Blessed by the Potato

Nothing seemed to be going right for me this week, especially when it came to electronics.

First, my home desktop broke down with no video, the problem appearing to be a combination of the motherboard, video card, and possibly power supply, so I went and ordered a whole new computer for myself as a bit of a birthday present.

Then, the DVD burner on my work computer died (I still have a DVD-ROM on that system, so the situation isn’t too dire).

My laptop pulled through, but it crashed a number of times the next day, including some very strange video errors that made me think the video card on it was dying, too.

Then my new computer arrived, and after putting it together, it wouldn’t boot with my old hard drive (one of the few parts I kept from the old computer). I spent all day trying to get the drivers right and repairing windows and slipstreaming, and just nothing. So after giving up the next day, I did a fresh install of windows, only to find that the brand-new PC-Cillin 2008 disc I picked up doesn’t support XP SP3. (Fortunately, Trend Micro upgraded me to 2009)

At work, I use a piece of hospital equipment for my research, but only get it when it’s not being used to treat patients, which is generally the middle of the night. It’s tough to find volunteers to participate in my study even at 11pm and 1am, but I managed to fill all four time slots last night: 11pm, 1am, 3am, and 5am (ending at 7am), the first time I’ve managed to book 4 people for a single night. Things were finally looking up: this one busy, hellish night was going to pay dividends in getting me that much closer to finishing my thesis. Then, halfway through the first person, my equipment broke down. Just gave an error message and stopped working. Then I’m left cancelling all these people, trying to get a hold of them in the middle of the night so they don’t waste their time coming in, in addition to not having my equipment and losing out on all that time…

So tonight is our Halloween party. I talk to my mom on the phone beforehand, and she mentions that she’d like me to print some of the photos I took of the trees changing colours. My camera, which she got me for xmas last year, is just fricking great. It takes amazing pictures, a few of which I’ve printed as 8×10’s and framed. So of course, praising the camera today has cursed it, and at the end of the party I set the camera on a bookshelf to take a timer shot with Wayfare and I in it… and the camera falls off the bookshelf and hits the floor. I’m thinking it’s no big deal: I’m not generally too gentle on my equipment, since I figure it’s got to be made to handle the rigours of everyday life, and a 4′ drop is not that serious. Nope, the camera’s dead. The motor that focuses and retracts the lens when it shuts down won’t operate, so it can’t focus on anything and I can’t retract the lens to shut it down.

Fortunately, my parents got the extended warranty from Black’s when they bought it for me (it must have been a freebie, since they never bother with extended warranties). I should hear back soon if it can be repaired…

Wayfare and I just had a rather monumental life experience, for which we received numerous lovely (and generous) cards of congratulations. What I found incredible was that we received somewhere in the neighbourhood of 60 cards, and there were only two pairs of similar ones. I’m amazed at how many unique cards there were, and since I doubt all of our friends and family conspired to pick different cards, it must mean that there is an extraordinary number of cards out there on the market.

I figured I’d geek out and do a quick combinatorics calculation to figure out how many that implies, however I find I can’t recall how to do the math any more. It’s kind of a sad point that I’m passing the halfway point in my PhD and I can’t remember how to do a high school math problem without opening up a book or Googling it.

So, even with just 59 unique cards, one can pick a set of 58 in 59 unique ways if no repetitions are allowed. However, repetitions are allowed, which leads to something like 10^80 possible combinations. I still can’t think of how to figure out how many cards that implies are on the market, but it does seem to tell me that it was pretty extraordinary that people chose such unique cards! It also makes me a little sad about where my math abilities are going to.

Well, it looks like the initial euphoria over the massive bailout plan last weekend has faded already, and the market has given up much of the gains today.

My computer’s problem looks to be much more complex than just a dead video card: possibly the power supply, motherboard, CPU, or multiple combinations thereof are fried in addition to the video card. So I’m going to do some more troubleshooting tonight, but it seems like I’m looking at needing a new computer: either I can take Wayfare’s (which is virtually identical to mine from a hardware point of view) and get her a new one, or get a new one for myself (she doesn’t game, so a new one for her might be a bit cheaper). I think I might try to hold off and continue to use just my laptop and work computer (and game on the Wii) for a few months, then maybe hope that I get computer parts for xmas.

The company that partially funds my research stipend had some bad results in their clinical trial, and have moved surprisingly quickly to terminate my student support. It looks like they’re gearing up to go bust, which has wiped out the stock I held in them, too. This is bad, but could be very bad. Since they hold all the patents for what my supervisor invented (and I continue to research), it means I might not be allowed to continue my research if they liquidate the patent rights and we don’t continue to enjoy our investigational license. The stock’s at about 8 cents today, so if anyone has $800,000 or so to lend me, I could stage a hostile takeover, keep it a going concern (though realistically, once I started buying up shares in a hostile takeover, the price would go up — better lend me $2M just to be sure). Maybe if I pretend I’m a bank with bad loans, one of the world governments will give me a few million?

