The city that is always working

I got this comment from Dad on my last post.  I started to write a response, but it got so long that I decided I would start another post on it instead:

Nice, very nice. I know what you mean by shopping in Hong Kong. I was looking for a external USB drive housing for my extra laptop HD, everything was at least 30 bucks, then I found a nice blue aluminum case with Viao written on it on Ebay, 10$ with shipping. Just came in today, it was mailed from HK!

Not a bad deal, considering your options. However, I also bought a 2.5 HD enclosure recently too. I first scoped out prices one of the big computer centers. I saw Viao cases everywhere for about $5USD. But those look a little too small for my drive and I kept wondering why some enclosures were so cheap while others were $20 or $30USD. So I didn’t buy that day. But the next day, I went to a smaller computer market not far from my house, hidden in an older shopping mall. It was one of those places that Goldie found previously during a Sunday walk around the neighborhood. While peaking around, we found a store with literally a *mountain* of computer parts. It was clearly a case of a person who never puts things back where they belong…to the extreme. We marveled over how anyone could operate a business there.

So anyways, that’s the store I went to, and I finally got to see the person behind the mountain. The atmosphere that day was something out of a David Lynch movie. I saw a slightly balding 30-something guy hunched over eating his take-away lunch. When he saw me, he jumped up and asked what I was looking for. After making my request, he ran off to some hidden location to fetch it. While waiting, I saw a woman casually loitering around. She saw the half-eaten lunch in the sytrofoam bowl and half-mumbled, half-yelled in Cantonese “Eating curry again?! Always eating curry… it’s not good for you, you know!” The guy came running back with armloads of boxes. Although I only asked for one HD enclosure, he brought back at least 3 boxes of the exact same make and model. One for about 7USD. He opened up them all up, checking to see if everything was there, and started to demonstrate one when he suddenly got interrupted by another customer. He asked for me to wait again, and went back to madly running around fetching boxes. It seemed there was something very urgent, but I am not sure what.

Well, I bought the one he showed me. I went back home and tried to set it up, but it didn’t work. I started to worry that there was some compatibility issues with Linux, although it seems that HD enclosures are pretty universal. I worried that maybe it really was too cheap and the circuit board was bad. I worried it was secretly destroying all my data…. Yet I was desperate to get it working. So around 7:30pm, even though I figured he was closed already, I went back to the shop. In fact, he wasn’t closed at all and still running around fetching boxes for people. I told him I couldn’t get it to work and he was a bit shocked. In between customer requests, he tested it with a harddrive he had lying around. He showed me that it was working fine, and that’s when I felt really stupid. I immediately realized in admist all my fears of ruining my precious harddrive I had neglected to fully plug it in in the socket. So I thanked him for his help, and he told me if I still had problems I could come back… “I’m opened until 10:30pm.” As I was leaving, he was back to rushing around. I felt a heavy sense of guilt. Opened to 10:30pm? No time for a real lunch break? Constantly rushing around all day? And he works/lives in what can only be called a computer garbage heap. I wanted to turn around and offer to help him organize the store (a dream for me!). Well, I guess I can’t do that but I did promise to myself to shop there more often.

Computer greed

I did something uncharacteristic of me today. I spent good money on something that was neither cheap nor absolutely necessary. I bought a 19″ widescreen LCD monitor. See, the thing is… Goldie’s desktop came with a 15″ CRT with a dead blue gun which leaves everything on the screen with a puke yellow tint. If it wasn’t for my notebook being out of commission, I would have just setup the desktop as a headless server and forgot about the dying monitor. But after a few days of eye-straining and not getting any real computer work done, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Everyone else is getting an LCD, why can’t we?

So today Goldie and I wandered around the computer centers in Wanchai until she gave me the ultimatum: either buy something or else we’re going home. If you like gadgets and electronics, you simply cannot walk through the computer centers in Hong Kong without buying something. Imagine shop after shop crammed full of the latest Japanese technology at duty-free, rock-bottom prices. If you think that the price could be cheaper, you just walk a few more feet and ask the next store. Ahh…computer shoppers’ heaven.

