Casualty

It's sort of funny, I suppose, that the computer that I've written pretty much every permanent residence post on would expire before the tale reaches its conclusion. On Monday night, after being put to sleep for a couple of hours while I watched Contagion on the shiny new Blu-ray player, it never woke up again. Just some blinking lights and a fan whirring. It wasn't even two years old, and had already had the fan replaced after only eight months.

The man at the computer repair shop declared the motherboard dead and a cost $450 to replace it, before even thinking about labour and overheads and so on. Given the money I had paid him just to look at it, he suggested I might as well buy a new one. So here I am, on my third new laptop since 2007. The man who sold me this one on Thursday morning all but admitted to me that the build quality of laptops is going rapidly downhill and that the major companies don't really bother about it since they know this will generate further sales. Charming. I took the new machine to the place the old one was yesterday, and they transferred everything across. A call this lunchtime to tell me to come and pick up, and an afternoon of tinkering and customising I'm roughly where I was on Monday night.

So I made a promise when I picked the new one up yesterday: if this one breaks inside two years, I'm going to the Dark Side, computer wise....

Beating

A belated first post of the year, since the present laptop has been somewhat ill of late. Not so much of a problem if the service contract was worth the paper it was written on, but their offer of fixing it over a period of 3+ weeks was never going to fly. An invalidation of the warranty, $375 worth of computer people, and a new fan later we're good to go again. So here's the outcome of a scrabble game this evening. I didn't think it possible to lose by 400 points, but in the words of Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights, 'that just happened'

Forms

So I'm still here. The death of my old (if it can be after two-and-a-bit years) laptop meant a couple of weeks with no internet access at home, then work inevitably got in the way. And in that time, I've been beginning to think about the future. I have just shy of 10 months left on my current work permit, but I think significantly more time than that in the current job is flogging a dead horse. Academia no longer holds much attraction, primarily because it seems that I don't have what selection committees want, as demonstrated by a complete lack of job interviews. When I can't even get an interview in the department I spent seven years in and know a good number of the staff, the writing is on the wall. It takes quite some time to put applications together to cater to the whims of what's currently fashionable, so I can't be bothered wasting any more of my time.

It's time to take a step in a different direction. Time to cross to the 'dark side' of industry. But where? To be honest, when I came out here it was as a CV-enhancing thing and I'd be going back home at the end. Now, though, I like it here enough (yes, even taking my constant moaning about snow in May into account) to stay a bit longer. How much longer? Who knows, I don't think you can ever plan 5 or 10 years ahead. But for the next while I could happily live here, and that's the key word. So examining my options has told me that I am eligible for the 'Canadian Experience Class' of permanent residence application; a minimum of two years in a skilled occupation, fluent in one of the official languages, a university degree and satisfactory completion of a medical. Processing time is currently 5-7 months, and requires numerous documents that would have to come from the UK and will take some weeks to gather. So the forms are downloaded, as you can see below. Look how long it is!

An OK Computer

I'm pleased to report a satisfactory outcome to recent computer related arsery. It's been a bit of a long wait to sort it out for a number of reasons. Firstly, having finally determined what type of DVD drive my computer has, I went to the campus computer shop this morning to buy some writeable DVDs.

In hindsight, buying the cheapest DVDs was a mistake....they were only 1x/2x writing speed and to back up my entire computer thus took four hours (!) to do. Long enough to take heed of someone's suggestion of going home for dinner before coming back. In attempting to restore factory settings, the computer asked me "are you really sure you want to do this?" about eight times, but everything worked and there was no blue screen of death this time.

Internet Exploder is back in it's munificent splendour, and Media Player seems to be OK too. And joy of joys, all my Bantams World stuff works again.

I can listen to Saturday's crushing away win now without people having to MSN me every 2 minutes :-)

Computer Rage

Following on with the subject of football, I couldn't hear any of the commentary of the Bradford-Accrington game this Saturday....it appears on my trip home I (or perhaps Heathrow Airport's wireless internet on the way back) have somehow corrupted either Internet Exploder or Windows Media Player. My emails back-and-forth to the technical support on the website concerned have ended at "you'll need to uninstall Windows Media Player". Can I just quote said IT support people this paraphrased passage from Microsoft's own website

"Windows Media Player is embedded in the Vista operating system and cannot
(like Internet Exploder) be removed from your computer".

Thanks for that, useful IT support people. It took at least ten seconds googling to find the answer on the Microsoft website. I told them I was running Vista. I am reminded of the really irritating, nasal sounding guy on The IT Crowd who would answer every call with "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

So I am faced with restoring the factory defaults on my computer, involving backing up almost 3 GB worth of iTunes files, 2GB of photos and almost 1 GB of work related palaver. This will return it to the state in which I received it from the Dell factory but will erase everything else bar the initial setup. That'll mean losing the new Kaiser Chiefs album but that's not a bad thing.

I would have done it tonight but for the fact I can't find my USB stick anywhere to back everything up up. and I wasn't sure whether I would exceed the capacity on it anyway. The choice at London Drugs was also not terribly value-for-money. That and I am terrified that what happened to my last laptop when I tried to do the same thing - instant, catastrophic death complete with blue-screen of terminal expiration - will happen again. I can't afford to replace them on a yearly basis.

Somewhere out there, my PC-hating, Mac-loving boss would be chuckling if he could read this....