Interesting Stuff

…man. It’s usually poor form to start off a Monday with an all-nighter. Last night at 3AM, when I was trying to hunker down and do some grad school apps, Dana IM’ed me and said that Tiffany was sick and wouldn’t be able to make the corrections to our mid-year clinic report. Since it was due on Wednesday, and we got an extension until Friday, and we were actually planning on turning it in on Monday afternoon, we decided that we really needed those changes made. So Dana, Cris, and I spent last night from 3:30 until 8:30 AM in the LAC doing clinic. I am not as happy a camper as he expected to be this morning.

So, recently, I have been frustrated that Xorg keeps randomly crashing. And I mean, randomly. It has only crashed twice while I’ve been using my computer, but about 5 times while I’ve been out of the room or asleep, with nothing but the screensaver running. I had attributed it to an unstable build of Xorg (I’ve been running version 6.8.2-r0), and waited until a new version was out (6.8.2-r6). However, I couldn’t get it to compile. I looked through the Gentoo forums for help, but no one else seemed to have the same problem as me. Today, I finally decided to start my own thread on the forums about this, when I noticed that the ebuild had failed in a different place than it had failed previously. That was really weird! On a whim, I tried building it again, …and it worked. As I write this, everything on my computer has been updated except OpenOffice, which is in the middle of updating itself. No problems with any ebuilds, least of all Xorg. wtf? I suspect it is a problem with faulty memory, and Mac just backed up my suspicions. We shall see… It’skind of neat being able to spot a hardware problem; I don’t think I’ve ever successfully done that before (though it would be great if I haven’t successfully done that here, either. I’ll find out more later).

BTW, I’ve (sorta) been off polyphasic sleep since Wednesday. I did it for a week, and I believe it can be successfully done for much longer. However, I was only getting a couple extra hours per day to do stuff, so the benefits weren’t as great as I had hoped. On top of that, it’s harder than I expected to schedule naps every 4 hours (they seemed to come in the middle of parties and movies and things), so it was a social inconvenience. Add that to the social inconvenience of swearing off caffeine and alcohol while on the cycle, and the drawbacks outweighed the benefits of it. However, I still seem to get sleepy during the day at certain points, and I took a 20-minute nap in the middle of the Putnam exam (this actually helped – I was getting tired and frustrated, and couldn’t get any of the problems, so I went to sleep. 20 minutes later, I woke up alert and energized, and solved another problem), so I’m not completely back to monophasic sleep yet.