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Thursday Tech Tips

I had a user setting up his notebook at the last second in a conference room full of expectant visitors.  When his notebook wouldn’t connect to the room’s built-in projector it seems that he went and grabbed our nice Dell portable projector.  When that didn’t work and the meeting was two minutes overdue to start, they finally came running to me.

Unfortunately, this left me with no time to help him with the problem he was having with connecting to external displays.  The only thing I could do was grab a spare Dell notebook on the way out of my office and have him copy his presentations to it so he could continue on with the meeting.  Problem not solved but crisis averted.

Today he tells me that he’s leaving on the weekend for a week and he needs that functionality to work and he won’t be able to let Dell have the laptop before then to fix it.  Uhh….  So I dredged through my rusty databank of a mind and remembered that I kept seeing a little graphic pop-up each time he hit Fn+F8 and it said “Presentation Mode: OFF.”  I remember thinking that that wasn’t right but couldn’t troubleshoot it at the time.

I contacted Dell Support and of course they can’t do much without me having the PC in front of me, but they did give me a hint that I thought might work.  There’s a Dell QuickSet application that runs in the background and gives some control over certain system settings and functions.  So I got the PC for a few minutes and checked QuickSet and sure enough, there’s a Display setting that, if unchecked, will not allow you to use external displays.  Presentation Mode was indeed turned off.

So I checked the box to enable Presentation Mode and tested it with an external LCD monitor and a HD Plasma TV in the conference room.  Imagine that…   it works now.  Not so hard of a fix after all.  But how did it get set like that in the first place?  That I can’t answer… yet.  I have two new D630s sitting here in my office though and I intend to see what their default settings are on this.

So that’s the first tech tip for today.  The second one is more of a common sense tip that should be obvious after reading the above.  If you need help with your PC, please… for the love of all that’s silicon, give us technical people a little time to fix your problem.  Asking for help at the last possible second is the worst time to do so.  Especially when you knew the problem existed previously.

Hong Kong: Closed

A severe tropical storm passed through Hong Kong this morning and the goverment instated the highest weather warning of Typhoon Signal 8 at around 10:30pm last night.  Because of that, our office along with pretty much everything else in Hong Kong, was shut down until the warning signal was lowered to a 3.  It makes sense when you consider that most of Hong Kong is water.

So that means that I was up every 30 minutes or so after my alarm went off to check the Hong Kong Observatory website to see what alerts were raised.  As long as the Signal 8 was in effect, the ferries to leave our island wouldn’t run, the busses to leave our apartment wouldn’t run and as far as I know, even if I were to make it out of Discovery Bay alive, the MTR trains don’t run either.  So, as I said, Hong Kong shuts down.

If the signal persists to 2:00pm then we can forget about work and do whatever.  But if the signal lowers before then we have to come to work within 2 hours.  That kind of sucks.  So when I saw that the signal had changed back to a 3 at around 11:30am I reluctantly took my smelly self to the shower and got cleaned up.  I had to go to work.

It’s not a bad thing.  I have a lot to do today.

Garsh Dangit

Garsh Dangit: Space Ranger.  Hehe.  Sounds funny.

It seems that I never got around to making a post yesterday.  Which is pretty damn lame if you ask me.  Which you didn’t but if you had that would have been what I would have said.  I have a stash of jokes and pictures that can be used in cases of post emergencies just like that but it does no good if I just plain forget.

Yesterday at work was insanely busy.  I had a big implementation of a Cisco ASA 5510 firewall/Intrusion protection/VPN system for an affiliate company and it took much longer than anticipated to complete.  I didn’t even really get to sit in my own office till about 3:00pm when I finally kicked the installers out so I could get some lunch.

Today has been busy catching up on all the things that didn’t get attended to yesterday as well as some things that needed to get done today.  I spent some time talking to the guy who will be replacing me out here in Hong Kong once I leave to go back to St. Louis.  He’ll be another ex-pat from St. Louis just like me and he has tons of questions just like I did when I was planning on coming here.  I think he’ll do OK out here.  He’s got some size 10 shoes to fill.  Seriously, I’m going to leave him a pair of my shoes.  No, not really.  I’m all hopped up on sugar right now so anything I say can and will be held against me tightly and I won’t let go.  What?  Don’t mind me. My teeth hurt.

Beer

I think I feel like having a beer.  Maybe two or three.  I could probably go for a full on drunken stupor to be truthful, but a couple of beers would suffice.  It’s been a rough couple of weeks.  It’s friday evening and I’m leaving work and I still have a ton of stuff waiting for me on Monday.  Beer: yeah, I’ve earned it.

