Picture My World

I’ve been helping out some of my older friends with their computer troubles and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend — Sony.

The first problem was with a Sony Vaio desktop model where the keyboard died. I eventually narrowed it down to a hardware fault on the motherboard. The computer was literally a couple weeks out of warranty when the problem struck. Surprisingly, Sony agreed to fix it under warranty — hurray for Sony. Unfortunately, I don’t know how many hours I spent on the phone with them on hold or attempting to escalate the call again and again. Oh yes, the repair broke something else and the computer had to be sent in a second time.

My current nightmare is a Vaio laptop PCG-F350 that seemed to shut itself off a minute or so after booting into Windows 98. Thank God for the web, though, as a search found this page from Andreas Zwerger describing the problem in detail. It turns out Sony built a ton of laptops with capacitors that fail quite a while after the warranty ends. The power management system gets confused and forces the computer to hibernate prematurely.

A fellow SFU engineering grad, Brendon Wilson, had the same problem and has posted instructions on how to replace the capacitors, but that’s a little heavy duty for me these days. I’ve gone with the fix of installing a non-Sony version of Windows 98 and disabling the power management hardware. Many mysterious crashes and difficult-to-find drivers later, I am close to having a useful computer again.

The moral of the story? Don’t by Sony computers.

On the way home from Manning Park.

We took a trip up to Manning Park for the weekend. It was a fairly dreary couple of days, weather wise. We stayed at The Last Resort with a small crowd from our synagogue. There were a lot of young children which kept the noise and energy levels up, but the 3 of us survived even though Shula came close to not sleeping the second night. We’re blaming that on over stimulation from her many admirers.

Tonight, it seems we’re back to the normal routine (as dictated by the two month old) which means everyone is asleep except for me.

I had a short discussion with the rabbi about faith and the many biblical inconsistencies that seem apparent when you consider an omnipotent and omniscient God. There were two parts to the discussion: 1) Faith in a god and 2) the leap from that to belief that the Torah is true and God as Judaism understand Him exists. I hope to write about that in the future but I’m out of energy now.

On that note, I shall retire to bed.

Via Dave Berry. At first it seems like a joke, but then you’re not quite sure… See for your self.

What’s going on in Zimbabwe? The government is planning to nationalize all farmland. It seems they are running out of food and think this move will somehow increase production. However, according to the article, the farms they seized from about 4000 white farmers a few years ago is mostly going to waste. It appears they were given to friends of the government who either lack the skills or the desire to work the land properly.

Thank God we live in Canada where our problems are insignificant compared to something like this.

There are two of us in front of the keyboard. Baby and myself. Guess who’s getting to sleep?

I have no idea what most infants are like, but this one sleeps more soundly if she’s being held. The first stretch at night is usually good even if you put her down, but after the first feed things get dicey. Put her down and she may wake up 30 minutes later (instead of 2 or 3 hours later if held). During the day, it’s even worse as she’s guaranteed to start stirring 15 minutes after she leaves your arms.

She’s just about 8 weeks old, though, so we aren’t panicking yet. We’re happy that she can occasionally fall asleep without sucking on anything at this point.

My duty is to ensure she keeps sleeping for at least 2 hours at the start of the night so my wife can get some quality sleep in before the night feeds begin. So far, so good. Perhaps I’ll add post something else if a topic tickles my fancy.

If you put your baby down to sleep make sure you pick a good spot. You won’t want to move her once she’s down for fear of waking her and if she’s in a poor place, like the couch, you’ll regret it.

At least I’m regretting it right now as I stay up to supervise her.

I just finished Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and I strongly recommend it. Bryson does an amazing job of conveying just how much scientific knowledge we have built up about Earth and life on it. At the same time, we find out just how much there is that we don’t know.

Bryson’s writing style is easy to read and usually quite entertaining. There are many laugh-out-loud passages in the book making it worth the time, regardless of the content.

Anyone looking for hard science will be disappointed but he covers an awful lot of ground in just under 500 pages. The book includes extensive notes and bibliography, serving as a good jump off point for more detailed information.

You come back to your computer after a long break and see a Word document still open. You’re done with it so you close it and are asked, “Do you want to save changes?” Your first thought is, “What changes?” You swear you just had the document open to check something and made no changes to it.

I hate this. It happens again and again. I want an easy way to see the changes its talking about. I want to know if I really made a change, if I accidentally typed a spurious character, or if Word is just doing one of its weird things with templates.

Somewhat related: Microsoft has a number of its employees blogging away. One of the guys, Rick Schaut, working on Word for the Mac often posts about the inner workings and bugs of Word.

It seems Shula has no issue taking a bottle and we had our first real feed tonight. I’m afraid to tell my wife for fear I’ll be the one who has to get up for the midnight feedings…

Scott! Did you change your name to Eric?

OK, it’s a not a perfect likeness, but man, it’s spooky from certain angles.

Design by Fire: Design Eye for the Usability Guy. Design by Fire’s Andrei Herasimchuk takes on Jakob Nielsen in a hilarious column. Jakob gets an unsolicited make over! It’s like watching an episode of What Not to Wear.