Bounded in a Nutshell

So the automotive difficulties I mentioned in the last post? As it turns out, the actual drivetrain and electrical systems of the car are pretty much fine. The issue is with the central computer… specifically, the part of the central computer that controls alerts and other notifications. It's pretty much gone quietly crazy, which is why it's been blithely announcing problems with the main battery when the car is, in fact, running fine.

This serves as a reminder that what you find depends on how you look. If you come up with (say) a system for ranking hockey players in a league, then you will determine better and worse players regardless of whether there is an actual difference in quality. And if your instruments are telling you that something's wrong, then probably something is wrong, be it the thing in question or the instruments that are informing you.

Anyhow, so I decided that I didn't want to risk driving the car down to Kentucky on the off-off-chance that somewhere along the way an actual problem with the hybrid system cropped up (and that I wouldn't be able to distinguish from an imaginary problem until the car was in fact on fire by the side of the highway). I therefore went and rented a car, a Chevy Aveo that I've conceived of many reasons to hate in my brief acquaintance with it.

The good news: a former student (from over a year ago) just stopped by my office to tell me again how much he enjoyed the course, and to give me a feather for my hat. So. Very. Cool.

The bad news: my drive from Ontario to my house yesterday was a rather tense one because my car kept telling me things. Unhelpful things, like "Problem" with red alert-lights on the dashboard and icons indicating the main battery. The pattern seemed to be that the alert would spring up, last for about five seconds or so while I did some small quiet panicking and easing off of the gas, and then it would announce "Problem solved" and be back to normal. Repeat about a minute or so later, and then again… except the third time the light would stay on. I couldn't tell any difference from the engine sound, but when your car is telling you "Warning: problem" then you don't want to push it too much.

On these occasions, I'd pull over to the shoulder, stop the car, and turn off the engine for about half a minute. Upon restarting, the car would act as though nothing was wrong or had ever been wrong… for about an hour, at which point the whole cycle would repeat itself. This happened about three times in total, with me getting more and more wound up about it (as you might expect).

I'm supposed to drive to Kentucky today. Needless to say, the car's currently in the shop getting looked at. Since I'm two payments away from owning the car outright, I really hope there's nothing too seriously wrong.

Last week I had a bit of a scare when my jump drive blandly informed me that no computer I had access to would read it anymore. This was an inconvenience, since I'd just downloaded a program to install on my parents' computer onto it (since the parents don't at this time have the kind of internet connection required to get ten megabytes of DMG off the net); more significantly, said drive is where I keep all of my teaching materials, all of my research drafts, and a half-dozen other pretty vital things.

Fortunately, I'd backed up the contents of the drive not five days before, so that the only things I'd lost (other than the download I mentioned) were some files associated with a talk I'd given in Halifax. Since these were based on files that had already existed, I really didn't lose anything significant.

To remedy this, I've gone and bought a new jump drive (for something like a third of the price I paid for the original, with four times the storage capacity) and also a large external hard drive for backing up, well, everything: my laptop, my office computer, my jump drive, and my portable HD for music and such. The backup software that came with the later has proven to be not terrifically useful, so what I'm doing right now is just dragging and dropping files from one place to another. This isn't ideal, since the Finder in Mac OS X hides a lot of the unix internals, but at least most of the obvious stuff gets copied this way.