Road Trip 2010 prep: loading up the GPS

We’re getting ready for our big summer vacation road trip starting next weekend: over 4,000 miles in 9 days through 12 states. As we finalize our plans, finish packing, and prepping the car, I took some time this weekend to get my Garmin nüvi GPS ready for the trip, the first step which was to purchase the latest map update.

Continue reading ‘Road Trip 2010 prep: loading up the GPS’ »

Star Wars Weekend at Disney

We spent the day over at Disney’s Hollywood Studios to check out the Star Wars Weekend event, and it was pretty cool! The park was the most crowded I’ve ever seen it, and this time it was mostly Star Wars t-shirt-wearing dudes my age waiting in lines to meet the characters (although, to be fair, most of them also had their kids with them, like me). 😀

Don’t mess with Boba Fett, he’s all business!

The Gammorean Guard wasn’t very talkative either.

The “parade” was cool, seeing all the characters go by, especially the “local Florida garrison” of Imperial Troopers:

One of the celebrity guests in the parade was Jeremy Bulloch, who played Boba Fett. Since it’s the 30th anniversary of the release of “The Empire Strikes Back” I thought that was pretty neat. Pac Man and “Empire” both turned 30 this week? Wow, 1980 was a great year for geeks …

Of course my daughter loves the Star Wars saga so she had a great time as well. We got to “meet” and get autographs from Darth Vader (who knew he had such good penmanship, much less signed autographs?), a couple of Storm Troopers (signed “Stormtrooper TX-352”), Boba Fett, Queen Amidala, and Luke and Leia. We also saw, wandering around, Chewbacca, some Ewoks, Tusken Raiders, the Cantina band, and various other characters. Unfortunately the lines for Darth Maul and C3PO/R2D2 closed before we could get in them. We didn’t even bother with the Star Wars-themed Disney characters (like Darth Goofy, Jedi Mickey, etc.).

Let me say that I’ve also never seen the line for the Star Tours line as long as it was in quite a while. In addition to it being a Star Wars Weekend, it was probably more popular since it will be shut down for rennovation in September before re-opening in May 2011 (for next year’s Star Wars Weekends).

Oh, and we did manage to squeeze in rides on Toy Story Mania and the Rockin’ Roller Coaster before we had to leave.

WIJFR: The Wizardry Consulted

After rescuing the world from the creatures of darkness and chaos by applying a few computer logistics, Programmer and Systems Analyst Extraordinaire Wiz Zumwalt finds himself in another fix when he is kidnapped by dragons.

“The Wizardry Consulted” by Rick Cook is my latest iPhone/Stanza read. Resuming the story three years after “The Wizardry Cursed,” this next installment finds Wiz stranded in a provincial town far to the lands of the North, having been kidnapped by Wurm the dragon. He is there, ostensibly, to help the townsfolk solve their “dragon problem” but ends up mired in council politics. Luckily, Wiz’s former life as a computer programmer and consultant lets him fast-talk around the council, baffling them with confusing presentations, graphic slides, project plans, and buzzwords.

As with the other books, a heathly dose of technology-meets-magic is mixed in: the internet, IRC chat, e-mail, packet routing, and the FBI all play a part. There was even a mention of the Cleveland Freenet, which was one of my first experiences with the internet back in the day (my user ID was ag154). Much like the second book, the narrative is split: Wiz and his dealings with the council, townspeople, and dragons; and then the rest of the folks back at the Wizard’s Keep (Jerry, Danny, Moira, etc.) who are trying to track Wiz down and rescue him from his kidnappers.

Unfortunately, it looks like the fifth book, “The Wizardry Quested,” was never published as an e-book and the paperback is out-of-print ($300 for a new copy on Amazon!?). Additionally, Rick Cook never finished the sixth (and final?) “The Wizardry Capitalized” but has put the unfinished manuscript online. So it looks like I’m done with this series unless I get motivated to read the partial manuscript. Overall, though, it was very enjoyable series to read. Fare thee well, Sparrow!

WIJFR: Cross Country

Alex Cross, a Washington, D.C., police detective, takes on a human monster known as the Tiger with ties to the African underworld. When the Tiger and his teenage thugs butcher writer Ellie Cox, her husband and children in their Georgetown home, Cross is devastated because Ellie had been his girlfriend in college. The Cox family massacre proves to be just the first in a series. Cross pursues the Tiger to Nigeria, where the profiler finds himself at the mercy of corrupt government officials who may be working with the Tiger.

