Blessed by the Potato

I’m really hating these sony vaio notebooks at the moment.

A long time ago, my dad was a loyal Dell customer, then we had 2 laptops in a row crap out in rapid succession, and we were stuck with a desktop that had weird proprietary parts and was nigh impossible to upgrade. From there, we went to Toshiba for notebooks (and bought one HP desktop for my sister, primarily because it had an attractive moulded plastic case, and I built my own desktop). They served us well: they were functional, ergonomic, stylish, and delivered decent power for the money. Then my dad was in the Sony store buying a TV or something and they sold him on a computer. It was fairly stylish, light, and extremely quiet (especially compared to my roaring Toshiba with its desktop processor) but not particularly powerful for the money. Since then he’s bought 3 more (4 total in the family now), the latest one coming pre-loaded with Vista.

That one though is just an ugly brick. It is quiet and cool, but it has no style. It’s heavy, with square corners and I find the keyboard isn’t placed quite right to be comfortable… the power brick has a pretty short set of cords, and they’re asymmetrical so that the bit between the brick and the wall isn’t long enough to keep the brick on top of a desk, if so desired. Of course, the biggest problem is that it came pre-loaded with Vista. After discussing the options with my dad, we decided reformatting to XP is the way to go for him, since he’s not very computer savvy and will have to switch to other XP systems constantly and doesn’t want to get confused (that and there’s no guarantee that all his software would work). The effort should be worthwhile since it would be easier for me to support him (I can’t help him troubleshoot an OS I don’t know) and it would save having to buy new versions of Office, Quicken, etc. There was the risk that some of the proprietary Sony stuff wouldn’t work (I figured the battery monitor and the memory stick reader in particular) but it should still basically function for what he needs.

So, after installing XP… nothing works. The ethernet, the wireless, the graphics acceleration, the sound, just nothing works. I figured Sony would have drivers on their website, but they’re Vista-only. I tried installing them anyway, but the installer says it’s for XP and instantly quits, without giving me the option of trying. To get around that, I tried grabbing the XP drivers for similar Sony laptops (same, or similar components), and in that case the installer says it’s not designed for my notebook and quits. It’s too smart for its own good! So now I’ve spent hours scouring the web and trolling forums to find out what each component is and getting 3rd party (or component manufacturer) drivers for everything. I still haven’t got the wireless working, which is pretty essential for my dad, but at least I’ve got the regular ethernet finally, so I can start the long process of patching windows.

And, of course, there’s no going back. Not only did it not come with a proper Windows Vista CD (when was the last time a computer did?), but it didn’t even come with one of those lame “restore” CDs. There was a “restore” partition on the hard drive (which always seemed like a waste to me — like constantly carrying around your restore CDs), but once I installed XP, I lost access to that partition, and don’t know why (though I suspect a weird Vista-only hard drive driver may be at fault). I’ve poured over 10 hours into this now, and have only one or two roads left to try to get the wireless working, and if that doesn’t work I guess I’m going to have to borrow (or download) a Vista disk to reinstall. Hopefully the paranoid authentication process will let me use the OEM activation code again…

Update: After spending another four hours on this (hey, my scan time went into the crapper and I was all set for an all-nighter anyway) I finally got the essentials working. The third Realtek sound driver I tried (from Realtek — none of the Sony ones worked) eventually worked. Once that worked the modem drivers worked too. I suppose I should have realized that earlier, but a software modem I guess needs some kind of audio processor. (In fact in the device manager, it even mentions the modem is attached to the sound card).

The wireless was the worst motherfucker of them all. I think my biggest problem is the exceptionally generic “LAN-Express” name Sony gave it. Everywhere I looked indicated that that name was used by Sony for various Atheros chips. I tried at least a dozen different Atheros utilities and drivers, from all over the internet (I got a wise-extractor to rip the drivers out of the other Sony packages to bypass the “too smart for its own good” factor, and tried the same trick on various HP drivers that were supposed to be for the same Atheros chips) — which was unfortunately necessary because Atheros itself doesn’t seem to have a drivers section. Finally, finally I found a site that told me the VGN-N250E doesn’t have an Atheros chip at all, but rather an Intel 3945ABG PRO/Wireless card. Bangarang, I was in (and having had to get Intel drivers before, I didn’t think their site was all that good… but now after trying for all these other drivers, I’ve got to say they’re one of the best).

There’s a lot that still doesn’t work: the keyboard controls for screen brightness don’t work; the memorystick reader doesn’t work (not a big issue, my dad never uses it), the touchpad works, but doesn’t have any of the advanced functions (the scrolling by sliding along the edges, or a way to turn it off when typing a lot or using a mouse). I think those are all compromises my dad will live with to spare him having to learn another operating system.

