Quals and Outings

So my friend Chris just got back from CA (where he interned at Apple for the summer -- and now has a job offer from!) today, and he told me about this ice cream place in Troy called Moxie's. He heard about it on another blog, Dish and Dirt, and asked me if I wanted to go. Tonight was especially important, since it was the last day that it was open for the summer, and it was only going to be open till 9:30pm. It was close to 8:30 pm. He picked me up at around 8:45, and we headed over to Moxie's, which was out in the middle of nowhere a little ways from Troy. It was so far out, that our surroundings ceased to look like Troy; the roads became more twisty and turny, hillier, and ever darker. As we were nearing our destination, Chris had to use his Brights just so that we could see a little distance away (and it was a clear night). Finally, we found it, and got there at 9pm. Chris got Blue Moon and Indonesian Vanilla. I got Sweet Cream and Indonesian vanilla. Moxie's is apparently famous among Vanilla lovers, because they apparently have five kinds of vanilla ice cream: one named from each place that their vanilla beans was imported from.

Best. Ice cream. Ever.

I am feeling so lazy and full right now, and am probably going to head to bed after I post this. I shouldn't feel lazy though; over the last three days, I have gone over all 29 questions of the C+C qual, 10 questions per day. Tomorrow, I'm going to do a final run through all 29. I think I should be good to go on my qual for Wednesday.

Of course, being my usual graceful self, and considering how accident and illness prone I have been over the last few weeks, I managed to go and twist my foot on some gravel the other day. Since I'm still limping, I'm probably going to head over to the health center tomorrow morning, and get things all set up. Hopefully things should be ok.

Okies.. bed time for me! Good night everyone.

ENTJ!

So I recently took the Jung Typology test, based on the Myers-Briggs personality test, and scored as an ENTJ. What type are you?

According to the description of my type:
ENTJ 1 12 12 44
- slightly expressed extravert
- slightly expressed intuitive personality
- slightly expressed thinking personality
- moderately expressed judging personality

ENTJs take charge quickly and deal directly with problems, especially in situations that involve confusion and inefficiency. They provide structure to the organizations to which they belong and design strategies to accomplish their personal and organizational goals. They are 'take charge' people who organise their own and others' external environments. They use their resources to find a way to meet the challenge. They are at their best in using their analytical and strategic thinking.

This page has more info about my personality type.

So, in summary, I am a leader! (apparently)

A leader who loves kitties. And sleep.

Speaking of sleep... bed time!

Night.

Late night misfortune

Tonight Kevin came over, and we decided to watch a movie. I had fallen sick a couple days back, so the visit served as a way to check up on me, and for us to have some of the chili we made the day before but never had a chance to eat. The chili was very good; it was really thick, and we mixed it with cheddar cheese and mozzarella cheese and ate it. We watched our movie, spent a little time together, and then went our separate ways (him, to home.. me, to bed). That was 12 am.

3 am I bolted upright in bed. My stomach felt like it was going to burst. I had thrown up a little in my throat, and it was really acidic. I cursed myself silently. While I'm a huge fan of chili, it's one of those things that I'm not supposed to eat, because it is tomato-based, and very acidic. Usually a few tablets of antacid and a little bit of stomach uncomfort is the worst of it. This time, however, I'd pay for my disregard for my body's dislikes.

I frantically searched for anatacid. No tums, no rolaids... nothing in sight. Among the pile of medicines, I was able to fish out a bottle of Pepto Bismol. I took a swig of it (I lost the dosage cap), and waited. In a few minutes, I began to feel a change... my stomach started to feel a lot worse. The pain was becoming unbearable. I frantically grabbed my laptop and started searching for ways I could neutralize the stomach acid. Sleep was a top priority, especially since I was trying to get better. Every time I coughed, it pushed down on my stomach, which felt like a nerve-ridden water balloon, precariously stretched.

Then I felt a difference. A rushing, boiling, churning difference. I pushed aside my laptop, and projectile vomited (I shit you not -- projectile vomited) all over my clothes, my bed, and my rug. I run to the bathroom and vomited again. I felt much better, but I returned to my room with anxiety replacing the acid that was there in my stomach.

