The other day, I installed my new Sony 52x CD-RW. To do this, I had to totally reorganize the power cabling in my case. (In fact, it helped really clean things up. Also, my chassis fans and video card now get their own dedicated power cable! I was also surprised to find out my power supply has SATA power connectors, so I didn't have to use so many molex ones. Anyway...) The next morning, I couldn't log into my machine. It just froze. Maybe it was the fact that I had 20-some PDFs open in Mozilla. (Crazy psychology class. More on that later.) So I hit the reset switch and went about my business... Then I noticed things weren't so good. First, Thunderbird quit doing good spam filtering. It basically decided nothing was spam. Secondly, I couldn't get Acrobat Reader to open anymore. Not good. Third, I started and cancelled a BitTorrent DL -- America's Army, to be specific -- but the file wouldn't let me delete it! I thought maybe some program had a lock on it, so I restarted. Still no luck! After much googling, it turns out Windows XP explorer, the buggiest explorer for some time, randomly keeps a hold on some files. So I had to kill explorer and delete the file from the command line. Problem solved: total of maybe two or three hours. Now Thunderbird. Well, maybe the reboot corrupted Thunderbird's spam training file. So time to delete that and start retraining... Problem solved, maybe. Acrobat was the real sucky one. It just quit starting. I had no idea why. So I attached a debugger to the process and found out where it was spending all of its time. Turns out it was doing a system call in kernel32.dll *many* times, continually failing. Each call took several seconds. Yet, I only had the address of the function, and not the name of the call itself. So I learned that you can download the debugging symbols for Windows XP and find out what that system call actually is. A day of downloading later, I find out that it's actually GetTempFileName() preventing Reader from starting. Sure enough, there were an enormous number of files in my temp directory. Deleting them (after several tries: explorer hung, cygwin complained that there were too many files to pass to 'rm' at once, etc.) fixed the problem! Total time: 1.5 days. I got to brush up on my x86 assembly, at least. Also, I learned of a neat way to make your Acrobat Reader start as fast as wordpad: download Adobe Reader SpeedUp. Now, all of these problems are independently explainable and don't imply that something is messed up with my computer. But just in case, I downloaded memtest86 and ran it. Passed 100%. That's good. So I guess basilisk is fine... Looks like the power reorganization didn't hurt anything. Now something that's not about computers... This semester sucks. Graduate school is super hard. I'm taking three classes: one on the advanced study of human memory (psychology 514), one on artificial life and evolutionary algorithms (math 378), and one on game development (art integrated studios 509x). The psych class is amazingly time-intensive. We have to read tons and tons of BORING papers about memory. The class discussions are interesting, at least. I have to find something to research for the term paper and presentation... The artificial life class is awesome. Taught by an insane mathematician who writes code harder to read than TopCoder's output, Dan Ashlock, the class learns about how the theory behind evolutionary system simulation, especially how to design your breeding approaches and fitness evaluation. In short, it's super cool, and he's a great professor. The game development class is simply a chance to get together with other motivation individuals and be forced to get something done by the end of the semester. Four programmers (including me) and three artists are working on Empyrean for this term. I'm considering taking the class again next semester in order to finish the game for the IGF. It'll be cool. Cool I tell you! I'm expecting an A in every class. Let's hope it happens. That would be a great way to start graduate school. Besides classes, I'm a graduate student with an assistanceship. That means I have to work hard and study hard. It's tough. But I'll make it. At this pace, I'll be done with all of my credit requirements in one year, and have a full semester to work on my thesis. That would be good, although I'll have a full year between my graduation and Laura's. Speaking of Laura, she's coming up this weekend for V-Day and her B-Day. Yippie! And now, check out my new desktop. Also, I set up AWStats on aegisknight.org. You can see them here. Wow, this entry turned out longer than I expected. Ja ne!