Beer.  It’s what’s for dinner.

The mobile web

I just attended a luncheon regarding the rising opportunities in the online mobile phone markets and it was pretty interesting.  I found out the the average youth user in China sends an average of 100 text messages a day.  That’s just sending!  Considering I’d never sent a text message in my life prior to coming to Hong Kong, that just seems inconceivable to me.

However, the focus of the presentation was about the youth market and how it’s affecting and shaping the mobile web.  Basically the premise is that the kids today are deciding and driving the technology and services available on mobile devices and us old folks will just get whatever they decide on.  Lucky us.  The 2 second attention span generation has come to power.

Supposedly, 50 Cent and young Japanese girls have something in common.  They are doing something called Lifecasting.  They basically wear their phones around their necks and let it record constantly throughout their day and it auto transmits these images or video to an online accessible site.  Personally, I’m not sure how I would feel about this but I guess it would keep Fiddy from doing illegal activities since he’d be broadcasting whatever he’s doing to the world.  The japanese girls will probably get flooded with dirty old men though.  But maybe that’s what they’re going for.

It sounds like more and more content on mobile devices will be branded as well.  Just like you can’t have a college bowl game without some companies name and logo plastered all over it.  Just like you can’t play certain video games without seeing billboards in the games advertising everything from soft drinks to cars.  Now your mobile content will also be branded.  Considering the size of the screens, I hope that you can still see what you were looking for with all those logos.

Of course since this meeting I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of making this site and A Little Scary more mobile friendly.  I found this Wordpress Mobile Plugin that looks like it makes your site mobile phone compatible and thought I might give it a try.  If anyone out there has any opinions on the matter, please leave them in the comments.

Too busy

It’s been a long day and it’s almost time for nighty-night time.  I’ve been swamped at work for the past week and a half to two weeks and I just got off two calls to my management in St. Louis to make a very long day even longer.  I haven’t had time to post, to do any artwork, to work on the comic or anything today.  Granted I was at work and I was working but I hate it when I’m being pulled in three different directions all day long and don’t even get to take a breather for lunch.  Oh well, whatever.

So other than a little whining I got nothing much else to say right now.  Although I do have to mention that I just found out that my boss (soon to be my ex-boss in a few hours) has been diligently reading this site.  I guess it’s a good thing I don’t complain too much about work on here or name names, eh?  If she’s reading this I wish her good luck in her new project.

And with that, I’ll be signing off to go put my shoes on, take the dogs out and then crash.  It’s been a long day and I deserve some sleep.  That cat better stay quiet tonight….

You need a what?

Our company’s CEO is in the office today and there are lunches and dinners planned to keep him amused and well fed.  However I must have missed an e-mail somewhere along the line.  The office manager bounded into my office asking for my baby picture.

You want what?  A baby picture of me?  Those are all in the States and not scanned.  Why?

So it’s something to do with some activity during a dinner.  So I’m assuming we will be expected to guess the employee by their baby pic.  I got nothing.  SO, I decided to improvise.

Here’s the first one I sent to the office manager:

I think my Mother would agree that this is a pretty close approximation to any real baby pictures that do exist.  But this was denied as an acceptable submission.

So I decided to improvise some more.  I broke out Photoshop and got to work.  And ended up with this:

I think that’s the one they are going to use.  Without the watermark of course.  I still say the monkey picture is better, but there’s just no accounting for taste on this side of the world.  Perhaps the hat won them over?

Windows Server 2008 launch event

Today I didn’t go into the office.  Today I went to the Wan Chai Convention and Expo Centre to attend the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 launch event.   I’d like to say it was fun.  I’d like to, but I can’t.  Oddly enough, going to a product event here in Hong Kong is not much different than going to a public festival.  It’s crowded and people will push past you to get to what you are trying to get to no matter what.

Add to this that the break-out sessions that I wanted to attend were all either full or in Cantonese only and it wasn’t all that great.  I really only wanted the free copy of Windows Vista Ultimate NFR and the little 3 Kingdoms figurines that they were giving away and I gotta say that it just wasn’t worth it to me to stay till the very end to try and get those.

But of course it was a Microsoft event and there were tons of vendors on hand to deplete my business card stash and add me to their mailing and call lists: all in the name of shwag.  Granted the shwag wasn’t as good as some events I’ve heard about, but it wasn’t bad.
Here’s a picture of the official Microsoft  Shwag Bag.