Well, I took some time tonight to do some work with the various computers around here. My dad bought a new laptop a few weeks ago and I’m supposed to set that up for him, but just haven’t had the time to even take it out of the box until tonight. It came pre-loaded with Vista, and we’re trying to decide if its worth the effort of nuking it and going back to XP. I think it is, particularly since he’s old and crotchety and doesn’t like learning new things, especially when he’ll be shuffling back and forth between the new system with Vista and the old one with XP pretty regularly. Of course, since it’s a laptop that means he’ll lose all the proprietary preinstalled programs like the battery meter. Poking around I haven’t seen much to recommend or damn Vista. I don’t really care for the new start menu, but then I’ve hated the changes posed by every incarnation of Windoze to date, so why should Vista be any different? I found it odd when I went to shut down and didn’t get a prompt for hibernate, reset, or shut down… I hit the button in the start menu, and it was off.

My laptop has been driving me mad as it passes 3 years of age here. It is still pretty powerful, has a nice display, and basically does what I want it to… except for the fact that there’s a loose connection in the AC power, so I have to constantly jiggle it when I’m using the computer.

A friend also had some computer troubles with strange lines and poor colour fidelity in his display. I had him bring the computer over and we quickly found out that his Radeon 9800 Pro had died. My computer, fortunately, had exactly the same card, so I just sold him mine, thinking I would get a new one in the morning. (It also saved him having to get new drivers!) Of course, now I haven’t been keeping pace with developments in graphics cards, so I have no idea what to get, or what a good price for that would be. I do know that the pace of acceleration seems to have slowed down (or that 9800 pro was a real gem) since it’s been going strong for over 3 years now with no sign of being unable to run a game. So, I figured this could be an opportunity to upgrade before I faced the grim spectre of obsolescence. However, I have no idea what to buy. I know that ATI went from their 4-digit numbering scheme to X-### quite some time ago, and figured that pretty much any X-series card would be an upgrade. Looking into it more though, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, it looks like you’ve got to go pretty high up into the X-series to equal the old 9800 Pro. I’m hesitant to get a nVidia card after the steaming turd that was my TNT2, but I’m told they’re much better now. Of course, I have no clue how their naming scheme works, or what level I need… so it looks like it’s going to involve a bit more research than just popping into the computer store down the block and grabbing a card…

Wow, was that a long weekend. Scans every day, finishing off with 14 consecutive hours in the MRI suite on holiday monday. Imagine the overtime I’d get if I was actually employed!

It was getting pretty rough there, with no breaks to go eat, so I had a cooler bag with lunch and dinner. I had a cancellation right around lunch, which was kind of good in a way, since I was starting to fall behind in my schedule, and it gave me about a half hour to run to Timmy’s to stock up on donuts and get some more ice for the cooler bag. I got home last night just absolutely exhausted, and did not sleep at all well. Now I’m getting ready to go back for more scans tonight. It never stops!

About halfway into the afternoon, an orderly came by and dropped a patient (as in, an actual sick person in a wheelchair) at the door of the MRI, and ran off even though I was yelling at him (I couldn’t leave the console for another 10 minutes or so). Finally I get a chance to go up to this poor woman and ask her what she’s here for, and if I can help her (hoping that she’s not going to say “I’m here for an MRI”). She’s here for “a scan”. I ask if she knows what kind of scan, if its an emergency case, and if she knew whether they paged someone to come in and take care of her because I’m not a doctor… she says the only thing she knows is she has to get an injection. Well that, at least, tells me that nobody’s expecting me to give her an emergency MRI. I start searching the mostly lights-out nuclear medicine department for someone that might know what to do. Finally, hidden way in back around the corner in one of the treatment rooms I find one of the nuc med techs, who had been called in to help this woman and knew exactly what to do (and was also confused as to why she was dropped off at the MRI).

So, crisis averted, it was back to scanning for me. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. We have two machines networked together to run the MRI. Basically, one is supposed to be running the scans, and the images are instantly sent to the other one for backing up to CD-R and viewing. Unfortunately, the hard drive on the other one filled up sometime on Friday, and noone who knew how to properly back it up and clear it off came in, which meant a lot of intense multitasking for me to make sure I got all my stuff backed up without having to spend an extra 7 hours at the end of the day to get it done. I was worried the same would happen to the main console itself, as it topped 90% yesterday…

So, a long weekend.

