Today, the screen looked like I couldn’t read it anymore. Fed-up with being unable to clean it—and no mention of howto in the manual, I searched for 6021+dust. Unsurprisingly, it appears I’m not the only one having this problem.

So, in simple steps, here’s how you do it.

• Power off, open the back cover, and the battery—to be safe.
• Now, try taking the front cover off by lifting and pushing up—starting at the bottom of the phone, close to the connector.
• The front-cover seems to come off at the bottom, but feels like it’s stuck in the middle. Using your nails, try easing it out of its sockets.
• Clean the screen, and keypad. Then put the front-cover back, load the battery and then close the rear-cover.

And you’re done.

My colleague asks me—while trying to get hold of the sender whose timezone has crossed office hours. I take a guess; think it’s a portable document format (PDF) file—what else can a report be in—these days? I dump the spanned files (file_1of2 and file_2of2) in a folder, and run the following on a prompt.

copy /b file_1of2 + file_2of2 thecompletefile.pdf

We now have the complete report.

Of course, there are other ways of beating the dumb system. You could ask the sender to send the contents of the batch file as plain text; rename the binary file as .txt with an instruction to rename to .pdf after download¹; or send the binary uuencoded²—which is in text, but would again exceed the size limit. Or simply what I did above.

1. Gmail is intelligent though, it can sniff a binary file—even if it’s renamed with a .txt extension.
2. Works best for small binary files.

The new drive barely has any usable software, other than the freshly installed OS. It would probably take me another week to install everything we need—piece by piece, before it goes live and the old one decommissioned.

Update: Four hours after writing this post, I took another shot at the cables to see if I could retain the older drive. I reversed the drive in the disk bay in such a way that the data and power cables faced the front, instead of the usual back. With a bit of a trapeze, it worked! I managed to connect the drives to SATA power pins—merely separated by a couple of inches. Yay!

Showers and washbasins run cold. Freezing cold. It wakes you up like no alarm has ever managed before, which is what happened when I stepped into the shower this morning. Damn, still freezing even as we approach summer.

I check the boiler (An AGPO Ferroli Econoforte HMA32 — a fancy setup that looks like a mini-nuclear reactor). An unfamiliar thing on display. It reads E.01. It’s an error code and, we have no clue. I search for the manual lying around somewhere in the store. Hallelujah, it’s in Dutch. No time to translate. 8.30AM. I’m running late. Kiddo is going to be late for school too, and she would have to register late again, at the front desk today.

My wife calls the AGPO hotline. The other end, I’m told, is friendly, says it’s simple to fix, but can’t explain howto very well in English. We decide not to try anything foolish, because the system is a blackbox, unconventional, Dutch labels, manuals and all. Instead, we call our official maintenance. They promise to get somebody to call us for an appointment. Goddamn, this whole country is obsessed with appointments.

Nobody calls. Wife continues to phone the official maintenance. The phone rings and then auto-redirects to voicemail. This is now on a do-loop.

By afternoon, the entire home temperature has dropped two degrees down; this inspite of a bit of sun today. No one calls us up for an appointment, and it is now evening. We are now worried about the drop in temperature at night. Worry that kids may not be able to sleep well at night.

I translate the error code and it says it’s a water intake error. Not enough pressure. The needle needs to be in the greenzone and above 1 bar.

We mention it to our neighbor. He comes up, looks at the setup and tells me that the sump needs water. Adds that it could also be clogged. Together, we unscrew those odd looking closure valves and pump water into the sump (that looks like a Cabsons gas cylinder — which is the reason, we didn’t touch it in the first place. Slap on the forehead!).

The code changes automatically, boiler’s familiar sound comes back on. We’re relieved; and thank Eric for saving us. All is well again.

1. Boilers — used in room heating systems and for supplying hot water to showers, wash basins and dish washers — are connected to the sump, which maintains a certain pressure, for water intake.
2. It’s a network of pipes carrying hot and cold water between radiators (for room heating) to the boiler and back.

I have always dreamt of having an IKEA store in my hometown (there isn’t one, by the way). I have often picked-up used and dated Ikea magazines from bookstores (yes, they sell, for inspiration, I suppose). My first time shopping in an Ikea store (in Malaysia) was a dream come true.

