(no subject)

About twice a week, I get a Facebook friend request from someone I don't know, who says nothing about who they are, who is not connected to me in any way (no mutual friends), who is not in any of my networks or groups or even lists any mutual interests, and who invariably has a profile picture showing a young, pretty woman. I haven't been accepting these requests (sorry, random pretty women of Facebook). Spammers? Hackers? How nefarious a business are they up to, do you suppose?

the deepest pits of geek despair

Is there anyone here who knows of an online resource that explains in relatively plain language how to debug programs written in MIPS assembly language? The assignment is due tomorrow and I'm getting nowhere. I got one program done by simply bumbling around until the damn thing worked. I'm at the point I would trade sexual favors for an explanation of why the target of my second program's jump-and-link call to a subroutine differs in high-order four bits from instruction program counter 0x00400090, while the class examples, which look just like mine as far as I can tell, work just fine. You don't even have to tell me what the hell that even means. Just tell me what three-letter diphthong is out of place.

I can figure anything out with the right documentation, but documentation on this is useless; there is nothing, anywhere, written for an amateur or newcomer. Google is totally failing to save my ass the way it does when I have questions about Java, PHP, XML, or anything else. My TA is AWOL. Figuring out what the hell exceptions mean and how to debug this crap was not covered in lecture.

This has gotta be a form of hazing or something.