Depressive solutions

Once every 3 or 4 hours i become frustrated with everything. Usually it's not so wretched that i become non-functional, but sometimes it is. Over the years i've learned various things i can do to overcome this depression, such as sleeping, starving and drinking. Sleep isn't always possible, starving takes too long for results, and drinking has some serious drawbacks. There are a few other activities that work predictably well, and some of them are non-hazardous to my health as well. One of these activities is taking apart computer hard drives.

Joe brought me an ancient 10mb disk drive today. It's one of the really, really old cases about the size of two cd drives. Three large, thick platters, brown instead of the shiny metallic in today's drives, circuitry that was designed to need patch cables and bent pins, and a head drive mechanism that i've never seen before. Was quite fun to take apart.

Another of those activities is finding ways to bypass security measures. We've recently installed keycard access on some of the doors. The inside, secure area has sensors which detect movement and unlock the door upon detection. Is it possible to set off the detector from the outside? This would open the door from the outside and security would see it as someone on the inside leaving. As i started to fool around with the door, a number of other people gathered around me, helping out, including my boss, the head of the IS dept. We weren't successful, but only spent an hour experimenting with the mechanism by throwing objects towards the sensor and slipping cardboard underneath the door, and didn't actually look up the specs on the device. Soon enough, though, i plan on proving that our security measures are detrimental.