Web design & FOSS

Guadalajara is one huge sprawling busy urban megatropolis. I accept defeat graciously, and alas I´m bowing out from any sensible blog entries for October. Internet cafes are fairly plentiful, however, writing blog entries without your own machine as reference/source material, long-hand, in pen and ink, is a painful process. It would be easier to post poetry but thankfully for you, this is neither the place nor the blog.

Hasta noviembre!

I feel bereft, without a netbook to be called my own, and spending the next month travelling around all of Mexico. My last Acer Aspire One broke while I hamfistedly tried to upgrade its RAM, so I am forced to write longhand using a pen in a book with old school hand writing, and then to transcribe these scribbles via the medium of the internet. The shame, the shame.

Yesterday, I thought my luck was in. I had found Office Depot, PC World Wannabe. But my slippery and incoherent grasp of spanish has really driven home the issues of communication. Armed with just a few words, web site navigation and structure becomes excruciatingly important. The "our shops" section of the Office Depot web site lists all their shops. But I´m not sure exactly how. And the addresses seem to be different to the maps. And Google Maps doesn´t recognise the postcodes...

With a couple of what I thought to be addresses tucked safely in my (paper) notebook, I set out with a friend to a location in the southern suburbs of Mexico City, near Xola. But the shop wasn´t, it was a secondary school. Undeterred, we set out to find the next store, on the longest street in Mexico, armed this time with a dyslexically written down number. Four miles, an electrical storm, a roundabout ride in a green and white VW beetle taxi later, we arrived at the store. Only to be told that they didn´t have any Acer Aspire Ones in stock, and they wouldn´t have any until next week.

Next stop, Guadalajara, and I will endeavour to phone them up before arriving and check if they´re in stock. Well, at least I managed to buy some socks...

Last week I attempted to install an extra 1GB of RAM on my Acer Aspire One (affectionately known as the AA1). I diligently followed the instructions on the Aspire One User web site. I consider myself fairly experienced at dismantling computers and installing RAM and hard disks. Heck, I even managed to upgrade the hard disk on a G3 iBook, notorious for their undismantleability.

So, I thought, what could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. I broke it good and proper. An error comes up at boot, not being able to find bootable media, and then there are numerous disk errors and freezes when it finally does manage to wheeze into life.

This all wouldn´t be so bad if I had the time to fix it. However, I´m travelling in Mexico for five weeks, and I was dumb enough to try fixing it the night before I left! I´ve had to leave the AA1 behind, and more importantly, I am without the proposed subject of my blog for the next five weeks, which was going to be about travelling and working with the AA1 in foreign climes.

Probably most frustrating of all is that I found the perfect man/shoulder bag from Uniqlo on Regents Street, London. I´ll be in Mexico City for a few days, and plan to pick up a cheap laptop. No signs of any netbooks whatsoever!!