Laptop problems

I bought my Advent 8212 Notebook from PC World in Basingstoke on October 16th 2007. That makes it 19 months old.

Yesterday afternoon the mouse cursor froze as I was doing some work and, as I felt around the machine in puzzlement, I discovered that the bottom of the notebook, next to the power plug, was too hot to touch. I immediately powered the machine down (hard stop via the power button being the only available option). I recollected that I had not heard the familar faint whine of the fan for a long while.

This morning I drove up to PC World at Basingstoke to see whether they could identify the problem and assuming I was right about the fan having gone, replace it. The PC World person at the "Tech Guys" counter was one of those slightly overweight thirty-something individuals of such mental slowness that one suspects catatonia. He reflected over the receipt I pushed in front of him for ten seconds or so and then went off to consult with his colleagues.

Three minutes later he ambled back and told me that to fix the machine, as it was now out of warranty, would cost £230. I must have stepped back with a half-strangled involuntary cry: I only recall saying in a shocked tone: "Excuse me?"

He moved with bovine stolidity to reassure me.

"If you had brought it in with a cracked screen, it would still be £230."

"The screen is not cracked" I responded weakly, "I think the fan's gone. It would probably cost £10 for a replacement and maybe ten minutes to fix it for someone who knew their way round the inside of a laptop. And it's Advent - it's your own brand, after all".

"Oh no" he said, pleased to see an opening. "We only buy them in. Someone else makes them. Your best bet is to look out for a fan on eBay".

I thanked him for his assistance but he had already lost interest, his gaze moving to the elderly gentleman who had been patiently waiting next to me, a man who desired above all else not to be the recipient of the same level of help that I had just received.

As I write this, I have just checked the bottom of the laptop and again it's too hot to touch. I have pulled out the power lead so we're on batteries now. I think that will keep it within its workable thermal envelope.

So it's a sad life from now on, pulling that power lead out and in ... remind me to get a Dell next time.

UPDATE: 17.45: It turns out that there are many companies out there on the web which will repair laptops, some for a fixed fee and others ... depends on the problem. There are even a few in Andover. None of them seems wild about getting Advent spares.

However, while I was searching, I was also unscrewing, to get the following picture of the fan subsystem together with its all-important serial number (click on image to make larger).

I'm currently doing a disk defrag with power on, waiting to see if the problem recurs.

UPDATE: 20.30: Having exposed the fan, and given it a bit of a clean, it now appears to be working again and the temperature of the casing has dropped to what I recall as normal. So much money saved! (At least for the time being).
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We currently have Clare's niece Jane staying with us, together with her three girls aged 4, 2 and some small number of months. I had forgotten the trail of debris which infants strew around behind them, not all of which is food.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald

It's drowning in books time again. Having ordered a bunch of books from Amazon (previous post) I then got three books from the library, including Brasyl - the subject of this post - and then the Amazon Vine newsletter arrived, and I couldn't resist something about Trotsky and something else about D-Day, weather forecasting and the maths of chaos.

Anyway, back to Brasyl.

The Amazon.com readers' reviews are a linear roll-off from 5-stars to 1-star. The folk who hated it deride McDonald for pretentiousness, undelivered aspirations to literary styling and a plot development which they describe as soporific. Oh yes, and they also hate his abundant sprinkling of Portuguese words throughout.

I loved it.

Here's the plot summary from Wikipedia:

Brasyl is a story presented in three distinct strands of time. The main action concerns Marcelina Hoffman; a coked-up, ambitious reality TV producer in contemporary Brazil, a striving amateur capoeirista who transcends the cliches of luvvy television phony and becomes a full-fledged, truly likable person as we watch her embark upon a mad new project. Marcelina is going to find the disgraced goalie who lost Brazil a momentous World Cup half a century before and trick him into appearing on television for a mock trial in which the scarred nation can finally wreak its vengeance.

Another strand is set in mid-21st century São Paulo, at a moment when the first quantum technologies are reaching the street, which industriously finds its own use for these things. Q-blades that undo the information that binds together the universe, Q-cores that break the crypto that powers the surveillance state that knows every movement of every person and object in Sampa and beyond.

The final strand is a 18th century Heart of Darkness adventure in the deep Amazon jungle, as we follow an Irish-Portuguese Jesuit into slaver territory where he is sent to end the mad, bloody kingdom of a rogue priest who scours the land with plague and fire. He is joined by a French natural philosopher, who intends to reach the equator and discover the shape of the world with a pendulum.

