All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

Psychology students and fans of Apple’s popular iPod can now listen and learn at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Calvin Garbin is one of the first instructors at the university to harness iPod’s versatility and use it as an educational tool. (Full story)

After reading this, I’m really excited that this professor gets it. Isn’t it worth the extra time to help the auditory learners? For me, I wouldn’t skip class, but instead use the recordings to listen to it again, in case I might’ve missed something.

Edit: I should elaborate. The “getting it” part is sort of against professors that don’t allow people to record their lectures. Personally, I think this hurts the majority of students who are trustworthy. It’s the 2% of dishonest students that mess it up for everyone else, and I don’t even know what that means!

I like 30 Boxes, but it still has quirks to tend to. I know, who doesn’t? Anyway, a tip for those who are messing with it: don’t use quotation marks in tags (a la Flickr). My calendar is currently inaccessible. Please fix it soon, fellas! (Update: Solved! Back to messing around with it.)

When I ordered my external hard drive, I opted with FedEx this time. I wasn’t home when they tried, but rather than trying a neighbor, they took it back to the sorting facility to try again. I wasn’t going to be home the following day, so I called and asked if they could just hold for pickup. I’d just go a bit out of my way on the way to work, really because I wanted my new gadget!

So what happened? The phone call that was made the night before, assuring me that they’d hold it for me, was all lies. I got there about 9am, and they said the driver left with it at 6:45am. What about the phone call less than 12 hours ago? Apparently it didn’t get onto the system until 8:30am. What!?! I didn’t even get an apology from the clerk at the front desk. (No, I don’t know what they’re called, and I don’t care.)

FedEx Customer Rep: The driver left with it, so you’ll have to come back tomorrow. *silence*

Me: Um, okay. *walks out*

No apologies. I was furious. Back on the road, I called the 800-number, and told the CS of the situation. He basically summarized what I already knew. (Duh, I just told them I was there.) I asked if he could get the driver to deliver to my neighbor, and that worked out okay. But even from him, no apologies.

In the end, my neighbor got my package, and I’ve been messing with the external hard drive since then. I just don’t understand how FedEx could mess things up for me, make me go more out of my way than I should have, without offering any sort of apology. If they said “sorry,” I would’ve been okay with it. It wasn’t that one person’s fault…hopefully. That isn’t too much to ask for, and it’s bad how big corporations like that lose the personal touches that everyone craves. Touches? I don’t know how to put it.

I finally bought a new hard drive for my computer. It’s a Seagate 120GB 7200RPM hard drive, and that replaced the Western Digital 60GB 5400RPM that’s about 5-6 years old. I installed the HD, partitioned it, moved my data onto the larger partition, removed the older HD, then did a clean Windows XP install onto the new one.

The good news is that the new HD seems to be working just fine. I don’t know when things are supposed to be snappier, because I have a 8MB cache instead of 2MB.

The bad news is that after receiving the Bytecc ME-740U2F External Enclosure I was going to use for the older HD, I’ve had two corruptions or something. (I hope it’s not the external enclosure - Alex uses the same one.)

Before the clean install, and the old HD was still in the case, I used Ultimate Boot CD to run Ranish Partition Manager to nuke the old HD and format it into one large partition. So, the first corruption happened maybe 20-30 minutes after Karen’s Replicator copied synchronized all my personal data onto it. I haven’t accessed the drive for awhile, but when I tried to open it in Windows Explorer, and it said the file system was corrupt. (I didn’t get the error message.) In Computer Management, I ran a quick format into NTFS, as opposed to the FAT32 it was formerly in.

So the second corruption was a bit weirder. I let Karen’s Replicator run as I fell asleep. I woke up, and tried to eject my external drive, but it was corrupt again. This time, I did a full format into NTFS, as opposed to a quick format.

As a side note, I saw a firmware update for the Prolific PL-3507 chipset, which is what my drive runs with. But when I tried to update the firmware, it says it couldn’t find or connect to the device. I don’t know.

So now, after it’s been thoroughly formatted, I’ve synchronized my torrent downloads only (about 5GB). I’ve ejected the device, and turned it off and on about three times. After synchronizing everything else, it seems to be okay. I’ve ejected and reconnected it two more times successfully.

Maybe it was the way I’ve formatted it, but I don’t get why it’d corrupt with FAT32, where I did run a full format. Time will tell.

Update: I’ve been running a defrag for the external HD, and I got the following error maybe 30 minutes into it.

Windows - Delayed Write Failed

Windows was unable to save all the data for the file X:\$BitMap. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.

Any thoughts? I couldn’t access the drive, so I powered it down, then back on. It seems fine right now. Am I not supposed to defrag it?

Firefox just got updated to 1.5.0.1. If you haven’t gotten Firefox 1.5, I think it’s safe enough now. If you’re not sure how to update to 1.5.0.1, the picture below should help. (Note: You need to be running 1.5 in order to update this way. If you’re running an older version, you need to get the full installer.)

(via Digg)