Amir Noel

One of the strangest customs around Christmas time is the hanging of lights around the outside of the house. I not sure where it all started but over the years this custom has certainly soared to a whole new level. Today, some choose to go a step further by having computerized light shows synchronize to Christmas music that is broadcasted over FM and be tuned into from car radio as you drive by. An extreme example is the guy in this video, who has over 200,000 light setup around his house.

I would to see this guys electric bill. The competition for an individuals to be the center of attention in their neighborhood across the US will result in some people growing broke by the end of Christmas. Like someone needs to tell these people that the world is facing a financial crisis and is fuel storage.

Computers are like spoiled children. They always want something and refuse to work when you want them to. Last Sunday my laptop decided it wanted a new fan a day before I was to attend a technology conference. On top of that my warranty expired a couple months ago. What a Bummer. I was able to locate the part I need from a Yahoo merchant after fishing around the Lenovo site for the actual part number. I wasted no time on ordering a replacement fan, but I would still be out of luck for the conference.

UPS finally delivered the fan today Friday. Relatively quick for ground shipping. Go Brown!

I started taking photos only about one quarter way into the repair. Soon after I replaced the fan however I realized how valuable those photos were. It saved me a ton of time by not having to figure out where those pesky screws needed to go.

Anyways belows are some of the photos I took of the install.

The new fan that came in the mail.

The front cover, battery, hard drive, keyboard and CD/DVD Drive.

Dining table converted to a repair station.

Laptop internals.

Side view of Laptop internals.

The back cover. This was most difficult piece for me to take out. After a bit of struggling I found the two screws that was preventing it from being removed. Luckily I was able to remove it without breaking anything.

The old fan that has been replaced.

All the parts almost back all back together.

Bad shot of ubuntu booting up. phew..!

Despite having a few problem removing certain parts I have to admit that this was relatively easy. I generally don’t like digging into my laptop because of the small parts in them are easy to break and misplace. But as my luck would have it I always find myself having to fix something in them. The experience is fun if everything works in the end but a nightmare if things don’t. Below are some tips if you have a repair job that you are thinking about doing yourself.

Tips:
1. Take pictures of every step during the process of removing the parts of your laptop.
2. Make sure that you clear you schedule before you begin to work on you machine. Small parts can unintentionally be lost by someone or thing, with less care for your project. Don’t assume that others will share the same desire to see your project to the end. Even if parts are not lost, your carefully laid out arrangement can easily be disrupted.
3. If you don’t know anything about what you are doing then don’t attempt to fix it yourself take it to a professional.

Just imagine, I woke up early Saturday morning anxiously waiting to see the Olympics Men’s 100m Final, scheduled to take place at 10:30am EST. I turned on the television and flipped the channel to NBC the only station given the rights to cover the Olympics in the United States. NBC’s coverage of the Olympics started at 10am on channel 6 in South Florida, so I had to wait an additional 30 mins before the main event occured. Ok, I got plenty of time. I’ll just sit and watch the US inevitably beat Spain in Olympics men’s basketball.

So anyway 10:30am is about to roll around and there is no sign that NBC is about to switch coverage to the highly anticipated event. I frantically began to switch to other NBC channels thinking that I was watching the wrong channel all along. Sadly there was no sign of the 100m event. At that time I began to think that maybe, so how I had a times wrong and went online to confirm the schedule at the official Olympics website www.beijing2008.cn. Shock overcame me when I saw the status of the event said “Running”, and at the same time disbelief that NBC was not covering the event live. What had just happened? Did I just wake up in the mid 1900s when I had wait 12 hours to view an event take place half way across the globe? I couldn’t even watch a video of the event after the fact on the BBC’s website because my IP was not permitted coming from the US.

In the age of high speed internet and you-tube you mean I can’t get to see the Olympics live. Of course if it had been Michael Phelps, they would have broad casted his event live. Enough with Phelps already. Not that I have anything against Phelps, the guy is a great swimmer, but the Olympics is more than just Swimming and Gymnastics or one man. I think that in the future the IOC needs to stipulate that companies that buy the rights to cover the Olympics must cover all events live or at least the main ones. I for one am totally ok with streaming a live event over the internet, it doesn’t have to be on TV. Another possibility is to sell the rights to cover various individual events live to different companies instead me being locked into NBC, but I guess that the point.

For now I have no choice but to wait to see the Men’s 100m Final later on tonight, hours after the actual event occurred. It’s a bit prehistoric but what can I do. If I do live to see the next Olympics in 2012, I’ll be more prepared.

Today I visited GoogleMaps and noticed that they added some new features. Notably, when you ask for directions between two points, in addition to the usual time it takes to drive between the two locations you can now also get travel times for local public transportation and walking. Needless to say, I was very impressed. This can be a really benefit for pedestrians on the go with a mobile phone and no bus schedule in hand. Google also compares what it would cost you to drive as apposed to using public transportation. Extremely useful if you’re debating using public transaction instead of driving to work. I used to have to do this calculation myself, it definitely takes some of the guess work away.

Although the new features was impressive I was however somewhat disappoint that it did not factor in other mass transit options. According to the Google’s results it would take me over 4 hours to take to bus to work by bus. Which would mean I would either have to leave home before 4:30 AM if I were to make it to work on time for 8:30 AM. This is a little deceptive because although it would take me about that time if I were travel by bus, since I travel most of the distance by train the travel time is much less. Approximately one hour to be exact, which is way more practical. I can just imagine countless people wasting many hours traveling by bus because of Google’s bad advice when there are better options available.

I can only hope that Google rectifies this potential problem before people begin to rely on this information.

