Trent's poor computers...

Be warned, this is primarily a frustrated rant.

This morning an assignment was due in one of my classes. It is worth 20% of my mark, although the course is only a half-course, so it's nothing huge. However, it was supposed to be over 4000 words long. That, along with its being a science course, made it a particularly arduous assignment. It was long, boring and not worth as much as the time put into it.

In my typical fashion it wasn't completed until fairly late the night before, which is OK with me. I am a little lazy and haven't bought new ink for my printer in ages and I instead use the printers at Trent to print off the assignments beforehand. It's a little annoying, but it always works. This morning, however, it didn't.

I took the early bus to give myself some leeway before class, especially since the computers have a tendency to take a little while to load up. I had roughly 30 minutes before class. You would think this would be well enough time to turn on a computer and print a paper off.

The computers at Trent are notorious for taking long to boot up, but the mornings are especially bad because the computers have been shut down all night. I'm guessing (I'm not a computer whiz) that as the computers are used throughout the day, they seem to 'warm up', like a car, and take a much shorter time to load up later in the day.

The computer finally loaded up with ten minutes left for class. Waiting for twenty minutes to have a computer load up is painful, especially in this day and age. I finalized some of the files and sent them to the printer, although the second file froze as it was loading (I imagine the computer was still feeling a tad slow at that point).

I then received an error message telling me that the print job didn't work. As I discovered a few minutes later, the printer wasn't connected to my computer somehow and the printer itself required maintenance. Several other students in the computer lab were in the same situation and equally (if not more) displeased. One student kicked a few chairs around. I don't blame him.

At this point class was starting, so I elected to run across the bridge to the other side of the campus to print off the paper in the library. It didn't take quite as long to load this time and I finally got into class ten minutes late.

I do take some of the fault for this silly situation, but it really shows how awful Trent's computer system is. Forty minutes to print something? It's a little reminiscent of print times circa 1982.

Trent has a lot of things going for it, but computers is not one of them.

The Facebook birthday experiment...

So tomorrow I'm turning 21. It's pretty cool. I get nice phone calls from family and close friends, some gifts and a few pints at the pub. This year though, I'm expecting that there will be a large number of people who don't realize it's my birthday. Why? I've deleted my birthday on Facebook.

In the past few years, my birthdays have been great, but I've routinely opened my email to find that I have tons of messages in my inbox. Sadly, most of them are from Facebook, telling me that one of my 'friends' has written on my 'wall'. I know what each message says and its fairly uniform: 'Happy Birthday!' accompanied by something along the lines of, 'hope it's a good one' or 'have fun partyin'.

Last year I got 40 or so of these messages. It's nice getting happy birthday messages, but what really concerns me is the reason for sending it and how these people know it's my birthday. Is it because they've remembered it from memory? Doubtful. Chances are they got a little alert on Facebook telling them it's my Bday and a few clicks later a congratulatory message is sitting in my inbox.

Great. But it just isn't genuine. Some of the best birthday wishes I've gotten since being on Facebook have been from close friends of mine, who either take the time to pick up a phone and call me or at least email me. I'm yet to have family members Facebook birthday me, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in the future.

So here's the experiment. Now that my birthday isn't listed on Facebook, how many birthday wishes will I get? Any? It'll be interesting.

I'll let you know in a few days how it pans out.

Oops, CERN snags again...

It's been awhile since I mentioned the Large Hadron-Collider located in Europe, spanning over two countries deep underground. You may remember that I mentioned several risks associated with the giant underground magnet, including its potential to create a black hole that could eventually swallow the entire Earth and perhaps the universe.

You may also remember it was supposed to get going during the past summer. The world is still here, so everything must have gone right, eh? Well, not quite. Back in September, a simple electrical fault shut the whole thing down just after it finally got going. The repairs (estimated at $26 million) are taking longer than anticipated and the new restart date has been postponed until September, 2009.

In my last post on this topic I recalled a conversation I had with my cousin, where we discussed the development of the CERN project as being a litmus test for intelligent life in the universe. If the project has the potential to destroy the universe, surely those uber-intelligent lifeforms will try to stop us from getting the machine going.

Strangely, these unexpected shutdowns have occurred before anything really dangerous has taken place. Maybe the alien theory is too far fetched. You never know...

A learning experience...

A few weeks ago the hard drive on my laptop failed for the second time in nearly four months. This is a little too frequent for my liking. While the first failure didn't surprise me too much (hard drives die from time to time), the second came out of nowhere.

After spending a few days taking it to different places to get repaired and hours on the phone with Best Buy to try to find out how they would pay for it (it's on warranty with them), I finally came across a place that would be suitable under Best Buy's little deal. There is no Best Buy in town, and only one place in town was accredited by them to fix my computer.

After waiting a few weeks to get it repaired, the computer guys told me that the probable cause for the hard drive failing was that Best Buy had given me a 'refurbished' (used and repaired) hard drive when my first one failed in September. This is pretty bothersome. Luckily these new guys were smart enough to give me a brand new one.

I learned two valuable lessons from this experience. The first: When buying a new computer, check to see if there is a similar store in your place of residence to make sure you don't have to go through all these annoying phone calls and store visits.

The second: Ask Best Buy (or any company really) to replace any failed parts with brand new parts rather than shabby, cost-cutting, used parts that have a much higher probability of failure.