Kicking off the summer at Busch Gardens

Other than our usual Memorial Day weekend preparations for the upcoming hurricane season we had no plans or obligations so we decided to go to Busch Gardens for the day. Even with Tropical Storm Beryl approaching north Florida, we had gorgeous weather for our outing.

We had purchased vouchers for our Fun Cards (pay for one day, come back all year) online the night before, hoping to avoid any long holiday weekend lines at the ticket windows. An early start got us to the park before the parking lot even opened so we got a great parking spot (once it opened) and were on the tram and across the street at the entrance with plenty of time to spare. We redeemed our vouchers at the automatic machines to get our Fun Cards and still had a few minutes to wait before the official park opening.

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Virtual Console and WiiWare games through a USB loader

[ I apologize for using the term “rabbit hole” three posts in a row! -windracer ]

Apparently I have a thing for doing homebrew stuff in April: almost exactly two years after softmodding my Wii so I could load my games from a USB hard drive instead of discs, I found myself wondering if I could do the same for Virtual Console and WiiWare content. Well, of course you can! The path can be confusing and frustrating, but the destination … well, it’s a cool destination.

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Parsing the Precise Pangolin

This week the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, 12.04 Precise Pangolin, was released. I waited a little bit for the initial download rush to die down (ok, only one day this time) and then took the plunge and upgraded.

As with my prior upgrades, the ‘do release-upgrade’ process itself was painless but I had a few post-installation issues:

  • calibre wouldn’t start with a “ImportError: cannot import name detect_xml_encoding” error. Deleting /usr/lib/calibre/calibre/ebooks/chardet fixed this.
  • zoneminder was completely messed up and wouldn’t run. After going down a seemingly unending (and increasingly frustrating) rabbit hole of package dependencies and missing libraries, I gave up trying to re-build it from source and just installed the package via ‘apt-get install zoneminder’. Even after that I had to clean up some of the mess left over by my previous from-source install, but I finally got it working again.

Coming this October: Quantal Quetzal!

WIJFR: 11/22/63

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. His friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

Today I finished Stephen King’s “11/22/63.” I’m always a sucker for a good time travel story and while this one doesn’t break any new ground in the genre I enjoyed it.

Jake Epping is shown the “rabbit hole” by his friend Al, the owner of a local diner that connects to September 1958 through the storeroom. Al has been using the rabbit hole for years to buy supplies for the diner at 1958 prices, keeping his own costs down. Every trip into the past is a “reset” … it’s always the same day when you arrive, and when you get back to the present only two minutes has passed.

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The odds are apparently in favor of “The Hunger Games”

The film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” has now spent three consecutive weeks at #1 and this past Easter weekend I finally took my daughter to see it. She had wanted to see it immediately on opening weekend (like a lot of her friends did), but the PG-13 rating concerned me and I wanted to read a few reviews first and see how the graphic violence was being portrayed before exposing her to it. As I told her, reading the book is one thing, seeing those things “for real” on the big screen is another. As it turned out, though, my fears were mostly unfounded and she really enjoyed the movie.

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Spring Training 2012: Day One

It’s (almost the end of) March, which means it’s time for my annual trip out west to Arizona. My brother and I are going a little later in the season this year and also bringing some other people along: his wife, our sister, and my daughter.

The tech arsenal for this trip is pretty much the same as past years: my iPhone (the new 4S instead of the old 3GS), iPad (no Bluetooth keyboard this time), Garmin nüvi (loaded with pertinent waypoints), and new camera. I also ditched the iPad camera connection kit since I now have the Eye-Fi card to wirelessly offload photos from my camera to the iPad.

Anyway, it’s time to see some Cactus League baseball!

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Apple iPhone 4S

I got a brand new iOS device this week, but it wasn’t the one everyone else was getting. I couldn’t hold out any longer: after getting my first iPhone 3GS back in 2009, I finally upgraded to the 4S. There was nothing physically wrong with my old iPhone, but after upgrading and jailbreaking iOS 5.01 back in January my old phone continued to get slower and slower and more frustrating to use.

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