Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Post-Easter Break

I was told when I got back that I missed the best break to stay at Taylor. I find that really hard to believe, because I had an awesome time in Ohio. My girlfriend and I drove up to her house Thursday evening and took it slow to stop for ice cream on the way. When we finally got there, the rest of the weekend was packed with things to do. I helped with baking in the kitchen pretty much all day Saturday and her brother took myself and her roommate's brothers out shooting that afternoon. I can now add a semi-automatic rifle and an old pistol to the list of things I've shot now (I think it makes three). The next morning was spent riding their horse, Max, who made me just about as sore as I've ever been. It was also the first time riding Western as far as I can remember. I then got to meet her extended family for a second time and had far too much good food to eat. And of course, no homework got done whatsoever...not until Monday after I recovered my sleep and had the whole day to devote to homework in the library.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Easter Break

My personal conviction this Easter break: to think and reflect on Christ's sacrifice more than once over the weekend. (i.e., not just on Sunday morning) I bet not too many people do that.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Yet Another Windoze Peculiarity

While working for CharitablePlanning.com this summer, I ended up with a bunch of files on my Windows partition of basically every 3-letter combination possible. I just now tried deleting these files, discovering that it can't delete four of them: 'aux', 'con', 'nul', and 'prn'. Deleting nul or prn gives the error: "Cannot delete nul: The parameter is incorrect." Deleting con gives: "Cannot delete con: Cannot find the specified file." Trying to delete aux freezes up explorer.

As soon as I saw nul, I got really suspicious. I created a new folder on my desktop and tried creating empty files of each of those names, but none of them worked; they were just reverted to the name they had before. Turns out the Wikipedia article on Filename lists these reserved words on Windows that cannot be used as filenames: "CON, PRN, AUX, CLOCK$, NUL, COM0, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT0, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9."

Further research indicates that you cannot rename, move, or open files of these names within Windows. That would make for an awesome April Fool's Day prank for someone with a Linux livecd...dang, I wish I had thought of this just a little bit sooner!

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I flipping HATE SMALLTALK!!!! GrrRRR! I just lost over an hour's worth of work because I accidentally created an infinite loop, forcing me to quit the program entirely. And of course, pushing Ctrl-S to save the class method doesn't actually save the file to disk. I think this horrid interface even surpasses Microsoft's worst attempts at anything.