Mystery at VL/HCC

First off…  Nicky, how about photographing some GI Joes for your assignment? They don’t move much! Now back to our regularly scheduled blog.

Last week, at VL/HCC, there was someone that claimed to be a student that stayed in the Statesman’s Room at the Sheraton where the conference was being held. When asked by some fellow conference goers about grabbing a bite, she’d claim to be tired or in need of presentation practice. Since I figured out within a few minutes of meeting her that she wasn’t alone in Pittsburgh from her mannerisms and a few verbal clues without me having to so much as utter a word in conversation, I found it hilarious that others were surprised to learn that she had actually been spending her time with a “secret” companion. This was despite the numerous conversations others had had with her. And then there was the case of the false identities…

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When life is a beach ball

Do you have a Mac that beach balls (colourful pinwheels that produce colourful language) for 30-60 seconds at a time when you’re not running a computationally intensive task? Your hard drive could be dying. I hope you’re backing up. But I’m not writing this blog post to convince you that backing up your data regularly is a good idea (but it is, though). Instead, I’m going to show you how to see if that is indeed what is causing the beach balling and, if so, how to keep on tempting fate by keeping your failing hard drive chugging along while reducing your unwanted trips to the beach ((Is it any wonder why computer scientists tend to be so pasty?))

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Academic nightmare

Back when I was in high school, I had the occasional dream where I’d forgotten to hand in some homework or some deadline was looming. I thought to myself, my high school is fairly high pressure. Maybe the dreams will stop when I start undergrad. In undergrad, I continued to have these dreams every once in a while. I thought to myself, “Self, these’ll probably stop once you’re done undergrad.” I had a few more of these dreams while taking classes in grad school. Whatever — surely they’ll stop when I’m done classes.
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