I shocked the BEMs community at the conference this year when I grabbed the microphone after the student awards ceremony so that we could bestow a gift on Shin, who was so helpful in guiding us around, getting us together, and keeping us happy. They finally tracked me down, and asked for a “one paragraph” description of the student experience at BEMs this year, and what lead to that unexpected gift ceremony for the newsletter. Here’s what I sent them:

We had received a few emails from the organizers in advance of the conference that an attempt would be made this year to have some sort of student function during or before the conference. I know two requests came through and nobody from my lab volunteered. Luckily, Shin, Alice, and Marylene stepped up and organized the small, low-key student meet after the main opening wine and cheese.

Each student took a minute to introduce themselves to the group, and then we played a few hands of poker for poster pushpins as we got acquainted. All too soon, a few people had to leave, and we thought we had to leave the room we were in, so the rest of us headed off to find a pub. With the help of some locals, Shin found us the “Apres” bar, close to the Hotel Excel Tokyu.

After getting to know each other outside the bounds of the conference, the students made more of an effort to get together during the evenings and downtime that we had. We all went on a walking tour of Kanazawa, mostly lead by Shin (who could read the tourist placards, written in Japanese), and Julia (who had actually read her guide book on the city).

When the social event ended early and was found to be lacking in the dancefloor department, again the students (and the registration desk girls) headed off to the “Apres” to stretch the evening out.

Of course, _the_ thing to do while in Japan is karaoke. Shin went above and beyond and spent a good portion of his time (possibly over an hour, depending on who’s telling the story) calling a bunch of different karaoke places to find one that would be good for us (private booths, multilingual song selection, good price, and walking distance). At the end of the conference, to thank him for all his help in guiding us around the city (which, it should be noted, is not even his city: he’s from Kyoto), we each chipped in 100 Yen to buy him a shirt. While I jumped up to the mic after the student awards were presented to make Shin’s give “official”, it was Dave (and Alice) who thought of giving him a gift, organized the money collection, and went out to shop for it.

All in all, it was one of the more enjoyable conferences largely because of all the fun student interaction. Typically at these events people stick close to their research groups or countrymen. Of course, there is mingling and discussions take place with all kinds of people, but those invisible connections and groupings can always be seen, especially when it comes around to dinner time. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this kind of interaction with students from all over the world, regardless of research topic or supervisor.

“Sorry boss,” one might say “but we can have dinner together any time back home.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to include all the students in the largely unplanned events. But that leaves us with room to grow for San Diego!

[Note that it ended up being slightly longer than one paragraph]

It’s been a hectic time at work lately. We’re scheduling an upgrade to our MRI system sometime in the winter, and to get ready for that the hospital is going to cancel all research time to get caught up on the clinical backlog (since the upgrade is going to mean weeks to months of downtime). That, of course, is extremely painful to someone who needs research time on the magnet for their PhD. To add to the pain of it, we only found out about this plan two weeks ago, so we begged and pleaded to get at least some of the time we need to actually finish a study or two… and we did, sort of. A solid block of 31 consecutive hours on the long weekend. Whee! Sure, we could technically do about 25 subjects in that time, but realistically? Even if I did hypercaffeinate myself, it’s pretty difficult to convince someone to come in for a scan (a sober scan) in the middle of the night on the long weekend… I think we’ve got 4 or 5 people scheduled, and that was damned near miraculous (and involved a lot of begging, pleading, and favours called in). Heck, I can’t even convince my immediate family to come down (“well, maybe, if you really want to graduate this decade… and if the weather’s bad at the cottage.”).

By chance or design, Wayfare’s parents came to visit last weekend (when I had another, fairly inconvenient, smaller block of time on the scanner) and I scanned her dad. He was thrilled to get a CD with pictures of his brain on it to show the people at work, something he’ll treasure long after his hand has stopped aching. Of course, we tried to go out for lunch beforehand, but had a heck of a time with the logistics of that. Wayfare’s had her eye on the new french restaurant just a block from our place (“Red meat, red wine, etc.” is their motto). We went by at 3 pm, and they were closed until dinner time. Moving on down the street, we tried the Village Cafe, which was closed for a catering event. Some clowns walked by on the sidewalk, in full clown makeup. “It’s like we’ve passed through a vortex into a universe where restaurants are closed on saturdays and clowns walk the streets.” I suggested we try Bertoldi’s or Symposium next, but Wayfare hasn’t been impressed with Bertoldi’s the last few times we went, so we settled on TJ Baxter’s, which was close. They met us at the door and sat us down, but other than that they might as well have been closed too. The patio was mostly full, but we were the only ones sitting inside, so it wasn’t all that busy, yet we had to wait about a half hour for our food to arrive. “Perhaps we should run across the street for a quick lunch to hold us over until they get dinner ready here…”