Two Little Words

Posted by Braden

Two little words—two very painful little words—ruined my day today: "RAM deleted."

Before you feel too bad for me, it wasn't my computer. It was just my calculator. It still hurts, however; especially when you consider how many hours I've spent building myself the most beautiful assortment of homemade programs any student could want! I spent my first two classes this morning adding to my glorious collection, this time with programs for calculating dot products, cross products, and orthogonal projections for linear algebra. I tested each program, and they all worked!

I then decided to clean up the code a little bit, for the sake of having pride in my work, so I started to combine two of my programs. Then something went terribly wrong. The screen of my poor TI-83 Plus made a picture that looked like each pixel had been randomly selected as "on" or "off." I pushed 2nd, then Quit. Nothing happened. I tried "Clear." Nothing happened. I turned off the calculator. I turned it back on, and something happened: the screen went black, then white, then up popped those two terrible little words—RAM Deleted—and all my pretty little programs disappeared. I imagine that's what it would be like to watch your dog being put to sleep right before your eyes. *Sigh.*

Tomorrow I'll start rebuilding.