Rambles » Computing

Lenovo Tech Support

Lance — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:53:41 +0000

Dear Lenovo Technical Support,

If you direct a customer with a valid warranty to a local certified Lenovo service center instead of doing the ship-to-depot do-si-do, you should also inform the customer the service center is going to charge $90.00 to work on their laptop so said customer is fully informed of the consequences of their decision.

Grumpily surprised,
Lenovo User

Dell’s sneaky case design

Lance — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:59:09 +0000

I unpacked a Dell T5500 today that I needed to install a GTX 285 GPU-capable graphics card in for one of my professors only to find that the card’s extra power connections interfered with the fold-down hard drive tray.

Dell’s case designs have been getting better and better over the years, but it looked like they’d shot themselves in the foot trying to make the T5500 case smaller. I figured I could eliminate the fold out hard drive tray completely by putting the drive in the slot for the floppy drive. After removing the hard drive from the tray, a very easy screw-less operation, I found that the section of the drive tray interfering with the GTX 285 could be removed! Dell was more clever with their design than I thought. I put the drive in the other section of the hard drive tray, unscrewed the conflicting part, and the drive tray folded down into place perfectly, leaving the full-size double-width GTX 285 card clear with the power connectors easily reachable.

Thank you, Dell, for thinking ahead!

My Google-fu, it is strong

Lance — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:47:05 +0000

Friday, I found a very nice looking job lead on Workopolis for a Red Hat system administrator position with knowledge of Drupal or EC2 a plus. Brilliant! My skills fit those requirements like a glove. Friday night, I wrote a cover letter and prepared to submit said letter and resume to the recruiter only to find out the recruiter’s registration-required website accepts only Canadian address information. Last night, on a whim, I tried a Google search using select terms related to the job and found the actual job listing by the hiring company! Tonite, I’ll rewrite the cover letter and submit directly to the company instead of using a recruiter. Yahtzee!

Fun and games with Time Warner Cable

Lance — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:18:31 +0000

Our cablemodem has been crapping out on us periodically. It would just stop working and we’d have to unplug its power and plug it back in to get it running again. This didn’t happen very often so it wasn’t an urgent matter. Yesterday, I had to run errands in Durham anyay, so I took the cablemodem with me and swapped it for a “new” one at the Durham Time Warner Cable office. Of course, “new” doesn’t mean new. It really means “another one”.

I plugged in the replacement modem and it didn’t work; it couldn’t lock onto the cable signal. Of course, the TWC office was closed by the time I realized I had a bad modem. I went through two levels of local support and two levels of national RoadRunner support on the phone before they decided to send a tech out. Fortunately, I got me an appointment between 9AM and 11AM today. I thought I’d be offline until Monday morning.

The tech called me at 8:20AM this morning, arrived at 8:35AM, checked the signal on the cable, and then replaced the “new” modem with another which immediately came online. He spent more time outside getting the replacement modem than in my apartment.

Gotta love TWC for giving me a bad modem after the customer service rep in the office bragged that they always test their equipment before giving it out. Shame on them.

Drupal development note

Lance — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:13:52 +0000

Don’t point two different versions of Drupal at the same database. Bad, confusing things happen that take hours to track down.

Monitor Envy

Lance — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:53:47 +0000

I’ve been using dual-monitor setups for something 6 or 7 years now. I got my first set at NIEHS when I worked there. I thought it would suck since I was moving from a single 21″ CRT to dual 19″ LCDs, but I quickly got used to it and really liked the additional real estate. One of the first things I did when I moved to Duke was get permission to buy a dual monitor setup for my office. I even bought a cheap used 12080×1024 17″ LCD to attach to my laptop at home.

I never expected to find myself feeling monitor envy at my dad, of all people. I’m the computer geek in the family, dangit! He’s training to do stock trading and decided he needed more screen to get all the information he wants at his fingertips. About a month ago, he went out and bought the equipment he needed and this is the result:

He’s using a Matrox TripleHead2Go device to drive the three extra monitors and built the stand holding the monitors himself. I think he used 1″ square steel tubing.

I now officially have monitor envy for my dad!

IPhone geekery

Lance — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 07:07:31 +0000

I’ve had an iPhone for a few weeks now and am really enjoying it. Tonite I discovered an app for letting me post to my blog from my phone and couldn’t resist trying it out.

Google Reader annoyance

Lance — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:23:20 +0000

Sometime recently I noticed a change int he way the ‘Mark all as read’ button works in Google Reader. I used to be able to press it, have all the articles in the listing marked as read, and then go back and hit ‘m’ to set one or a few of them back to ‘unread’ mode so I could catch them later.
Yesterday, I tried to do that only to find that the ‘m’ key stopped working on all those articles and the ‘keep unread’ check box was gone from the bottom of each article so there is no way to make a ‘Mark all as read’ article ‘unread’ anymore. How frustrating.
I don’t know why Google added this behaviour, but it sure is annoying and I’d like them to fix it.

New twist on an old joke

Lance — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:53:39 +0000

This just came across one of the mailing lists I’m on:

Jesus and Satan have a discussion as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest, with God as the judge.

They sit themselves at their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over.

He asks Satan to show what he has come up with. Satan is visibly upset, and cries, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well, then,” says God, “let us see if Jesus fared any better.”

Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers. Satan is
astonished.

He stutters, “B-b-but how? I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact.
How did he do it?”

God smiled all-knowingly, “Jesus saves.”

Lenovo mans up and does the right thing

Lance — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:28:52 +0000

One of the things I’ve always loved about my ThinkPad and Lenovo notebooks is the System Update feature. I’d just run it and get all the latest updates from lenovo. They also notified users of critical updates via the Message Center facility. Very nice, until Lenovo terminated System Update. Around the beginning of March, SU started reporting that updates were no longer available and a new, better, service would replace it beginning in May. Well, that didn’t happen. May 1st came and went and the only solution offered by Lenovo was to check the support website for updates. I was not a happy camper along with lots of other angry Lenovo owners.

Yesterday, Message Center popped up with a notice that several updates were available. I was thrilled! I didn’t have time then to run the updates, but let it run tonite and everything updated just fine. A quick Google search revealed that Lenovo has reinstated System Update. A very smart move on their part, in my opinion. I don’t know if Lenovo users can run their current version of System Update to get the new install or what. Might be worth a try.