What a (lousy) semester. Where to begin?

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Housing. Originally, I was going to move into my room the third week of August. ("Welcome Week" started the next week, and instruction began the week after that.) The new carpeting in my room was supposed to have been installed by the first week, but, of course, it wasn't. After commuting to school for a few days during the first week of classes, I finally got to move in...

And then I realized that the room didn't have a telephone jack.

No television and no Internet access makes James go crazy.
No television and no Internet access makes James go crazy.
No television and no Internet access makes James go crazy.
No television and no Internet access makes James go crazy.
No television and no Internet access makes James go crazy.

Well, I wasn't completely cut off from the Internet. Thank goodness for my friends' computers and the University's computer labs...

The room was supposed to have a telephone line, so I talked to the manager about it, who apologized and called the electrician to install a phone jack. Weeks later, I was still without a phone line, so I bugged the manager again. She called the electrician back to see why he hadn't shown up yet. Apparently, the electrician was so backlogged that he wouldn't be able to show up for another three weeks. Sigh...

Finally, the electrician arrived and installed a telephone jack during the last week of October. I was pretty busy with school-work that week, so I didn't get around to calling Pacific Bell for service until a week later. When I called PacBell, they said I'd have telephone service by the next day.

(By now, the general theme of nothing ever going right for me should be fairly evident.)

So I waited another week, but I still didn't have service. (I would have complained earlier, but I was usually busy during their normal business hours.) So I called Pacific Bell's repair service and talked to a representative who said he couldn't find anything wrong with the phone line. He suggested that the electrician may not have installed the line correctly and that I should talk to my manager about it. So I talked to my manager, and she said that other residents had similar problems in the past, that it wasn't the electrician's fault, and that I should ask Pacific Bell to send out a repair-person. So I called Pacific Bell back after-hours to request a technician. This time I dealt with their automated support service, which immediately found the problem, determined themselves to be at fault, and had everything fixed the next day.

Score one for automated help. After only thirteen weeks of waiting, I finally had telephone service!

Oh, and although I don't have my own bathroom or kitchen, I do have my own cockroaches. Woo-hoo.

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Classes. This past semester, I took two CS courses: "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" and "Software Engineering." Both are known to be fun, interesting courses... except this semester, of course...

The AI class in past semesters focused on the history of artificial intelligence efforts and involved a lot of game theory. This semester, the professor decided to try a different curriculum that instead focused on probabilistic reasoning and number-crunching. How exciting. Since we had to deal with so much linear algebra, we used Matlab for our programming assignments rather than the more conventional Lisp. Argh. I was really looking forward to using Lisp, too, and I don't like Matlab much...

This semester, our software engineering class was taught by a visiting professor. (The regular professor, incidentally, is one of the founders of Inktomi.) Our project for the semester was to create a variant of the familiar battleships game, which was simple enough. Our first assignment was to write a user manual (10-20 pages), which our group, not really knowing how what our professor wanted or how strict he'd be, did rather poorly on. Our next assignment was to create an analysis document (20-30 pages) that essentially was to describe what we were going to do. Again, we didn't quite understood what was supposed to be covered in the document, and we got another poor grade. Our third assignment was to write a design document (30-40 pages) that was to describe how we were going to program the the project. After that, we finally got to start programming. Once we got past all the document writing, we started doing pretty well, though.

Anyhow. In that class we had a midterm, in two parts, but no final exam. I ended up getting 71 points in the class, which was a C+. My friend had 74 points, which was a B, so that meant that there were only about two points or so per grade subdivision, which was a bit ridiculous. I had previously spent a lot of time significantly revising our user manual, for which I thought we could get at least a little extra credit. So I went to the professor's office hours to talk to him about it. Since all our documents were online, I didn't think I needed to bring the hardcopies with me. Whoops. The professor wouldn't talk to me without the hardcopies, so I crossed campus again and came back with them. He flipped through our old user manual, looked at some comments he recorded on his computer, and promptly denied my request. He wouldn't even look at our revised manual. Man...

So then he asked me what grade I think I should have gotten. I thought a B- would be more reasonable, especially considering the dramatic improvement in our work for the later assignments. He looked at my midterm scores, which were a 57/100 and a 90/100, said that they averaged to about a B-, and since our early project grades were poor, I'd have to get a lower grade--the C+. Of course, this mentality didn't account for the turnaround we made in our project work, and the midterm scores weren't exactly fair either. On the first midterm, I misunderstood a question and didn't get any partial credit. If I had gotten some partial credit, I would have ended up with probably an 80-90 on that exam, which would have been a fairly solid A. Of course, I neglected to bring my exams with me, so I couldn't argue that point. Nuts. And how meaningful is it to extrapolate a grade from the midterm averages when the point-scale is so skewed, anyway?

