I have a riddle.

Q -- Why does Rob's new 56k modem refuse to handshake with anything slower than a 28.8 modem?
A -- Because it's trying to drive me mad with grief.

Please, if you have some insights, I'm not one of those boys who pretends to know so much about computers that I could never sacrifice my pride and accept a little bit of help. Neither Carleton nor Freenet (my two accounts) offer more than a handful of 28.8 lines -- the rest are all 14.4 -- so if you want me to be able to log in so that I can actually update my page, I'll need the services of your brain. The last thing I want to do is bring my brand new computer back to the store, scratching my head like a primate picking at parasites, dumbfounded by the technological intricacies of a "magic beepy box." Man, I do not want to become a tech-support anecdote. If you've ever had a friend work at a computer-related help desk, you know to what I refer. People are horribly stupid, and until this morning I was pretty sure I was somehow better than the urban legends about people who think their CD-ROM drives are coffee holders and break them off by actually using them this way.

Today I'm bedridden, with a fever forever wavering just a few points of a degree above or below 102 degrees farenheit. I'm pleasantly lucid, but rife with aches, dizziness, drowsiness, nausea, and a killer headache which only gets worse every time my lungs force me to cough like I have pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis or something.
Sigh.
Tomorow I'm working on a computer science assignment with a friend who took the same course I'm now mucking through, last term. See, the first year introductory computer science courses are split between two terms -- 95.105 in the first term, and then 95.106 in the second term. Well, keeping that in mind, last year when I took it, they were coaching us in an obscure, backwards, object-oriented language called Smalltalk. Between the spring term of 1998 and the fall term of 1998, however, they changed the computer language. So now they teach us Java -- eminently more trainable and employable, or so I imagine. Unfortunately, I walked into this winter's 95.106 course where I was greeted with the assumption that every single last student had taken Java last term, and not Smalltalk the term before -- and by no means is that unreasonable. Most people would, especially computer science students. So, now I'm hopelessly lost, dreading the prospect that I will have to drop 106 and start over with 105 again either in the summer or the fall. And I just hate big steps backwards like that. Here's hoping I can learn a term's worth of new syntax virtually overnight.

Cough!

Brought to you by Jolt Cola, with
the buzzing and mild irritation of
caffeine induced paranoia.

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