unhandledexception.net

So after receiving my Koss headphones back, I noticed that they were not sounding right. After a fwe probes with a digital multimeter, I found out that the LEFT and GROUND terminals on the mini-phone jack were inverted. Nice. Koss has sent me bad warranty replacement.

So I got to work. I grabbed a earbud cable from which the earbuds were long gone from it (I beleive these were some Sennheiser earbuds I used to have), and some electrician’s clamps (from the men’s section at Dollarama), and got to work, until the Creative Mixer utility’s Left channel and left channel sounded from the proper channels, and not from both.

Then, I went to my local Radio Scrap, zoom through the cheap home theater section and to the racks in the back, where I picked up a male and female inline 1/8″ phono connector, and a brand new soldering iron (my old one broke), grabbed some spool of hook-up wire from my junk drawer, and got to work. What came out of these two hours (including the trip to Radio Shack) is a nifty little adapter. My 1337 soldering skillz made sure resistance was about 0.05 Ohms, to retain full sound fidelity.

Then I immediately went back to work on my compiler, which I demoed thursday to the professor. I have to say he was actually pretty happy with it. Well at least that’s what I think and I hope I’m right. It properly compiled samples containing arithmetics, loops, if statements and functions. I have to say I am proud of this project.

Tuesday I hopped in my dad’s car to go get 500 euros to spend in Greece, get an international driving permit and a haircut. Today I went to buy some last minute things, like an American to European power socket adapter for my razor, tags for my luggage, and some bubble gum, yes now there’s no more braces, so I’m pigging out on bubble gum and popcorn, two wonderful American inventions, along with soft drinks!

So my flight leaves at 5:15 p.m. on Greek Easter Sunday. I hope the lamb will be ready before I leave for the airport. This would be midnight, Athens time.

To make a long story short, I learnt the hard way that it was not a good idea to sleep with headphones on, you know, listening to music in bed at night. The hinge broke a little over a year after I got them, and that’s like 4 years ago. I have been waiting to send them for warranty repair for awhile now, but always procrastinated. I finally packed them up last march, after I learnt I was going to Greece.

So I went and picked them up at the postal counter this morning, and let me tell you, there is a difference between a $80 Koss headphone, and a $30 Optimus (Radio Shack).

One of the most annoying things about Concordia is registering for classes. What can make that go wrong, one may ask? It’s simple. Using a retarded and pathetic web application, called the My Concordia Portal.

They have had the portal for at least 3 years now, and for 1 year, it has been the only way to deal with registration, payment of student fees, schedules, etc. The issue is that while people such as the dean of students of the university, who obviously know nothing much about web applications, go around the country bragging about how cutting edge the system is, the system itself has not had a day where nothing went wrong. In fact, the system constantly harasses students with rather original error messages, anything from ASP errors, Oracle DB access errors, and of course, a bunch of seemingly random HTTP 500 errors.

So this morning, registration opened for me at 6 a.m. to be precise, but unfortunately I value more getting my sleep than registration, so I got around doing that around 1 p.m. So, let’s see, I start by registering for the fall semester. Throw in the SOEN courses I have to take. That would be SOEN 321, 342 and 343. At that point of time the system was painfully slow, and kept trowing a 500-13 error every once in awhile to spice things up.

Then comes time to register for engineering core courses. I wanna get that done someday so I can finally graduate. So yeah, ENGR 371. Nope. This shit comes up instead. Right. So not only the system is acting up (remember the 500-13’s? they are still comming up!), but now the imbeciles over at the ENCS faculty are at it again. So there are three sections of that class, but here’s the hint, they are reserved for specific departments, for whatever stupid reason, other than they will prolly throw in some incompetent prof to teach the course, because of course CSE students can take it up the you know what. We’re used to it after all. So, section S is the one I should register, but guess what? It conflicts with with SOEN 343.

I’m essentially fed up now, I leave it at that, turn up some techno, and work on my SOEN 341 group assignment.