And Stephen Harper, against all sense, won the election. Ok, it wasn’t the best time for the Liberals to flog their Green Shift plan; but what’s he going to do with another minority government? He just dissolved parliament, breaking his own election law, because he couldn’t work with a minority government. Now that he has another he’s going to pretend it’s all hunky dory and a mandate from Canadians? I was also really surprised at some of the Ontario ridings that elected Con MPs — they should have known better.

Update: After further troubleshooting, I found that my CPU is fine, my RAM is fine, and I think my hard disk/DVD-R is fine. My video card is shot, my motherboard is shot, and my power supply is unknown. So I think I’m looking at a new computer here :(

I’ve soured against gift cards in recent years, and have tried to turn back the stigma against cash gifts by thanking people profusely for the “universal gift card”. The government did a world of good by not letting companies forcibly expire the easily-misplaced interest-free loans, but in these tough economic times, that won’t necessarily stop a company from going bankrupt and not honouring them. I was reading a completely unrelated article about the mess we’re in when I noticed a little blurb about Linens ‘n Things going bankrupt this week, and that they might suspend their gift cards. “Hey!” I said to myself, “we just got a Linens ‘n Things gift card!”

I have no idea if they can do such a thing here in Ontario, but I’m hoping to rush right out to use it up soon anyway.

This post originally appeared as part of my irregular feature “Potato Wedges” over on the Moneygardener

In the course of all that school work, I’ve pulled a lot of all-nighters, which has required a lot of caffeine to keep me somewhat awake. I’ve never been able to get into coffee, just too bitter for my sweet tooth (actually, I have about 28 sweet teeth), so Coke was my vice. Lots and lots of Coke.

The thing about Coke is that it is just stupidly destructive to teeth, especially when you’re in the lab for 14 hours straight and aren’t brushing until you sleep, and you’re not doing that, either. Pretty much every tooth from my canines back has a cavity, and the funny thing I learned about cavities from my dentist is that the fillings, particularly when you “chew hard” or grind your teeth like I supposedly do, have a limited lifespan, on the order of about 10 years at which point they usually have to be re drilled and refilled because the enamel starts wearing down around the filling (widening the hole), or the filling itself may crack or become loose. So now I’m in this holding pattern where I have more than 10 fillings that are all on this 10-year cycle, so I’m getting at least one filling redone every year. Needless to say, I spend a lot on dental care — I usually max out my $500 university dental plan every year, and still end up paying another $500 or so out of my own pocket in co-pays.

To try to ameliorate the situation, I jump on almost every dental care fad there is (I have yet to get a water pick irrigator thing, but I know it’s coming). Recently, Crest and Colgate came out with new toothpastes: Crest Pro Health and Colgate Total Advanced Health/Professional Clean. They were more than twice as expensive as the regular version of the toothpaste I usually buy (Colgate Total), so they must be good, right? Well, after I got home from the store (Shoppers Drug Mart, btw) I looked at the active ingredients and the health claims and they were exactly the same. What a scam! I went back to the store and also saw “enamel hardening” toothpaste, which sounded like just what I needed. Turns out this had fluoride as its only active ingredient — basically, they renamed their basic toothpaste (non-total, non-12-hour-antibacterial, non-tatar-fighting) enamel hardening. I started to wonder if the new Advanced Health tubes were just a marketing gimmick, repackaging the same stuff for a much bigger markup.

To make a long story merely medium-length, I found that there was one very slight difference: the new expensive versions had tiny silica particles in them, basically sand grains to act as abrasives to help clean teeth even more. I’m skeptical first off of how effective that might really be, and secondly on whether that really makes the toothpaste cost twice as much. I was just about to launch into full righteous indignation mode and write to Colgate-Palmolive and P&G expressing my dismay at their deceptive price gouging tactics and how I was going to switch back to Colgate Total when I was hit by the noodly appendage of perspective. Toothpaste, in the grand scheme of things, is an extremely minor expense, especially in light of how much I spend on dental care. In fact, I’ve gone and bought myself some Colgate Prevident, something I had been avoiding merely because it costs $12/bottle. Prevident, for those who don’t know, is a concentrated fluoride toothpaste (1.1% vs the 0.243% in regular toothpaste) that’s meant to be used as a before-bed brush-on treatment after you’ve already brushed your teeth with regular toothpaste. It’s really for people like me with particularly horrible mouths; most people don’t need that kind of treatment.

So kids, brush and floss those teeth, and do your homework early so you don’t stay up all night drinking Coke like it was your job. I don’t want to recommend caffeine pills since they always seemed kind of extreme to me, but it might not be such a bad alternative.

Oh, and MG: Sorry, I know you own Procter & Gamble (PG), but I’ve just always been a Colgate (CL) guy (and Crest doesn’t have a Prevident alternative!)