An extended weekend: a pleasant surprise, a requiem for Thursdays and some 'Geek Talk'. Seriously!

As I write this on a quiet Saturday morning, I want to share with you all this bit of news: in keeping with the pressures of a global economy that works in full swing on Thursdays (at least), the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia finally made the move to shift its weekend from Thursday + Friday to Friday + Saturday. This is the transition weekend, and we got three days off from the OPD grind! Thus, this post is a requiem for Thursdays, which will no longer be part of the Saudi weekend, and welcome to Saturdays, when we can, with the rest of the world, relax in our homes - as I am doing right now, and watch weekend specials on the television channels - which I plan to do today, or simply sleep it off till the next morning - which, of course, I will do as the evening shadows lengthen.

Yesterday, I busied myself with preparing a Powerpoint presentation on Neonatal examination, something that I wish to lecture the residents and nurses in the hospital on. The problem was that Office 2007 (which I have installed through a local computer dealer) stores the presentation as a .pptx, a format that Office 2010 (of which a trial version only is installed on my new laptop) does not recognise. Thus, after opening, creating and storing the presentation, when I tried to re-open it, I got the message: "This app can't run on your PC. Contact the application provider for details and help".

Ha ha. So, I sat to think: when I go to Office 2007 and open the presentation, it opens nicely, thank you. But when I try to open the presentation from its icon directly, the default app that runs is Powerpoint 2010, and it does not open the presentation because it does not recognise the .pptx format. I then decided to make a copy of the presentation and stored it in a non-Windows drive. Then, I right-clicked on the file and selected "Rename" from the context menu. Now, I have configured my files to always show the extensions, so the name of the extension is also visible. I then simply removed the "x" at the end of the extension "pptx" and saved the file. A dialogue box opened warning me that if I changed the file extension, the file might become unusable. However, I felt bewitched right then, and lo! The icon of the file changed to show that it was now a PPT file, and when I clicked on it, it opened correctly with Powerpoint 2010! That's a tweak readers might like to remember when they find themselves in a similar spot.

Just so you know that I remember we are on the life in Saudi Arabia blog and not a tech savvy write-up, let me return to my humdrum life back here. A three-day on-call holiday can be a killer, make no bones about this. Two of those three days have already passed, but the third day, a Saturday, no less, is upon me, and I am hoping it turns out to be an eventful one ... but not very taxing on the professional front. Yesterday evening, I walked in the garden - after a long time - and did only 2.5 km before feeling tired. Even so, it is a start, and I hope to keep up the habit.

I have a window of opportunity to sit for the final part of the MRCPCH examinations this November in Jeddah ... guys, what do you think? Should I sit or appear next year? 

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.

Day 87, Friday, 10th February 2012

Computer troubles, Day 2: This seems like an apt sub-heading to the almost continuous agony that I have been facing due to the crashing of my laptop yesterday. Over the day, I cooked a little food, and went for a short walk, but for most of the rest of the day, I was with Adil Ansari, the computer guy, to fix my laptop. I had stayed awake most of the night yesterday to download and install some essential software after Adil had restored the Windows by installing a new Home Premium version late yesterday night.


It seemed on this morning that the computer was finally okay and that there would be no further trouble from it. I went back to the computer shop to tweak some of the minor hassles and he (Adil) asked me to leave the laptop with him and return after a few hours. When I went back, he had just finished uploading some of the missing drivers and was going through the process of a restart. However, the unexpected happened: the computer went past the start-up "Please wait" section and then loaded the Acer Recovery Management Tool. This tool asked me if I wished to do "System Restore" or to go back to the "Image" of the disc created by me in the past. I wanted to do neither as my laptop had already loaded with a newly installed Windows. Adil and I struggled with this for a long time.


Eventually, we decided that we had to let the laptop win. I had checked in the morning, and all my desktop files, images etc. had been preserved in a new folder called "Windows.old" within the main drive. I had hoped to take all the data from there and restore them to a non-Windows drive on my hard disk. Now, since the computer wouldn't boot at all, we had to face the very real risk of losing all that data since we would HAVE to format the C drive. I took a deep breath and told the engineer to go ahead and format the disk. This done, I re-checked the C drive of the newly installed Windows. The windows.old directory was there, and all the folders within it under the sub-folder "Administrator\user\, but the folders were all empty. I had, within the space of 24 hours, lost hundreds of photos, the data from my Indian mobile stored on Nokia suite, all financial data of the last four years (purchases and sales of shares and mutual funds, credit card statements and IT statements .... and much more), video clips of old Hindi movie songs, and lots of other stuff which I cannot even remember. In their place was an empty shell that nearly made me cry. 


I can perhaps get back the songs, the financial data (from the websites) and even the telephone numbers of my old mobile when I visit India later this year, but I have lost hundreds of photos of my stay here in Saudi Arabia. I had kept them, sadly, on the desktop, which falls under the C drive. 