Now I am back home and reeling over my luxurious purchase. The monitor is so….expansive… compared to the 15″ screen I have been working off for the last 3 years…wait, more like 10 years. It fits so nicely on my desk, it matches my black and silver theme, it has a trendy blue led on-light… Why, it has nearly twice the desktop space then my 15″ 4:3 screen. So now I really don’t have any excuse not to pump out that thesis, right? Except that LCDs seems to be so eye-friendly that I can now stay up into the wee hours to write silly blog posts. Hmph.

Up and running again

Last night around 1:30am while I was happily programming away on my laptop in bed… it hung.  Oh, that’s not the first time mind you.  My laptop does hang occasionally because, you see, I have had bad memory in my laptop for at least a year.  Of course, I meant to fix it a long time ago.  I have warranty so there is no excuse not to.  But last year when I inquired about warranty repairs at the local center here, they said it takes 7-10 business days.  For someone who uses their computer every day, for the vast majority of the day, for someone who only wakes up just to go to the computer…  the idea of being separated for up to two weeks is unthinkable.  So, I put it off.  I was hoping that I could wait until the thesis was done and before the warranty expired.  Well, last night was my wake up call.  ‘Cause when I tried to reboot, it couldn’t boot up again.  I silently cursed myself for not doing a backup on my research data a few days ago as I intended (actually it was Dustin who said “Alissa, you are backing up your thesis data right??”)  But I went to sleep with a sense of resignation.  I knew that my laptop’s time had come.  It wasn’t exactly a surprise.  And luckily this morning it was able to do a cold boot.  So I backed up my data and headed to the service center.

The woman asked what was wrong.  I told them the memory was bad and showed them the memory test results.   She reminded me that the problems I was reporting (system hangs) could be software related.  Yeah, right.  She took it back for preliminary inspection and lo!  Behind the closed doors they confirmed the memory was bad.  She then proceeded to tell me that it may take 1-2 months for repairs because they might need to order parts.  I felt kinda faint and tried to press for details.  “Don’t you have the memory in stock?”  “Well, your laptop is from the U.S. and we do not yet know if the memory we have for the Hong Kong model is compatible. Plus we have to check if the chipset is bad.”  I couldn’t really argue with that.  Well, not until I got back to campus and did some research.  The memory in my laptop is the same as several Toshiba models in Hong Kong.  That made me more optimistic that the woman was just giving me the standard “we must cover our asses” repair talk.  Still, I was in a bit of a trance today.  I racked my brain for ideas of how to survive possibly 2 months of solitary confinement for my computer.  Should I even mention that the thesis is due in less than 2 months?

Well, I did come up with a plan: go to Goldie’s mom’s house and take their broken desktop.  The desktop broke a couple weeks ago mysteriously and lately they have been talking about throwing the whole thing out.  Good grief!  Goldie just had the motherboard replaced last year.  So I had an inkling that it wouldn’t be so hard to fix.  Sure enough it wasn’t.  The first thing I did was spend 3 hours cleaning it.  Most of that time was wastefully spent cleaning the keyboard…but you know what?  After dusting off the motherboard, the hard drive that refused to be recognized suddenly was back to normal.  Does anyone reading this realize what that says about the dust problem in Hong Kong and Goldie’s mom’s house in particular?  Pretty scary stuff.  Goldie says it seems dust here is like a living and breathing creature.

Anyways, I really just want to boast about my revenge on the service center.   Screw waiting 2 months for a 5-minute memory repair.  I got a pretty nice desktop with Ubuntu freshly installed.  Ohhh…it runs so much snappier with Ubuntu than that other no-name operating system.  And now the sky is the limit with all the tweaks and things I can do.  If only I didn’t have that damn thesis to finish.