A few days later I realized that he probably graded us on the same scale as the graduate students who were taking the class, which wasn't exactly fair. But by that time it was too late to dispute grades...

My linear algebra class was the only one I had been enjoying-- and doing well in--all semester... well, until the final. The exam was the day after the final for my artificial intelligence class. Since my grade in the AI class was so dismal, I studied a lot for its exam. Unfortunately, I therefore wasn't very well prepared for my math one, and to make matters worse, my mind was still cluttered with artificial intelligence junk--not at all good on an exam almost entirely of proofs! Sigh...

I couldn't think clearly at all during my math final. I remember one day in lecture I wrote down a question to ask the professor during his office hours, but a few moments after I had written it, I figured out the answer. Of course, when the same question appeared on the exam, I was completely lost. I think I answered only two of the eleven questions correctly...

Oh well. There goes my GPA.

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Computers. Last month I booted up my home computer and was greeted with:

Data error reading drive C. Abort, Retry, Fail?

I performed a surface scan of the hard disk and found 27 MB of bad sectors. Oh joy! I performed another surface scan and found another 2 MB of bad sectors. I performed another surface scan and found yet another 2 MB of bad sectors. At the last count, I think there were over 33 MB of bad sectors scattered through the 1.2 GB HD. So I went out and bought another HD to replace it. I really didn't need a high-capacity drive--I don't use my home computer that much and a 2 GB drive would have been more than sufficient--but I ended up buying a 10 GB drive. (A 1 GB drive was $100-200, and a 10 GB drive was $250...)

After installing the new drive and attempting to boot up, I discovered that the BIOS on my motherboard doesn't recognize drives larger than 8.4 GB and freezes when it boots up. It doesn't use a flash ROM either, so I can't easily update it. After some scrounging around, I found an almost identical motherboard with a different BIOS chip. It turned out that its BIOS also didn't recognize the 10 GB drive, but instead of freezing it treats the drive as an 8.4 GB one instead.

I went to the new Fry's Electronics and bought a new IDE controller card, hoping that would fix the problem, since it's cheaper and easier to install than a new motherboard. The BIOS on the controller is supposed to load before the BIOS on the motherboard and thus enable it to recognize the 10 GB drive properly. Of course, for some reason it doesn't work, and the computer boots as it normally does. Oh well.

Anyhow, so now I'm using the drive as an 8.4 GB drive instead, which isn't really a big deal, since I doubt I'll ever need those extra 2 gigs anytime soon. But now I'll also have to go return that IDE controller, and I'm not eager to deal with Fry's wonderful returns department...

I'm an idiot.

Not that that fact isn't already common knowledge, of course.

I had assignments from all of my classes due last Wednesday. Being irresponsible as usual, I didn't start any of them until Tuesday night. Of course, my math and CS homework turned out to be far more time-intensive than I had thought. It wasn't until 4 or 5 AM Wednesday morning that I finally got to start my EE problem set.

So I worked through the EE problems, went to sleep at around 6 or 7, and woke up for class about two or three hours later. I turned in my EE homework, picked up the solutions to them, and upon looking them over, realized that I had done the completely wrong problems.

After each chapter, my EE textbook has several pages of "exercises," followed by several more pages of "problems." Furthermore, the two sections are numbered independently, and both are listed under the general category of "Problems." Stupid me, I just went to the end of the chapter and started working there, not noticing that I was supposed to be doing "P2.18" instead of "E2.18." It didn't help that I was half-asleep at the time, either.

So I ended up staying up wasting my time for what will likely be no credit. Bleah.

I installed Windows 98 on my laptop yesterday, since I think Win98 has better power management, and who knows, maybe I'll find something to use that infrared port with.

Installing went a lot more smoothly than I thought it would: a few weeks earlier, I put a new HD into my dad's computer to be used as the primary disk. It was a 6 GB drive, and I didn't want to deal with multiple partitions, so I used a Win95 OSR2 boot disk to fdisk and format it under FAT32. So I went and watched television while the thing formatted away and ran the Win98 setup after it was done. The Win98 setup program first ran ScanDisk to inspect the HD before performing the installation, and apparently it didn't like the "compressed drive" and decided to re-fdisk and reformat it. Sigh. Back to watching television. (Incidentally, I was installing the upgrade version, yet the setup program said that it was meant to be run on "new computers" that didn't have pre-formatted drives... (I guess it makes an exception if Win95 is already on it?))

