After nearly 2 years and a month of working at Trilogy, they finally decided to give people at my designation some real laptops. Well, I did have an IBM 600X before this, but that was so stone age, that it was embarrasing to show it around to others.
As it happens, we are getting some spanking new Dell Lattitude D620 to replace both my desktop and laptop. While I do feel that my productivity will drop by around 25% in moving from two computers to 1, I still did opt for this because the new laptop is kinda cool!
I did figure that the image that help was ghosting on to the laptops was kinda wierd, so I asked them for a factory piece along with the CDs so that I could install things myself to my satisfaction.
In some of these respects people like Dj and myself are both boon and bane for the sysadmins. Boon, because we take several things like this off their shoulders, and bane because we know our stuff (or atleast we think we do), and usually bug them a lot more than the average user.
In any case, Dj and I both walked off with a factory fresh laptop and the cds, and set about reinstalling Windows from scratch, in tandem, kind of doing the same things.
Except, after we had finished installing Windows, and then installed the motherboard drivers, my laptop crashed.
A fresh install of windows, with just one driver update and it was corrupted already.
An even more interesting event was that I was able to recover using the Windows Recovery console by expanding just one missing file (SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\PCI.SYS), and things are back on track now.
Sitting at home and formatting the other drives, I decided to make this blog post from the spanking new laptop. Its kind of sad that I'm doing this using IE. I haven't gotten around to installing Opera yet because the partitions are not formatted yet, and I decided to put up with this just this once.
All this while I was still trying to get some work done on my old laptop. Contrary to point 12 in this joke, it does seem that computers do behave like women sometimes, and my old laptop just BSODed on me twice in the span of ten minutes. Talk about jealousy!
I have yet to put this new laptop next to my desktop. I hope it takes this more sportingly.
Friday, July 14, 2006
Saturday, July 08, 2006
OutOfPetrolException at name.deepjoy.Bike(12.30 am)
Dj and I typically wait around for each other, if we're leaving for home in the middle of the night. While this was reasonably balanced a while ago, of late, he's been waiting around for me more often than the other way around.
Tonight, he figured that he really did want to get home and sleep, and I was only halfway through the workspace that I was reviewing, so he said he's leaving and, well, left.
Incidently, both his phones were out of battery.
Around 10 minutes after he left, I received a call on my office desk phone. It was Dj, calling from a borrowed phone, telling me that he was stranded halfway to home as his bike was out of petrol. I told him I'm coming to pick him up.
I got the workspace I was reviewing on my laptop and basically ran from my desk to my car, and drove like crazy to where he was standing. My head was basically spinning with fear (and a little bit of anger too) in the time between his call and my getting there. Thankfully, he was where he said he'd be, and nothing worse had happened.
Of all the cities in the world, Bangalore is the worst choice for a 24-year old software professional to be stranded alone on the road at 12.30 am and borrowing people's phones to call for help, even if he is a yellow (or brown?) belt in kung-fu.
I raised an eyebrow, when he said he wanted to go find fuel somewhere, but I could see his point of view, so we drove to the closest 24 hr pump that I could think of, and got a bottle of petrol and dropped his bike home. We then went and grabbed some tea at one of the midnight places, and I did calm down eventually, but I nearly scolded Dj worse than his parents probably ever have in the meantime.
Lessons to take away from this incident.
Oh, well, back to work again.
Tonight, he figured that he really did want to get home and sleep, and I was only halfway through the workspace that I was reviewing, so he said he's leaving and, well, left.
Incidently, both his phones were out of battery.
Around 10 minutes after he left, I received a call on my office desk phone. It was Dj, calling from a borrowed phone, telling me that he was stranded halfway to home as his bike was out of petrol. I told him I'm coming to pick him up.
I got the workspace I was reviewing on my laptop and basically ran from my desk to my car, and drove like crazy to where he was standing. My head was basically spinning with fear (and a little bit of anger too) in the time between his call and my getting there. Thankfully, he was where he said he'd be, and nothing worse had happened.
Of all the cities in the world, Bangalore is the worst choice for a 24-year old software professional to be stranded alone on the road at 12.30 am and borrowing people's phones to call for help, even if he is a yellow (or brown?) belt in kung-fu.
I raised an eyebrow, when he said he wanted to go find fuel somewhere, but I could see his point of view, so we drove to the closest 24 hr pump that I could think of, and got a bottle of petrol and dropped his bike home. We then went and grabbed some tea at one of the midnight places, and I did calm down eventually, but I nearly scolded Dj worse than his parents probably ever have in the meantime.
Lessons to take away from this incident.
- Don't leave alone at night.
- Don't let your phone(s) go down when you're travelling alone.
- Never disregard both 1 and 2 at the same time.
- Never, repeat never, disregard 3.
Oh, well, back to work again.
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