So, was there anything at all to redeem the bleak scenario? Yes, not one, but several things: Firstly, many video songs were also present on a flash drive that I had used to transfer these songs to Dr. Narendra's laptop; secondly, I had been meticulous in storing all the set-ups of the programs downloaded by me yesterday night into the E drive, so I could now re-install these programs without additional trouble; thirdly, I had uploaded many of my Saudi photos into this blog, so I had not lost all the photos - I can download these photos from the blog whenever I want to; I can always get the phone numbers from my family in India; and lastly, at least now my laptop was free from viruses or malware!


These thoughts relieved my depression to a large extent. However, some problems still remained: my touch-pad was not functioning well - although its tap function was working, its scroll function wasn't; the Fn + Fx keys were malfunctioning, so that I could not easily start the wireless or Bluetooth, could not manipulate volume of the speakers and so on (this was, however, rectified by Adil through the day and over the next few days); and, of course, this was no longer a laptop with an Acer Welcome screen, an Acer Screensaver and so on. Even the Microsoft Office I now had was a 2007 version, since Adil did not have the 2010 version. Furthermore, it was not the same as the legal copy I had at home with a legal key. So, there. 


I did most of my routine tasks as usual and there is nothing more to write about. I paid Adil for his services (SR 70) but I don't regret paying him because he has, over the next few days, given me several concessions and helped me a lot.

Day 86, Thursday, 9th February 2012

First of all, my sincere apologies to you, dear readers, for the inordinate delay in posting my recent entries. On this day, my own mistake caused my laptop to crash. My computer engineer thinks that this happened because I must have deleted an important system file while running "Regseeker", a registry cleaner, on Wednesday evening. The laptop just would not start. Initially, I thought nothing much of it and continued to go through the "shutdown-restart" routine by pressing down on the power button - first, to shut down, and then, to restart it. I tried pressing F8 during this process several times, and used options like "SafeMode", "Last Known Good Configuration", etc., but there was no relief. Next, I went to options to Repair, running the Memory Diagnostic Tool, and "System Restore", but these caused even more problems. Tired, I approached Adil Ansari, an Indian computer engineer who manages a mobile-computer shop just outside the lane where I live. We tried, over the next few hours, all the previous options and also tried to run the Acer Recovery Management Tool found within
the Acer folder on my computer in the Programs directory of the C drive of the computer. This prompted us that it would restore the backup image of the disc that was taken when the laptop was configured at the very beginning (i.e. at the time of its purchase), so we aborted it. Later, I went back to my room to sleep off the depressing circumstances, and thus, the day ended.


I have this advice to render to my friends: don't tinker with the files unless you are damn sure of what you are doing; and if you are planning to install a registry cleaner, do NOT, I repeat, do NOT choose Regseeker. I may be over-reacting, and this is natural, since that was the program that caused all the anguish and trouble to me. I will tell you more about these in the next entry, since this is a chronological blog.


Additionally, today was as busy as the rest of the emergency days. I had three visits to the hospital, and I managed the work quite well, I think. I cooked a few dishes ... dal, and the Bohri way of making curry with coconut milk and the special curry masala ... I made it with duck. Also made chapatis. I hope to cook more stuff tomorrow.


That's all.


P.S. The Arabic word for completely spoiled or out of order is kharbaan. That is where my laptop was on Thursday night. :-(
    

Days 65 and 66, Thursday and Friday, the 10th Weekend for me.

I was completely free these two days, and had a good time relaxing, walking in the garden, buying stuff to eat from the local supermarkets and surfing the net. Also, I cooked a few things to last me the week. On Thursday afternoon, Dr. Narendra dropped in at my place as his computer was facing some huge trouble and he was unable to open any programs or access the net. It turns out that he had no antivirus on his laptop. The inbuilt Windows XP security adviser kept opening whenever he tried to open any program or file and auto-scanned the computer to reveal 30 "serious threats" and informed the user that the computer was hacked and it would not be able to run the asked-for program.


Dr. Narendra was sceptical of the genuineness of the warning as he has been using the same laptop since a long time without any problems. It was obvious that the security box was a form of Malware. Rightly, therefore, he ignored the warnings, and as I could not help him further, we stopped exploring his laptop for the time being and had lunch, with Niaz joining us with his freshly cooked chicken.


It appears that after he went back to his house, he kept trying to resolve the issue, and by late evening, he had found a way to disable the security box, and was able to run the net and download avast! antivirus program and start a boot scan. By Friday, his laptop was back to "normal". He told me that avast did not find any of those 30 threats/worms/viruses/spyware!


Friday was my wedding anniversary (the real one, LOL, as it was on this day that we, i.e. Nishrin and I,  began to live together as man and wife 22 years ago). I itched to go to Ta'if and have some fun, and to this end, I went on the highway to hitch a ride with some truckwallah, but to no avail. Eventually, I returned to my house, morose and beaten. In India, Hannah took Nish to Phoenix and they had fun shopping. After this, they had dinner at Gajalee, and Inas shared some pictures of the three of them enjoying Basa fish and some Oyster dish. When Nishrin came to know that I had wired money to Inas to pay for the anniversary shopping and the dinner, she was surprised. Her response: had she known that I had sent money, she would have done more shopping! He he.


By the way, this week, I cooked masoor (black dal) and brinjals. On Saturday, I made chapatis.