School started for real today, but still it’s actually surprisingly calm. The first lecture in Numeric Analysis started at 1500 today, and we warmed up with some new definitions and methods of thinking. Having only worked with exact math before, none of us are too proficient in numeric thinking and calculation.

The web-based course from the College of Dalarna in Mandarin also begun, and it was the first time I sat in discussion with other people with webcams, everybody talking to each other in Mandarin phrases. There has been an enormous lack of information about the course, so I’ve had to discover most of the things by myself. Things are a bit different and not as well-coordinated as here at the University of Linköping, and I doubt I would have understood the registration process if I hadn’t had one year of experience with how higher education works.
The course is at a newbie level, starting from the first page. Everybody in the course is really on the beginner level, and even though I had missed the fact that you had to see the lecture before attending the seminar, nobody seemed noticed that. Indeed I have studied some Mandarin already, as I had no trouble speaking and reading the words.

My Thinkpad T30 laptop almost died on me today, as the CPU fan took its last breath. The fan sounded like a chainsaw, and it is almost expected to happen just now, since the computer is five years old already. I can’t be without a computer, though, so I had to get it working again. Lenovo couldn’t help at all (I don’t feel like ranting today, so I’ll just leave out the part of the story where I sat 30 minutes on the phone talking to a clueless support assistant ). For a while I thought the only options were buying a new computer or somehow fixing the fan, since it seemed impossible to get a spare part.

What needs to be replaced

I removed the keyboard and unscrewed the heat sink assembly, in which the fan is located. After a few minutes of thinking, I simply took the assembly apart, got the fan out, and then inserted a small amount of a light lubricant. Back with everything, put on some arctic silver, pray, and press the power button. Amazingly, it worked again! Though I still can hear imperfections in the fan sound, I think this will buy me enough time to find a spare, and it already seems like I’ve found a completely new fan assembly in Germany. Let’s see what will happen.