Jonas Beckman

I’m in bed with the same cold as before (I think).

Aila is making breakfast, I’m writing this in bed, on my new Thinkpad. Soon I’ll go downtown and work again.

Sorting out customer-vendor relations for a client (as I had to do Monday and Tuesday) is very stressful when you really should be in bed all day (instead of most of it). So simple is nice, and thankfully I have a very simple agenda today: hack some scripts for an XMetal customization. I’ll use JScript and an editor API to build a simple gui for producing HTML tables – very concrete just-do-it kind of stuff.

Tonight I’ll continue swithching more of my working environment over to the Thinkpad. And someone just called about Internet connections for our renovated office. Thank God!

Best of all: it looks like Spring is finally coming to Sweden! Ja, aber jetzt an die Arbeit….

Lovely evening with Aila yesterday: we almost cured our colds with fantastic seafood and the best beer.

What is Big Blue… and feels warm&fuzzy today?

It has been impossible to format and install any OS whatsoever on my new IBM Thinkpad T21. I tried many things, and nothing worked. Shit happens: anyone reading this has a similar tale to tell.

But this story is very different:

I call tech support and immediately get through. The person I talk to is competent, tries to help and suggests things I haven’t already tried. I call back and another person knows all about the earlier call. No one is in a hurry. When nothing helps, they tell me the quickest way to send it in. I take a taxi to IBM Repair Center and less than 24 hours later the disk is replaced – no questions asked. Do I want to pick it up myself or should they send it somewhere?

Thank you, IBM!

Sweden in early March is not the best of times. We see the sun more often – but it’s still cold. Spring is far from here; we are all reeling like old boxers, listening for the bell and trying to keep on our feet.

Update: It has been suggested that I should re-consider this analogy: Mike Tyson is an old boxer, too. Well… if he can live with his flaws I’ll live with mine. Plenty of old boxers around.

BTW – in case anyone else is concerned: I DO keep my ears covered.

Back in Stockholm late last night, with a very severe cold – went to work after lunch and pulled of ten straight hours of prototyping anyway. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But I had fun.

My business partner has the flu, Aila is still sick… but enough of that. Life is beautiful – I feel blessed to be here.

I’m off to do a guest lecture at the University of Linköping. More later…

Still fooling around trying to make a clean OS install on my new Thinkpad. All this would be completely unnecessary if companies like MS and IBM didn’t tried so hard to control software they have already sold.

Soon I’ll leave hardware hell and get some work done – but first of all I’ll do some swimming. I’ll make it before the pool closes today, too.

Made it to the pool in time – I had fun with my backstroke today.

Now I know at least someone else will understand… Dale Dougherty has been in W2K installation limbo, too!

Me, I have a Thinkpad hard disk that seems impossible to format. We’ll see what happens. I have work to do and sleep to catch, so that stuff must wait…

Finished a hectic Friday very peacefully: first another great massage, then and a vegatarian dinner with my brother and his family. Maja, my niece, doesn’t want to eat meat. But she didn’t like the vegetarian food either – I guess she’ll have to keep living on ice-cream.

Today I did very little before lunch. Now I am trying to tear myself away from my new Thinkpad T21 and go swimming before the 50-metres pool closes for today. I think I’ll make it.

In a few minutes the pre-installed Windows 98 will be gone completely – none of that junk on my machines! I’ll use W2K and then VMWare for running Linux – and some IBM-specific stuff (but nothing I haven’t installed myself).

W2K is up. Some drivers are still missing – I’ll take a break before it’s too late.

Great swim, nice dinner with Aila… unfortunately I then told her I would make “just a few quick installations more”.

I am now in installation hell, the customary punishment for being impatient and stupid. My W2K CD-ROM turned out to be damaged, my DVD is not bootable – and I am getting far too deep into pages like Bart’s way to create bootable CD-ROM’s and Making a Bootable Windows 2000 CD with Service Pack Integrated.

I just finished messing with my company’s DNS and MX records – very simple stuff, but it could temporarily cripple my mail. We’ll see. Yesterday I was busy buying Thinkpads, discussing office furniture, preparing lectures… many good things are happening, really… but I must get some sleep now.