RMA my RAM (with no mar on my arm)

My laptop started acting wonky. Specifically, it started to spontaneously restart whenever the computer had been running for, say, 40 seconds. That is quite annoying. After doing a little research online, I figured that I had a bad capacitor. After ripping apart my laptop to look around, I realized that a laptop motherboard doesn't have the kind of capacitors discussed as being part of the capacitor plague. After looking around some more, I became convinced that I probably had a bunk RAM stick. If your computer is spontaneously restarting, you might want to suspect a CPU overheating problem or power supply issue or bad driver problem if the restart happens after more than a few minutes, but should suspect bad RAM if the restart can happen very quickly (sometimes during boot) or still happens when your doing something like checking BIOS. As I was investigating the problem on my laptop I had tried to get into the BIOS and the computer froze (didn't restart because that is a Windows response to the bad RAM) and that was the last clue to me that the RAM was at fault.

I had bought a 1GB stick from Newegg.com (which I highly recommend for all computer component shopping) a little over a year ago. I was able to pull up the old invoice on my Gigaram RAM. I went to the Gigaram website and found their RMA (returned merchandise authorization) policy and followed it. After about 3 weeks total, I had my replacement RAM at only the cost of shipping my broken RAM to them. Could have been faster, but having the lifetime warranty honored was a good feeling. The fact that Newegg kept a copy of my invoice avaialable to me and that Gigaram honored the warranty made this a fairly painless experience. Thanks Gigaram and Newegg.

More than fair

Saw this in an AP story about Lance Briggs pleading guilty to something:

Defense attorney Frank Himel said he was pleased with the outcome.

"The judge was more than fair, more than fair," Himel said.

I guess my question is: if you are more than fair, aren't you clearly being unfair somewhere? If we decide to split a cookie evenly and I take 60% of if, I was totally more than fair. I guess this comes down to zero-sum games versus not, but I think it is still a silly statement.

Michael Vick and the Prisoner's Dilemma

If I ever go back to teaching math, I'll need to remember this week for a great example for a lecture on game theory. We are watching a real-life version of the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. For those unfamiliar with the PD, wikipedia has a good summary. Basically, the problem is described as a scenario where two prisoners are separately brought in for questioning. If either one cooperates with police (confesses and gives up the other guy), they will get a reduced sentence. If neither one cooperates (both keep quiet), then they will both get the lightest sentence possible. However, if one doesn't cooperate while the other does, the non-cooperator will get the harshest sentence possible.

Here is a nice table directly taken from Wikipedia:

	Prisoner B Stays Silent	Prisoner B Betrays
Prisoner A Stays Silent	Each serves six months	Prisoner A serves ten years Prisoner B goes free
Prisoner A Betrays	Prisoner A goes free Prisoner B serves ten years	Each serves five years

From a game theory standpoint, even though it is in the prisoners best interest to not talk to the police, the risk of the harsh sentence entices both prisoners to betray each other.

So, why the heck bring it up now? Well, I think we're seeing this play out right now with the Michael Vick investigation. For those not up on their NFL scandals, Vick has been indicted on charges related to running a dog fighting ring. The really interesting part is that a few of his cohorts were also indicted. One of them already plead guilty a few weeks ago. This started the pressure on the other three, including Vick. Now there has been an announcement that Vick's two other buddies are scheduled to enter pleas later this week. Uh-oh.

If you look at the table above, that could put all of them squarely (or, more precisely, rectangularly) in the lower right box. Granted, I am sort of forcing this analogy a bit especially since there is likely a boatload of evidence coaxing these confessions, but it is still fascinating to watch from a game theoretic standpoint. It is also fascinating to watch in terms of hoping dog torturers get their comeuppances.

Yves redux

Alright, I was hard on Yves in my last post about them. So I thought I'd share my latest positive experience with one of their products. I bought some of Yves Meatless Ground. I am a sucker for sales at the grocery store. I understand that many of these "sale" prices are somewhat artificial, but I still go for them, especially when they have those five special words: "Buy one, get one free". Oh yeah. So I got a couple of these fake ground beef things.

