Saw my ex-girlfriend of several years ago while crossing Woodruff Ave today. We had a pretty traumatic breakup, and it's always kind of a shock to see her around campus, since I almost never do. I don't really have any hard feelings anymore, but I think she does.

She was driving her big-ass Ford Explorer SUV, and I was going to cross the street. The light was green in her direction, but traffic was stopped, so I could have walked across in between the cars. After a few seconds the car in front of her started moving a bit, but she stayed in the same place, and kind of looked at me expressionlessly, as if offering to let me walk in front of her car to cross the street.

I almost started to do that, since I was in a hurry, but right before I stepped out in front of her car, I realized that she wasn't offering to let me go in front, she was daring me to. I decided it would be a good idea to wait for the crosswalk signal. She drove off.

Yesterday, I took my laptop to MacMobile, a local Mac repair place. If you're in Columbus, Ohio and you need your Mac repaired, I highly recommend them. They expertly extracted the mini-CD stuck in my drive, which put me out about $70. Seems fairly reasonable.

Then I mentioned the real problem, which was it crashing. Of course when he booted it up into MacOS X from an external FireWire hard drive, it ran perfectly. But Linux still crashed while trying to mount my XFS partition. One of the techs suggested filesystem corruption, and I realized that I'd never even thought of that. XFS has been rock solid for me for a year, but it was possible. So I decided to take it home and try reinstalling Debian on it.

First in order to do that, I needed to install MacOS X to download the Debian installation bits, so I went ahead and did that. While I was in MacOS X, I tried beating on the computer by ripping a CD with iTunes, copying files around, etc. It ran perfectly.

I was at this time almost totally convinced the problem was software, so I tried installing Debian. The installer hung halfway through. MacOS X continued to work perfectly. I was starting to feel like my laptop had decided it only wanted to run proprietary software. Then, the next day, MacOS X hung hard when I tried waking the computer up from sleep, and it's fairly repeatable. So now I'm convinced again it's hardware. Damn.

SyntaxPolice: Thanks for the links to PC laptops. I think I'm still wanting to buy a Mac, mainly because figuring out what PC laptop hardware has Linux and XFree drivers is a big pain in the ass. Plus the Mac battery life rules. I dunno though, if someone pointed me at a PC laptop in the $1200-$1700 price range with integrated ethernet (and maybe integrated 802.11{b,g}, that had good Linux/XFree drivers, I might consider it.

Got my midterm in math back yesterday. I'd studied a lot for it, but since I really need to do well in this class in order to stay in school, I had a bit of anxiety about getting it back. When the teacher handed me the test, I flipped it over, and on the front was a score of 44...out of 100. I felt this complete and total sense of failure. I didn't even bother to look at the rest of the test; I just stared a the wall in front of me, thinking about how I was going to get kicked out of school and wondering what I would do.

But after a minute or two I sort of shook myself out of my brief melancholy, and decided to see what I had done wrong. That's when I noticed that the handwriting didn't look much like mine...in fact, it wasn't my name at the top of the test. I felt a sense of relief that was much like an equal but opposite reaction to my first. It turned out that I got an 85, which is good enough for me. Maybe I won't be kicked out of school after all.