Interesting Stuff

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.