Random Synapses

In recent years, all the books I’ve read were either for school or technical-related, while the little literature I’ve read was in electronic format.

I love e-books: not collecting dust and not taking up space on shelves, usually cheaper than their printed versions, and environmentally friendly. I can deal with reading on a computer display, while I appreciate the search ability of an electronic document.

But for my birthday, I bought myself a few books from Amazon.com. Real books. Words on paper. They’re books I have been looking forward to read for quite some time. Now that they’re here, I can almost taste the thrill of anticipation. Here’s the list:

• Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat - A brief history of the twenty-first century”;
• Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind - Why right-brainers will rule the future” - the revised version of “A Whole New Mind - Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age”. Ok, so I made a mistake and thought the two books are not related, and ordered them both. They’re good books nonetheless, and one of them will make a nice gift.
• Daniel Pink’s “Free Agent Nation - The future of working for yourself”.

“A Whole New Mind” caught my attention in February 2005, just a couple of months before it was published. Daniel Pink’s article “Revenge of the right brain” in Wired Magazine briefly brought up the main points of the book. It was equally a very interesting reading, and proof that Daniel Pink has an excellent writing style. The subject came in right on time to fuel my interest in self-development and potential trends in work environment. “Free Agent Nation” is now about to continue building on those thoughts.

Thomas Friedman has made excellent points on globalisation in his earlier work. I’m very curious on what synapses will be fired by this new book of his.

Hands down, these will be the most interesting things I have read in recent years. Even before I opened the covers, I highly recommend them to you. At least read Daniel Pink’s article and see if anything clicks for you.

Yesterday I finally had the time to shop for replacement capacitors for the Dell desktop I bought for a file server, whose 5 capacitors were swollen.

Somehow electronic parts shops are all grouped together on the same street in this city, stretching for a couple hundred meters on both sides. I needed 5 capacitors of 2200 microfarads at 6.3 volts. Armed with patience and enjoying the warmth of the late autumn sun, I went through all the shops in a few hours. It’s pretty difficult to find capacitors for such a low voltage; some shops only carried from 10 or 16 volts up, others only from 50 up.

I started with largest electronic parts distributors. One didn’t have what I needed, another had the 10 volt kind - so I bought 10 of them for about $4. Cheap for a reason: their brand is “NA.” Not Applicable? Yikes. I’d better find alternate options.

Across the street, a smaller shop carried the kind I wanted - 6.3 volts. A bit more expensive, I bought only 5 of them for $4, but I wasn’t confident they were any better. They are dark blue with golden markings, made by “Kingcon.” Never heard of this one either, but they look a lot like those I’ve seen swelling up, and the brand sounds a lot like the 5 faulty capacitors in the Dell, “Nickicon.”

On a side note, what were Foxconn thinking when they picked “Nickicon” as a component supplier for manufacturing motherboards for Dell?!

Anyways, I went through the other stores, many being specialized in audio parts - speakers, amplifiers, specialty audio cables and connectors, and ultra-high performance electronic components for hi-fi audio devices. In such a small shop I found the kind of capacitors I needed, but this time a well-known, trusted brand: Jamicon. Clearly, these capacitors were nearly $1 a piece, but it’s money well spent.

Later in the day, I replaced the faulty capacitors on the motherboard with these Jamicon gems, powered up the desktop and… it started beeping at me. For a few seconds, I froze. Then I looked at the 4 diagnostic LEDs on the back of the Dell - two orange, two green. I looked up the pattern in the troubleshooting section of the manual and sighed with relief: “Bad memory.” I knew one of the memory modules has been acting weird, and this time I got proof: self-check identified two faulty locations. After taking the module out, everything worked perfectly.

Now I’ve got a new story to tell, a working file server, 15 capacitors I don’t need, and a deffective SDRAM memory module as a fancy keychain.

It happened again.

The first time it was an accidental discovery. I was happy to think that I have fixed the problem.

The second time it was a surprising discovery, but I was convinced that the second blow will finally kill the monster.

But it didn’t. And a few days ago I discovered that another two of the original capacitors left on the motherboard look like a finger stung by a bee.

That got me mad. Really mad. I definitely ain’t gonna patch this motherboard for a third time. It’s time to stop trying to resurrect the dead and let the priest light a candle.

Darned capacitors.

I was planning to replace the core components of my PC with modern stuff — a new motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, some DDR2 memory and probably a reasonable video card on PCI Express. That’d give me a lot of juice, less heat, less noise, and a bundle of features such as 10 USB2 ports on-board and Serial ATA 300. It looked like a big investment and I was waiting for prices to drop, using the old PC in the mean time. After all, I only get to spend maybe 6 to 8 hours per week at my home computer these days, so $1000 sitting in an unused computer would be a stupid idea.

But the old PC went belly-up, thanks to the effin’ faulty capacitors. And I needed an immediate solution. So I bought a cheap motherboard for Socket A (pretty much the only model I could still find in stock anyway), which will keep me running for some time. In need of space, I also bought a new 320 GB hard drive on PATA, so the pressure of SATA is gone for now.

Effin’ capacitors.

On a side note, yesterday I bought a second hand Dell OptiPlex G150, a nice Pentium III in a slim case, to become a flexible file server (and maybe a print server, and media center, and whatever else I want to throw at it — like, running a couple more virtual machines on it with Microsoft Virtual PC). Its inner workings are wonderful, the case is so well thought and the airflow keeps the system cool with one fan for video card, hard drive and power supply. Everything inside is made by Foxconn and labeled as such. The motherboard is a little smaller than mATX form factor, and has only 5 capacitors on it.

They’re swollen.

*sigh*

Now, does anyone want to buy an old Epox 8K3A motherboard (Socket A, VIA KT333 & 8233 chipset, 266 MHz maximum processor FSB and 333 MHz maximum memory frequency) which has gone through surgery twice and still needs (at least) a third intervention?