Something funny happened recently, and I just
need to post it lest I forget. I'm getting so forgetful these days I'm afraid I may one day forget what my name is.
Firstly, let me quote the awesome statements that broke through my frustration of the past 15 days of the project.
...don't hesitate to romanticize yourself and love yourself for being the raucous bastard who dares to try something ambitious and won't stay down or shut the fuck up. You're in the springtime of your FUCKING youth and THE GLORIOUS DOMAIN OF MAKING A CHANGE AND FULFILLING SOME NOBLE ENTERPRISE IS YOURS TO ENJOY!
You're one motherfucking asshole! You make me proud!
This'll happen even more in your line of career, but something about your attitude tells me you're not willing to kiss asses, even if need be. But if you're not scared of getting screwed by those stronger than you, feel free to try and put them in their proper place.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Okay, now let's see:
A friend of mine, also the guy in our team in charge of designing the environment, had been bedridden for a week due to a bike accident, but appeared yesterday nonetheless. When we told him about what the headmistress says about the
lab computers only thing and how we're simply sneaking work from home and sharing it on my Ubuntu netbook, he said, "I've got a better idea."
See, one of the reasons we refuse to use the lab computers was that it's not secure and is prone to viruses and file corruption; we don't want to work for hours only to realize we have to do it all over again. They had recently formatted the PCs (they do it every month) and installed all the tools (which takes a fuck load of time).
What our teammate did was write a .BAT file and placed it on the Startup folder. This, on each reboot,
pops up various programs and command prompts all at the same time, rendering the computer unusable. I did the same on some other random computers and called the headmistress.
"Help! The computers look like they're infected. Please hurry up, or our files will be corrupted!"
They hurried, checked the computers, until finally the engineer said, "It's nothing a simple restart won't fix!" They rebooted and... it actually got worse. At the back, me and my classmates chuckled in silence. I told the faculty that the system's infected using complex mumbo-jumbo they couldn't keep up with, which obviously I made up on impulse just for laughs, and funny enough they bought it.
"It's badly infected," said our ingenious
engineer. "We'll have to format this system again."
It was even more hilarious, considering what we did wasn't even a virus in the first place, and only my friend and I knew how to remove it, while this guy thinks that the only way to fix a problem is to
format a system. To hell with everyone's data, I guess! Nevertheless, I ask if we could work on the eProject from home for the time being, to which the headmistress stubbornly said no, and that it'll be fixed by the next day.
Next day, we did the same thing, only more creatively. I prepared a script which actually pops a restart message every reboot and there's no way to cancel it. I even went so far as to mention, "File corruption countdown, stealing data in: (insert countdown here)". This time I even scoffed at my headmistress at how irresponsible she was with the machinery and her students' works. And she
still insists we do it there. Only this time, we got permissions to work from home temporarily.
Nevertheless, there's nothing like the scent of sweet revenge in the morn!
On a different note, as I said the headmistress despises students who get their laptops in the lab (another reason for that being they're afraid the students would steal softwares from their machines; they'd rather sell it to em, even free ones for money). She marched into the lab and ordered my classmates to leave their laptops out. I was still wearing my bags in front of her, and was even in the process of using my netbook
just before her, ignoring her orders.
But for some reason she said nothing to me. Not a word.
