Midterm madness

Got a 90% on my Japanese midterm, with an overall score for the first term of 92%.

A little good news, a little bad news

I woke up this morning and dragged myself through the cold and snow to reach school, only to find that my first class (Japanese) has been canceled. I could be laying in bed nice and warm right now, but nooooo. So, now I get to waste an hour sitting around waiting for my other class to start. Zzzzz.

On the bright side, I got my marks back from Kinesiology, and I scored myself an A. Go me! Almost a quarter of the class (19/81) got an F, and I must say that's pretty sad.

The bloody aftermath

So, I moved my server this evening. Finally got all the essential services off the homebox and out into the cloud. Mad props to Linode for not sucking!

Only thing that isn't working quite right is my Jabber server, but I'm hoping that it'll sort itself out once the DNS refresh percolates out through the tubes. I may have to poke at it a bit tomorrow, but it's not a big deal. There will probably be a few glitches with delayed emails until then too, but that's just part of the game.

It took a bit longer than I expected to do the switchover as I waited until now to copy over the spamassassin databases without realizing they're about 100-120MB each. Takes a few minutes to squeeze that through a 512kbit uplink.

It's good that I check these things

First day of class is the 5th, not the 6th.

Unfortunately, the U doesn't open until the 4th too, which means I couldn't go in and sell a textbook I want to get rid of and buy a bus pass while I was out today. At least I figured this out beforehand rather than wasting a trip going out there.

Sadly there wasn't the option of postponing my shopping until tomorrow, as I was fresh out of milk after breakfast this morning.

Christmas Interlude

Just a quick, cute video to pass some time.

The Good Little Bunny with the Big Bad Teeth from Foolish K. Bunny on Vimeo.

And done

Last exam written and done earlier today, I'm now free and clear until January.

I also got some marks back (provisional pending approval by blah blah blah) of A+ in Numerical Methods and A in Math Prior to 1640. All in all a decent showing.

A minor scare

So yesterday, when I was out in the Polo Park area after writing my exam, I had left my backpack with my laptop in the car (I know, I know). It was still there when I returned a few hours later, but unfortunately the cold temperature had taken its toll.

When I woke up my laptop when I got home, to my horror I saw a series of teal streaks on the display. Needless to say, I was not pleased.

The streaks were on the order of a pixel or two wide, and up to an inch long. They seemed to react to pressure, so I surmised that whatever was happening wasn't just outright pixel death. I played a bit of minecraft to see if exercising the pixels with a changing picture would help things along, and after a little while of playing it seemed that the streaks were starting to get better.

Then the inspiration hit me: condensation inside the panel! The cold temperatures and high relative humidity inside my car had clearly caused some water or frost to infiltrate the panel and condense, messing with the function of the display.

To test this theory, I got out my hair dryer and, starting on low, heated up some problem areas. To my delight, they reacted by shrinking and lightening. After 10-15 minutes of heating, the areas I was concentrating on had vanished into perfect, flawless pixels, and I continued my way around the monitor cooking off the streaks. In the bottom corner, the last and worst trouble spot, I had to switch the hair dryer onto high, but those pixels too were soon brought back to life.

All in all, I'm annoyed but happy, and find myself with yet another reason to hate winter.