Just showing up for a second so nobody thinks I vanished off the face of the earth. Lately—and especially these past few days—everything has been driving me crazy.

Week 14 is almost here, and that means the linear algebra exam. Some people are even saying it might happen over the weekend of week 13. The problem is, I still barely know what’s going on. Then there’s the English speaking test in week 14 too. I’m supposed to memorize eight model essays, and so far I haven’t even fully nailed down three of them. At best I’ve got less than two weeks left.

And week 17 brings the even more oppressive CET-4 exam. I’m already sick of it.

As if exams weren’t enough, I managed to wreck one of my data drives while installing Ubuntu a few days ago. I accidentally set it as a SWAP partition, and not a single file survived. This time it was total destruction—completely wiped out, forcing me to start over from zero. That drive had basically everything I had collected since the first time I ever touched a computer. For someone like me, who thinks data is priceless, this kind of thing is unbearable. There’s not even anywhere to go cry about it.

I’ve made up my mind: I need to buy an external hard drive. If anyone has a good recommendation, I’m listening.

Junjun is also looking to buy a computer, so I spent the last couple of days helping him compare models. Honestly, there aren’t that many exciting choices. We looked around and still didn’t find anything especially satisfying. He clearly leans toward Lenovo, even though he keeps saying he’s fine with anything. I just don’t think Lenovo offers great value for the money, and I’m more inclined toward ASUS. In the end, he decided on the Lenovo G450, while the one that caught my eye was an ASUS F81 that I noticed in a quick glance. Curious what other people think about those two.

Today’s elective class officially turned into a film appreciation session. Before, the teacher would at least lecture a little, but today it was even more direct: “Today we’ll enjoy Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.” :-|

And of course the movie was old—really old—and dubbed in Chinese, probably copied from some random DVD. The screening dragged on forever. After more than two hours it still wasn’t over, and by the end the audio had gone out of sync. My eyes hurt from staring at it. Nobody else seemed interested either. The moment attendance was finished, people started leaving. By the way, Julien is seriously shameless... enough to compete with certain characters from Père Goriot.

My microblog has also been acting up lately. The database connection keeps throwing errors, even though logging in works fine, which makes it even more annoying.

Query: INSERT INTO `entry` ( `prefix`, `content`, `time`, `from`) VALUES ('20', '这是一篇测试消息', '1257410923', 'Web') Info: MySQL server has gone away Code: 2006

If anyone knows what’s causing that, please tell me, because I’m completely stuck and beyond frustrated.

PS: I think I’ve gotten a little better at Photoshop lately, haha. That’s enough proof of life for now—I’m disappearing again, in style.