Without a Traceroute

NOTE: Unlike my other posts lately which were written on or about the day they were posted, this was actually written on the night in question (Thursday, October 2).

I finally got out of Palermo. I’ve decided that I want to visit the Aeolian islands, which are a series of volcanic islands off the coast of Sicily. Apparently they’ve only recently become a tourist destination and are still lightly frequented during the off-season(i.e. Now). In any case, I needed to get out of Palermo. It was dirty and noisy and crowed. “Clusterfuck” is the only word that adequately describes the traffic situation in Palermo. I feared for my life every time every time I set foot on the street. People I met at the hostel said that Palermo reminded them of Morocco or some Latin American countries more than Europe.

This is what large parts of Palermo look like: cars parked randomly and garbage on the ground.

Other parts are quite beautiful, however

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After the hackmeeting ended, my top priority was trying to get my computer situation resolved. I generally hate solving problems by just throwing money at them (although that’s usually remarkably effective at smoothing away life’s little irritations). Not only does it make me feel wasteful and profligate, it makes me feel stupid that I couldn’t come up with anything more clever than buying my way clear.

However, in this case, the answer was pretty obvious. I had a dead computer that could not be repaired here. I needed a new, working computer. Monday, I went to one large electronics store that had an Asus eee PC 900 for €400, and a Acer Aspire One for €300. I resisted the temptation to just buy something on the spot, did some research at an internet cafe and located some specialty computer stores (God, I wish Europe had Fry’s). Tuesday I spent most of the day (4 or 5 hours) trekking around from store to store comparing prices and seeing what was available.

I finally bought a Asus eee 901 (for €400), which is quite similar to the 900, except it ships with the new Intel Atom processor and a larger battery. This means better performance and longer battery life. I also got a USB drive enclosure (€10) and a 120 GB external drive (€50), since the eee pc has only 20 GB of on-board storage. The guy at the store helpfully loaned me a small screwdriver to transfer the old laptop’s HDD to the enclosure, which then led to this unholy scene:

It's Alive!

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I guess the last time I wrote was over a week ago now. As you may have noticed, the site was down for a few days, too. Between that, and the fact that I haven’t been any place with reliable internet, it’s been hard. I’m going to try to get caught up, but I think I’ll do it as several posts because that seems to make more sense.

So, first, the Italian Hackmeeting. My biggest impression on first arrival was just how cool the location was. I think I mentioned this earlier, but the story I heard was that the place was built as a party mansion for a guy with mafia ties. It was pretty huge, with at least two main levels, plus the roof and the basement. There was also a good-sized coutyard with gardens and mosaic tiled fountains that I’m sure were quite impressive at one time. The place now is appropriately graffitoed (Italian word!) and grungy, with some pretty cool artwork and berpunk junk lying around. All in all, an excellent venue for a hackmeeting.

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The Italian hackmeeting is really awesome. There’s a bunch of cool people, and the building is awesome. It was apparently built by some guy with mafia ties as a fancy house in the city, but was confiscated by the government before construction was complete. It sat empty for years, but now it’s a squatted social center. I only wish I spoke Italian, because it’s tough to follow the presentations.

Sadly, my computer is now totally dead. The hard drive had been behaving much better, lending further creedence to the loose-connection theory. However, today, it started freezing during bootup at the “Checking NVRAM…” stage of the POST. It’s completely unresponsive. Even more bizarre, if I try to enter the BIOS, it prompts for a password, and I’ve never set a BIOS password for this machine.

I’ve been in touch with tech support via email, and they claim there’s no easy way to reset the BIOS, no reset jumpers like on a desktop. The machine is still under warranty, so I’m hesitent to start tearing it apart and shorting EPROMs based on suggestions from the internet (or Italian hackers). Tech support keeps giving me variations of, “just bring it down to the store”, despite the fact that I’ve told them I’m traveling.

I’ll see if I can get them to pay for repairs at a computer shop here. Alternatively, I may wind up shipping it back the US for warranty service, and then just buying the cheapest thing I can find here, since I’ll be looking at a least a month round-trip. The ASUS eee PCs can be had for around €250, and they’re kind of trendy so I’m sure I could re-sell it easily if/when I got my machine back.

Ugh, super frustrating. If anyone has ideas or suggestions, I’m open.