It’s a pretty nice messenger bag with a compartment for holding a notebook computer smaller than mine.

Here’s the crap… I mean shwag… that I dumped out  of it after I got home.

Which consisted of leaflets and folders from over a dozen companies that I could care less about, 4 spiral notepads, 3 post-it note bundles, a wireless mouse (no batteries), an inflatable drink float shaped like a tiny inflatable chair, a Swiss-Army like pocket knife, numerous CDs and DVDs with things on them I will never install, a couple of pens, 2 monitor wipey things, and a nice booklet of all the updates in Vista SP1: completely in Chinese.

I’m sure I missed a few things but who cares really.  It’s all crap and will almost all eventually end up in the trash just like usual.  It may take me a while but that’s the ultimate end for shwag.

For those with time

For those of you with the time and inclination, Lifehacker has a fun Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks to use on your unsuspecting users, friends and family. Of course, if you plan on doing any of these at your place of work, please keep in mind the mentality and patience of your co-workers and your management. No point in getting fired over a dumb prank.

I’m a big fan of pranks myself and would love to try some of these out. But like I said, I just don’t have the time. I got a call from my boss in St. Louis and was told that they were cutting my contract here in Hong Kong a bit short. It seems I’ve done such a good job here that they now want me to take over the IT for the European region and do for it the same as I have for the Asia-Pacific region. That’s a great thing of course and I’m glad they have such faith in me but I have my doubts of course. Europeans are a much different breed of people than Asians.

So needless to say things are going to be a bit crazy for the next few months. We need to figure out how to arrange getting our things moved from Hong Kong to London and make sure the pets are all taken care of. Finding a place to live should be even more difficult than it was in Hong Kong I imagine. Hopefully we can find a place near a pub. With good internet access of course.

Not only that but I’ll have to interview for my replacement here and do training and everything else that’s involved. The guy who’s leaving the lead position in London now seems to have stopped caring for how things were done quite a while ago, so it sounds like it may be in even worse shape their than it was here when I first moved. All in all, a good challenge of course but I don’t imagine it will be easy by any means. Add to this that I’m an American and I imagine that some of the existing staff will probably rebel a bit as well.

So more news to come as I have it and hopefully it will be a smooth transition (yeah right). I’m trying to get a trip there to check things out in person before hand to see what I’ve gotten myself into. They’ll probably agree to that since they did the same before I came to Hong Kong. Oh well, at least London is a bit close to the States as far as time difference goes! Wish me luck….

And on Wednesday…

The computer gods truly are pissed off at me for some reason.  I’m not sure what I’ve done to annoy them but I wish they would get over it.  I’ve had no impure thoughts about Macs.  I’ve felt no sinful urges to install Linux, lately.  I properly drool over the newest video cards and bow to their power.  I’ve even cleaned the user slime off a few keyboards last week.

Whatever it is though, they decided to mess with me at work.  Not sure why I forgot to post about this earlier.  Oh wait I know… my work laptop blew up.  Well OK not really.  But the video card is toast in that laptop.  I get dotted lines through the POST display and Windows XP splash screen and then it garbles and then goes blank.  Normal mode, Safe mode, with an external monitor… no change in results.  The card is fried.

And of course being a notebook (even a 20-something pound notebook Dell XPS M1710) means that the 512MB 7900GT video card is still a part of the mainboard and will probably mean the whole thing gets replaced.  Now luckily, I had enabled Remote Desktop on it a week ago to try accessing it from home so I wouldn’t have to bring it home with me anymore.  And since it is just the video card that is failing, the rest of the PC works fine.  So I was able to Remote into it and transfer all my data off of it to an external drive.  Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s never ever leave your data in the hands of a service technician.

And of course since it’s Lunar New Year, they couldn’t come out to fix it.  It was Wednesday when I got transferred to a service center in Mainland China where they pretty much ONLY spoke Mandarin.  After a very long conversation, I was able to get them to have a local engineer call me to setup a time to come fix it.  They finally called me and Monday was the first time they could come.  I figured as much.  So they’ll be here today between 12pm and 4pm to look at my computer and find out what the problem is because I can guarantee that the Chinese guy I spoke with did NOT get the diagnosis right since he didn’t even understand the word “video”.  At the very least I need a whole new mainboard.  At worst they’ll need to swap my PC out for another one.  Neither of which I expect to see in the hands of the tech when he arrives.