Sony Support may well have redeemed themselves — I got a call today saying they’d fixed my laptop, and would be sending it back by FedEx overnight after having it for just a single day! They replaced the hard drive and re-soldered some memory sockets to the motherboard.

I’m not very happy with Sony’s U.S. support operation. My burly Sony Vaio GRX-500K laptop, which is only about 6 months old and was bought to replace another defective Sony Vaio, developed an intermittent fault about a month ago where it would suddenly freeze up.

At first, these occasional system hangs were presaged by a too-brief-to-read “blue screen of death,” after which the screen would go black and the system would need to be rebooted.

Then, about a week ago it started dispensing with the nicety of the blue screen of death, and would just freeze up. Completely: No mouse, no cursor, no keyboard — nothing. And it started getting more and more frequent, until sometimes I couldn’t even log in to Windows before it had frozen up.

“OK,” I thought, “I’ve seen this kind of thing before. It looks like a hardware fault, because it happens instantly, and even Windows can usually fall over a little more gracefully than this. It’s probably a duff SDRAM or something.”

So I call Sony, and they tell me to defrag my hard drive. Now, I’m a little skeptical that disk fragmentation could cause the kind of spectacular system hangs that I’ve been experiencing, particularly with 40% space remaining, but the drive certainly needs to be defragged, so I play along. That’s one not very entertaining night wasted, and unsurprisingly, the problem has not been fixed.

Next day, I call Sony back. They’re still convinced it’s a software problem, and tell me to do a system restore, talking me through the process. This is a little more involved and time-consuming, since I have to be “escalated” to a more senior techie, but we get though it. Guess what — another fun night spent on the ‘phone with my new-found pals at Sony doesn’t resolve the problem.

At this point, they’re telling me the only option is to do a System Recovery. This means wiping drive C: and returning it to the state it was in when it left the factory. My work is all backed up to an external hard drive, so that’s not a problem, but all the Windows and network configurations, software installations, device driver updates and a bazillion Microsoft “critical updates” will be lost. I’ve done this before, on my previous Sony laptop, and it can be WEEKS before you’re back to having a functional system.

I plead with them, saying “Are you SURE this is the only way? It really looks like a hardware fault to me, do I really have to trash my hard drive before you’ll look at it?”

“I’m afraid so,” they say.

So guess what happens? I back up my work, insert the System Recovery CD, and reboot. It gets through the first CD, then the system hangs again, proving incontrovertibly that this is a HARDWARE problem, NOT a software problem.

So now they’re sending me a shipping carton, so I can send it back to them for warranty repair. SHAME I HAD TO TRASH MY HARD DRIVE BEFORE THEY’D BELIEVE ME!

Just spent 3 days in Las Vegas, at the Museum Computer network conference at the Riviera Hotel.

I have a really hard time understanding what people see in Vegas. This was my third visit, and although it certainly has a novelty value, I just don’t see the long-term appeal — it seems to be full of bland middle-aged white folks from the mid west, mechanically pumping quarters into chirping slot machines 24 hours a day, minus the odd trip to the “all you can eat” buffet… I find it really depressing for the most part, and the noise of the machines drives me crazy after about an hour.

I played the machines with some other conference folks, and managed to win about $40, some of which we put towards another round of drinks. I also had a quick go at the $5 blackjack table; put down a $40 stake, and walked away half an hour later with $40 worth of chips (having tipped the dealer $2.50 worth of chips) — probably my best performance in a casino ever.

Still, there were lots of fun folks at the conference to hang out with, and an amazing chocolate fondue/fountain at the reception at the Liberace Museum!

Getting home almost turned into an unwanted adventure — I was allowed to board the wrong plane at Charlotte, and almost ended up getting the last flight to Orlando, FL instead of LaGuardia! Luckily I twigged something wasn’t quite right, and checked the destination with the cabin attendant.

Doesn’t look like I’ll ever get to fly on Concorde now. Very sad 🙁

I continue to be intimidated by ovens. What is it about these seemingly-innocuous cooking devices that I can’t figure out? I always follow the instructions, and yet disaster always seems to strike when I use ovens.

Tonight I tried to heat up an oven pizza, which should have been simple — the label on the pizza said preheat the oven to 450 degrees F, stick it in, and then take it out 20 minutes later. Easy, right?

About 10 minutes after I put it in, I start hearing these little “Sssss!” noises coming from the kitchen intermittently. I check, and a few drops of cheese have melted off the edge pizza onto the floor of the oven. “OK no problem,” I think, “there was probably just a bit of cheese too close to the edge of the pie.” I go back to my computer. By 15 minutes, I realize the sizzling is now pretty much a constant white noise, and find that most of the pizza has melted through a hole in the pie’s centre, and through the slats of the oven tray, onto the bottom of the oven. And the pizza is stuck to the tray. Nice.

Well, it’s almost a whole month since I last posted anything here — tempus fugits, etc. etc. Quite a lot’s happened in that time — some of it good, some of it not so good…

Not so good: Getting unwelcome news from California on the telephone, and then having a long uncomfortable red-eye to the U.K. to churn it over.

Good: Seeing a lot of family and close friends in Kent, London, New York and Arlington, Virginia.

Not so good: Having to rescue my car from an evil and devious garage that have messed it up good and want to charge me over $1,000 to make it driveable again. Mike at Salamis Service Center, 21-15 38th Ave., Long Island City, NY — this means you. May you break out in malodorous pustulous sores, you greedy dishonest crook.

Good: Completing the painstaking editorial process with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model at a marathon 4-day CRM Special Interest Group meeting in Oxford.

Good: Watching the England v Turkey Euro 2004 qualifying match in two different pubs in South London (The Landor for the first half, the Duke of Edinburgh for the second). The score was 0 – 0, but the football and the atmosphere were amazing — particularly as a draw was all that England needed to qualify.

Good: Hearing the news that the Aussies are demonstrating in Canberra to protest of George Bush.

And soon it will be November.

I recently invented a great new hangover cure… The banana and Berocca smoothie!

It’s very simple to make, provided you have a blender; First, dissolve one effervescent Berocca tablet in half a glass of water. Berocca is an effervescent dietary supplement containing B & C vitamins that is a little tricky to get in the U.S. — you have to get it mail-order — but is easy to find in other countries such as the U.K.

Add the Berocca solution to a sliced banana, a cup of skimmed milk and some ice in a blender, give it a whirl and you’re done! It tastes pretty good (much better than it sounds anyway), and both of the primary ingredients have proven hangover fighting properties.

ARTstor, the digital library of art that I am helping to build, took it’s first tentative steps into the world as a “real” service yesterday, as we ran our first “train the trainer” session for staff of test institutions.

There were a few initial hiccups with the obligatory server reboots etc., but overall it sounds as though it went very well and people were excited by the possibilities. Of course there’s still a long way to go before it’s being widely used on campuses, but its definitely an encouraging start.

So AOL bought TimeWarner back in 2001, and yet now the AOL online operation has been subsumed (assimilated?) as a mere division of the newly-merged company, which is reverting back to it’s old Time Warner name and stock ticker symbol… Now that sounds like $112 billion well spent!

I can’t believe that the Israeli government is openly suggesting political assassination as a possible solution to the middle east peace crisis. Are they all on crack!? Do they really think that mimicing Bush’s heavy-handed and oh-so-successful “regime change” tactics will have any more success in the middle east than it’s having in Afghanistan or Iraq? What will it take for these people to learn what’s so obvious to almost everyone else?