Friday, January 21, 2005
Well, it looks like I'm consistently busy enough this quarter to only blog on the weekends. How lame. Oh well. It was an interesting week. It culminated in me doing really crappy on my physics midterm today. I think I wrote down one of the equations incorrectly in my notes, because my numbers seemed way off. Sigh. Oh well, they do drop the lowest midterm. I was just hoping I could only take two....
Monday night I was very restless. I stayed up late talking with Chad, and got very worked-up/invigorated by it. I tossed and turned, finally getting a total of three hours of sleep. Tuesday night, I was feeling kinda lazy, so in between finishing up my physics homework, I watched Stargate. That helped a bit. But right as I'm about to finish my CSE assignment and turn it in (I thought I had just a little bit left), internet explorer crashed. No biggie, but some other stuff didn't work right, so I rebooted (which I usually try to
<Fire alarm just went off - but no one's here but me, and I'm not cooking anything. Okay, it's not our smoke detector, but the building-wide fire alarm. Nothing seems burning.... I gather up phone, wallet, keys, mp3 player, all the essentials.>
<Two fire trucks came and turned off the alarm. They looked around, couldn't see what caused it, so they let us back in and left (half an hour after it went off. Quite fun.>
do as infrequently as possible). When windows comes back up to start it says: "Cannot find file: \Windows\System32\Config\System Windows cannot start." Okay, this had me a little worried, I had no idea what this file was. I ran scandisk, which took about half an hour, only to forget the flag that makes it fix the errors, which took another hour or so to run with. Still no luck. If it's only a Windows file, at least I know all my data is intact. Hardly a hard disk failure (that would upset me). I tried using the repair console and grabbing the file from the Windows installation cd, but I could not find it ther. So, luckily I have this linux live cd (Ubuntu), I pop that in, hoping I can find it on the cd. But it can't read my second cd drive, and I can't take the cd out to put in the Windows cd. Great. Maybe online has something. Nope. Can't connect to the internet. It freezes when it tries. Okay, restart and try again. Same problem. So, I have Linux not working, and Windows not working. What to do? I figure maybe I can reinstall Windows and that could fix it. I go to reinstall it, but realize I probably don't want to reinstall over my existing installation, I'd lose a lot of good stuff, at the very least system settings. Fortunatly I remember I have another partition that has just been sitting here this whole time. So I installed Windows to that. A little over an hour later, I was up in this new Windows and googled for the error, finding a few results. First one's a forum post: "This problem cannot be fixed. You're screwed." Glad I kept reading. The other posts and search results proved more helpful, pointing to a microsoft knowledgebase article. It says the file is part of the system registry. That makes sense - Windows makes several thousand registry references just on bootup, so if it's missing a file called "SYSTEM" that's probably a big deal. It suggested I grab the restore point backup of the file - smart idea. Only one problem, the NTFS drive my backups were on are on a different partition, and since the restore folder is a system folder, this new version of Windows didn't have security clearance. Fortuantely, it magically granted it when I used explorer instead of typing in the folder name (weird, huh?). So I grab the file, overwrite the lost version, and reboot, making sure to boot into the original version of Windows. Yay! It boots up! A boot.ini edit, system restore, and reformatting of previous temp drive later, everything's back to normal. Only one problem - it's now 0300, and I'm already runing on fumes, and I have to get up early for class early the next morning, and I still have that last part of my homework to finish. Fortunately, I had emailed what I had to my professor and TA when I first got into the older version of Windows, hoping they would be a little understanding and grant me a little more time. Thank you Ashish!
Wednesday: woke up feeling really good thanks to a dream the night before. I dreamt I had a kitty! It was a pretty striped orange kitty. I think I was back at my parent's house, and they had a three black and white cats that I got to play with too. Yay for kitties! Sigh, I want a cat so badly. Sure, I may be alergic to them, but... kitties! Isn't that the answer that makes everything okay?
Found some really cool links today:
I guess we really are different
Can you imagine it? New study finds it's stupid to commit suicide!
Slashdot had a link to this speech. It has some pretty good advice for high school students. I realize those reading this are probably out of high school, but still, it is good advice. I was pleased to find that a lot of how I did things in high school were mentioned in it as good approaches. Of course, I didn't treat it like my day job (unless you count Diablo as my hobby, which you shouldn't).
