星期五, 九月 30, 2005
Bah. Earlier this week, one of the hinges on my Powerbook's screen broke. I've gradually been transferring my data across to my portable hard drive, and to my 2001-vintage iBook, but the Powerbook has still been usable. This evening, although it's the weekend before China's national day, I'm too tired to do anything special. Quite a few of my classmates have gone out on a pub crawl, after which they'll spend the night in Tiananmen Square to watch the flag being raised. Me, I planned to grab a DVD, get an early night, and sleep in tomorrow. I was happy to find a copy of Twighlight Samurai in my local DVD shop; Ihaven't seen it there before. I originally caught the film in Singapore, and I found it really heartwarming. Sadly, it jammed in the disk drive, and when I picked up the laptop to try to get it out, the second screen hinge broke. So, my faithful old Powerbook has a detached screen and a DVD jammed in its drive, meaning that it's basically junk. This computer was my pride and joy when I bought it after arriving iin Singapore for the first time in late 2002, and it has served me well. The iBook will do for a while, but it was only intended to act as a lecture note-taker, andit really isn't powerful enough to use for real work. So.... much as I would like to buy another Mac, I simply can't afford it at this point.. This means buying a Windows machine, which I swore I would never do again. Ah well, too bad. Tsinghua actually produce a line of laptops under their own name, so probably I will get one of those. I've spoken to the guy my company usually buys IT stuff from, and he's confirmed he can supply one partitioned with Windows XP and Linux installed for dual boot. All I need to do then is load FreeBSD to replace Linux and I can at least be reasonably happy and productive. It's an expense I could really do without but, well, there's nothing else to do.
