As it is right now, the battery lasts about four minutes, the DVD/CDRW drive doesn’t work, something rattles on the inside when you shake it, and the touchpad and mouse buttons are on their way out.  It has half a gig of RAM, which just barely cuts it for Windows XP, and it tends to get really hot when in use.

So, to start with, I opened it up and took out the fan/heatpipe for the processor.  Surprise, surprise:  The thermal grease had all dried up and flaked off.  I cleaned that up with some rubbing alcohol and applied a fresh coat of arctic silver, which should help mitigate the processor overheating problems.  I still may need a cooling pad though, we’ll see.

Next up, battery.  This is the second battery that has burned down to nothing, so I’m guessing it’s a design flaw.  The power jack on the side of the laptop is also at an odd angle, but I don’t have a soldering iron so I can’t easily replace that. Hopefully it won’t burn up my new battery, which is slightly larger in capacity than the old one (4400 mAh instead of 4000).

I found the source of the rattling after taking the optical drive out – the drive itself. I’m not even going to attempt to fix that, just replace it with a new one. As for the RAM, I just bought a gig stick to replace the 512 MB stick. The touchpad poses a bit of a problem, as I really don’t want to muck around with the internal wiring too much. So, instead, I just bough a mini bluetooth dongle and travel mouse.

The total cost for all of that came out to just a hair above $100. There are still two bits I could upgrade further, but haven’t decided about yet. Shockingly, the hard drive hasn’t given out yet, so I’d be happy to leave that alone if it wasn’t a 4200 RPM drive instead of the faster 5400 RPM. The faster disk speed would be nice, but it would also generate more heat. Actually, what I’d really like to do is just replace the HDD with a SSD. I’ll have to think about it. Also, I could technically upgrade the processor from an XP-M 2000+ to an XP-M 2200+, but that’s only about a 133 MHz gain. I’m pretty sure the added RAM will resolve a lot of the performance issues, and it’s not like I’m going to be using this thing for anything more than the Internet and word processing, so I think I’ll leave that alone.

Voila, new life into an old laptop.

Japan trip is in a month. Adam and I have a sort of rough itinerary worked out, so it should be fun. Luckily for me, it looks like I’ll be able to do most of what I put in my last post, including getting a picture next to a Gundam. Adam also brought up the topic of staying at a ryokan for a night, which I hadn’t thought of, so that adds another thing to my list of things we’re going to do.

I’m finally starting to see some good results at the gym, which I attribute to my rather drastic change of diet. I’ve never really been able to put on any weight, so I’ve started focusing on constantly eating high-protein food. This has amounted to me roughly doubling the amount of stuff I eat every day, mostly of the dairy and meat variety. My daily intake looks something like this at the moment:

Breakfast
Large bowl of cereal
Cup of yogurt
Two eggs

Lunch
Meat and cheese sandwich
Protein shake

Dinner
Some sort of meat (ie, chicken breast, etc) or whatever I order at work
Veggies

Snacks throughout the day
Two more eggs
Can of tuna
Colby Jack cheese sticks and crackers
Another protein shake (if I’ve been to the gym that day)
Another cup of yogurt
Peanuts
Lots of milk and OJ

(Plus 2-3 Mountain Dews, a multivitamin, the occasional fruit, and my creatine and glutamine supplements)

I definitely feel more energetic now that I’ve added a bunch to my diet (combined with my 4-6 gym visits per week). I’ve also only been sleeping 8-9 hours per night, as opposed to the usual 10-11. I’m hoping to put on ten pounds of lean muscle by the time school starts, although my trip will probably interfere a bit.

• Find my Way to Tokyo station from the airport.  Adam’s meeting me there, so getting lost before that would be a bad thing.
• Visit Akihabara and see what all the fuss is about.
• Visit a robot museum.
• Ride the bullet train.
• Bathe in a natural hot spring.
• Waste money in a Pachinko parlor.
• Eat real ramen.
• See a castle or one of those gate thingies.
• Play DDR in Japan (and, by extension, spend some time in an arcade).
• Observe a Japanese classroom (can I do this?)
• Swim in the Pacific (if possible)
• Get my picture taken next to a Gundam statue
• Hike up a mountain

Obviously I need to think of a few more.

• One apple (peel first)
• One banana
• Handful of broccoli
• Handful of spinach
• Ice
• Splash of orange juice

Blend.  Drink your vegetables.

Oh well, all fixed now.

Truth be told, I’m not looking too hard for a job right now, partially because of the craptastic economy and partially because I haven’t heard back from grad school yet.  Since I don’t have a full-time job to commit to, and my part-time job will keep paying the bills, I’ve decided to just bum around until my three week trip to Japan in July.  After that, if I don’t get into grad school I’ll actually put some effort into a job hunt.

As for the trip, I finally ordered my plane tickets a few days ago and now I get to play the waiting game.  Adam’s helping me figure out a budget, and we’ve got an extremely vague schedule worked out for the first week or so.  I expect a lot of biking to be done, so I’ve switched to doing cardio on a stationary bike at the gym.  Right now I’m only doing 10-15 miles per day, but that’ll increase once I get my lower body back into shape.  All that’s left now is to learn a bit of Japanese and order some train tickets (a friend has graciously offered his hospitality the night before and the day after my flights.  Thankfully, this means I won’t have to leave my car in Chicago for three weeks).

To help alleviate the boredom, I’ve reactivated some old marketing campaigns, which after a bit of tweaking are doing about 20% ROI. Not spectacular, but I’m doing a lot of volume so it’s a nice bit of autopilot cash. If Facebook will cooperate, I’ll probably be able to bump that up another 5%-10% in a week or so. All of that money is going to get pushed back into itself so I can scale those particular campaigns (because I know they are working). No more speculative, money black hole projects for me.

Imagine my surprise today when I went to check the status, only to find that the page title is now “Current Roommate Alex.”

What?  I didn’t change that.  How did that happen?

EDIT:  Now I see why it’s still indexed.  My robots.txt disallows the Googlebot, but this site has still been linked to from other sites that appear in Google’s index.  Apparently I had to add another piece of code to the header to have it completely removed.

Personal Library PHP Script

• Web-based script for recording, organizing, and rating personal book, DVD, video game, etc collections.
• Public, private, and adminstrative areas.
• Ties in with Amazon API to simplify data population of new entries.
• Wishlist section also tied to Amazon API to allow friends/relatives/etc to gift items.
• User interface that isn’t ugly (black text and frames do not make for a pretty web site).
• Extended goal:  Plugins and visual themes, kinda like Wordpress.
• Ultra-extended goal:  Recommendation engine.

Should be fairly simple, although I’ve never really worked with APIs before.  If it ends up not sucking, I’ll release it to the public.