Monday, February 5, 2007

Lost Sleep and Lost Memory in Cambridge

Lost sleep. Today has been less productive than I would have wished. I stayed up to late, until 1:00 am watching the first half of the Super Bowl game as the Bears and the Colts slogged it out. I watched with two friends, Barry Danylak and Trond Skinstad, with whom I attended Evensong at St. John's College chapel. Barry, having lived in Chicagoland, as I have, rooted for the Bears. Trond, on the other hand, is from Norway. That made it fun. He was learning the game of American football. As we watched, we enjoyed fine cheeses with crackers left over from a fancy reception for the launch of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, not the ordinary snack for watching a Super Bowl game.

I suppose that I should not have been surprised when I rose this morning to discover that the Bears lost. I hope to watch the other half of the game when I return home in March. John, my son, recorded it for me in high definition.

Well, now about losing memory. Before I left home for Cambridge, I had ordered an upgrade of RAM for my laptop computer. Unfortunately, it had not arrived before I left. Today, it arrived via DHL. I was eager to get it, hoping that it will ease some of the strain on the computer, given the increasing demands of software. Regrettably, I discovered that one stick of RAM is defective. Of course, to discover this took considerable amount of time and some alarm. I did not narrow it down to one stick without numerous attempts to sort out where the problem resided. Upon carefully and meticulous placing the RAM sticks into the computer, the laptop would not boot up. It simply ground away. At last, I received an alarming message, "system32\Drivers\Ntfs.sys" missing. Oh no! Now what do I do? Well I decided to place the original RAM back into the computer. VoilĂ ! It booted up properly. Thanks to Google, I after searching the web for
"system32\Drivers\Ntfs.sys," I discovered the likely problem. Bad RAM. Sure enough, one stick is no good. So, after having received the RAM upgrade, it unfortunately does not help my situation. The old RAM is back in the computer. Memory gained and memory lost, all in one day.