Now the trick was to figure out what to do with it. I ended up feeling a bit nostalgic for the cuisine of my youth. Sweet, sweet Hamburger Helper. Lasagna flavor to be exact. Using the fake meat actually was pretty darn good in the HH. I'd say that kids and many adults wouldn't think too much about it if they tried this. The texture is a bit different (bit chewy), but really the flavor comes from the HH packet anyway. And the Meatless ground is a bit cheaper than the real thing. Especially at buy one get one free.

Transformers

This may contain a weak spoiler or two.

I go to the movies only about once every few months nowadays. My seasonal trip to the theatre took me to Transformers last night. Oh boy. Lots of crazy animation, a few explosions and a whole heap of transformations! The most AMAZING transformation of the movie, though, was the how the movie transformed my childhood joy into a pile of crap. So disappointing. I know it may be a little shocking to hear that a Michael Bay film lacked and semblance of soul, but, alas, it did. It wasn't that I was expecting anything too deep or moving, but it would have been nice to care a little about the main characters (or ANY characters for that matter). I guess it is good to see that some aspect of the 2-D original cartoon series was preserved in the flatness of the characters. Megatron wasn't in the movie much, but he had way more personality than anyone/thing in the movie. I almost wanted him to destroy the earth. Oh, spoiler alert: he doesn't destroy the earth.

Another interesting thing to look out for is the treatment of African-Americans in the film. There are a few black characters, a car salesman, a computer hacker, a soldier, and one of the transformers, Jazz, talks like a street stereotype. I'll just point you to this other blog post to get a more in depth understanding of Bay's treatment of these characters. Spoiler alert: To that, I'd only add that Jazz is the only Autobot ("good" transformer) that doesn't survive. For fun, take a look at how the Latino soldier and the Indian(?) phone operator characters.

More than meets the eye indeed.

Max memory in Toshiba Satellite 1955-S803

Just a quick note about the laptop I use at work--a Tosihba Satellite 1955-S803. It is a bit old (2004?) with a Pentium 4. Anyway, the documentation I found online said this thing has a maximum 1GB of memory. It comes standard with 2 256MB sticks. Things were sluggish and the only memory I had available was a 1GB stick, so I popped it in place of one of the 256s and thought to myself: "Self, you should just leave that other 256 in there and see what the heck happens." I listened to myself. I assumed that nothing too bad would happen. Worst case I figured that the motherboard hardware just wouldn't recognize anything over 1GB, but would make use of up to that amount. Too my delight, Linux booted up just fine and checking /proc/meminfo showed me the full 1.25 GB was recognized. Awesome. So the moral of this engrossing tale is that you can't always trust the info from the folks selling you the equipment. Sometimes you can trust your overall knowledge of computer architecture. Now, I wouldn't try and shove all kinds of stuff that doesn't belong, but this was benign enough to try. As a quick aside, I think the system will take up to the full 4GB if I had 2 2GB sticks available. If I ever try that, I'll be sure to post about it. I know you can't wait.

Brushing

Things are not looking good. A couple weeks ago I got a haircut. Something I do now once every couple months I think. I used to get no haircuts. Then in the Peace Corps I went to a buzz cut every 6 months. In the intervening years, I have reached my current rate. If I extrapolate properly, when I am 54, I will be getting a haircut every 13 minutes.

But my haircuts aren't the cause of today's very important blog entry. You may want to sit down for this. Actually, you should most always sit down when using a computer, so forget that last piece of advice. I bought a hair brush today. Yikes! Gives me shivers just thinking about it! Luckily I haven't used it yet. I used to have a brush back in the days when I never cut my hair (man, that was a sweet ponytail). But since then, I haven't bothered with combs or brushes (or rollers or blow dryers or any other such hair styling implement).

Anyway, that's it for now. Wish me luck with the new brush... I'll need it.