Sorry Sir, your phone is broken

jeepney-icon.jpgSo, if you've been following along, you'll remember that the villain of the last piece, Smart Telecommunications — wait, let me try that again — "Smart" Telecommunications, have a sub-standard internet service. I also have my mobile phone account with them, which could come under the category of having all your eggs in one basket.

3G, doesn't work. That's pretty much it. For the first three months I was here, whenever I was at home, I couldn't make or receive calls, or send or receive SMS. If I stepped out of the building and into a different cell zone, everything was usually dandy, but at home, where I spend most of my time, nothing. I spent two months complaining several times a week at their office and over the phone. However both these approaches were fraught with difficulty – in their offices the 3G signal was perfect, of course, and to complain from home … well its pretty hard if your phone doesn't work. My girlfriend's phone (also a Smart subscription) also didn't work in my apartment despite both phones having a 5-bar signal.

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Big Switch 3: Tweaking and Troubleshooting

OK, so we did the research and installed the chosen distribution in the last part. Now we're going to fix some of the problems.

As I mentioned before, this Thinkpad R51e doesn't play nice with Linux. I tried several distributions on it, and none of them worked perfectly out of the box, leading me to believe that Lenovo had slipped some non-standard hardware in there.

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Big Switch 2: Installation Day

Having chosen the distribution and done some research on the feasibility of the move (see Part 1.), it was time to make some space for the installation.

My hard disk was originally set up with the partitions as follows.

  • hda1 – Windows Partition – 20Gb
  • hda2 – IBM restore partition – 4Gb
  • hda3 -Extended partition, containing 36Gb
    • hda4 – my data partition. 36 Gb.

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Sorry Sir, the Internet is Broken.

I hear the phrase above so often in the Philippines I can barely believe it. Replace the word 'Internet' with almost anything you use in daily life, and there, in a nutshell, is life in Manila.

I should have started this blog a long time ago when I first moved here. At that point I was still incredulous and I would doubtlessly have filled many pages with examples of inefficiency and brokenness in this country. I may still fill in some of the more memorable examples at a later stage, but to kick this blog off, my main beef at the moment is the Internet.

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