This is for everyone, who think DIY¹ is cool. When you put a couple of screws in a wooden board, make your chair roll over the floor, it’s cool. It’s one thing to build a couple of things yourself, but entirely another when it comes to setting the furniture for an entire house.

Sneha working with an IKEA staff in sourcing hardware for her design.

It came as a rude shock when we actually received our first shopping consignment. Because, it was then that we realized the amount of stuff, we had to put together, to make a livable home. And this was just half the stuff. There were many items unavailable—some of them still are—with the most notable being the sofa; my daughter’s desk; and a couple of matching dining chairs.

Ikea’s (transport/delivery) service makes me go hmm. We blew €95 for the first shipment, which weighed about a ton. This price is applicable only if it is a ground-floor delivery. (I really like this one.) Add 30% of that cost to every higher floor you want the delivery at. Anyone familiar with Dutch homes will know that this bit of news comes like a well-seasoned hard dried brick aimed right at your skull.

We took our delivery at ground-floor, obviously. We then, dismantled large components into manageable ones before we could haul them up our narrow spiral wooden staircase. Imagine ants at work—carrying one piece at a time.

That day, Sneha and I spent an entire back-breaking evening setting-up our kids’ bunker bed, in a cycle of couple of do-loops and a couple of if-else, break routines.

I quickly realized that this activity was not worth enjoying, and decided to get help. A senior colleague of mine recommended a local help and offered his contacts. At €14 euros an hour, the man went on to fix most of our stuff in about a week’s time, 3 hours a day on an average. You can add up the economics, if you like. And believe me, this is a steal-deal, locals would say.

Today, we ordered our consignment number two². It would be delivered sometime in the middle of next week. That’s when we will start shedding either fresh drops of sweat or those green bills. Tough choice.

I am happy that there is no IKEA store in my home country. Our local ‘Ramlal’ would happily build anything, that we come up with, as a design.

1. We were forced to go this road simply because Ikea is the place where you get the stuff you want quickest. If you have lived long enough in Holland, you’ll know that a typical furniture order takes at least 3-months for delivery. We didn’t want to sit / sleep on a cheap rug until that happened. The downside, however, was the DIY that came with it.
2. After another round of 7-hours shopping, my daughter is sick of it.

Sneha’s kitchen hack: First, wipe the excess oil off the floor with kitchen tissues, and then to remove floor stickiness, sprinkle some wheat flour over the spilled area. Wheat absorbs the oil and makes your floor completely dry. Collect and trash the oil absorbed wheat flour.

These days, it is becoming something of a routine, with our little one playing the devil.

While browsing the documents and lecture notes on OCW, I came across a list of presentations that—the page said—were created using SketchUp. One look at SketchUp, their video presentation, the quality of images and I was like oh yeah, oh yeah.

Sneha and I right now are just oggling at the possibilities with a software like this. To sum it up, SketchUp is a software that lets you be yourself, lets you think and execute your ideas with incredible ease and without being in your way. I almost think there’s no learning curve whatsoever. How incredibly amazing! And, it has a soft touch of those projection lines that you’d have as a way of a visual impression of a sketch. While, it’s not like you’d do with your hand, it’s almost, and it’s great!

If you’re an architect, dude/babe, you’re missing the world if you’re not aware of this software. Guys, are you paying attention? This one’s for you too. Forget Studio Max, SketchUp [probably] gives amazing possiblities for your game development.

And it gets better, they have a plugin for Google Earth, and wait, it’s got Ruby API hardwired in! Oh my God!

It has been a while since I stuck my head inside a desktop computer. So when I did today, I was pleasantly surprised by the intricate details that manufacturers take care of these days. Among those I noticed were:

• There were spare connectors for everything.
• Extra fan for cooling the air inside the cabinet.
• Almost everything comes integrated on a motherboard.
• Extra spare Serial ATA connectors.
• Vertically mounted hard-disk. How thoughtful! If you’re aware that you should stack all your CDs vertically, the same analogy holds good for the hard disk as well (if not more aptly). And in this case, whether you place the cabinet vertical or lay it down horizontal, the HDD stays vertical.
• There’s virtually no clutter as all the cabling is nicely secured. Much easier to clean.

The upgrade was clean as a whistle. Open, install, close and load-up.