(Little) Ups and (Big?) Downs.

I seem to have built up a rather impressive streak of haphazard experiences in the past few days. It all started with my laptop.

Many of you probably already heard about my laptop troubles. For those who haven't, my older laptop of 5 years suddenly crashed while I was coding an algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem, and wouldn't turn on after reboot. Just a blank dark screen. And this happened two days before Thanksgiving Break. >_<

The good news is that the hard drive was not damaged. The bad news is that it was not monitor failure or memory failure. I went home and looked up the beeping codes that the BIOS was making and guess what? The entire motherboard was fried. Freaking overheating computer. I blame the Traveling Salesman Problem for taking up so much resources.

But all was not lost. I removed the hard drive, put it into a case, and reformatted it into an external. That wasn't so bad, I still had all my files and now had two externals to store/back up files. The only problem is now I can't dual screen gaming/anime/work/etc.


Fast forward to the week after break.

I discovered that a student in the Chinese class before mine wears the exact same bright-red jacket that I have. It was strange...I never realized how much that jacket makes you stand out in a crowd. I like it. =]

They decided to put the second ORF 245 midterm the Wednesday after break, and it was bad. 10 true/false questions and 3 other questions that total up to 15 parts......in 45 minutes.....for number-crunching chart referencing statistics.....what kind of midterm was that? That was a test on which it was not enough to just be solid on the material, you had to lose yourself to test-taking frenzy. And I just couldn't do that 3 days after break. Terrible.

Ahhh....Thursday afternoons, nights, and Friday mornings. As always, Math 215 consumes these hours indiscriminately. Although I make it sound that MAT 215 is something to complain about, I have not once regretted signing up for this class. Yes the material is hard, yes I'm getting bad grades (C as of midterm), but I feel like I am learning to understand math in a completely new way. Plus it really is something else to know that so many of the people sitting around you in lectures are IMO competitors, RSI people, international prospective math majors.....just really smart people.
But at least I'm not alone. Every Thursday afternoon, you can find me in the Lewis Library, 3rd floor, room 312 with a bunch of other students collaborating (but writing up independently!) on the week's problem set. We're not the "geniuses" of the class; we're the middle ground people who have never taken an analysis course before and all constantly experience that hair-pulling, banging-head-against-the-wall impulse, and yet are still here. Working with them has really been a bonding experience, to not just survive the class, but understand as much of the material as we can as a collective group.
Being in the same room with 5+ other people for more than 10 hours...as you might expect, moments of hilarity occasionally arise (or maybe we're just delusional after doing so much math):
(1) Telling bad analysis math jokes - "How do you insult a mathematician? Tell him his brain is less than any epsilon greater than 0!" and "You've heard 'I want to take your derivative so I can lie tangent to your curve'...Well I'm the Weierstrass Function, bitch!"
(2) Finding Princeton FML's on MAT 215: http://princetonfml.com/2009/12/02/in-high-school-i-thought-i-wa/#comments
(3) Gossiping about the "Mysterious Six": http://princetonfml.com/2009/12/06/i-heard-that-there-are-supposedly-six-my/#comments
Why we believe in the "Mysterious Six" - the class average is 80%...for an introductory Real Analysis class....wtf.
(4) Drawing murals on the library chalkboards that epitomizes MAT 215: http://photos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs110.snc3/15756_106399699370264_100000007020164_170518_6732283_n.jpg
I'll tell the story behind this later.

Went to sleep at 9 AM on Friday. Awesome :D


Then I got sick from staying up all night. D:

But the week's over right? Recovery time! Except not.

Friday night, my first external decides to fail. Somehow, it lost over 100 GB's worth of files, as in the files became inaccessible. As if that wasn't bad enough, Windows ChkDsk proceeds to see the "lost" data as orphaned files and rehash them into system files and deleted the original data. I spent Friday night and half of Saturday recovering the files.

I just have to say Testdisk is a godsend. 108 GB's / 120 GB's salvaged.

Today I recovered from my cold. :D

And finally, I broke the strings on two badminton rackets (one of them mine and the other borrowed after I broke mine >_>) during smashing drills at badminton practice tonight. Geez, I don't smash that hard.