I had paid almost $200 for my rug. It was a really nice rug. A beautiful rug -- black and creme colored, nice and thick, and felt really good when I walked on it barefoot. Miserably, I rolled my sheets into a ball and threw them into a corner of my room. The sheets were easily fixable as well as my clothes. I procured an extra set of sheets, and extra pants and an extra shirt, and threw them on the bed. Those can wait. What I needed to was get rid of that vomit on the rug.

I blotted the entire area with paper towels. This took a long time, since i didn't want to push the vomit into the rug any more than it was already. After I was satisfied, I got a wet, soapy sponge and tackled the stains on the cream part of the rug. I think I managed to get it all out; I got some more paper towels and removed all the moisture I could. There was nothing left that I could do, but consign myself to the next part... head towards bed, and wait till morning, when the rug dries. Then I can vacuum up the rest of the stain. If the instructions I found online work, it should come right out.

I remade my bed, changed my clothes (which I scrunched up and threw in the pile containing my dirty sheets) and sat there contemplating what had happened. Sometimes, I learned, it's not good to test your body's limits. My stomach still doesn't feel that great, but I'm getting tired again, so it's time for sleep. Will update after I vacuum.

Good night (or good morning), world.

UPDATE:
11:20 - Tuesday, August 21 2007
My rug is pretty much completely clean, and I am getting better... I still get exhausted very easily, but I think by tomorrow, I can fit in a full day's worth of work. Even though I was Master TAing on Monday, I couldn't bring myself to start working afterwards, and Sunday I was pretty much forced to stay in bed. Today, I worked very little on quals (it was astonishing how quickly it was exhausting me), and then concentrated on doing research. The research I'm doing right now is relatively light.. some touching up with CGI-perl on three sites that I'm transferring to a new server. It was slow, time-consuming work, but in a way somewhat relaxing. When I went home close to 8 pm, one of the sites had their transition completely finished, and the other two are partially there. A little more poking, and little more prodding here and there, should complete it.

Being sick sucks. On a positive side, this happened (and is ending) now, a full week before I have my first qual, and a good two and half to three weeks before my second (and last) qual, which is the one that I'm worried about. It's also a wake-up call from my body: I haven't been paying enough attention to it as much as I should have. Especially since I'm on RAship this coming year, I should try and work on taking more breaks, eating a bit better, and incorporating exercise into my weekly routine. I think with a little planning, this can all happen. I am starting to worry about my health somewhat, since I don't think I'm usually this sickly. Hopefully, things will get better.

Hopefully tonight will be better.

Good night.

Wireless Adventure - Part IV (Wireless in Linux)

As I write this, I'm logged into my Ubuntu partition on my laptop. We have total and complete success!

This is great. Not only can I scan for wireless networks now, I can also connect! I'm so excited.

Lessons learned:
network-manager: friend
orinoco: friend
hostap: THE DEVIL

Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn: Completely f-ing awesome.

Now, to sit back and enjoy my intrawebs on my linux partition! How shall I celebrate?

I know. Watch as many Flight of the Conchords episodes as I can!

Then some Planet Earth! ^-^

I am completely pleased with myself.


Wireless Adventure: Success!

Wireless Adventure - Part III (Blacklisting hostap)

So blacklisting Orinoco had some positive effects. Now, I can scan for wireless networks (whoopee!) As you can imagine, this was very exciting. I thought I had finally got it to work.

Unfortunately no.

I'm now thinking about blacklisting hostap instead of Orinoco:
my etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file should now read like this:

blacklist prism2_pci
blacklist hostap_pci
blacklist hostap

Let's see how this works!

More update goodness soon.

Wireless Adventure - Part II (Blacklisting Orinoco)

More poking around the internets. Lucking I found this.

To quote:
The problem is that the hostap and orinoco kernel modules are competing for control of the card. This is mentioned as a likely problem on NetworkManager site:
(http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManagerHardware)

hostap: "Supports unencrypted, WEP, WPA, and WPA2 networks. Be aware that if you have both this driver and the 'orinoco' driver installed, they may fight for control of the wireless card and render it inoperable to NetworkManager. You should either disable one of these drivers, or ensure that only one driver is able to control the card."

Thank you, Brett!