Worth the effort of engagement and why hasn't it received a major award yet?
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Note: Within the colourful cultural immersion of Brasyl, there is a central plot due solely to hard physics, inspired by David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality. There are nods to String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity (his character inclines towards the latter but it doesn't seem essential). However, the good guys do seem to require the non-information-loss solution to the black hole information paradox for plot resolution.

Did I mention that the ontology for the novel is the MWI?

Angels & Demons (redux)

So we finally got to see it last night, with its linear plotting, clumsily-telegraphed intentions, stereotyped, one-dimensional personalities, and tensionless direction.

On the positive side, there are some great shots of the architecture of Rome and the Vatican; on the negative side, we really must stop CERN making oodles of antimatter in short-battery-life containment vessels. And never trust an Irish priest who seems too good to be true.

As we left our seats, we waded through little piles of popcorn and discarded plastic cups to get to the aisle. In the lift going down, the demographic seemed to have enjoyed it.

Bunny handling

Just before lunch today Adrian spotted a "baby" rabbit hiding at the bottom of the stairs, next to the filing cabinet. Immediately all resources were marshalled to rescue it (we assume the cat brought it in early this morning).

I obtained a small towel from the bathroom while Alex moved the CD tower and the wicker basket we use to keep umbrellas and cricket stumps in. Adrian managed to envelope the rabbit with the towel, and he was dispatched to release it in the rabbit-ridden fields some 200 metres from our house.

I was puzzled by our collective response.

Rationally we had a number of choices. We could have left it there (but it would have made a mess and the cat would certainly have made a bigger mess later) or we could have killed it ourselves and maybe ate it. But instead we chose the compassionate route and rescued it.

I wonder how we would have behaved if baby rabbits were made out of chocolate?

Something for the Bank Holiday weekend

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At this time we're living at Penton Corner, on the outskirts of Andover... Next year we will move to Wells, Somerset.

It must have been 6.15 p.m. when Clare popped her head round the door and said "Come and look at this ...".

"Another rabbit?" I said with resignation as I eased myself out of the chair, but she shook her head. I guess I should have realised she wasn't using her 'look-what-the-cat-brought-in' voice.

The ground-floor toilet ceiling had that curious dimple with which I'm wearisomely familiar, a kind of six millimetre three dimensional Gaussian with a small drop of water dangling from the bottom. Other ominous patches were visible in the surrounding plaster. Yes, we were in plumbing hell again.

I bounced upstairs, Clare following with a torch, to a rendezvous with the boiler, which is caged in a network of unlabelled copper pipes, gauges and valves which ongoingly taunt me with their vast incomprehensibility.

Squashed between the cylinder and the wall, as accessible as the fan belt in a sixties mini, was a cone-shaped cutaway section of pipe. What looked like overflow water was gurgling and chuckling as it spattered down, stray drops running down the outside of the pipe and onto the sodden floor beneath.

To a first approximation, and speaking strictly as a layperson, prima facie evidence of a leak.

Nothing for it but to invoke our maintenance contract with British Gas. Clare got on with the job while I tried to deal with matters in my hopelessly impractical way, lodging a fan heater at an awkward angle to dry out the flooring, and shoving some kitchen roll in to catch further run-off.

Someone is apparently coming tomorrow afternoon.

And to that point, the day had been going adequately well. I spent a small fortune at the opticians on varifocal plus reading glasses, complete with differentially-hued photo-reactive lenses. Brown for general and grey for reading - matches the frames although this seems to have been by accident.

Then this afternoon: two solid hours of reviewing orbital angular momentum and spin, taking copious notes and trying to figure out whether the act of applying quantum operators corresponding to observables to state vectors ever maps, as such, into any procedure performed in an actual experiment.

As I understand it, the utility of the operator lies in defining eigenfunctions and eigenvalues which, so to speak, establish the set of possible observables when an experiment is 'subsequently' carried out. The operator then bows out, its job being done.

Experiments are all about computing the evolution of the state vector and then reading off amplitudes (leading to probabilities) in the basis of the chosen observable at the space-time locations of interest.

What a puzzle quantum mechanics is, and how much easier than plumbing.
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Update 9 p.m. The cat just caught a rabbit which, by dint of frantic chasing around, we have managed to let escape into the back garden. The cat is under house-arrest for twenty minutes. Clare is looking increasingly frazzled ...

