Geek on Two Wheels

Evidentally, to replace the systemboard on my two-and-a-half year old ThinkPad R51 would require 1300 of our Canadian currency. Yes, thirteen-hundred smackeroos for part and labour. Incidentally, with roughly the equilavent number of loons, I can buy a brand new ThinkPad R60, albeit the lowest model, but still technologically superior to my R51, and still have enough money left over to purchace a 3-year warrenty plan and cover shipping.

As such, I have decided to attempt and repair my comatose machine by mine self over the weekend. Were I to be unsuccessful, it would appear that I can look forward to a new laptop, and some creative accounting come time to depart from under my parents’ roof at the end of summer.

Evidentally, the power module for my ThinkPad died Thursday night, turning my black machine of sexiness into a black box of paper-weight. Currently, I await a quote on the cost of replacing its motherboard from the SFU Microcomputer Store as the laptop is long out of warrenty.

On the plus side, I’m confident that the data contained within the laptop are safe and sound, and the malfulction provided a good reason for me to hijack the family desktop for school work and other related things. On the bad side, I do actually have said work that needs to be done, one of which would be much, much easier had my laptop not died.

Stay tuned…

Today, I made a trip to south Burnaby to check out the new Taylor Park Bicycle Facility—what an adventure it turned out to be.

The plan was simple: bike to Lougheed station, sky train to Edmond station, find the park, then session for an hour or two. As luck would have it, what should have been a 40 minute trip turned out to be more like 2 hours.

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After two more glibc recompiles, the first of which failed, ldconfig is once again operational. Yay!

Looks like it may have been yet another distcc problem.

After upgrading gcc, my server once again began to crap up with libstdc++.so.6 not found errors.

Three recompiles, and much research later, it turns out that my ldconfig is busted. Some poking around later, I finally managed to create a proper ld.so.cache file on my laptop, solving the linking problem on the server.

ldconfig, however, is still busted:

sui ~ # ldconfig -vp
Killed

Fuck…

After some dealy, numerous trips to Sport Junkies, an epic struggle with an U-lock mount, more delay, an only semi-successful trip to MEC, and a few visits to Bikes on the Drive SFU, I now have a new commuter bike that is even pannier enabled.

Of course, me being me, I’m no where near done spending more money on this bike. There are a few components that are annoying me slightly, but not enough for me to replace just yet.

Next on the list: start eating better in the morning and bike up the mountain to school at least once a week.

No final product and no updates from team make committee chair go something-something…