My notebook lacks a CD-ROM drive (heck, it doesn't even have an internal floppy drive), so I copied the install files to it over the network. It also came with Win95 OSR2 pre-installed, so it was possible that it used FAT32. (There's probably a way to tell, but I was too lazy to figure it out.) Luckily, my notebook wasn't using it, and the setup program didn't try to format over itself.

Anyhow, Windows 95 has a battery meter that gives an estimate for the time remaining on the battery. The Win98 battery meter (under its "improved power management" system) seems to just give a percentage, which to me is somewhat meaningless. At least give me a guess for the time, gee! (At least I remember that Win95 estimated the fully-charged battery to last for about two hours, so I can do some math...)

I disabled all the web-view/IE4 shell stuff. But the status bar in Explorer is now divided into three parts anyway: the left part shows how many files are selected, the middle part shows how much disk space they occupy, and the right part shows "My Computer" (or "Internet Zone" or "Local Intranet Zone"), which is absolutely useless. The worst part is that the left and right divisions are defined with a constant width, so as the window is resized, only the middle one changes. Even with a window that's around 400-500 pixels wide, the middle division is shrunk down to almost nothing. Meanwhile there's a nice big block of wasted space to the right of it...

(By the way, I think the whole idea of blurring the distinction between browsing files on your own computer and on somebody else's is a potential security hazard... That would, of course, explain why that right division gets more priority over the middle division, even though the middle one is generally more useful. Of course, there was nothing wrong with the way Win95 handled this in the first place... Keep up that "innovation," Mr. Gates!)

Also, the TweakUI applet that comes with Win98 sucks. They added a few new options (mainly to tweak the new IE4-style features of the shell), but they changed the interface for the worse. For some absolutely crazy reason, instead of spreading multiple tabs over multiple rows (such as Word uses under Tools > Options), they lumped all the tabs in one row, making the user scroll through them one at a time. The new TweakUI is pretty buggy too. The "Create As File" option under the Desktop tab doesn't seem to work, a function that is useful to access Control Panel applets through the Start Menu. (I ended up copying the ones I use under Win95, and they work fine.) The "What's This?" tips also display the wrong help entries for certain items...

Windows 98 also categorizes the Clipboard Viewer and Character Map as System Tools rather than as mere Accessories. The CV and CM being lumped into the same folder as ScanDisk and the Defragmenter? What...? (Yeah, that's really minor, but still kind of nonsensical to me...)

The new "Folder Options..." setting is supposed to allow the View options (ie, viewing with the "Large Icons," "Small Icons," "List," or "Details" modes) for all folders to be set the same, but I can't get it to work. It seems to behave sporadically, just like Windows 95. Ho hum.

Somehow Microsoft also managed to screw up the Network Neighboorhood properties too. I added a new protocol (NetBEUI) as I normally would with Win95: I click the  Add" button, which brings up the "Select Network Component Type" dialog box, prompting me whether I want to install a new client, adapter, protocol, or service. I choose "Protocol," and select Microsoft's NetBEUI. It seems under Windows 98 there is a bug that after clicking the "OK" button, the "Select Network Component Type" dialog box does not immediately disappear. Naturally, I think that I did something wrong, so I select "Protocol" again and continue on. The dialog box still doesn't go away. What do I do? Do I hit "Cancel" and potentially abort the installation? or do I hit "OK" again, go through the process of the selecting NetBEUI again, only to return back to where I started? After spending some time to ponder this, I discovered that the dialog box disappears after a few seconds. Argh. Again, this worked perfectly fine with Windows 95.

Overall? Well, I haven't run too many applications under it yet, so I don't know if Win98 is any faster or slower than Win95. I probably couldn't tell without a stopwatch anyway. I also configured it to be as much like good ol' Win95 as possible, because I don't care for the shell "enhancements." (Let me know when one can customize the titlebars as easily as with an X-Windows manager, like twm...) The only real advantage seems to be that I can now access the infrared port on my notebook, though I haven't any use for it, and if I probably could have just downloaded some Win95 drivers to do that anyway.