Result!

To our unfeigned and unparalleled delight, Adrian reported back this afternoon from Basingstoke that he had finally passed his driving test. Within minutes I was outside with the white spirit tearing the L-plates off the Toyota.

In an unrelated development, I have to visit the optician in town tomorrow to handle a situation where I can only view TV at 45° from straight ahead through my varifocals, and have to hold books and newspapers at arm's length from my reading glasses.

My 2005-prescription glasses have provoked one eye-strain too many as I'm forced further down the endless staircase of ocular decline. Ageing? You can keep it.

Angels and Demons

The wind had dropped, a beautiful setting sun was framed by a deep blue sky, flecked with high cirrus clouds. As 8 p.m. approached, we drove into town to the Reel Cinema to see "Angels and Demons". The anticipation of seeing the Vatican encounter a few grams of antimatter was further piqued by the knowledge that on Wednesdays it's half-price night. Yes, we'd get in for £3.50 each.

As we rolled into the car park, Clare ominously observed that it was unusually full. Could all these people really be shopping in the Asda store beneath the cinema? We took the lift to the ticket desk to be told that 157 seats were all sold out, as tout-Andover came out from days of rain for a little recreation. A testament to the price elasticity of demand.

Since Hannah Montana did not recommend itself as an alternative, perhaps tomorrow?

Amazon - Overflow - Painting

New arrivals from Amazon today.

• The Quiet War by Paul McAuley


• The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller


• The City & The City by China Mieville.

Paul McAuley's book got an excellent review at Strange Horizons, here (Reynold's book "House of Suns" less so) while China Mieville's book has been seen as a return to form with a truly weird premise.

Miller is an up-and-coming evolutionary psychologist and his book has been widely recommended for its examination of the role of sexual selection in human cognitive evolution: I guess the title was Marketing's contribution.

Additionally to come

• Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science by Hermann Weyl


• House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

once Amazon has got hold of a copy of Weyl's book.

On the domestic front, there is some kind of overflow pipe from the heating system which emerges just outside our back door. It has intermittently dripped water for some years now: echelons of plumbers have scratched their heads, simulated competence and opined that they have no idea what is causing it but that it can't possibly be doing any harm.

Recently the flow has increased somewhat, and rather than expend a fortune in calling out yet another nonplussed plumber, Clare decided to channel the water to the flower bed. The two photos below show the hydraulic mechanism which has now been put into effect.




Meanwhile Adrian demonstrates those aerial skills which have so contributed to his snowboarding and skiing success (below), painting our windows from an elevated height.


OK, enough displacement activities. Back to quantized angular momentum and spin.

Surprise

On Friday, the condemned criminal - let's call him Pete - was told by the Governor that he would be executed either on Saturday or Sunday. But whichever day was chosen, it would be a surprise.

Pete then reasoned as follows. If Sunday rolls around, then I shall know that I am to be executed that day and it will be no surprise. So they have to execute me on Saturday.

Ah, now I know that, it's clear that when they come for me on Saturday it will be no surprise either ... so that means they can't execute me on Saturday!

Pete went back to his cell that Friday afternoon happy in his absolute certainty that he would not be executed this coming weekend after all.

Imagine his surprise when they came for him next day!
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Note: this well-known paradox indicates the slippery, multi-level nature of the concept of "surprise".

Banks

Spent way too long on the phone today.

The NatWest bank branch in Andover failed to process correctly a cheque to myself paid in by Clare. Joint accounts being too hard for them to understand, they sent the cheque, the paying-in slip together with an aggrieved note to an RBS clearing centre (rather than to my bank branch, as clearly indicated on the paying-in slip).

The clearing centre, clearly believing we were criminals, sent the original NatWest aggrieved note back to us, and then proceeded to lose the cheque.

Just to explain, NatWest couldn't do this themselves because, despite being owned by RBS for years now, they have failed to integrate their IT systems and consequently didn't know our address. Yes, we bank with the RBS but as there is no branch in Andover, we have to deal with their adopted NatWest division.

Anyway, as a consequence, I have had to stop the cheque and get it re-issued - a process which may take up to a fortnight.

If there was one thing you would think a bank was capable of doing, you might imagine it was taking receipt of a cheque. In this case, the incompetence seems equally-spread between the NatWest and the RBS.