To summarize the instructions:
1. Check to make sure I'm dealing with the right network card: I entered the following command in bash:

:~ lspci | grep Network
I got:
02:02.0 Network controller: Intersil Corporation Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset (rev 01)

HA! It matched. Yes! Next, for adding some blacklisting marks to
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

blacklist orinoco
blacklist orinoco_pci
blacklist hermes
blacklist p80211
blacklist prism2_pci

Last step, reboot!

Completing this process took less than two minutes (even less time than it took me to install WICD), and it was relatively straightforward.

I still don't know if it will work yet. I have to go home and see. But I have my fingers crossed! Results later. Hopefully, this should do it!

Wireless Adventure - Part I (WICD)

I looked for suggestions. The first one was WICD. It looked great. A lot of people seemed to be having the same problem, and WICD seemed to just fix it very quickly. Also, the Digg reviewers were treating it like the second coming of Christ: "GREAT interface! network-manager BLOWS! ALL my wirless problems were FIXED when I started using WICD! AND it improved my sex life! FIVE+++ StArS!" Sheesh.

Installation was breeze. I was liking this already! Now came the fun part: testing it out. The interface was lot larger than network-managers. One thing I didn't like about it right away, is that it didn't automatically connect to my WIRED network, which was annoying. Furthermore it required me to create a profile for each IP (for -wired- connections). I didn't like this at all. Since I connect to the internet all over the place, the last thing I wanted was to have a bunch of "profiles" cluttering up the interface, most of which I will probably never use again. Of course, I won't delete any of them in the off-chance that I -do- use them again(and who wants to enter all that information again?). Too aggravating. The kicker was that it wasn't detecting the wireless network present.

That would have been okay. network-manager wouldn't automatically detect wireless networks. I just had to enter them in manually. But, as it would turn out, in WICD, there is no way for me to manually enter a wireless network it didn't detect (they had a "hidden network" box, which allowed you to enter a ESSID, and no encryption key, which wasn't satisfactory.) Maybe I should have given WICD more time. Maybe I should have poked around more. Maybe I was dumb and wasn't looking at the interface closely enough. Could the solution have still been there?

Whatever. I uninstalled WICD and reinstalled network-manager. Back to square one!

Wireless Adventure - Introduction

So my IBM ThinkPad T30, Phoenix, got a makeover earlier this summer. Due to my general laziness and strange attachment to Ubuntu Breezy, I didn't update to Dapper. When Feisty came out, I found out that I could no longer update my system, period. Shit.

Among other things, this meant that I couldn't do an automatic update to Dapper, and then from there, into Feisty. So, I wiped my partition (after backing up my data) and did a clean install of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. That, plus giving Phoenix a new fan and an additional 512 MB stick of RAM, she seemed ready to rock the world.

I really like Feisty Fawn. It's sleeker, cleaner, and it got rid of some minor annoyances I had with Breezy. Perfect set up, I thought.

Then it turned out that my wireless card wouldn't work.

I was mystified. In Breezy, my wireless card worked fine. There was a bug that prevented me from scanning for wireless networks, but as long as I knew the SSID and/or password of the network I was trying to connect to, things worked fine.

Did something go horribly wrong? Did I do something wrong? Why is my wireless card not being recognized? I rebooted into Windows. Maybe it's the network that's at fault?

In XP (where I can scan for wireless networks fine), I located the wireless network I wanted to connect to. I entered the WEP key. Everything worked fine. So nope, nothing wrong with the card, nothing wrong with the network.

Doing some poking around the internets revealed that this is a known bug with network-manager, which, of course, made things so much easier for me. But how to fix the bug?

This multipart (hopefully not too long) series of posts in this blog will chronicle my wireless adventures. Will end when either I give up, or my wireless works in Ubuntu. And, I don't want to "rollback" (if that's even possible for me, considering I did a clean install of Feisty) to Dapper Drake. Let's see who wins!

Flaming Hatred

So fellow graduate student Nikhil drew a picture of a dragon attacking a group of hapless villagers on our whiteboard.

I had spent all day working on Programming Languages. Gazing admiringly upon his artwork, I was suddenly inspired to label it in thus manner:


You see, the allegory just popped out at me, and everything just snapped into perspective.

Clearly, I'm the unfortunate chap tripping on the log (right-most grad student).

Working hard! Now to move on to C+C. More updates later.

Enjoy!

-Suzanne