Category: General

The Unproductive Blogger

I am going through what appears to be the most unproductive phase of my blogging life. The laptop getting a replacement motherboard and possibly a replacement hard disk drive as well at the Dell service centre for one week is one of the causes but by no means the major one. I simply did not have the urge to blog.

Wuan and I have been cooking up a storm on weekends, meals for two, well, that is still a storm to us, albeit in a cooking pot. My days have been a hive of activity lately which makes a lot of interesting things to write about. However, I just could not translate thoughts into words in a coherent manner.

Anyway, the laptop is coming back later today. There will be applications to install, usernames and passwords to remember, and personalising the system to my preferences again. That alone may take a few days. Hopefully, in between that, I can rediscover my blogging mojos again. There is so much that I want to put into words.

Integrated Network Connector Busted

My Dell XPS M1330 laptop could not connect to the Internet after I restarted it from sleep mode yesterday. Switching to another ADSL modem did not work either. The red light on the network slot is on all the time while the green light does not blink even when the cable is connected to the modem. Windows Device Manager showed that only the wifi adaptor is active. After trouble shooting for a while, it was apparent that the integrated network card is busted. I had to wipe the dust off the router that has been lying idle and connect to the Internet via wifi.

A phone call to Dell technical support this morning confirmed that the integrated network card is indeed not working. The motherboard has to be replaced as the network card is built-in. This is my second motherboard replacement. The first was four days after I took delivery of the laptop in 2008. The good thing about Dell is the very friendly technical support and warranty that provides next business day onsite repair. It sure beats having to leave the laptop in a service centre for a few days.

Heat Wave

This must be the hottest season ever. The heat during Chinese New Year was scorching. The sky was blue, almost devoid of clouds. I could almost hear my skin crackle whenever I got out from the car in Ipoh. The heat in the afternoons are now being replaced by thunderstorms in the evenings for the past week or so. That did little to bring respite to the discomfort I have been feeling. I am most unproductive during times like this.