I finally got a room last week! Woo-hoo! Not an apartment, really; just a room, so it doesn't have a bathroom or kitchen or anything. There's a small bathroom next door, though, and I can't cook or anything, so that's no big deal. The room's fairly small, and it looked rather dirty, but it's in the middle of getting a new carpet installed, so that could be why. The window opens to an open shaft that runs down the middle of the building, and I happen to be at the very bottom of it. I hope people don't throw trash down there or anything. Oh well. At least I have a place, and the location and rent are good.

I also finished the serial link cable for my TI-85/86. And it works! Huzzah! (Now what am I going to do with it? Hm.) I must be pretty bored, since I made two more (a better-constructed serial one, since the first one was put together rather shoddily and isn't particularly reliable, and a parallel port one which was significantly easier to assemble, especially with the extra room of a 25-pin connector hood).

I'm trying to construct a link cable to hook up my TI-85/86 graphing calculator to the serial port of my PC. So I went to the local Radio Shack yesterday and picked up all the necessary parts, except for the LED, which was out of stock. Of course, Radio Shack has oodles of T1³/₄-sized LEDs in various colors, but they only sell one package of T1-sized LEDs. So I went to another Radio Shack today and picked them up.

I came home and started to assemble the device. I had to fit three resistors, two diodes, and the LED in the confines of a 9-pin serial port connector case. Soldering everything together is a pain (but when isn't it?), with one hand holding the soldering iron and only one other hand to keep two things in place. After a few hours, I got to the point where I only had one diode and the cable to connect, and I thought I was almost done...

Of course, I wouldn't have anything to gripe about if I really were. I then realized that I stupidly mixed up the brown band with the red band on the resistors and switched the two by mistake. To make the situation even more annoying, those were the only two devices I soldered in place decently. So I tried to melt the solder to remove them, which was harder than I thought, since after I connected everything, the heat from the iron got dissipated throughout the assembly.

I finally got the two swapped resistors off and tried to put them in the right way. I don't know how the heck I soldered them to the 9-pin connector the first time, since I couldn't get them to stay in place the second time around.

In the process of trying to get the resistors back in place, I got a drop of solder stuck in the exact center of the 9 pins, and it connected three of them together. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggh....

I tried to get the solder out of the 9-pin connector, but I can't. The iron doesn't fit too well between the pins, and it would be hard to get all the residue out anyway...

Anyway, so now I have to go back to Radio Shack to get a new 9-pin connector and start over from scratch, as the first connector is completely ruined. Man...

I bought the Adobe Photoshop 5 (for Windows) upgrade a few days ago and installed it today. By default, Photoshop 5 installs to a completely different directory than Photoshop 4 and doesn't automatically uninstall the previous version, even though it is an upgrade version, and the first thing it does is check the hard disk for prior installations. I didn't think it wise to install APS5 and then uninstall APS4 afterward, in case the uninstall program removed some file necessary for APS5 to function. I also didn't want both versions existing on my computer simultaneously, though in retrospect, perhaps that would have been a better choice...

So I uninstalled Photoshop 4 first, along with all the associated plug-ins. Hey, if I was going to install a new version of Photoshop--in a completely different directory no less--I might as well reinstall all the plug-ins too.

After all that, I finally installed the new version of Photoshop along with all my old plug-ins. Of course, then I find out that APS5 has a few quirks...

First off, when I minimize the application and restore it, all the image windows lose their original locations and become aligned at the top of the screen. That's rather annoying. Secondly, the "new and improved" type tool doesn't seem to allow bold or italic styles to be applied to fonts without a separate file for style. So the pseudo-italics/boldface of APS4 and almost every other application in that situation isn't quite the same as the real thing, but eliminate the option completely? Gee. I went to the Adobe User Forums to see if other people had the same problems and if there were fixes. There I found out that although APS4 kerned perfectly fine, APS5 does not; that APS5 is less stable and crashes more than APS4; that Painter 5 won't read .PSD files created by Photoshop 5; ...

Sigh. I want to reinstall version 4 until Adobe releases a patch, but the idea of having to uninstall and reinstall everything all over again (and yet again when the patch is released...) doesn't seem very appealing...

Man, I haven't touched my web site for over two months...? Yikes. A synopsis of that time:

My whole affair with housing has turned out a mess. My friend got a contract for a Unit 1 double (which is what I wanted), but later he decided to live in another building. Since he's the RCC (Residential Computer Consultant), he's an employee of Housing and Dining Services and can live wherever he wants. So we thought that maybe I could get his contract. Well, H&DS said that since he's an employee, technically his contract is their property, so he can't give it to whomever he wants. Nuts.

