Maybe quiet for awhile..?

I have had series of not-so-happy events during the last 24 hours: to start off, I had pleasant 14.5 hour flight from NYC to Narita, starting with a security check (.. surprise ..). The flight ended relatively happily (half-full plane, so I had 2 seats to myself, luxury!), although I forgot my pen somewhere on the airplane. Similarly, I forgot my pen case AND pens on the flight from Narita to Chicago bit over week ago, so I guess it is a trend.. I hate the idea of shopping for replacements, sigh.

That was not a big hurdle though, and I got off the airport (relatively) happy. Of course, I missed the train home by 3 minutes and needed to wait another half an hour. Then, I got home and learned that our most recent hunting dog (Tupu) had died (driven over by a car) during the week. I wasn't too happy after that.

Then, I went to bed too early (7pm), and woke up 1am and could not sleep. Again, not a huge obstacle. Then the fun began.. I started playing with my laptop, trying to backup files from the trip, and suddenly all sorts of strange error messages started showing up. Not deterred, I played with it few more hours, but in the end even the adminstrator's profile got corrupted and I got depressed and decided to debug things later on after trying to copy what I could to safe place in safe mode.

On further examination, I guessed problem to be either memory or CPU - the machine booted randomly, or programs crashed, depending on phase of the moon or something. After fiddling with memory sticks, USB devices, and the CPU's thermal paste, I ran memtest86 - and lo and behold, the internal memory was partially broken. (few bits on 168mb (out of 256mb internal memory) point did not work correctly)

So to conclude, it seems that my pimped Panasonic R3 laptop is dying, sigh.. 3 months after the hard drive upgrade, to boot. I see only two real alternatives - move to a Linux-only environment at home (because Linux can be told that the few kb of memory are dead), or alternatively have the laptop repaired/replaced. I guess I will inquire Panasonic if they do memory chip replacements (somewhat unlikely, as it's somewhat tedious thing to do), and if not, I suppose I have a Linux-only laptop - and nasty decision whether to buy a new one for Windows use or not.

So, the NYC pictures will show up once I salvage them off my laptop's HD (one way or another), and until the time I get laptop up and running I don't think I will be reachable via Skype or MSN either. I'm safely in the land of the more free though, so all is well, relatively speaking - potential financial expense of replacing the laptop is not appealing.

(Although, the repairs of my camera were fairly cheap here, so maybe laptop repair is cheap too - we shall see.)