Highlights of my past semester:

I had been hoping that my computer graphics class would be fun. As usually happens with classes I look forward to, it turned out to be a huge disappointment.

The main problem with the class was that it was so poorly organized. The professor didn't post a syllabus until the third week or so; even then, it was incomplete and was never updated. Not even the professor knew when and where the exams were.

Even worse, the teaching assistants were horrible. Memorable moments from one of them:

• During his first discussion section, he spent the time discussing English and French words that contained the 11 most common letters of the alphabet.
• About fifteen minutes before the end of class, he said, "The professor wanted me to talk to you guys about convolution and filtering... but you don't want to hear about that, do you?" So he then continued talking about more random, completely irrelevant things.
• "Don't ask me anything about programming, because I don't know anything about graphics programming."
• When asked why he is even a TA, he responded: "Well, I wanted to learn about graphics, but I didn't want to have to do all the programming..."

That certainly was encouraging.

The exams also had loaded questions such as:

• True/False
  There are exactly three vanishing points in perspective projection.
• True/False
  In perspective projection, two parallel lines always meet at a vanishing point.

For the question on vanishing points, I put true, figuring that there's one for each dimension. It turns out that the answer was false: there are three principal vanishing points, but there are actually an infinite number of other ones. Those other vanishing points, of course, can each be decomposed and expressed with the three principal ones. (Naturally, the lecture notes never made any kind of distinction between principal ones and the rest...)

For the question on perspective projection, I put false and gave an example of two parallel, horizontal lines. Of course, the answer was actually true, since horizontal lines "meet" an infinite distance away. Right.

---

My psychology class was an interesting experience. Grades in the class were based solely on the three midterms and the final; we didn't have to do any homework assignments or projects.

Since there was no homework, I hadn't been motivated to keep up with class. By the time of the first midterm, I hadn't done any of the reading and didn't know the material very well, so I slept in and skipped the exam.

Yes, I skipped it. Our professor had a really flexible grading system that gave everyone the option of skipping any number of midterms in exchange for having the final exam worth more.

A few weeks later, we had our second midterm. Unfortunately, I had a major paper for another class due on the day of the psych exam. I was up all night working on the paper and didn't study, so I skipped the second midterm too.

By this time, I had gotten into the unfortunate habit of skipping my psychology class to get extra sleep. After three or four weeks of missing class, I had no idea what we were covering, and I thought that it would be wise to attend at least one lecture before the third midterm. So I finally made it to lecture on November 24th. I got there, and I saw that everyone was frantically going through their notes and the textbook. And then I noticed that everyone had a ScanTron form out...

Uh-oh. I was completely unprepared; I thought that the midterm was following week. Apparently I had misread the date of the exam as November 29th instead of the 24th. Whoops.

Sigh. I left immediately, of course, and so now I had skipped all three midterms, making the final worth 100% of my grade. Furthermore, I hadn't read any of the textbook and had missed about half of the lectures. Yikes!

Due to projects and finals in other classes, I didn't start studying for my psych final until the night before. Even though I stayed up all night just going through the lecture notes, I managed to show up half-an-hour late to the exam that would completely determine my grade. Sigh...

My exam was in Hearst Gym at 8 AM. I left my place at around 7:55 and got to the gym at 8. There was a man at the entrance who stopped me before I went in:

"Are you here for a final?" he asked me.

"Yes," I replied.

"It's not here."

"What?!"

Right then a student left the building and said the finals were moved to the Haas Business School, on the other side of campus. So I followed her. I asked her if she was in Psych 2, and she said her final was for BA10 instead, but that my final would probably be somewhere in Haas too. Stupidly, I went all the way to Haas but couldn't find any signs or information about where my final was. Great.

I went back across campus to the gym, hoping that maybe there was a sign that told me specifically where to go. So I got back, went inside, and talked to an unfriendly administrative person who wouldn't help me at all:

"You should check the final exam locations a day in advance," she retorted.

"I checked this morning."

"No, you didn't."

As I left the gym the second time, it finally occurred to me that I was in the completely wrong place. I wasn't at Hearst Gym, I was at Harmon Gym. (Argh, two gyms that start with H!) To make it even more confusing: I had a few finals in Harmon Gym a few years ago, so I assumed my psych final was in the same place. Furthermore, Harmon Gym currently is being renovated and is now known as the Haas Pavilion, and so it no longer says "Harmon" in big, engraved letters on the side of the building. Sigh.