But I reapplied, so maybe I would get a contract anyway. So I waited...

This year, H&DS also started a policy not allowing buying/selling/trading of dorm contracts after April 20th. (In previous years buying/selling could happen anytime throughout the year.) After that date, anybody who would want to move out of the dorms would have to give up their contract to the next person on the waiting list. (Which in some sense is kind of fair, except why allow buying/selling of contracts at all?)

Compounding the situation even more is that I was not on the waiting list for a Unit 1 room, since I reapplied instead, and we're not allowed to do both. Since reapplying worked for me last year, I went that route again...

April 19th rolled around, and I still hadn't received any word about my reapplication for housing. I finally called H&DS (it's kind of difficult for me to contact them since I'm in class most of the time when they're open). They told me that since so many more people accepted their contracts this year than last, they didn't have a second round of housing assignments after all. They also told me that I was supposed to get a letter in the mail about it, which I naturally didn't get. At that point, of course, it was pretty late to go looking for people to sell me a contract...

Maybe H&DS felt guilty about me not receiving the letter regarding my housing reapplication, since a week later they sent me two copies. Gee, thanks.

Since I reapplied for a housing contract, I couldn't accept the original Bowles contract they gave me, so now I have nowhere to live next year. I could commute, I suppose, though I've had enough of taking the BART here and back every day after summer school. And there are obvious advantages to living near campus, of course. But the idea of looking for an apartment (by myself, no less) is pretty loathsome too. It wouldn't be so bad if I were going to room with someone, but all my friends are going to be in the dorms or already have apartments. Living in an apartment probably will also mean having to go back to using a modem (and they finally (a year late) upgraded the Internet connection in our dorm too!). Supposedly TCI is planning on installing cable modems in Berkeley by August, but I'll believe it when I see it.

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Anyway. I can only recall one event this semester in which things actually worked out well for me:

I was supposed to have the final exam for my materials science course from 12:30 to 3:30 PM on Tuesday the 19th. It was a fully open-book, open-notes, bring-whatever-reference-materials-you-want exam. I meant to study for it several days before, but I kept putting it all off. By Tuesday morning, I hadn't really studied at all and was planning on looking up whatever I needed to know during the exam. The difficult part would be to look up the necessarily information while still having enough time to finish the exam, but I figured that I could do it.

Around 11:50 AM or so, the entire campus loses electrical power. Even the emergency power doesn't work. But the maintenance crews think that they can restore power by 1:30, so everybody with an afternoon final is instructed to show to their exam location. My exam is in a room huge lecture room that has no windows; it's almost pitch black in there, so there's absolutely no way we can take our exam without electricity. Our professor says that we'll wait an hour, and if power is restored, the exam will just run overtime. If not, he'd decide what to do then. We all wait, trying to get some last-minute cramming done in the meantime. So 1:30 passes, and the power is still off. Our professor says that since the exam consists of six problems, each problem should take an average of 30 minutes, and for every half-hour the power's out, he'll take a problem off the test. Finally, at 2:00, the power comes back on, and we now have a four problem exam. We start working on it until, at 2:10, the power goes out again. By this point, the professor is frustrated and sick of the whole situation and decides to make the exam a take-home final. Furthermore, we're not even required to finish it under testing conditions; we can finish it "at our leisure" and hence aren't restricted to the three hour time limit, and the professor admitted that he couldn't--and therefore wouldn't--prevent us from conferring with other students.

Of course, the mean of the exam will be ridiculously high, so the professor added that anybody who answers all the questions essentially correct will be guaranteed at least a B in the course; those who already had A's going into the exam will essentially be guaranteed an A. So that worked out pretty well for me, since I already had an A, and the hardest part for me would have been meeting the time limit, which became non-existent. Sweet.

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Oh, and I managed to get into the College of Engineering under the EECS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) major.

Last August I tried to figure out how to use System Policies and User Profiles for Windows 95 on my home computer. I didn't have any success, and yesterday, being tired of having to type "\Windows\Profiles\James\Desktop" all the time at command prompts, I finally decided to remove them from my computer and to use global preferences again.

