Starry night in Tokyo!

After a long time of cloudy/unclear sky nights, I've seen a beautiful starry night in Tokyo. I guess this is what I love about winter nights.

I've counted more than 50 stars, including Orion's belt, which is rare in downtown Tokyo. 50 is not a big number from where I come but when you feel homesick it's a quite good number :) This good news in one hand, but in the other, we've felt 2 long earthquakes in less than 3 hours :(

I know I used to enjoy the small eqs when I was in Osaka, but these are too many and I kinda start worrying about a BIG one like they predict. So far I put down all the heavy stuff near the floor level and made sure to put my lantern and emergency canned food somewhere I can reach easily. I also cleaned up my messy room, so in case of a catastrophe the ones who have to rescue me can find me immediately. Otherwise they would have to dig into a real mess (they'd think that my room was affected not only by an eartquake, but also a bomb, a typhoon and some civil war!).

Anyways, I found a good reason to organize things around here.

Fixing Win XP SP 2 unsuccessful installation

Last Friday, a friend tried to install Service Pack 2 for Windows XP but the computer crashed before the installation was completed. Normally, the system should have undone all the unsuccessful installation and left the OS in its original state. But instead, the next time she booted WinXP an error read "Explorer.EXE - Entry Point Not Found - The procedure entry point SHCreateThreadRef could not be located in the dynamic link library SHLWAPI.dll" and the only thing we could see was her desktop with no icons, no taskbar, only the mouse cursor. I tried to find a solution in Microsoft's site, but no luck. I also tried searching in google but still no solution. So I started to try some alternative methods like making changes from the command prompt. I thought of replacing the SHLWAPI.dll (which was calling some SP2 tasks) with a dll file from a SP1 computer. I think it might have worked, but the computer wouldn't recognize any of the usb devices (memory stick - floppy drive) so I wasn't able to do it.

Then we tried to use the recovery cd that came along with her computer but it showed another error with and FDI file so it wasn't possible to do it that way either. So I tried to uninstall SP2 manually from the DOS but there was one file missing or corrupted (I guess it was the shlwapi.dll). By this point I though that I couldn't fix it myself (which would hurt my pride AND my friend's pocket.. hahaha). Anyways, I kept on trying on google, going from link to link until I found a nice blog http://weblogs.asp.net/ I couldn't fix it immediately as it was said there, but then they helped me to find my way :D

The solution is (for those who have the same problem):

1. Boot WinXP in normal mode.
2. In the desktop open the Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del)
3. From the Task Manager open a new process and type "control appwiz.cpl" and click OK. This will open the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel (many message windows will appear, just click OK)
4. Once in the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel, find the "Windows XP Hotfix – KB834707" entry. It should be among the Windows XP hotfixes, not in the SP2 ones.
5. Restart.

Now your computer should boot normally, but you still have to go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall completely SP2. Then go to http://www.microsoft.com/sp2install for instructions to install SP2.

That's all folks !! (end of the headache, a nice high fives and jumping around with Monette :D)

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After this problem was solved, Microsoft updated their site with the instructions on how to repair unsuccessful SP2 installations. A bit late grgrgrgrg !!

Anyways, the information they provide is the same and you can read it here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888162

Days in Nagano

I spent last week in Nagano in a sort of study camp to prepare for our Interior Coordinator qualification exam. I didn't expect it to be fun, but I also didn't expect it to be so boring. Waking up at 6, studying the whole day until 23.30, it was really exhausting. The last day we had a sports' day and we played volleyball and basketball, which I didn't do for a long time. I enjoyed that, but I wanted to play more!! I miss the old good days at high school playing volley and soccer every freetime we had. We're not young anymore :(

And after that, we had 2 hours to walk around the city, which is really nice. It has a little bit of Kyoto (maybe the old houses and the Zenkoji Temple in the middle of the city) but something in it was new. It also had some european air (even though I've never been to Europe, I'm just comparing it to the "image" of Europe that I have). I think I'd like the city better in winter, yuppy !!

We went by shinkansen (bullet train) and it was my first time taking it... I can say it wasn't much out of this world experience as I expected. The best thing of my trip to Nagano was Gunma.. !! (?!)

I went to a friend's place in Maebashi, Gunma prefecture, she took me to her favorite coffee shop in her hometown, we drove around, we went to gaze some stars along a river, it almost felt like home! We climbed a little mountain in the middle of the darkness and saw some glowflies. It was really nice!

I can't say I'm a country girl, but I'm not as city girl as I thought... I need more stars in my nights.