The Cookies on the Dark Side are Really Good

Well, the gas tank thing isn't as bad as it could have been - we can patch the tank instead of buy a new one, which brings my dreaded anticipated cost down from $400 to $60. The patch itself won't be over $10, but I had to pay for the gas for Dad to take it to our mechanic (the one he trusts is 45 minutes away) and to go to class. So that's one depressing thing off my plate.

And another thing lit up my day: ICE CREAM WAS ON SALE!!!!! Instead of $4 for the fancy ice cream pints, it was $1. I decided I deserved a little comfort food, so I got some. So there :-P

In other news that no one cares about, I'm brushing up on my Linux command line skills, so I can impress people with things like:

chmod a+x-r *.sh

or

sudo mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdb2

or other things that look like they mean "TYPE ME IF YOU WANT YOUR COMPUTER TO EXPLODE!"

Yesterday was Sabotage Day in Software class. This means that each group had to switch computers with another group, and break Windows. Then, each group would go back to the computer and fix them. We'd all done backups and such in previous classes, so recovery wouldn't be an issue if we really messed them up. But we tried.

**WARNING - GEEK HUMOUR AHEAD PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK**

I am a part of the only group with three people; all others have two. And, to bring imbalance to it all, my group contains three people that know computers really well. One is a mostly-Mac person, one is a mostly-Windows person, and I am a mostly-Linux person. Together, we're rather formidable. We exchanged computers wit a group with one guy that really knows what he's doing, and another guy that has no clue what's going on. We decided to have no mercy. Even though you probably won't appreciate how evil I was (the fun kind of evil), I will describe how we tormented the computer, with hopefully non-geek translations in parentheses, 'cause I'm nice that way.

I happened to have a Linux Live CD handy, so I booted from that (Instead of starting Windows, I can start Linux on a CD without installing it). The first thing we did is shrink the partition to the minimum size (Made the hard drive think it was full). This was a red herring - it wouldn't actually cause problems, but he might think it's the cause. The next thing we did was delete the bootable flag on the partition (This would make the computer think that there's no hard drive, and would not start Windows). Last but not least, we deleted the entire registry (In other words, broke Windows so badly that if he couldn't find his backup, he'd have to install it all over).

When we got back to our computer, we found out that he'd replaced the boot.ini (Made it so the hard drive couldn't find Windows), which was easy enough to fix by copying an old boot.ini over it, once we figured out what he'd actually done (which took a while, I must admit). Next, he'd randomly deleted some of the registry, but we just replaced that with our backup. Lastly, he had deleted all but one user, but that was easier to fix, since we just made them again.

Meanwhile, he was still trying to figure out why he was getting the message "No bootable drive found." As I said, he knows what he's doing, and he also had a Linux Live CD, but still missed the bootable flag. He kept trying to restore backups, recover the system, all to no avail. We were all having fun watching, and he was having fun trying to fix it, and the teacher and lab assistant both laughed evilly when I told them what we did (Did I mention I love this class?)

Finally, when there was ten minutes left in the class, I showed him what we did (to the bootable flag anyways) and let him fix it. He then had to deal with the registry of course, but that was comparitively easy.

So... it was a lot more fun to be there, especially if you like geeky things like that. But the summary is I had FUN in class yesterday.