When I switch back to using global settings, all Windows does is is create new Desktop, Start Menu, and Recent folders in the Windows directory. (It forgets to recreate the NetHood folder...) Of course, what the OS probably should do is prompt the user which profile was the primary one that should be used for the global settings. Since it doesn't, I then have to move everything from my old Desktop, Start Menu, and NetHood folders to the new ones. What's worse, it doesn't copy any of the registry data in the old user.dat registry file, so now a bunch of my programs need to be reconfigured. (I would think that with registry keys such as "HKEY_USERS" and "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" that all the user information would be stored in a global registry file rather than using separate files...)

(ICQ, incidentally, is probably the most annoying of the programs I need to reconfigure, since I need to disable all those annoying help dialogs again. They have a "Reactivate Help Dialogs" option; why no "Deactivate..."?)

On luck, or more appropriately, the lack of it:

A few weeks ago I got my dorm contract for next year. Once again, I got a contract for a Bowles quad. And the dorm I'm presently in finally got connected to the Berkeley backbone through a 100 Mbps fiber-optic cable. Sounds like last year all over again...

Somebody in the housing department probably hates me or something. Anyway, I again reapplied for a new contract, but reportedly 800 more people applied for housing this year than last year, so my prospects for getting a contract I want look pretty slim...

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On the unholy union between mail programs and web browsers:

Okay, normally I don't use Netscape for e-mail, but I am too lazy to install a separate e-mail client on my home computer, so I use what's available. And Netscape Mail isn't terribly bad, so it suffices...

... except when one is in the middle of writing an e-mail message, does some web browsing, and crashes the web browser, bringing all its components, mail client and all, tumbling down with it.

And Microsoft wants to integrate web browsers with the operating system...?

Last week some ninny polled our UCLink e-mail server for what seemed to be all the e-mail addresses from J through K and then mass-mailed all the ones owned by people with Chinese surnames.

Naturally, this annoys a good number of people, especially since none of us have ever asked to be put on this mailing list in the first place. So one person replies, asking to be removed from it. But he doesn't just reply to the author of the junk message; he uses the "reply to all" command in his e-mail software and thereby sends his complaint to the other 540 or so of us on the list.

Naturally, this annoys a good number of the good number of people. Now everybody is receiving mail requesting to be removed from the mailing list. Other people, not wanting to receive any more mail of the sort, also request to be removed. But they also reply to everyone on the list...

Naturally, this then cascades into a week of chaos. Everyone keeps replying to everyone else, asking to be removed from the mailing list. But these mass-mailings annoy everyone else and make them believe that there really is some mailing list, prompting them to reply too.

Of course, in reality there is no mailing list, and all the messages just consist of people replying to one another with complaints. Even after several people explain the situation to the ignorant bunch and tell them all to stop replying, no one shuts up.

Anyway, I got fed up with this a few days ago and mass-mailed all of them a moderately long diatribe trying to explain to everyone in somewhat simple terms the whole situation. Of course, even though I explicitly asked everyone not to reply to it, I received three or four responses anyway. Good thing I moved all the other e-mail addresses to the BCC field...

Thank goodness all that nonsense is over now.

And this, by the way, should dispel the common misconceptions that Asian people are intelligent and are competent with computer software.

My home computer (as opposed to the one I have in my dorm) is a P100 with a 3.5" and 5.25" inch floppy drives, an old single-speed SCSI CD-ROM drive, and two hard drives, all enclosed in a tower case.

I don't have a SCSI card installed in it anymore (the one I had was really, really old), so the CD-ROM drive isn't hooked up to anything, just filling up the drive bay. The 5.25" floppy drive is essentially doing the same thing. So for the heck of it, I decide to remove both drives.

Anyway. So I go to Fry's Electronics to buy some slats to cover the empty drive bays. Simple, right? I buy some 5.25" slats for $1 each (which IMO is pretty expensive for some cheap piece of plastic), go home, stick them into my empty drive bays, and they turn out to be slightly too small.

What the heck?

Apparently the outer ridges on these slats aren't big enough to prevent the slat from falling into the case once the tabs are inside. So I ended up using the slats that had been covering my HDs for the empty bays (and these are good, old-fashioned, quality plastic slats that are maybe even worth a whole dollar) and using the cheap-o Fry's ones in front of my HDs instead. At least with the HDs in the way, they won't fall through. They're pretty wobbly though.

Yeah, I probably should have just left the drives in the case.

As I'm trying to eat dinner, I feel something stuck between my teeth. So I reach into the back of my mouth and tug on it. It doesn't come out, so I tug a bit more, and then I realize it's probably a stitch... Augh.

I got my wisdom teeth removed this morning. How exciting. How much more weight will I lose living off applesauce and yogurt for the next few days?