Just over a month since I got my new laptop, I’m already breaking it in. Kind of like breaking in of a brand new car, except at a different pace.

When you get a new vehicle, you need to run the engine below a certain rpm and speed, in order to break in the engine.

For me, it’s a different matter altogether. I break in my laptop by installing the OS no less than three times.

Not just one OS, but at last count, two. Ok, I tried to install 3 OSes, but I FAILED miserably. Maybe not miserably, but at least I failed.

So, it came with Windows Vista. I did an upgrade to Windows 7, because the laptop came with a free upgrade anyway, so might as well get rid of vista. It was crappy too as the very first shutdown I did, didn’t work at all. The laptop hung at the shutting down screen.

After installing Win7, I tried to install the erm .. fruit OS. I failed twice. I gave it up, and installed Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10

The first time I installed it, it went like a breeze. However, I must have installed it at a partition which win7 didn’t like. After playing around with the unused partition space, it screwed up the Ubuntu partition and destroyed the MBR. I reinstalled it at a different location, and it all worked well, until I decided to switch the boot partition to somewhere else, where I failed. Also, the OS somehow wasn’t detecting my ATi graphics card. So, it’s back to the drawing board, with me now installing Ubuntu for the third time!

I think I’m quite about done with the installation of Ubuntu. Anybody wants to install Ubuntu?

I’ve been busy playing with my new toy. Hard to believe that I’ve been procrastinaing on this decision for at least 2 years already. Well, that’s according to my colleague’s count anyway.

Still exploring it, and trying new stuff, together with installing new software. I just got windows 7 running. So far so good. Next is to try to get Ubuntu installed. Mac OS X didn’t allow itself to be installed though.

It’s been there for quite some time, and I don’t think many of us would have used it. I don’t usually use it too, since there are other alternatives out there, like RealVNC. It doesn’t really duplicate all the features, but at least the feature I used was there – desktop sharing.

Today was the first time I really used netmeeting extensively, and by that I mean for a duration of more than an hour. It’s supposed to be a training for a few of us, and rather than having the trainer fly over here to give the instructions, or better yet for us to fly to Germany, we did it via the web. I guess it’s also the first time for quite a number of us, evident by the hiccups along the way – background noises, overly large screen resolution, notification pop-ups galore etc.

Still, it’s quite interesting, although for us at least, what’s also important is a phone with a good speaker. Otherwise, the voice which comes out would be a little echoy, and perhaps easy to put you on a path to doze off. It doesn’t help too, since we were in a fairly large conference room, and there were so many of us. We have to make a conscious effort not to make any excessive noise, and well, those further back have to strain their ears just to be able to catch what was being said.

Still, at least we’ve got some form of training to help us in our work. Better than nothing as always.

Somehow, I managed summon enough courage to brave the expected crowd present at the Commex 2009 IT fair. As usual, unlike the counterparts overseas, the ones held locally are meant to be a market place, with pamphlets and flyers strewn all over the place. The crowds are there for only one thing – to get the best deal possible and make their purchase, unlike overseas, where such exhibitions are meant to showcase new products, or innovations.

There was a point in time, many year back where I would diligently make my way into the crowded halls, just to get a feel of the gadgets and stuff. Then I stopped going altogether, in a way due to the crowds. It’s getting too crowded, and I didn’t have anything to purchase anyway.

This time however, I went there for a purpose – to make some purchases. Not overly big purchases anyway, just some small accessories for my computers. I’ve been wanting to get a laptop for over two years already, but every time such an exhibition comes and goes, it just feels as though the time isn’t right yet. I’m still waiting … and saving.

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe I have not recuperated fully from my midnight return flight, but halfway during the mad squeeze, I started to feel lethargic. Maybe it’s the bag, or maybe it’s the crowd.

Maybe it’s the poor air quality?

Or maybe … I’m not as fit as I used to be?

Again, I’ve re-installed a fresh copy of windows xp. It’s probably the fifth time already, with the four times made before I left for Australia 3 months ago. Thankfully it appears to be working fine … so far. Many more tests to go before I can properly use it. Good thing I still have my Ubuntu installation on the other hard drive.

I’m eventually back in India. The key word here is not finally, but eventually!

I’ve discovered one good thing about staying at the apartment as compared to the posh hotel. Of course there are more than one not-so-good points which I have in mind – no posh and excellent service, lack of pool and spa facilities and no more “good” food.

For one thing, I get to save more, since I have a caretaker here, and he’s able to cook budget fare. It’s all local cuisine, so it’s something I still need to get used to. But it’s very simple, and definitely easy on the wallet.

