DELL Laptops - great design?

My laptop crashed a week back taking most of my data with it. Also the eject button of the PCMCIA card reader came out. I could still push the card and get it out, but the IT staff wanted to get it fixed. My initial thought was, the engineer from DELL would just remove the entire slot out and try to put the eject switch back into it, or replace the reader. Guess what he did? He replaced the mother board 'coz the reader comes as part of the motherboard (soldered to it) and not as a separate removable entity. Nice design, what say?

At least I (almost) got a brand new laptop ;)

_

After a long break...

The last post discussed what happened at Day 01 of the Architecture World, after which I don't remember why I stopped blogging (probably I lost interest). Months have passed since then, and the some events I attended also went unblogged - like the MS Tech Ed 2006. It was a two day event with differents tracks on Data, WinFX, Mobile & Embedded,... Most of the sessions on the data track were good, the video of WinFS was excellent (I later came to know that they are scrapping the Beta 2 of WinFS, and is being split of parts and integrated into other products like MS SQL Server, and ASP.NET). One other good thing happened there - there was a XBox gaming competition and guess what I participated (being a gamer) and came 3rd in the finals. What I got as a prize? - A Mouse Pad, a Stress Cube, and ... (I guess that was it). The guy who came 1st got a all-in-one USB kit. Isn't that unfair? ;)

I also attended a couple of internal trainings conducted by my company on Advanced Design Principles, Design Patterns Workshop, and JSF (JavaServer Faces). I will be attending a couple of trainings in the months to come...

Right now my interests are from writing a wigdet library in JavaScript, to understanding JVM,Java, and C++ design & implementation, to distributed & concurrency systems, to linux internals, and of course patterns & frameworks. Still unsure of what I will be doing the rest of this month... maybe spend the month trying out various games ;)