Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Thesis proposal nightmare #1

Invoking Dream either by reading or talking about him (as I was doing recently) tends to cause screwy dreams. This pattern continues...

It is April 4th -- 10 days before my real thesis proposal. I've done one practice talk which indicated that more practice talks were in order, yet somehow I'm giving the proposal anyway. Weirder still, I'm giving the proposal in my parent's family room on an old television instead of with a projector. Only four people have shown up -- two faculty and two students. Nobody in my area. It is only when my advisor Eugene shows up that I realize that not only is the rest of my committee not present at the proposal (one of the attending faculty members assures me is not a problem). I then realize that I've somehow scheduled my thesis proposal during a major conference which my thesis committee members (including Eugene) are attending.

Wake up.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Error: Too many errors



Count the errors. There are at least three:
Error 1: Saying there was an error, then saying there wasn't.
Error 2: Saying there was an error, then saying there wasn't when there really was -- it really didn't rip the DVD.
Error 3: Title says "Error while burning" but it was ripping, not burning.

Is this a bad joke? While trying to rip a DVD, I got this message from Brasero. This is dailywtf material but I haven't been able to find any previous postings on it. While ripping the DVD, the output file grew, but apparently, Brasero deleted it at the end. Also, there are no messages from the kernel about a DVD read error, so we appear to be hallucinating problems.