Rajin’s Blog

My main computer is currently suffering from some issues. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s been suffering for some months now. But it wasn’t until the last couple of days that it became completely un-usable.

At almost any point in time, pixels can been seen going across the screen. Pixels that shouldn’t be there. When I first start it up, the pixels are white. They seem to form in thick, non-solid, horizontal lines. Once Ubuntu had loaded, the pixels went from being white to random colours. This lead me to believe that it was my graphics card that was the issue.

Then over time, it got a little bit worse. The pixels were still there, but whenever there was text while booting, it would sometimes change the colour of individual letters. A little while later it was capitalizing them. And shortly after, it was changing them completely. By this point in time, I could no longer boot into Ubuntu. It would work until I got to the point where there should have been a login screen. Instead I was just getting a black screen, the monitors went into their power saving mode. So I decided to run a ram test.

This ram test isn’t turning out good. The text is all garbled, but I can make out most of the important stuff. Thankfully, I don’t have to be able to read text to be able to say that I probably need new ram. There’s alot of red, and if I assume that what it’s telling me is correct (which it might not be), then I have over 700 MB of ram that’s failed… That means that both my sticks of 512MB ram are gone.

I went downtown to pick some up, if I could find some for a reasonable price. It was going to cost my $60 for a 512MB stick, and $105 for a 1GB stick. This is a bit much for my tastes.

Tomorrow I’ll show my classmates some pictures of what my desktop is doing, and see what they think. Considering the prices of hardware from any store in my city, I’ll have to order some over the internet. I figure that it’ll probably take at least 2 weeks for me to get what I need. And then I’ll just have to hope that what I get fixes my problem.

Last time I posted, I was almost finished writing midterms. Now I’ve finished finals for the term. To clear up that thing with the stats midterm rewrite, I did it, and it turned out to be a waste of time. I didn’t pass the class (which sucked, and was early in the morning). Thankfully though, I only need the class to get my degree, it’s not a pre-requisite for any other class. I also managed to pass the other 4 classes I have (2 Computer Sciences, Chemistry, and Calculus 4). I didn’t do as well overall as I would have liked. But I’ve freed up more time this term.

Unfortunately, I’ve still got to be at class for 8 AM every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thursday is an hour or so later, and the best part is that I get Tuesday off (only time will tell what that extra time goes towards). I also quit my job which frees up my weekend.

Now for the bad news. Yesterday, I murdered my car. It was a 1996 Dodge Plymouth Neon (Yes, it actually says Dodge Plymouth). I’ve been driving it for around 2 years now. I can’t tell you for sure what happened, but I believe that the engine is gone. This means that I will need a new car. This also means that I’m going to be spending a pretty penny (more than $20) on getting a new one.

Some okay news, is that I’ve got a little bit of work done on my other car. It’s a 1957 Oldsmobile 98 Holiday Coupe that I’m restoring. It’s currently got 5 main colours. Black, White, Red, Rust, and Chrome (there’s enough chrome on the car for it to be considered a colour). The engine that I’m restoring is a 371 inches^3 or around 6.1 Litres. According to the specs, it’ll put out around 300 hp, and 400 ft-lb for torque.
I recently bolted the heads back onto the block, and the driver’s side head is all set. The passenger side still needs to be tightened, and the rocker assembly still needs to be installed. Unfortunately, we should have bolted the exhaust manifolds onto the heads before putting the heads on the block. This has created one additional headache, and the exhaust manifolds go under the heads, which is hard to get at because of space. The solution that was used, was to take the motor off the front motor mount, then use an engine hoist to lift the front of the block up enough to get the exhaust manifolds on.

That’s more or less been my life for the last month or so.

Happy New Year!

I wrote 2 more midterms this week. Both of them in Computer Science. They both felt overly easy, which worries me. That means that I probably messed up a few things pretty bad. I also got my Statistics midterm bad… it didn’t go over too well. Thankfully since almost half the class failed, the prof is letting us do something like a rewrite. Basically, we redo the midterm at home, and treat it like a homework assignment. They we give it to him, he’ll mark it, and then that mark will get weighted with the midterm mark. And for the part that I’m happiest about, my last midterm of the year is next week. It’s in Chemistry, so it could either go fine, or go bad. But either way, I won’t have anymore midterms. I’ll just have a few assignments, and a couple of weeks to prepare for finals.

You’ll probably only get this if you’ve done a year or two of calculus.

Me and my fellow computer science students were discussing how to approach some work in one of our labs. After a few minutes, the discussion derailed, and one person goes “We’ve gone off on a tangent, and need to get back on track if we ever hope to finish this lab”. One person decides to speak up, and goes into this long winded idea about how we were never off on a tangent. We were off on a normal. His reasoning was that in order for a discussion to go off on a tangent, the discussion has to be a curve. That implies that the conversation wasn’t on track to begin with. In order for the discussion to be truly off track, it has to be orthogonal, which would make it a normal, and not a tangent.

Long story short, we didn’t get as much accomplished in the lab as we’d originally hoped.

For the last week or so, I’ve studied like I’ve never studied before. I somehow managed to run through 3 chapters of calculus 3 in that time. Better yet, I actually felt like I understood it. Even though I spent 7 hours yesterday working on the last chapter, I still felt like I understood what was happening.

3 Dimensional Vectors - check
Dot and Cross Product - check
Equation of a Line and Plane - check
Arc Length - check
Tangent Vectors - check
Normal and Binormal Vectors - check
Partial Derivatives - check
Directional Derivatives - check
Gradient Vectors - check
Chain Rule - not so much
Tangent Planes - check

Unfortunately, I wasn’t as prepared as I’d thought that I was. Sure, I didn’t really know the chain rule for it. But I understood everything else. Where did I go wrong then? Was the midterm just beyond my abilities? Was there something that I’d missed? After talking to other people, it sounds like everyone struggled. One guy said what he was thinking during the exam, “If you made it to calculus 3, you’re incredibly smart, and I’m honoured to be failing this midterm with all 100 of you”.

Hopefully it went better than I think…

Props to Metziel for setting this up for me ^^

For those of you who don’t know me, which I suspect is quite a lot, I’m currently the programmer for Chozo Tech. I also have another programming project currently underway called Artillery. It’s a 2D RPG that is being programmed in C++. Aside from programming, I take Jiu-Jitsu in my free time, and am also working on restoring a 1957 Oldsmobile 98.

I’m currently a second year student at UBC-O, and am majoring in Computer Science. Unfortunately, classwork and such does suck up a fair amount of my free time.

I currently plan on using this to detail what is happening with my programming, school, and whatever else I feel like at that moment.