jeffy124's Journal: Goodbye Email! And Hello Fall Term

Well, this sucks. I mean, really, sucks.

Drexel's mail systems went offline around 6pm Tuesday. Everyone school-wide is without email. It was a hardware related failure that forced a total outage yesterday while the IT dept made the repairs. They then found damaged files on the system. Based on the incident details on their website, it looks like the lost files were only system files, not user data files. The files would be restored from backup. I first saw this notice at about 4pm yesterday, and was still there when I went to sleep.

Well, this morning I come in and open up Outlook, and find that my mailbox is empty. All the old mail was gone, including every folder I had sorted everything into. Some new mail was there, probably queued from last Tuesday. AHHHH!!!!

Check their incidents board to see that the server is indeed running again, but they have to restore all the email from tape -- A two-day process. Meanwhile, queued incoming email is suddenly now being force fed into the system, making everything go slowly.

Fingers are already being (jokingly) pointed at various suspects in this crash. All signs point to the freshman that moved in last Sunday.

Thank god this was the summer/fall break and nobody important is around. School starts Monday (Drexel follows a quarterly schedule, 10 weeks + 1 week finals per term). I have five classes this term - Networks, Algorithms I, Thy Computation, Criminology & Justice, and History in Tech Perspective. I was gonna take History of WWII, but they cancelled it last week (which sucks, I was looking forward to it), despite a full 40-person class that was orignally for 25 students. They had increased capacity because of reasonably high demand. Why they cancelled I dont know, but it sure pisses me off.

Networks and Computation I'm not too concerned about. I know plenty about networks already, and Thy Comp was a pre-requisite to Compilers I, which I took last Winter. Algorithms, OTOH, I'm told the guy will scare the s*** out of you each lecture. As such, I'm already reviewing material from past courses related to various proof techniques (ie, Induction) and simple combinatorics.

My crime class (a sociology course) has a lit-style book required, and I'm already reading that given I have nothing else to do aside from Algorithm prepping. It's a story about the Philadelphia Mob and the FBI's investigation of them in the early-to-mid 1990s. So far a good read into life in the FBI and life in organized crime. I might even be done the 200 page book before Monday. The story was primarily based on the author's examination of FBI info (from undercover mobsters wearing wires, informants etc), interviews of mobster types, and reviews of court proceedings.