Boned!

Gah! Many happenings.

Laptop plus garage floor equals non-warrantee repair. The front left corner of my computer was squished in, which somehow equated to the display showing the sorts of things you would get from a partially connected connector. It correctly runs an external VGA monitor. So, took it to the Apple store, where they say that it “could be” a loose connector, and it “could be” a cracked logic board. The first will cost “Tier I” support (~$150) while the second will cost “Tier III support” (~900). Plus the cost of backing up my data ($50). Unless you pay the fee, they don’t promise anything better than getting the machine back totally wiped (“but sometimes all your stuff is still there…it’s up to you man”). Gah. In the future, I’ll buy myself a firewire drive and make periodic backups. For the moment, I paid the $50. Just make it work, okay? .

In better news, I fixed the floating point underflow from before. Turns out all that’s required is the compiler flag “-mieee” which (for the interested layman) means “do the right thing.” In case you try to create a number that’s too small to represent in a double precision floating point number, round it to zero. Seems reasonable, but I guess DEC assumes that people are going to want to know when their answers are not totally accurate. Thanks to technolope for the tip. A full on dialogue about this issue is here, on the biodevelopers list.

On the other hand, we had a quite productive meeting today at the “we write code” end of the project I’m on. Meetings at the PI level have been pretty tense of late, so the code writing people have started getting together to try to make sure we’re not fermenting strife and trouble more than is actually required by the political realities of the project. Turns out that we had a lot to talk about and some good info to share.

Seems like my house might actually get sold at some point here. The buyer had her property inspected today, and she’s having my house inspected on Wed. If all is well with both of those inspections, then we have a no-conditions purchase agreement and I’ll be homeless at the end of July. W00t! One piece of the puzzle might actually fall into place!

Oh yeah, and I planted marigolds all over my garden. Bunnies hate marigolds, you see. Somehow, dirt crusted under my fingernails makes me happier and happier as I age.