Yesterday evening, I started French lessons at Alliance Francaise de Manille. I’ve had an on and off relationship with French. Tried studying it on my own through the years. A few years ago, I took the exact same course but I didn’t push through with it so it all sort of went to waste. But I’m thinking, if I persist this time around, I just might succeed and become conversant. I think so because now I can practice it more with Aby who is also taking up French and maybe even with my French bosses. I think so because I’ve learned English, Tagalog, Cebuano, some Hiligaynon, and even a bit of Maranao. And I probably would have learned Arabic had I more time. My teacher in that language was said to have been amazed by my progress. So I’m thinking this should just be a matter of seeing it through to the end. As with all things.
And my Thinkpad T60 is at it again. When I got to work this morning, I plugged it in, opened the lid, swiped my finger on the fingerprint scanner, and tried connecting to the office network. Nothing. I “repaired” the network interface. Nothing. I disabled and enabled it. Nothing. So I rebooted. And I get a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). I tried Safe Mode. Works. I tried Safe Mode with Networking. BSOD. So I know now that the problem is networking related. I was not in the mood to fix it myself so I asked Jon if he can fix it. After an hour or so, I checked on it. It’s been fixed. The solution? A simple restore to a previously known good configuration. Still it was irritating.
As I mentioned in my High Fidelity movie review, I read Wander Girl by Tweet Sering, a passing acquaintance in college. It chronicles the journey of the lead character Hilda through her tumultuous twenties. Her changing relationship with her parents and sisters, her search for a job and a career, her search for the right guy, etc. It culminates in her finding her calling and the right guy. It’s pretty entertaining enough, even quite amusing in some parts. But I read it mainly because it was written by Tweet. So, no, I don’t think I’ll be reading any other book in the series.
“What came first? The music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns and watching violent videos, we’re scared that some sort of culture of violence is taking them over…. But nobody worries about kids listening to thousands — literally thousands — of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” this litany from High Fidelity‘s main character Rob (John Cusack) immediately struck a nerve and so I continued watching.
Why am I watching the equivalent of a guy’s chick flick? See, I was reading Wander Girl by Tweet Sering, a passing acquaintance back in college. At one point, I was amused by the book’s lead character Hilda’s (or is it also Tweet’s?) obsession with John Cusack. Later in the afternoon, as I was browsing my sister’s video collection, I saw High Fidelity. I remembered that it has John Cusack in it and so I decided to watch it. I’m glad I did. In fact, I wish I had discovered the movie earlier.
As I said, the movie is a guy equivalent of a chick flick. Not to say it’s bad, quite the contrary. In fact, it’s almost a revelation: a lesson on things I should have known and a reminder of things I have forgotten. Rob is going through his nth break up and he was wondering why this is so. So he goes talk to all his previous girlfriends to ask why. In the process revealing the stupid things we men do, the stupid things we say, the things we don’t do and should have done. How we analyze things too much. How we are concerned with the wrong things. And so much more. All this is done in a light, humorous, and quite entertaining manner by Rob.
I could see why the obsession with John Cusack.
Rating: 3/5
Encountered a malfunction with my new Thinkpad T60. When I got to work this morning, I plugged it in and opened the lid. Normally, this should wake it up from standby mode. Nothing. So I pressed on the power button to power it down. Nothing. I unplugged it, removed and reinstalled the battery, plugged it back in and pressed the power button. It started up and started making beeping sounds. Not good. Jon and I thought it’s a memory issue, so I opened the notebook up, removed and reinstalled the memory but to no avail. I called up the supplier and they, to their credit, immediately sent in a technician to fix it. Apparently I didn’t try hard enough, because it turned out that a loose memory module was indeed the culprit. How it got loose (bumps? vibrations?) I don’t know. I certainly expected more robustness from a notebook and a Thinkpad to boot. Is this a deterioration of quality due to the handover by IBM to Lenovo? I certainly hope not.