Traversing the Levels of Hell

The First Level of Hell:
After an inordinately long period of time and many failed downloads, I finally finished downloading Fedora Core 2. Excited, I installed it, and then I booted into it. The installation was uneventful, except for a warning message that I had never seen before. It said something about there being a possible problem with the partition geometry. I casually dismissed it and continued with the installation. After booting, everything seemed fine initially, but my DSL was not working on the new installation as it had on my old Red Hat 9. Despite this, I was not fazed. I did, however, need to check my email, so I rebooted to launch the Windows partition. After GRUB came up I got a mysterious output and the computer hung. It appeared that the Fedora installation had mucked with my partition tables, even on my Windows partition, thus leaving me incapable of booting into Windows. This has led me to the conclusion that the vast majority of Linux hackers must be the most incompetant dolts imaginable to release an OS with this malevalent problem.

The Second Level of Hell:
Comment spam on this blog has reached Brobdignagian proportion. I neither jest nor exaggerate. In the period of two days during which I have been without the use of my computer and email, I have been unable to be vigilant against the merciless horde of the comment-spammers. In this period, this blog has received over 130 comment spams. This means that my backlog of comment-spams to delete is approaching 150. Since I am unable to employ my IP-blocking strategy when I don't have email access, the weaknesses of this strategy for dealing with such a volume spam is coming painfully into focus. There are some options that are in consideration.

The Third Level of Hell:
In my lovely class of AP US Government and Politics, the grading system is essentially designed such that it would be extremely difficult not to get an A or B, difficult not to get an A, and somewhat hard not to get over 100%. I have decried this system and the idiotic method by which Marchese instructs without avail. But the obscenity of unreason was demonstrated in a very contrary way this week. Despite the fact that we have done a number of assignments besides tests, Marchese decided that in order to make it easier for him to tally up the points on his grade sheet (he doesn't even use computer grading!), he would only count the tests (they are the first 3 items of the grade sheet: factoring in other assignments would require adding such things as item 6 and possibly 7!). This leaves three tests that comprise the bulk of the grade. The first test was a multiple-choice, computer-generated test with completely random and specific questions that were often irrelevant. The highest score out of the 70 or so students who took it was 90%. That was the only A. With an 82%, I was somewhere around 5th or 6th of 70. The questions were taken from extremely specific about seeminly unimportant sections of the book. An example of this was a question on the method by which the first president of Mexico was chosen. Considering that this course is supposed to be US Government and Politics, this is a rather surprising question. The second test was an old take-home practice AP test from 1994. The entire thing was due yesterday. This is rather surprising considering that our class lasts a semester. It would be suprising that we should be expected to know the half of the material which we have not yet been taught. It was a take-home test, but it is still unfair to expect people to know material from 50% of a class that they have not been taught. In any case, thanks to Greg Tainter's scoring of my essays, I got some weird decimal score like 89.34%. Those unique and honest individuals like Jonathan Kadish, who decided to change all of their answers as they corrected their test, of course, received 100%. The final item that comprises the grade is a take-home test on which I will probably receive 98% (assuming I receive full credit on the essay portion, which is very likely). The imperfection of my score is due to two flawed questions. All I will say is that Congress does limit debt by setting a debt ceiling, and that Congress does have the implied power to censor TV and radio broadcasts (the FCC exists to do this now, and the FCC was created by Congress by the implied powers linked to the Commerce Clause of the constitution). Despite the obvious incorrectness of at least one of the questions, Marchese has admitted that there is no way that he will change the questions on the test. In other words, if the test is wrong, he doesn't care. This repeated idiocy of grading has led to the fact that I am 1 point short of an A for this quarter. Thankfully quarter grades are meaningless and more like midterms than anything else, but I am still incensed at this blatant disregard for fact and truth. Furthermore, it is objectionable that much of the work we have done this quarter is not being counted toward this quarter's grade. Nevertheless, by the semester when the disturbing amount of allowed extra credit is tallied into the equation, and all of my work is recorded, I will have far greater than 100%. I oppose both of these grades on principle. One is an example of grade deflation and the other is an example of grade inflation. Both are inaccurate representations of a person's performance.

The Fourth Level of Hell:
This is the week for TESTS!! Lots and lots of TESTS!! I did well on the government test, and I think I did well on the physics and ecology tests. I should do well on the english test tomorrow too. Regardless, it's not pleasant stuff.

Escaping the First Level of Hell:
After not having enough time to do anything about it, I finally paid homage to the great god Google and discovered that this is apparently bug with the Fedora installer. Whenever Fedora is installed on a dual-boot machine, this nasty bug changes something like the allocation of heads in the drive (not quite so sure). After the great god Google came forth and delivered me from the evil of poor programming, I did some mucking with the extremely dangerous tool sfdisk in a linux shell and managed to fix the problem. I'm not entirely positive what I did, but I can now boot into Windows.

Finally:
I also ask that you refrain from posting comments for several days until I can get a handle on this spam indundation. I also have this interesting thought on ecology. The people reading this blog with doctorates in the subject will probably view my thoughts as elementary and trite, but I find it compelling at the moment. I've also become obsessed with the issue of outsourcing. Rather than wait until I take econ next semester, I'm going to do a little research myself. At this point, I'm becoming convinced that outsourcing is the greatest trend since sliced bread going out of vogue. Give me a day or two, and there will be more to come! Apologies for the numerous typos; I really blitzed through this one and I don't want to reread it.