Decline and fall of an iBook

Alexandra Bridge, Ottawa

After more than two years of faithful service, my laptop is now having serious problems. It takes upwards of ten minutes to boot, frequently forgets important preferences (like to ask for a password before letting you log in), and has distinct trouble connecting to wireless networks. In general, performance has become spotty and unreliable. Things have reached the point where I would ordinarily suspect that a virus has been generating minor havoc, though scans have not supported that hypothesis.

I am tempted to make a full backup, format my hard drive, and start from a clean install. That said, I think the inevitable physical breakdown of hardware is reasonably likely to be the cause of my woe. The constant ambient heat here – enough to keep the fan running constantly, which almost never started in Oxford – will certainly contribute to breakdown. The machine is still subject to the AppleCare plan I purchased, so perhaps it is worthwhile to send it on a potentially refreshing trip to the Apple store before such a lobotomy is carried out.

Once the IKEA bills have been paid off and some sort of a bike has been acquired, it may be time to start thinking about a new Mac.

Reading about ten hours a day

Museum of Civilizations

In addition to all the reading I have been doing for my first big project at work, I am finding myself well-immersed in interesting personal reading. Aside from the stack of fiction that has been oscillating in size for about a year, I am reading George Monbiot’s Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning and Harold Coward and Andrew J. Weaver’s book Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada. Simon Singh’s The Code Book is catering to a less immediately work-related interest, as is the Simon Blackburn book Antonia gave me.

It can be tough to maintain an appetite for the written word that exceeds the immediate requirements of work and the secondary need to keep up to date on current events. Of course, it is essential in order to become and remain an informed member of society.

Unrelated: Emily introduced me to a new web comic: The Perry Bible Fellowship. It is pretty random, but also quite funny at times.

Arisen

IKEA Ottawa

Having corrected some errant DSL settings, I am now online. I can now properly say that I have a place to live, rather than simply an area in which I am storing my stuff.

Now that I am off the EC network and can freely access sites of a social nature, I can announce the following: Emily Horn, dashing young woman who I met at Cabin Fever 3, has a new blog emerging: thebeanery.wordpess.com. I look forward to seeing what evolves there.

Still in the wilderness

Human shapes and fire engines

Unfortunately, I am still sans internet. It seems the only way to get DSL is to pledge an entire working day, then wait to discover what time the installation team cares to show up. They don’t do evenings or weekends, naturally, and they certainly cannot commit to a time more specific than ‘probably am’ or ‘probably pm.’

To anyone who has sent messages to my personal email accounts, I apologize. I simply cannot check them until I get access at home or lug my laptop to a coffee shop downtown. The latter, I may undertake tonight.

[Update: 31 July 12:05pm] At least my July 21st issue of The Economist has finally managed to wander to the right place. I am not entirely isolated from the goings on in the world outside the TLC complex.

[Update: 1 August 2007] By midnight on August 3rd, I will have a DSL connection through TekSavvy – one of the local ISPs that seems to be well liked by people on web forums. Thankfully, someone who lived in my flat previously had DSL set up; as such, I don’t need to spend an entire day waiting for Bell to show up and make hardware adjustments.

To sleep, perchance to dream

Marc Gurstein and IKEA furniture

I have discovered an additional element of full time work. It concerns what might be called a Wakefulness Index (WI): a notional figure representing one’s ability to concentrate and think creatively at any point in time. The index has natural oscillations; for me, it probably peaks in the afternoon and evening (insofar as work related thinking is concerned). Of greater personal policy importance is what might be called wakefulness forcing, the undertaking of behaviours and actions that alter one’s wakefulness index during subsequent hours or days.

Such behaviours encompass everything from the micro (a particular decision regarding caffeine consumption) to the macro (the selection of an overall sleep regime). All this seems clear to me right now because of one of the major choices that frequently needs to be made, in regard to wakefulness. That is, the decision of whether to use leisure time (especially weekends) for the purpose of increasing your index (resting, but not doing much else) or decreasing it, but having a lot more fun.

It is a classic biological trade-off like, for instance, the balance between time spent looking for food and time spent looking for a mate. Like all such balances, there are multiple stable equilibria and a near infinite number of ways to shift between them. In the interest of overall balance, since yesterday and this morning were used as WI investments, I will have to draw down the account a bit tonight.

Ottawa River hydro

Bridge to Gatineau

Right near the complex where I work, there is an unusual hydroelectric system on the Ottawa river. On either side of the main channel are large concrete canals with blocks of turbines. From those, high voltage power lines extend. In the middle of the river, there is a long arc of gates. These are to manage the degree to which water flows through the side channels, and the degree to which it flows over the uneven stone surfaces that were once natural cascades.

Since the water level in the river is high, there is pretty much always some degree of overflow venting through the gates. The little building you can see above them actually moves along the arc, raising and lowering gates. I am not sure if there are people inside or whether it is robotic, but everyone with an office on the south side of my building has a constant view of the whole installation. Those on the north side must content themselves with the fountain at a Gatineau casino.

Forbidden features

It turns out the new cellphone that I got for Ottawa (Nokia 6275i) is technically capable of using any mp3 as a ringtone. Irksomely, Bell Canada has intentionally disabled that and other features, so as to force users to pay $3.50 or $4.00 a pop for using them. It’s possible to revert the phone to factory settings, but doing so requires buying a USB cable, downloading the software Nokia uses to program phones, and then updating your firmware in a way that will occasionally leave the phone as a worthless lump of plastic. Because it is a CDMA phone, rather than a GSM one, you cannot just download an unlock code and enter it manually. Another example of pointless crippling is how the phone will only store about 60 text messages, even when it has 15 megs of free space on it.

It’s just another example of how rarely digital rights management and related technologies actually benefit consumers. It also affirms the motto of Make Magazine: “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.”

[Update: 25 November 2007] Yesterday night, I finally unlocked my phone using Diego. Now, it can use any MP3 as a ringtone and can run any Java application.