So received this email today claiming that I have won the lottery. Here is how it goes:

Dear Winner,
Winning Notification
This is to notify you that you have won (£4,250,000.00) FOUR MILLION, TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND BRITISH POUNDS. in our online email lottery in which e-mail addresses are picked randomly by computerised balloting powered by the Internet. Your email address was amongst those chosen for this period.
Ticket no: 2752246896 177
Serial no: 652-662/08
Winning number: 08.11.21.32.35.42. {47}
Draw (040SB06-03)
Reference Number: IPL/4249859609/WP1.
To claim your prize fill the below form,
CLAIMS VERIFICATION DATA FORM
(HTML FORM)
YOUR FULL NAME: ……………………………………………
YOUR SEX:………………………………………………….
YOUR ADDRESS:………………………………………………
YOUR COUNTRY:………………………………………………
YOUR FAX:………………………………………………….
YOUR PHONE NUMBER:………………………………………….
YOUR OCCUPATION:……………………………………………
POSITION:………………………………………………….
YOUR COMPANY’S NAME:………………………………………..
YOUR AGE:………………………………………………….
YOUR REF NUMBER:……………………………………………
PREFERED METHOD OF RECEIVING WINNINGS (CASH, CHEQUE OR BANK
TRANSFER):…………………………………………………

My only question is, “how many people actually fall for this con?”

Beware people, Beware.

I received a forward today for a simple solution to repelling mosquitoes. I haven’t tried this yet but intend to once those pesty creates come around. Here’s what the forward said:

“Mosquito Spray…Worth a try”

I was at a deck party awhile back, and the bugs were having a ball biting everyone. A
man at the party sprayed the lawn and deck floor with Listerine,
and the little demons disappeared. The next year I filled a
4-ounce spray bottle and used it around my seat whenever I saw
mosquitoes. And voila! That worked as well. It worked at a
picnic where we sprayed the area around the food table, the
children’s swing area, and the standing water nearby. During the
summer, I don’t leave home without it……Pass it on.

Found my way to this site from slashdot. The site is about the “Fusion Man”, a swiss pilot who builds his own rocket propelled flying wing. The videos on the site are cool to watch and for those of you who speak French maybe you can understand what he’s saying, cause I sure can’t.

It’s a notable achievement but I think we still have some ways to go before we’re all flying around with our jet packs like the Jetsons.

So with all the hype about the upcoming release of latest edition of the Ubuntu distribution, I decided to give it a test run. The machine being tested a Lenovo Thinkpad T61. I’ve been having a love hate relationship with Ubuntu on this machine since the release of Feisty and was desperately hoping that this time around the installation would be smooth. I was especially looking forward to hibernate/suspend feature which I could never get working properly with Fiesty or Gusty, although I’ve read on ThinkpadWiki that others have been able to get it to work with the same machine with just minor modifications. Not sure how they managed to do that since power management for 64bit systems didn’t get put into the kernel until version 2.24. Who know what I was doing wrong.

Ok step 1. Downloading the CD iso. This is a no brainer. I obtained the link to download the Ubuntu desktop iso through BitTorrent from here. The download took less than half an hour.

Now on to step 2. Installation of the CD. After burning a copy of the iso image I downloaded in step 1, I was now ready do the install. This is the step I normally dread. I started up the computer, popped in the CD, and after reaching the boot options and confirming the install Ubuntu, I couldn’t help feel a sense of regret. About a minute or two later disappointment and frustration started to set in as installation got to a terminal screen with some unintelligible text and refused to proceed. Just my luck. A similar thing happened to me while installing Gusty and I had to plough through blogs and forums to get the issue resolved and I wasn’t about to go through that again. So I rebooted the machine and attempted the install again. This time I was just left with a blank screen and not knowing whether or the machine was actually doing work or had just frozen, impatience got the better of me and I decided to reboot again. To take some of the guess work out of the equation I removed the splash and quiet from the kernel boot options. This time everything went smooth and after watching text scroll down the screen for a couple minutes I was then greeted with installation menu. What a relief. After that everything was a breeze, no further obstacles. Besides the minor hiccup, I have the admit that the was the easiest Ubuntu install I ever did on this machine.

On to step 3. Time to play. The first thing I wanted to checkout was if I can finally communicate with my phone over bluetooth. With the installation of Gusty I was able to get the computer and the phone to see each other but was unable to do anything useful like transfer files etc. This time around file transfer over bluetooth worked like a charm. Next stop explore whether or not I can hibernate/suspend my machine. The simple answer to that question was “No”. I was able to get the machine to suspend to disk ok but it failed to resume from it’s state of suspension. So after giving up on the problem and going to bed, I realized my error the next morning. I installed the Nvida restricted driver for the video card because I couldn’t edit my video resolution past 800×600. So I removed driver and everything worked ok, and the resolution didn’t go back to 800×600. Now I’m a happy man. This may have been the cause of my frustration with previous distributions, but I was not about to test whether or not my assumptions was right.

I will continue to explore that the new features Hardy has to offer, but I’m satisfied with having just those two features working. Now I can get some meaningful work done on the train ride to work without having to completely shutdown and startup my machine between stops to save on battery power. Maybe I’ll even be able to get internet access through my phone. That will be my next project.

Conclusion. Ubuntu Hardy Heron (Beta) Rocks, minus the nvidia restricted driver problem.

Working on building my own solar panel from a collection of smaller panels that have collected in the past. I visited YouTube to see what was out there and this video captured my interest.

Found an interesting article on cnn money today that details the looming battle between the social networking site Facebook, and Internet search power house Google. If what they’re saying is true then I should end all my plans now of starting my own social networking site, as these two giant will certainly gobble up all market share making it difficult for upstarts. Could this be the end of Google. Only time will tell.