By the time I finally reached the correct location, I was about 30 minutes late. Luckily, the exam turned out to be really short and fairly easy, so I didn't need the extra time.

I ended up with a B+ in a class; not great, but not bad for one night of cramming for the whole semester. Phew!

I'm in Berkeley, and I need to get something that I packed away. So I open up the box, and what do I see?

A ROACH.

I try to kill it, but it scurries away. I think it escaped underneath a flap at the bottom of the box, which, unfortunately for me, is glued down and inaccessible.

Rats... (or roaches...)

Now I am really worried that when I eventually move out of this dump, I'm going to inadvertantly bring a few home with me.

Since everyone seems to be getting such a big kick out of by my roach problems, I started a roach death log.

Most of the nymph sightings have been in the bathroom, but occasionally I see an adult straying into my room, crawling all over my stuff. And I don't even store any food in my room! What's up with that?

(There are probably lots of nymphs in my room too, but since my carpet is very inconveniently black, and the lighting is really poor, it's hard to notice any...)

I'm in Berkeley, supposed to be writing a paper or studying for my final. I go to the bathroom (which is next door) and see about seven or eight roaches crawling around the inside of the toilet. I see three or four more in various other places around the bathroom, in the tub, along the walls, on the door...

GROSS.

I've never seen so many simultaneously before. It's really disturbing.

The other day I saw one crawling on top of my laser printer. I tried to grab it with some tissue paper, but it fell in. I opened up the printer but couldn't find it, and I didn't see it crawl out. I hope I'm not greeted with a nice, pleasant burning smell the next time I print something...

I finally looked up pictures on the web. These things are definitely roaches. I also started reading information about the disgusting little pests, which creeped me out even more.

For example: I discovered that cockroach feces can harbor Salmonella for several years.

GROSS.

I want to go home.

More hardware problems:

Last January I purchased an ATI All-in-Wonder Pro graphics card with 8 MB of RAM to replace my ATI Graphics Xpression with 2 MB of RAM. Installation turned out to be nightmare.

The setup program kept freezing (though luckily it didn't lock up the whole computer). After more than hour or so, I finally figured out that my old ATI graphics card was possibly confusing the setup program. I had never replaced a video card before, so I stupidly had removed the card before removing the driver, assuming that when I booted up, there'd be a typical yellow exclamation point next to it in the Device Manager. Apparently, however, when Windows boots up with a different video card, it immediately reports "Incorrect display settings" and doesn't list the old video driver in the Device Manager. To make matters even more frustrating, my old video drivers had an uninstall option under Windows' Add/Remove Programs applet, but they wouldn't uninstall unless they were already running. They weren't running, of course, since I had removed the old video card...

I booted into Safe Mode (the first time in many months), found my old video card drivers listed in the Device Manager there and removed them without a hitch. Everything installed normally after that.

---

I brought my old graphics card home to replace a Cirrus Logic card with 1 MB of RAM. This time I booted up my home computer and uninstalled the Cirrus Logic drivers before replacing the card.

After I plugged in my ATI Graphics Xpression, however, my home computer froze as it tried to load Windows. Safe Mode worked, but turned out not to help the situation any. I added the Cirrus Logic card back and tried booting again. Windows booted, detected both video cards, and installed their drivers. Unfortunately, the Cirrus Logic card was designated to be the primary card, so I hadn't really accomplished anything.

I went to the Device Manager, removed the Cirrus Logic drivers, shut down the machine, and took out the card. At least now that Windows had the ATI drivers loaded, I figured maybe it'd boot normally.

Win98 actually booted. But the video came out all garbled, similar to what happens when an incompatible resolution or refresh rate is selected. Even worse, Safe Mode booted into the same garbled mess.

I tried other configurations, such as having both video cards installed but with the ATI card as the primary one, with no success. I was about to give up...

There shouldn't have been anything wrong with the ATI card, since it had been working fine in my school computer, but I decided to run a diagnostic program anyway. I'm not really sure why I did it, but instead of rebooting into a DOS prompt, I opened a full-screen DOS window. I ran ATI's DOS diagnostic utilities, and everything seemed to be working fine. But when I quit the DOS prompt, Win98 was displaying normally!

Well, at least I had a workaround. All I had to do was go into DOS after loading Win98 and toggle full-screen mode.

