notebook PC update

Your Compaq Presario v5000z notebook PC arrived on Tuesday, Feb 21st. It was supposed to ship by the 15th, but there was a manufacturing delay, which you were informed of on the 17th. So you did not expect the notebook to arrive on the 21st.

[Update] Here is why: today, Feb 24th, you received an email from HPshopping, informing you that the notebook has just shipped. Maybe this is HP Compaq's idea of a pleasant surprise.

Leaving this aside... The factory installation of WinXP Home SP2 was full of software you neither wanted nor needed, and trial offers for just about every major ISP you could think of. Not desiring any of those, you proceeded to wipe the HD and reinstall XP and Kubuntu Linux 5.10 from scratch. You have done this twice before on your desktop, so what's there to screw up, right?

Wrong. Both XP and Kubuntu 5.10 installed successfully, but in the case of the latter, you could not boot into KDE Display Manager, and thus could not log onto the GUI environment. After several hours trying to solve the problem from the command prompt, what few answers you gleamed from the Kubuntu forums told you that the problem lay in an incorrect X11 configuration for newer ATI (and Nvidia too, actually) GPUs. Wonderful. Beautiful. Great timing.

Next, you tried to install SUSE Linux 10.0 using their boot-CD-internet-install option. You barely get past the welcome screen. Hit "Enter" to choose to start the installation sequence, the kernel begins to load, then the system just hangs. One more distro down for the count.

Ironically you experienced no trouble booting from an older MEPIS Linux live CD though.

[latest update] Finally, you tried a different, experimental (literally) approach: Kubuntu 6.40 "Dapper" Alpha Release 4. Not even a beta release candidate, but an alpha release. Not meant for production purposes. Installation goes without a hitch. Sometimes it pays to live on the cutting edge.

what's -- or more exactly, where is -- the beef?

Remember Bovril, the thick, beef paste sold in the distinctive jar? Or its vegetarian, yeast-based version, Marmite? When you were young, your parents had you try Marmite spread on toasted bread. Your verdict: yuck! It is yeast after all.

(As for why it was Marmite and not Bovril, it was because your parents are staunch Buddhists--or so they claim, for the most part "Buddhism" as it is practised in Spore is really a confusion and/or conflation with Taoism--and your gastronomical encounters with anything beef only occurred during your teenage years. Ah, an unforseen side benefit of rebellion.)

Back to the main subject. Bovril, is it turns out, is an excellent base for Hainanese beef noodles. If you have neither the time, energy, nor resources to boil kilograms of beef bones in order to make soup stock, turn to Bovril. (There, you have let the cat out of the bag. Or the cow out of the farm. Whatever. Now you wait for Beef Noodles Hawkers United's vitrolic response.)

But you have now found out--over a year too late, as it turns out--that Bovril is now yeast-based. Its manufacturer switched from the beef formula to yeast in order to allay fears of BSE, and cater to vegetarians and vegans. You were unaware of the news. Until you used the bottle of Bovril you had painstakingly asked a friend to bring back from Canada. And wondered why it smelled and tasted like yeast. There is a discernible difference. Manufacturer claim: "... in blind taste tests 10% didn't notice any difference in taste, 40% preferred the original and 50% preferred the new product." 10 percent did not notice any difference in taste. You belong to the other 90 percent then.

Bovril is now no different from Marmite. Beef Noodles Hawkers United should have more obvious targets than yourself.

upward mobility?

You just placed an order for a Compaq Presario V5000Z Notebook PC. Features include:

– AMD Turion 64 ML-40 (2.2GHz/1MB L2 Cache)
– 15.4" WXGA BrightView Widescreen
– 128MB ATI RADEON(R) XPRESS 200M w/Hypermemory
– 512MB DDR SDRAM (1x512MB)
– 80 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
– DVD+/-RW/R & CD-RW Combo w/Double Layer Support
– 54g 802.11b/g WLAN w/ 125HSM/SpeedBooster
– 12 Cell Lithium Ion Battery