Edit: I’ve been continuing my apartment search online and I’ve discovered one thing that is both baffling and annoying. Apartment complexes brag about all kinds of extra stuff, e.g., “We have a duck pond!! Come see our manicured lawns! OMG we have a fitness center!!!1” without having things like a dishwasher or washer/dryer. I would give up crap like the duck pond and fitness center in exchange for an apartment with a dishwasher, washer, and dryer.

I’m so tired because I have the worst time falling asleep, so I stay up late and then of course end up waking up late which repeats the whole cycle. I got up last night after I’d been lying down a bit and just wandered around the apartment, stretching and doing yoga. Everyone loves lights-out, 1-AM yoga! I ended up stretching out on my rug in the living room and almost fell asleep there before panic about not hearing the alarm the next morning woke me, so up I got, surprisingly stiff after that brief time on the floor. I’m going to the gym after I get out of class today and will hopefully be so exercised and exhausted tonight that I’ll fall asleep at the ripe old time of 11 o’clock.

In web site news, I recently adjusted my .htaccess file, using this guy’s tutorial, to redirect all non-Feedburner traffic that goes to my posts RSS feed to the Feedburner one. If you’ve had any trouble with my RSS feed recently, it may be due to that, so please let me know. I was also amused that a friend called me “a one-woman consumerist.com” after all the cell phone and PS3 posts here. I can’t help having trouble with these online purchases!

When I saw that I was pretty much getting the short end of the stick in every way, I tried to cancel my order online. Couldn’t do it, so I called AT&T. I spoke to one guy for a few minutes before he told me I’m a Premium customer, whatever that means, and transferred my call. I then spoke to another guy who said he couldn’t cancel my order and he couldn’t refund any money, so I asked to speak to his manager. I was then put on hold for the longest time ever, around fifty minutes according to my call timer. I was at work so I went back to my desk and continued working, letting the happy hold music play while the phone sat on my desk.

Finally some lady picked up and I explained what happened and that I either wanted to cancel the refurb order or get $9.99 credited back to my credit card. Neither could happen, apparently, because the order was already processed. She told me what I could do was wait until Fedex had a tracking number for my package, then call Fedex and refuse the package, causing them to send it back to AT&T. She checked AT&T’s site and confirmed the new Magnet’s price. She explained AT&T would then exchange my refurbished phone for a new phone, give me a refund, and I would get the new phone for free. I asked if there would be any kind of restocking fee or any fees at all: yep, a $9.95 “Buyer’s Remorse” shipping fee. Well, of course I had buyer’s remorse when I saw AT&T’s web site sold me an inferior product at a higher cost without so much as a peep that I could save some money by buying a new phone instead! I confirmed that there would be no other fees and that, essentially, I was going to get a $0.04 discount. Yep, pretty much. I get the $9.99 back for the refurbished phone but have to pay $9.95 in Buyer’s Remorse fees.

I went ahead and okay-ed this plan of action because of the extended warranty I would get with a new phone, plus it’ll be new and I can hope it will be in better condition than a used version. The delay is a bit annoying: when I called Fedex, they said it would have to reach its destination center before it would be turned around and sent back to AT&T. They estimate that will happen on Friday, so then its status should be updated to “return to sender” and I can call AT&T and have them send me a new Magnet. I confirmed with the AT&T manager that this was all being noted on my file so that I would get the right phone for free and there wouldn’t be any confusion, and I wouldn’t have to reiterate my story. I also asked the manager if she had any sway over prices of refurbished phones versus new ones, and why it was that a used phone could ever be sold for more than the same model new. Nope, she said, these are just every-other-day deals that change and so sometimes this happens. Still seems to me like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.

When I told the story to a friend at work, she hoped that AT&T would send my $0.04 refund to me in a check. If they did, I would totally try to take it to a supermarket and see if they would cash my third-party check. I’d probably get some runaround about how they couldn’t go out on a limb in case the check was no good, haha. Nah, I figure I’ll get the four cents credited back to my credit card, which will be a fun line item in my next statement.

More recently, the phone would cut out audio on my end when I was talking with someone. I would keep talking to them, asking “hello? hello?”, but it was dead silent on my end. The phone would vibrate once (its “death rattle”, I decided), the screen would go completely black, and I’d just shut the phone in disgust. A couple minutes later, the phone would come back, the outside display once again showing the time, the inside screen no longer black. It would take it a bit for the bars to come back, and then I would call the person back and find that they had been able to hear me the whole time, had been talking, and I had just been unable to hear them. Not cool. This seemed to happen with a frequency of every other call I made or received, and I was no longer chalking it up to AT&T’s network.

Last night, I talked with Jon on the phone for a while before we each [voluntarily] hung up. He had recommended I watch this YouTube video, so I proceeded to do so, speakers turned up, phone nearby on the coffee table. Jon apparently tried to call me back three times, the first time failing somehow, but the second time he seemed to be connected… He heard music in the background and he heard me cough, but I didn’t respond. Now I didn’t respond because I never answered the phone, it was still by my feet on the table, shut (it’s a flip phone). He disconnected and called me back a third time, and this time it rang as expected and I answered. He told me what had just happened, I confirmed I was watching the music video and had possibly coughed. Yeah… Kinda creepy. No one likes the feeling of being spied on by their technology.

