to have a good time, I talked to people I had not seen since High School, and I met a few new people.
I'll be back in Louisville in early March for a week, and I shall look forward to seeing people again, although not quite so many this time.
The pictures from Carolyn's New Years Eve party are up. As are the videos. I'll be putting up more videos from other things later this week and writing HTML to go with it, its functional enough for now. I'll work on the witty captions later as well. As usual, the high resolution versions, suitable for printing and blackmail, can be found here.