I just finished James Patterson’s 14th Alex Cross thriller, “Cross Country.” I’ve read other Patterson books in the past, but never any of the Alex Cross novels (though I have seen the movies of “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider”).

I don’t have that much to say about it: Cross ends up chasing a killer from D.C. to Africa in a hunt that takes him to Darfur, Sierra Leone, Lagos, and other impoverished locations. I’m not trying to be insensitive, but after a while it felt like I was reading a political statement instead of a novel. It just wasn’t that interesting or thrilling to me and maybe that’s the reason I wasn’t that impressed (plus, I could only see Morgan Freeman in my head as I was reading).

The novel is not short, but at 403 pages it contains 158 chapters. That’s about 2.5 pages per chapter! As a result the narrative seemed choppy, but on the other hand it read very quickly (and gave me lots of places to stop). Maybe Patterson’s earlier Alex Cross stuff is better and after 14 books, the ideas are running out …

Acer Aspire Revo 3610

My Dell OptiPlex Linux server was getting louder and hotter in its old age. For the past three years it has been running 24×7 as my media server in the closet. The fan in the power supply had started to whine (especially when the CPU was maxed), and I already lost one hard drive to a crash earlier in the year. I decided it was time to replace it and started looking for smaller, quieter, more power-efficient alternatives.

I call this box a server because it hosts this blog, a small Gallery site, some home media applications for my TiVos, and is running all the time, but I don’t need a server-class machine. My past Linux machines have traditionally been older desktops, even a laptop! So the latest crop of nettops seemed like an ideal solution.

After researching products like the Asus EeeBox, the MSI WindBox, and even the Dell Studio Hybrid I decided on the Acer Aspire Revo 3610. This little box packs in Intel’s dual-core Atom N330  CPU (1.60GHz), 2gb of RAM, nVidia’s ION graphics chipset, and a 160gb hard drive. Peripherals and storage can be connected via the 6 USB ports (one of which is used for the included wireless keyboard a mouse), the eSATA connector, and the SD card reader, and network connectivity includes a gigabit network connection and B/G/N wireless. The Revo has no optical drive, but experience with my EeePCs has made me comfortable with booting/installing from other removable media like USB thumb drives, so no biggie there. Also, since I’m not using the Revo as an HTPC I won’t be using the HDMI or digital audio (SPDIF) connections, but they’re there. The Revo comes with Windows 7 Home Premium pre-installed (although I wish Acer sold a cheaper version without it). If you’re going to use it as an HTPC it comes with a mounting plate so you can attach it right to the back of your HDTV.

My plan was always to put the latest version of Ubuntu on the box. Warranties be damned! After unpacking my new Revo, before even turning it on, I immediately cracked it open, thinking I would make an image backup of Windows 7 just in case (since it comes without a rescue disc). Unfortunately, even with my lack of fear for warranty-voiding, removing the hard drive involved more steps than I was willing to take. So rather than wiping the drive and starting clean, I booted Windows 7, did some initial setup, and then shrunk the primary partition so I could dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. Considering the current server only had a 30gb hard drive in it (and most of my media is on external NASes), having a 60gb partition for Ubuntu was acceptable to me.

Installing Lucid Lynx didn’t go as smoothly as I anticipated, however. The 64-bit version (imaged onto a 2gb USB stick) wouldn’t even boot correctly and the 32-bit version would start and then complain it couldn’t find the CD-ROM. After figuring out how to manually boot the installer from the command-line, I found this blog post that helped me get through the rest of my installation issues. Shortly, I had my Revo set up as a 64-bit Linux server!

It took me a few days to get everything transferred from the old server to the Revo and then get everything set up and configured the way I wanted. So far I am very impressed with the Revo. It’s very quiet, even when both cores are busy (i.e., folding a work unit and transcoding a video file), and my UPS utilization dropped from 29% to 10%! That’s a serious cut in power consumption. I have noticed a slight performance decrease over the old Pentium 4 Dell, but nothing major and it was expected. It’s well worth the trade-off for the reduced noise and power usage, though!

Out with the old, in with the new!