So I dug around last night and my phone was upgradeable through AT&T’s site. I ended up buying a refurbished Samsung Magnet for $10, though it did require I extend my contract again. *shrug* Everyone I talk to uses AT&T, and I haven’t been impressed with some of the policies (Verizon) or coverage (T-Mobile) of other companies, so I’m not too bothered by sticking with AT&T. When I get the phone in, I’ll take photos and post on here.

Also, it seems as though the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing at Toys R Us: I got an email promptly yesterday morning saying that the PS3 120GB I ordered is backordered, despite 1) their web site saying at the time I placed the order that they were in stock and 2) not trusting the web site, I called and spoke to a person at Toys R Us who again assured me that yes, the 120GB PS3 was in stock and there should be no delay in my order. *rolls eyes* Seems like they should update their inventory list more often. I canceled the order and will wait to spend my money elsewhere. I’ve called my local Best Buys for the past few days but no luck so far; I will prevail!

My landlord seems interested in keeping me around. I’ve been going back and forth with her for the past few days about the rent increase and she had the maintenance guy come out yesterday to fix my patio door. I still don’t have a latch and the guy said he doesn’t know where he’d find one. It’s a modern door, it just doesn’t have a latch because the previous tenant was an asshole or something. Anyway, he fixed the seal on it so it no longer functions as a big heat-sucking hole in my wall, and he installed one of those frame-mounted bars that lifts up so you can open the door. I’m still using the trusty length of wood and my non-mounted metal bar to keep the door shut firmly, hoping for a better seal/more safety.

I lived in a larger apartment here in town that actually did have a separate bedroom and it was cheaper than the new rent. I lived in another apartment the same size as this one, and it was still cheaper by $450. And let’s not get started on the problems with my apartment that the landlord has refused to fix! How about my sliding patio door that has never had a latch? How do I keep it shut, you might ask? Why, with a stick and a sliding door bar I bought from Home Depot. This is the same missing-lock door that was supposed to be fixed before I moved in. Nope, sorry. Or what about the inside-door doorknob on my front door, the one where if you accidentally lock the bottom lock, you cannot unlock it from the outside and you’re thus locked out of your apartment? Yeah, that was put on by mistake and was supposed to be changed shortly after I moved in. Never happened. I don’t have doors on my closets, nor did they remove the old sliding-door rails that were there from the previous doors. I only recently got a door over the closet with the water heater and that was because I badgered the landlord and asked their maintenance man myself to do it.

Basically, I live in el-cheapo apartment and I was fine with this for the rent that I’m paying now. I chose to live with this apartment because the rent was so cheap, but if rent is going up to more than what I’ve paid for much nicer apartments in the past, in this same vicinity, I’m out of here. It just pisses me off because I was hoping I had found a place where I could live for more than one year. I hate moving and now I’m stuck digging through all the online apartment-finding sites again. I guess I should work on getting rid of unnecessary things again, before I have to move out.

I found the 120GB version on Toys R Us’s web site for $299 and it said it was in stock. Not trusting that to be accurate, since every other store I checked online was out of stock, and stores I called in person were sold out, I decided to call Toys R Us. I fortunately got stuck with a phone menu that you talk into instead of the kind where you hit different buttons. I say fortunately because the speak-aloud ones are easy to circumvent: just wail and squeak and squeal different inhuman noises. It frustrates the machine and causes it to say things like “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” and eventually “Please hold while I connect you with a representative.” Score! I got a guy who checked for me and said it did indeed appear to be in their warehouse and that there shouldn’t be a delay in shipping. We’ll see. I went ahead and ordered it from their web site; $299 PS3, $13 shipping, and $18 in taxes later, my PS3 order was placed.

Games I’m looking forward to playing:

• Eternal Sonata
• Heavy Rain
• Katamari Damacy
• Dragon Age
• Heavenly Sword
• Little Big Planet

If you have any PS3 game suggestions, let me know. :) Also, has anyone else had trouble finding these things?

Melissa had stopped blogging for a while but, after having a child, got back in the scene. I was worried I wouldn’t be interested in what she has to say about motherhood because, damn, I’m a far way from wanting to have kids at all yet, but it’s nice to see that I do still enjoy her posts. I haven’t seen the girl IRL in several years and it’s nice to keep up with what’s going on in her life, even if she’s in a stage beyond mine.