The best part is … there are many home owners here who have internet connection. For some reason, having internet access is not part of the deal here. It’s available in the hotel, but we have to pay a premium for it. Anyway, where there are home users, there’s bound to be wifi, and where there is wifi, there’s a fair chance that one of two will be unsecured.

Well, it’s not very right of me to be doing this, but well, what else is there for me to do? Besides, it’s not like I am downloading anything which I shouldn’t be doing in the first place; I don’t install those kind of software in company property anyway, so that’s final.

My only concern right now is of security. There are many reasons why there are unsecured access points, one of which is ignorance. Then there are the honeypots, which should be avoided at all costs. I don’t do internet backing unless I’m back at home, so that’s not an issue. I still need to check my e-mails, so even though I’m entering my passwords, I’m a little skeptical. Who knows what lurks on the other side, snooping around …

That’s the number of times I have re-installed windows xp on my system since I returned back from India on Thursday morning. 4 crazy times, all because it reboots itself everytime I insert a USB device (usually either my bluetooth dongle or thumb drive).

It can totally drive you nuts, whenever you need to offload something or otherwise, it won’t even let you do it.

I somehow managed to narrow it down to some inconsistant USB2.0 enhanced driver probably found in windows xp service pack 2. Yup, after some trial and error, that appears to be the case. I just happened to decide to un-install the driver, and when I reboot the PC, it attempts to re-install it back again. However, even before it can complete the process, it reboots itself again.

Disabling the USB support in BIOS managed to solve the problem.

Let’s see how it goes without me installing the bluetooth driver. That could be one part of the problem.

Which is not a good sign too, this habit. First, it was because of national service. Nothing which I had control over. After that, I sort of picked it up again, but somehow, I slowed down and stopped it eventually. Then I picked it up again, all because of an upcoming trip. Then I slowed down again. Surprise surprise, I did it again today. Finally made a trip down to Climb Asia to break my 1 year (?) climbing break. I can’t really recall when was the last time I climbed. I did climb once sometime in May, before my trip to S.A. That was then, and I stopped again, only to start again today. It’ll be good if I can keep the momentum going, but when there’s a route which you know can be done mentally, but physically impossible, it a very demoralizing path to take.

Still, that’s what you get when you put on the brakes, only to start again some time later. It’s not the first time too. I need to find time to take my bike out for a spin, but the excuses I manage to create are one too many.

Still, it was climb never-the-less, although it was very unspectacular, which isn’t a surprise at all. All in all, I managed to do 2 climbs worth $2, and another 2 climbs worth $1 each. That’s all, and that’s extremely dismal.

Ahh well, age has finally caught-up? I guess the only thing I can do is to play catch-up, although I do believe that in time to come, probably some time next year, I’ll put climbing on hold again, for a short while. Until then, I guess I can only do so much.

Incidentally, does anyone have a classic xbox console which is taking up space and collecting dust? I’ve got this sudden urge to look for a budget set. I’ll be on the look-out until this urge suddenly disappears as quickly as it appeared. Until then …

So, I finally decided to get for myself a budget webcam, just for the fun of it. I eventually settled for one which stated on the box to have Linux drivers. It’s not often that a product such as this would ship with Linux drivers. After a little thought, I got it.

Turns out that there wasn’t any clear instructions on how to install the driver, since it didn’t ship with any shell script, or any instructions on where to park the 3 files it came with. After a little while crawling the web, I installed a few programs and managed to get it working. All without the manufacturer’s drivers!

It wasn’t at all smooth sailing on the windows side. In fact, where I eventually got it to work in Linux, I couldn’t even get it to cooperate in Windows. I installed the bundled software, which went smoothly. Fired it up, and 10 seconds later, the video feed froze. A minute after that, it complained that it could not capture the video grabber. Even uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers didn’t help. Viewing the twain video feed via VLC resulted in a blue screen.

This is sucky. For once, a device worked noticeably better in Linux. Still, I would have preferred it to work without a hitch in both operating systems

Wonder if I can get a refund for this “defective” piece of hardware.

I guess it’s probably the lack of practice of some sort. Or maybe it’s just that what I’ve learnt before have somehow escape me. Something so simple as re-installing windows escalated to not just one but five re-installations. All because the drive letter allocation somehow didn’t seem to go the way I had wanted. I had an existing NTFS partition which I didn’t want to touch, so I guess that complicated matters a little. That and the fact that windows refused to allow reallocation of drive letters for system and boot partitions made it worse. Thing is that it didn’t even allow me to choose the partition to set as a boot partition in the first place. It just assumed.

I guess I’ll just have to live with this for now.