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As everybody knows, European skies are now mostly empty of aircraft due to the Iceland volcano eruption and the ashes it spews.

I think this is positive. Honestly. Everybody who knows me knows that I really really hate flying. Everything about travelling by a plane makes me feel physically ill. But this is a personal thing of course. This current situation is not personal but affects pretty much everybody and people seem to be quite agitated about not being able to fly here and there.

But think of all the good things:

• No emissions from the air traffic. I understand air travel causes something like 3 percent of all carbon emissions, so this is not insignificant.
• There will be a better business case for videoconferencing and remote presence. It makes me sick to fly for example to sweden to take a two hour meeting. Maybe, just maybe this will make the teleconferencing option so much more efficient that clients finally understand that flying to just meet a person for a few hours does not make that much sense.
• There will be a better business case for developing sea and railway travel. I mean really developing, like digging a railway tunnel under the baltic sea for ultra-high speed trains or something like this. Also opening a fast shuttle ferry between Finland and Sweden would be a big improvement over the 14 hours or whatever it now takes to cross the gulf.
• The unhealthy government-subsidized air carriers may go bankrupt. What’s healthy for the economy, I believe, is also healthy for the people.
• World becomes larger again. I know this point is easy to hear like “I’m a racist idiot who wants to keep people of different nationality separate”, so please hear me out. What I mean by this is that if flying suddenly would get more expensive or difficult, people would start to plan their time more. When you would fly for example from Finland to, say UK, you would actually think what you’re going to do there and then enjoy it more. Nowadays people just fly in and out and see and hear nothing because of the constant hurry to get around.

That’s just a short list, I can probably think some more points. Let’s see where this goes but for now, I’m actually pleased about that Volcano.

More than a year ago, my wife’s Acer Aspire 3100 laptop died. Not like “blue screened” or “started crashing” but completely died. It would not even turn on. Removing the battery did not help and I practically did not have any time to diagnose the problem, and buying a new laptop seemed like waste of money at the time. So I decided to take it to the repair shop who offered to take a look at it for a small amount of euros. I figured that since it would take me couple of hours to diagnose the machine and save the HD contents and since my hourly salary at work is more than the repair price, I paid the money to get the diagnosis and also have the hard drive contents burned to a DVD by the repair shop.

The diagnosis was simple: Broken motherboard. Getting a new one would have cost more than a new machine and would have been a pain to install (repair shop offered to do this for a “small” fee) but this was the time netbooks were all the rage and my wife wanted one, so I decided to throw the machine to the PC graveyard (my home office cupboard) and buy a new one (Asus EEE PC).

Couple of days ago I was cleaning the office and looking for some receipts for tax returns and saw the machine. I decided to spend a few moments with the dead laptop. I plugged it in and pressed the power button. I was quite surprised to see that the thing booted and loaded the Win XP that was on it without any problems. I did try to do this once when the machine was returned from the repair shop and it did not work at the time!

So, apparently one way to fix a broken laptop motherboard is to leave it in a dusty cupboard for more than a year.

I’m just now installing a new OS on the thing since it’s still a usable machine, especially after I added some memory from the dead Asus EEE PC netbook that was bought to replace this particular machine. In human context this would be like a liver transplant from a dead son to a dying father. I guess lives of laptops can have similar ups and downs as ours.