If you have a super-spleen, you might be able to be like Wolverine! And no, Wolverine's mutant ability is not his adamantium skeleton, it is his healing factor.
"Hey, bub, I'm not finished with you yet." - Wolverine, countless times
Monday night I was very restless. I stayed up late talking with Chad, and got very worked-up/invigorated by it. I tossed and turned, finally getting a total of three hours of sleep. Tuesday night, I was feeling kinda lazy, so in between finishing up my physics homework, I watched Stargate. That helped a bit. But right as I'm about to finish my CSE assignment and turn it in (I thought I had just a little bit left), internet explorer crashed. No biggie, but some other stuff didn't work right, so I rebooted (which I usually try to
<Fire alarm just went off - but no one's here but me, and I'm not cooking anything. Okay, it's not our smoke detector, but the building-wide fire alarm. Nothing seems burning.... I gather up phone, wallet, keys, mp3 player, all the essentials.>
<Two fire trucks came and turned off the alarm. They looked around, couldn't see what caused it, so they let us back in and left (half an hour after it went off. Quite fun.>
do as infrequently as possible). When windows comes back up to start it says: "Cannot find file: \Windows\System32\Config\System Windows cannot start." Okay, this had me a little worried, I had no idea what this file was. I ran scandisk, which took about half an hour, only to forget the flag that makes it fix the errors, which took another hour or so to run with. Still no luck. If it's only a Windows file, at least I know all my data is intact. Hardly a hard disk failure (that would upset me). I tried using the repair console and grabbing the file from the Windows installation cd, but I could not find it ther. So, luckily I have this linux live cd (Ubuntu), I pop that in, hoping I can find it on the cd. But it can't read my second cd drive, and I can't take the cd out to put in the Windows cd. Great. Maybe online has something. Nope. Can't connect to the internet. It freezes when it tries. Okay, restart and try again. Same problem. So, I have Linux not working, and Windows not working. What to do? I figure maybe I can reinstall Windows and that could fix it. I go to reinstall it, but realize I probably don't want to reinstall over my existing installation, I'd lose a lot of good stuff, at the very least system settings. Fortunatly I remember I have another partition that has just been sitting here this whole time. So I installed Windows to that. A little over an hour later, I was up in this new Windows and googled for the error, finding a few results. First one's a forum post: "This problem cannot be fixed. You're screwed." Glad I kept reading. The other posts and search results proved more helpful, pointing to a microsoft knowledgebase article. It says the file is part of the system registry. That makes sense - Windows makes several thousand registry references just on bootup, so if it's missing a file called "SYSTEM" that's probably a big deal. It suggested I grab the restore point backup of the file - smart idea. Only one problem, the NTFS drive my backups were on are on a different partition, and since the restore folder is a system folder, this new version of Windows didn't have security clearance. Fortuantely, it magically granted it when I used explorer instead of typing in the folder name (weird, huh?). So I grab the file, overwrite the lost version, and reboot, making sure to boot into the original version of Windows. Yay! It boots up! A boot.ini edit, system restore, and reformatting of previous temp drive later, everything's back to normal. Only one problem - it's now 0300, and I'm already runing on fumes, and I have to get up early for class early the next morning, and I still have that last part of my homework to finish. Fortunately, I had emailed what I had to my professor and TA when I first got into the older version of Windows, hoping they would be a little understanding and grant me a little more time. Thank you Ashish!
Wednesday: woke up feeling really good thanks to a dream the night before. I dreamt I had a kitty! It was a pretty striped orange kitty. I think I was back at my parent's house, and they had a three black and white cats that I got to play with too. Yay for kitties! Sigh, I want a cat so badly. Sure, I may be alergic to them, but... kitties! Isn't that the answer that makes everything okay?
Found some really cool links today:
I guess we really are different
Can you imagine it? New study finds it's stupid to commit suicide!
Slashdot had a link to this speech. It has some pretty good advice for high school students. I realize those reading this are probably out of high school, but still, it is good advice. I was pleased to find that a lot of how I did things in high school were mentioned in it as good approaches. Of course, I didn't treat it like my day job (unless you count Diablo as my hobby, which you shouldn't).
If you have a super-spleen, you might be able to be like Wolverine! And no, Wolverine's mutant ability is not his adamantium skeleton, it is his healing factor.
"Hey, bub, I'm not finished with you yet." - Wolverine, countless times
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