22 October 2011

Saturday Musings

It's a Saturday again here in this tiny tiny island. That means the week has just flown by and gone in a blink of an eye. I always tell friends and family one thing when asked about how I find life here in Singapore: fast.

Being Filipino, I'm used to lazy afternoons during weekends and mellow evenings from Monday to Friday with short treks from the work place to the nearest Starbs or CBTL joint and chat with office friends about work or life in general over a cup of coffee.

I miss the cappuccino at Alexandre, an authentic French café in Bonifacio Global City; they have these cool freebies every now and then for their VIP members and being a member only takes giving them the right to spam your email inbox with coupons.

That picture seems a remote reality here in Singapore though. Everywhere you look are people in hurry to get somewhere, on time. We do have Starbucks at Clementi Mall which is but a short 3 to 5 minute walk (depending on my mood that sets my pace ;D). However, it's always brimming with people and the interaction with the baristas isn't quite like the same in Manila. I still haven't totally erased my slight aversion to that questioning phrase: "Wha' you wan' ah?" and the look and the body language that go along with it compelling my psyche to hurry up. Who wouldn't feel a bit harassed?

So today, as with all Saturdays, I tried to sleep in upto lunch time if possible. Yes, it may be construed as rebelling against the precipitous flux of SG life and I'd rather be called stubbornly unadaptable than embrace this cult of time pounders.

But guess what? The HDB management decided that work on the "lift improvement" project should also include Saturdays and I'd gather that's to be more time efficient and get the job done faster.

Why is it just always about getting something over with right away when after all that hype, there's only something else to get over with again? Where is that rainbow after that storm (of pounding and pounding)?

Perhaps that is an alien concept here.

And thus, dismayed with not getting my 14 hours of sleep as planned, I resorted to a reconciliation with my cabinet drawers. Sorting out the mess that has acquired in there for some time revealed that 2 GB Kingston stick that I pried out my MacBook Mini because it was dead and caused it not to boot up.
Without anything else to do and unable to go back to sleep because of that jarring noise of jack hammers and drills that shook our whole HDB, I decided to push my luck.

I put the 2GB stick back in. The first try, it wouldn't boot. But I tried again and voilĂ !
Hello again there, 3 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 :D

Maybe that memory stick has acclimated to dry hot weather. Will I follow suite?

Should I try updating to 10.6.7 next? I don't reckon 10.6.8 was ever sorted out clean for the HP Mini 311 anyways...

6 comments:

Rocket said...

Yay Saturday! The day I can wake up at 11am, and not 7am. :-)

Also, DO NOT update to 10.6.8 on your HP mini. On my HP mini 1000, 10.6.8 killed my wifi, sound, ethernet, USB, and probably more. 10.6.7 /should/ be fine, it worked for me :-)

mosslack said...

Nice to see your guide made the netbook compatibility chart http://www.mymacnetbook.com/compatibility-chart/ for the mini 311. Have you seen any evidence of anyone working on 10.7 for the netbooks? I know there is a 10.7 legacy kernel out there for the Atom, but haven't really heard too much about people trying it. I believe the Asus 1201N will be able to run in native 64 bit mode with it's dual core Atom. Always nice to read your blog, keep it up!

mosslack said...

It's me again, after posting here the other day I decided to get serious about installing Lion on my Asus 1201N. Via a couple of HQ-A members, they alerted me to a thread on Insanely dealing with that very subject. Long story short, I now have Lion running on my 1201N (just updated to 10.7.2). Works very well as a matter of fact. I think maybe some of the same techniques may be useful on the Mini 311. Of course it will have to run in 32bit mode, but I think it will work. May give that a shot next.

LeMaurien19 said...

@mosslack
Which thread? Although I think you may be luckier with an Asus motherboard/implementation. HP is a serious pain the neck for giving us those alien of hardware configs - ex. the HP Mini 311's SD Card is not bootable while the rest of the civilized world of netbooks have this feature as the norm.

Who knows what else could be a problem right? :D

If only I were really talented at this hacking stuf, I'd gladly help develop but I'm just a n00b who happens to get a bit of understanding...you know what I mean...we don't want to offend Mount Olympus.

mosslack said...

I understand completely, which is why I don't post there more often. The 1201N seems to be running very well now on 10.7.2, but I've learned this may not be possible with the Mini 311. I thought if Chameleon were set to boot into 32bit mode then all would be well, but it seems maybe not. Before I forget, here is the thread on the 1201N: http://bit.ly/t3zzGz You can read if you want. I still plan to give this a try sometime soon, will let you know how it goes.

mosslack said...

After messing around with it for a bit, I'm not really sure it can be easily done. I found this: http://bit.ly/tvktPl which basically shows the hoops you must jump through to get it running on a netbook like the Mini 311. My system is currently at 10.6.7, so I believe that is where it will stay. The fact that the 1201N is dual core really makes all the difference, so until someone comes up with an better way to update the Mini 311, I guess I'm done.