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Here is the beginning of another story, started on a whim. This time, it’s not for an assignment, but writing for the sake of writing. Here goes:

Rain. Aolin hated the rain. She had to remind herself that this will be quick, whatever it was.

Riding her bike during a storm was nothing new to Aolin. Cold, stinging drops smacking her face, both shower and puddles alike doing their best to drench her woefully-nonrepellant clothes, numb fingers grasping the handlebars — she knew all of this well.

Kinda hard not to get used to it, living in Washington, she thought bitterly. It never became any less unpleasant, though. As always, she hoped her glasses would still be usable, exposed to all this moisture.

However unhappy she would have been on any other rainy day, Aolin knew that this occasion would be worse. Professor Stenton had requested her presence for a meeting. No doubt he wants to discuss my latest failure of an exam. God, it’s not my fault you can’t teach!

She could see the entire meeting unfold in her mind. “You are obviously intelligent,” he would say. “If only you applied yourself more to your studies…”

Aolin sighed, her breath steaming the raindrop-dense air in front of her. Whatever, let’s just get this over with.

A chime sounded in her left ear. Aolin instinctively touched the left frame of her glasses, and was pleased to see the name “Chloe Brandt” floating before her in glowing font.

“Hi, Chloe!”

“Hey, ‘Lin, if you got a minute, I’ve just got to tell you something –”

“It may have to wait — I have a meeting with Stink-ton in a bit. Rain check?” The irony of what she just said struck her a second later.

“Ha, yeah, sure. Wait, ‘Lin, are you out riding in the rain again?”

“Come on, Chloe, it’s not that big of a deal –”

“You should be careful; at least take off your specs. I heard that a guy in LA was wearing his during a storm, and a short caused some sort of electric discharge or something and gave him permanent brain damage.”

“I’m fine. And you’re the one talking to me!”

“At least I’m indoors.”

“Ha, fair, I’ll take them off.”

“That’s all I ask.”

Aolin was reaching up to her face to remove her specs when Chloe spoke up again. “And don’t let me catch you riding in the rain again!”

“Hey, what happened to ‘that’s all I ask’?”

Chloe sighed into Aolin’s ear. “Fine. See you.”

“Bye.” Chloe’s name disappeared from Aolin’s vision, and she removed the specs, slipping the device into her messenger bag slung over her shoulder to her right side.

She arrived at the entrance of the Department of Metaphysics, a large, four-story box-shaped building seemingly composed of porous metal. Aolin dismounted her bike and pushed a blue button set into the center of the bicycle frame, prompting the bike to collapse and lock itself to the nearest fold-rack. She looked down the row of fold-rack slots, and saw only a couple more bikes collapsed here.

Not many people here today, she thought. The entrance’s translucent double-doors slid laterally outwards as Aolin approached. Upon entering the building, her surface was scanned, and countless simultaneous precision laser pulses dried her clothes in seconds.

Ah, much better. She looked across the atrium, ignoring its gleaming marble floor and reception desk, into the long, white hall directly across from where she was standing. Time to face Stink-ton.

**

Let’s see where this one goes.

Sickness has gotten worse. More frequent coughs, increased headache, elevated temperature.

That’s not the worst part. The most terrible bit is the blow to my motivation to complete tasks. It feels rather debilitating. Sigh. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow morning.

A couple of days ago, I woke up to discover an itch in my throat. Now, it has blossomed into a full-blown cough. I guess that’s what I get for going to school in the north.

I count myself fortunate, though. I did not get sick when pretty much everyone living around me had the flu (the constant-fever, wearing-a-mask, staying-in-bed kind), or when I pulled 3 all-nighters in five days (a harrowing experience). Nope, I have this simple cough and slight headache during a relatively less-intense academic week. So I have much to be thankful for.

In other news, lately I have been reminded by things going on in my world that I am a college junior, and should start behaving like one. That means I should begin thinking about what I’m doing this January and the following semester/summer in preparation for graduate school applications. GRE’s, interviews, talking to professors, all that fun stuff. Better get started!

This weekend, I decided to install Windows 7. Not only that, but I wished to keep my old Windows XP installation as well as have a Linux installation (I’m such a greedy geek! ). My goal was therefore to have three partitions (hard drive portions) on my single 120-gigabyte laptop hard drive: 36GB for Windows XP, 30GB for Linux, and the rest for Windows 7. I would choose the operating system I wish to boot into at startup.

I originally thought that the process would be pretty straightforward; I know friends who have set up triple-boot systems with relatively little hassle. However, things here and there have complicated matters for me.

I already have a dual-boot system with XP and Linux, so my first task was to resize my existing Windows XP partition to make room for a Windows 7 partition. Armed with a Linux live CD (essentially an operating system on a CD-ROM, leaving my hard drive free to be edited Frankenstein-style, mwahahaha), I thought that it would be a simple matter of running GParted (a graphical program that automates the magic of altering hard drive partitions). However, this is where I ran into my first snag; GParted detected bad sectors (gasp!) on my Windows XP partition, and it refuses to make any changes to it.

The term “bad sectors” sounded scary to me; I did a quick Internet search to see what other users have done when confronted with this. I learned that there were ways to edit partitions from a live CD’s text terminal that deftly avoids the bad sectors issue. I would have to use things called “ntfsresize” and “fdisk,” which would move the filesystem to take up a smaller size, and then shrink the partition, respectively.

The terminal command ntfsresize had an option, “–bad-sectors,” which basically roped off the unreadable parts of the hard drive and allowed hard drive operations to continue as if they weren’t there. I used this and set my filesystem size to a new, smaller one. Nice!

Then came time to use fdisk to shrink the partition around my smaller filesystem. This thing was a bit confusing to understand at first; the fdisk readout showed the partition sizes in integer numbers of 512-byte chunks. The interface was incredibly manual, with no automatic safeguards; I had to define the start/end points, type of formatting, and so on, all by myself, and a single slip-up can potentially destroy my entire drive. Thus, I did careful research and learned how to set my endpoints, avoiding overlap with other partitions or cutting off the XP data. With all of my edits meticulously entered into the command line, I nervously pushed Enter.

It worked! Hooray, I finally had space to install Windows 7! Whew. And I did. Windows 7 is so pretty! I found that I needed to find a wireless driver to make wi-fi work, but that’s a task for another time.

Next, I had to find out if my XP still worked or not. I rebooted, choosing this time to load XP. My stomach sank as this message popped up:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

<Windows root>/system32/hal.dll

Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Oh no! Once again, I scoured the Internet for a solution. Suggested fixes have included:

• Downloading a new hal.dll file (too risky; dll downloads have a nasty habit of turning out to be viruses)
• Undergoing a series of steps that require a Windows XP install CD (didn’t have one on me)
• Wiping the operating system and starting anew (was not an option as far as I was concerned)

I was about to lose hope when I found out that the issue may not be with the hal.dll file at all, but some incorrect configuration of XP’s boot.ini file. Hmm, worth a shot.

I popped the live CD back into my computer to mad-scientist one last time with my hard drive. I found the boot.ini file, made a quick back-up, and dived in.

The file was simple text, so I was able to simply use Gedit on the live CD to make changes. I found that the file directed XP to find its startup files from the *first* partition on the drive. At first I thought that there was nothing wrong with this; it was the same configuration that it always has been before.

But then I thought more about this. There was a small system recovery partition right before the XP one, right? How did it know to go to the *second* partition with XP.

Then it hit me. Before, XP was the only Windows there was on the entire drive. But now there are TWO instances of Windows, so it had to go with whatever partition index written in boot.ini to find the right Windows to start XP. What have I got to lose? I changed boot.ini so that it read from the second partition.

I restarted. And XP now works!! Awesome. Thus ends my weekend geek adventure.