I had already gone to ATI's web site several hours before looking for relevant information without much luck. But I decided to check again in case I had missed anything before. I tried dialing out, but all of a sudden Windows couldn't seem to communicate with my modem.

I had a Wacom tablet installed in this computer, but I hadn't been loading its device driver through the whole ordeal. Since my tablet was using COM2 and my modem was on COM4, however, I thought perhaps by not loading the Wacom driver the shared IRQ was somehow affected.

So I loaded tablet drivers, rebooted, and Win98 booted with no scrambled video.

Okay, this was really weird. But my modem still wasn't working, and working graphics card or not, the situation wasn't acceptable...

I figured I'd try changing the jumper on the modem to COM3, so I turned everything off and took out the modem. The modem had a PnP setting, which I had completely forgotten about. I had tried using it before but couldn't get it working. Since I had already wasted my evening due to hardware problems, I decided to try it again. I set the modem to PnP mode, put it in, and everything worked fine; Windows booted normally, everything displayed properly, and the tablet drivers no longer seemed to affect anything.

Truly bizarre. I don't even think I could make stuff like this up.

---

My problems with the All-in-Wonder Pro, however, weren't over yet. A few weeks ago, I went to the ATI web site and noticed that they had posted a new driver for the card. Hoping that it fixed an extremely annoying font-smoothing bug, I downloaded it and installed it.

It did seem to fix the font-smoothing bug, so I thought everything was fine. A few days later, however, I tried to run the ATI Player to watch television, and I was greeted with an error message claiming that my screen resolution, bit-depth, or refresh rate was too high and that it couldn't get a television signal.

Uh-oh.

Okay, I thought, this wasn't a big problem. I remembered reading that the ATI Player was supposed to be installed after installing the driver (even though there was not a new version of the player), so I tried reinstalling the player. Not only did the problem not go away, but the installation deleted all my configuration files, containing my channel and display settings. Sigh.

After spending an hour uninstalling and reinstalling the new driver and the player without any luck, I decided to go back to using the old driver. I ended up spending another hour trying to figure out how I installed it properly before.

Anyhow, next time I even think about installing a new video driver, I think I'll completely backup my registry, my system directory, and my ATI directory first.

---

Someone's smoke detector in a room above mine has been in need of a new battery for the past month or so and has been beeping shrilly every couple of minutes. It is, needless to say, extremely annoying. Whoever designed the smoke detector in its current incarnation needs a good kick in the head. First, since this thing has been beeping incessantly for around a month, the battery obviously has plenty of power left. Second, there are less annoying and obtrusive alternatives to beeping. Didn't old smoke detectors have LEDs that were lit when the battery was fresh? What was wrong with those? Third, couldn't someone design a smoke detector that uses an external power source, so it only uses the battery when necessary? Fourth, even when the thing is beeping, it's not particularly obvious where it's coming from. And since it doesn't beep continuously, trying to pinpoint the exact location involves a lot of waiting around...

I tried to figure out what room the beeping was coming from, but either the acoustics in my building happen to be really weird, or there are multiple smoke detectors in my building that need new batteries. Sigh. I guess I'll have to put up with it until those batteries die completely.

I bought a 5 GB IDE HD last spring for my computer at school. After I installed it, my CD-ROM drive stopped working. It was the weirdest problem: when I attached the IDE cable to the CD-ROM drive, my hard drives apparently wouldn't get any power and thus wouldn't boot; when I detached the IDE cable from the CD-ROM drive, the hard drives would boot fine, but of course, I then couldn't access CDs.

Anyhow, I spent probably around nine months without a functioning CD-ROM drive. (It's a good thing I never needed to install software during that period, though it was nonetheless annoying not being able to access CDs.) A few weeks ago, I replaced the IDE cable to the CD-ROM drive and everything started working. Sigh. All that frustration over a faulty cable...

Speaking of cable: @home was supposed to have cable modem service in Berkeley starting this month, but I called them today and apparently they might not have it until March. (And then again, they were supposed to have it last August...) Three more months (at least) of being on a normal modem. Sigh.

On the topic of time (sort of): I'm fairly annoyed by all the media hype that started after New Year's Day about the "end of the century" and the "end of the millennium." The last day of this millennium is not December 31, 1999, it's December 31, 2000. The new century and the new millennium don't start until the year 2001...