Anomalous Anomaly

I don’t know whether to blame the hard drive, Windows 2000, or NTFS-3G. But never in my life do I want to see chkdsk show this again:

It kept scrolling that text for about 10 minutes before finally hitting this BSOD:

So we booted a Windows Vista DVD and ran chkdsk with that to finish the job it couldn’t:

Long story short, we were trying to reformat an external hard drive and ended up putting temporary copies of the data onto the local disk. Unfortunately, the local disk went haywire at that moment, and to make a long story short, most of the files were nicely toasted. The machine needed to be reformatted as well.

During some general failure of mine, I mentioned to my mum that I would probably also fail at failing, since I can never seem to tie a proper knot.

And that’s when she told me that “Tying a noose is easy. Let me show you how.”

Talk about parental support. <3

After tormenting my room for weeks, Beelzebug has met his end.

I really enjoyed these because of how true they were to life.

From the book How Not to Program in C++ by Steve Oualline:

• Real Computer Scientists admire ADA for its overwhelming aesthetic value, but they find it difficult to actually program in it, as it is much too large to implement. Most computer scientists don’t notice this because they are still arguing over what else to add to ADA.
• Real Computer Scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations; software doesn’t. It’s a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O.
• Real Computer Scientists don’t comment their code. The identifiers are so long they can’t afford the disk space.
• Real Computer Scientists don’t program in assembler. They don’t write in anything less portable than a number two pencil.
• Real Computer Scientists don’t write code. They occasionally tinker with “programming systems,” but those are so high level that they hardly count (and rarely count accurately; precision is for applications).
• Real Computer Scientists only write specs for languages that might run on future hardware. Nobody trusts them to write specs for anything homo sapiens will ever be able to fit on a single planet.