When everyone around me (Facebook, blogs I read) seemed to be going baby-crazy, I considered Rose’s blog to be a bastion of what I find entertaining in blogs. She wrote funny, über-personal entries about her family dog, the assholes she has to deal with in retail, and her musings about the weird things in life. I just read an entry today though saying her blog will go in a more technical, professional direction, and this saddens me. I read Eric Lippert’s blog, Joel Spolsky’s blog, Ars Technica, and Stack Overflow for technical stuff. Rose’s blog was a break from all the geeky, technical things in my life, like a more personal Not Always Right-Reddit duo written by a single person. So hers is another blog from which I’ll probably unsubscribe. :(

As it stands, I read the blogs of a couple folks I know IRL, Melissa’s blog, and Leslie’s blog. I’m going to have to scrounge around some in people’s link lists to see what other blogs I might enjoy, because the ‘Personal’ folder in my Google Reader has slim pickings.

Here's sample output on my Mac:

Searching *.rb for "puts"...
./finder.rb:4:puts
./finder.rb:5:puts
./finder.rb:11:puts
./finder.rb:22:puts

And here's some sample output from a Linux machine:

Searching *.c for "struct task_struct"...
./fs/fcntl.c:414:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:423:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:462:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:481:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:490:struct task_struct

Modify the algorithm that allocates a file descriptor for the open() and socket() calls. Implement a per-process variable availableFileDescriptor whose value is always the number of the first available file descriptor. Make sure that when a process closes a file descriptor and or a socket, availableFileDescriptor is properly updated. Use your driver harness to compare the performance of your modified kernel with the original kernel, both for situations in which the original algorithm should work fast and situations in which the original algorithm should not work fast. You might want to remove the restrictions in the kernel on the setrlimit(RLIMIT_NOFILE,...) call.

I banged around on that thing for almost two weeks, variously getting a modified kernel that would a) segfault immediately, b) fail to reach the login prompt and just kind of hang out, or c) reach the login prompt but fail to allow me to log in. Turned out one of my main problems was that the sorting function I was using, an implementation of merge sort that I had found posted on a Linux kernel mailing list, was eating my nodes instead of just sorting them. It would delete one at a time in a sneaky fashion. I thought I had checked the thing, and who knows, maybe it worked it at first and then I changed something that caused it to grow an appetite for my struct type. At any rate, I replaced the function with my own implementation of selection sort since it was quick and easy to implement. Upon doing that, things started to behave as I expected, and it was a short road to getting my modified kernel to work properly then.

Poor Jon was sick this past weekend and so he did a lot of sleeping and sniffling. This actually worked out okay for me because, while he slept, I worked on my Linux project. He still has to go to work this week, which sucks for him, and his job is in Cincinnati, which sucks even more because of the traffic. I’m hoping he’ll be well by this weekend so he’ll be back to his usual self, plus the two of us could then go to Carly’s birthday party.

Note for students: my professor requested I state that, should you be taking his programming languages class CS 655 at the University of Kentucky and you try to use this code, (1) you'll get in trouble for using someone else's work and (2) you have to include the GPL and my copyright notice, which would be a big hint that it's not entirely your work. ;)

The name of the book, “House of Leaves,” seemed familiar to me but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Then I noticed on the back the word “Poe” and it looked like the same logo the singer Poe uses but I thought it was a coincidence. Then I noticed the word “Haunted” in quotes above the logo, and that’s a song by Poe that I love (and to which I am currently listening) and thought “okay, there’s got to be a connection here.” Then when I started reading the book and saw the phrase “five and a half minute hallway” I just had to check into it. I’d never heard that phrase before except on Poe’s album “Haunted”: there’s a song titled 5 ½ Minute Hallway. Turns out the author, Mark Danielewski, is Poe’s brother and her album “Haunted” is meant to parallel the book House of Leaves. Neato.

Now I had the album “Haunted” back in high school and loved it but, like a dork, gave it away to a friend and all I have left are crappy MP3 rips. Even worse, several of the tracks on the album are dialogue and I didn’t care about them at the time so I didn’t rip them from the CD. Well, I’m thinking those tracks might be interesting now that I’m reading the book, and I wanted better quality audio than 128K, so I re-bought the album on Amazon MP3 just now. It’s nice to be rehearing it. As usual, I debated between getting it off iTunes or Amazon MP3. Both had the 18-track album with the extra Hey Pretty remix, but Amazon offered it for $8.99 while iTunes had it for $9.99. I’ve written about this before, but iTunes often loses out to Amazon for me when it comes to buying MP3s, all due to price.

I got P.S. I Love You in on Netflix yesterday and, for the life of me, I don’t know why. I mean, I intentionally put it on my Netflix queue, but I dunno why. I don’t normally go for romance movies and now poor old Jon’s going to sit through it with me, haha. Speaking of movies he’ll have to sit through, I’ve already told him that he may have avoided seeing New Moon in theaters with me, but he won’t get out of watching it when it comes out on DVD. It’s already in my Netflix queue, in fact. Listen at me, saying I don’t go for romance movies and then saying I’ll inflict New Moon upon my boyfriend! Let me clarify: I enjoy the Twilight movie series because I like the book series, even though the movies are really pretty terrible. Anyway, I’ll now discontinue this line of discussion since your opinion of my Twilight-liking intellect has sunk through the floor… In other news, the next movie on my Netflix queue is The Machinist!