I’ve had this issue happen to me several times, and I’m finally writing myself a note to fix it in the future. There seems to be an issue with downloading VMWare Workstation (.bundle). I first tried it with Firefox, but it just died at loading it into /tmp. Next, I tried it with Lynx, but alas, it tried to download it as a text file. Ahah! The quickest solution I could find is to right click the link, save as, and save it as a zip. Rename it to .bundle when you’re done.

I’ve lived in several different parts of the world, and they all do internet differently. Back in the US I had 8Mb/sec cable (leaving just before Fios was really an option, darn!) In New Zealand, for instance, I was paying for “high speed ADSL” rated at 1.5Mb/256k. Vrooom. Up in Taiwan I was paying 1/2 what I paid in New Zealand, but for 12Mb/1Mb. Down to Sydney and we have a rated 24Mb/1Mb.

The laptop had 1 GB of memory and ran Windows Vista. I heard a memorable quote today: “I think Vista plus Office equals Monster.” That was followed by: “I just clicked the exsomething.exe with the somethingelse.exe and hit end task. Now my desktop went black.”

This is a fairly inconsequential entry, but I found the incident amusing. I assembled my external drive enclosure this morning and noticed a bug crawling around inside it; I hadn’t used the enclosure in a while. I decided not to interrupt what I was doing to remove it, so I closed the enclosure and hoped for the best. About an hour later, while moving files from my laptop onto the drive, I heard a dreadful “blugrrrrrrrrrrrr.” I looked over and said, “Oh no!” For a few seconds, I thought the hard drive was failing. Then I realised the bug had tried to crawl out through the little fan.

We woke early to the sound of cars, but easily ignored the noise to get a few more minutes of sleep. At 9:00 a.m. we went to a Chinese-style breakfast place around the corner from the hotel. Next, we wandered to the Potala Palace to stand in line and buy our tickets. The sun was intense; every minute without sunscreen felt like another minute closer to a burn. After a short wait, Mei and Kwon returned from buying train tickets. The line was massive, stretching along a wall and out into the open. Luckily, we were able to find some shade.

I decided to sleep in and woke at nearly 11:00. I ate breakfast at a nearby bao shop and checked out at 13:00. My first stop was the bus station, where I tried to decide where to go next. Ultimately, I chose Guilin, about a day’s journey northwest of Guangzhou. After buying some rice balls, I took the MRT to another bus station and bought my ticket. The bus didn’t leave until 20:00, so I ate fried rice and sat in a small “reading bar” for a few hours, mostly reading and playing cards. I checked my email one last time in perhaps the most run-down internet cafe I had ever visited, then went to the bus. Guilin, here I come!

My laptop really is on the way out. I’ve been quite pleased with it so far, I’ll admit, and have no complaints. Today, I carried it around in search of a better cafe to work from, one that would also make it easier to get to work. I turned it on and got nothing. The screen wouldn’t even light up! In the end, I removed the battery, turned the laptop back on, and it worked. Phew. Of course, this is all a bit of a catch-22. I want to buy a new laptop, but not yet; I would rather wait until I’m in Australia and have a steady job. Not exactly a crisis, but certainly inconvenient.

I’m writing this just in case somebody runs into this same issue. I’m about to go live with a website and figured it would be best to have the latest SVN snapshot checked out from Django. I updated, and noticed that my voting module didn’t quite work as expected. I was getting the following error: 'module' object has no attribute 'GenericForeignKey' I jumped into Trac and noticed that just yesterday some things were rearranged. In short, if you are using generic relations, you’ll need to change two parts of your code. First, the generic relations field must be imported out of conttenttype.

As you may know by now, I’m in Taiwan. Live is pretty good here, especially the internet – I’m sitting on a pretty decent 12M/1M connection. But the company I have my internet through seems pretty laid back about network usage -- which for me isn’t good. Their entire IP subnet appears banned from IRC, which means I have to be a little sneaky when I want to talk to my I.T. friends in New Zealand. Worse, some websites even banned the entire subnet: