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qtrhorserider has been sick with a virus all week, her best friend/law school buddy/neighbor is having another rough pregnancy, my finals are today and tomorrow, and AKOTAS' hosting service hasn't yet received the check I mailed for quarterly hosting and for annual domain renewal due May 7. I may be a bit on edge.
I got up this Thursday morning to go to back to work, after having had two days off to drive qtrhorserider to the bar exam. There'd been some snow in the overnight forecast, but I looked out the back window and I didn't think it looked too bad.
Then it started thundering.
The garbagemen didn't come.
The university where I work is closed. Jesuits never close.
The state legislature is closed.
I-29 is closed from South Dakota to Missouri.
(qtrhorserider and her study buddy are sitting on the phone reading the closings to each other off the tv screen. "Life Changing Academy! There will be no life changing today.")
So much for that test.
qtrhorserider is taking the bar exam. I'm across the street in the state law library in the state capitol building, doing homework. Not Windows Programming homework - I'll worry about that over spring break next week (though there's a test tomorrow afternoon I'll want to do review for before then) - World Lit homework. Yesterday I wrote two pages on Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper in compensation for missing the discussion in class today. Today I'm working on the term paper due Friday, for which we're to write a one-page Romantic poem or short story (quality optional) and then spend four pages describing why it's Romantic. This is my poem.
The clerk sits in the C.O.'s tent and pushes papers through.
No soldier's loss or doctor's lack escapes his process (due).
The wounds, the deaths, the lives undone when not just whisked away
Reduced to words, or numbers, are. That's where his duties lay.
The doctors do the best they can the horrors to defray.
No doctor, he. To him it falls to log, not save, the day.
An envelope to headquarters he folds the war into.
Then goes out to the crates in back and feeds those in his zoo.
Finally progress
Feb. 18th, 2007 01:10 pm At my lengthy post describing in fine detail my fruitless attempts to download, burn, and install Visual Studio 2005, j_a_c_s pointed me toward an unsupported tool that would read ISO files as if they'd already been burned to disk. I downloaded the tool, and set the first ISO file to installing VS05. Partway through the first disk install it occurred to me that I might have been wiser to define the virtual drive as both ISO files instead of only the first. Perhaps that would have worked, but I may never know. Naturally when the install called for the second disk, I tried to get the tool reassign the virtual drive to the second ISO file and couldn't. I rollbacked the install, and tried to unassign the virtual drive from the first ISO (so I could start over with the virtual drive assigned to both ISOs) and couldn't. That was last weekend wiped out.
I had a homework assignment due Tuesday, a file of code in Java (which, you'll recall, I am the only person in class who doesn't know) which is to be converted into a whole C# project. I emailed the professor that I mean to turn it in ... eventually. I asked him whether the CS department has any tutors; he replied that all the CS majors find better-paying jobs elsewhere on campus, but this is the sort of reason he holds office hours. I said I'd see him Monday afternoon, but first I wanted to do some self-assesment: review the material we've covered in the book so far.
j_a_c_s in his comment was only one of several people whose ear I bent with my troubles to suggest that I download Visual Studio 2005 Express instead, or some C# compiler so I could at least run my code. That was my plan for Saturday. Then Friday night we had dinner from Long John Silver's ... and Saturday I had another bout of the stomach distress I had twice last March from eating outside our usual ring of fast food (last time it was a Runza; the time before, a Wendy's). This bout was much lighter; no vomiting, which may not be a good thing, since last time it seemed to be when I'd lost the food that was bothering me that the symptoms abated. Anyway that was all yesterday lost.
Today I've downloaded Visual C# Express and installed it, and it works! Yay. I'm up through Chapter 3. In class Thursday we covered Chapter 17.
Puts the "stall" in "install"
Feb. 6th, 2007 09:27 pmSo I mentioned Hourly Comic Day that I can't install the Visual Studio 2005 I'm 'sposed to use for Windows Programming in C# homework.
The professor directed us to the MicroSoft webpage where our university's comp sci majors get to download selected MS products for free. First it wasn't clear to me that you can't just burn an .ISO file to a CD, it has to be decoded during burn by software such as Nero of which I therefore downloaded a trial copy.
So I started the install, the install wizard warning me that the install would leave only a gig free on my laptop PC. Then I discovered it hadn't been made clear to me that there were two VS05 .ISOs I needed to download and burn.
So I rollbacked the install. So I downloaded and burnt the second disk. So I started to install again, and the wizard told me it'd now leave -34 meg on my laptop PC. So much for rollback. So I decided to try it anyway. Then partway through the second CD I get the message:
"Error 1305.Error reading from file [file directory path and name]. Verify that the file exists and that you can access it."
I did verify that the file existed, and there can't have been permission issues because on the home network we're all administrators. Then I rollbacked the install again.
So, reasoning that the problem may have been too little free gigs, I tried to install on the desktop PC. Then I got the same error message, for the same file, and rollbacked. Lather, rinse, repeat.
All this time I've been e-corresponding with my professor. He googles the error and emails one of the fixes he finds: fiddle with msconfig to keep there from being any other processes running. So I try that. The same message pops up, for the same file. Lather, rinse, rollback.
So I guess the problem is with the download or the physical CD, so I go back to the MicroSoft download page to start over with CD2. Except you can't download their .ISOs twice without applying first to technical support, and there was no point in that because they take 24 hours to respond and my trial Nero was to expire at midnight. Meanwhile the professor has offered by email to lend me his CDs. This is as far as it'd got Thursday, Hourly Comics Day evening. But he doesn't have office hours again till Monday.
So Monday, yesterday, I pick up the CDs he offered to lend me, including install CDs for VS03, which he lends me though warning me that it's "a hog" and will slow the PC down. Last night I looked over the CDs he lent me, and couldn't tell from the handwritten labels on the half a dozen or more of'em if there were VS05 install CDs among them, so I started installing the VS03. Then I got the same error message, this time for a file on the first CD.
So today I brought the professor's CDs back to him, and said I'm going to have to go to MS tech suppt. He said, "Don't do that, they never get back to you. Google the error. The fix I emailed you was only one result, see what other fixes come up." He also said, "Here, no harm in trying these again," and handed me back three of the CDs he'd lent me. One is labeled "Visual Studio 2005" and "CD1", and the other two aren't labeled. I thought VS05 downloaded onto two CDs.
So tonight I google "error 1305" and the most commonly suggested fix is to copy the files from the CDs onto your hard disk and install from those copies. So I go back to the desktop PC and start the copy operation. Of course you know that you can't trust the estimated time offered by Windows operation dialog boxes, and all through all this every time I've going off and done something else while these operations are going on. This time I didn't even get out of the room before the copy operation failed on a file because "parameter is incorrect". The file will not be copied in Windows, and it will not be copied at the MSDOS prompt.
When class meets Thursday it'll be the one-month anniversary of its first meeting, and I'm still not capable of doing homework at home.
So let's review, what options remain at this point:
- Try other fixes from Google results
- Try the install CDs the professor wouldn't let me return
- Do all my homework at the campus computer lab
Did I mention that I alone in this class took Intro to Programming long enough ago that I learned C++ instead of Java? I was in the very last C++ class. Not only haven't I done any coding in four to six semesters, I started out behind everyone else. And I can't download C#. And the homework assigned today and due in a week is converting a page of Java code into a C# program.
Never, ever tell me that I write fanfiction and draw webcomics because I don't have a life.
