WIJFR: Red Mars

For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.

John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic “alchemists, ” Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life…and death.

While traveling last weekend I finally finished “Red Mars,” the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. While first and foremost an SF novel (it is about Mars colonization after all, and even includes an incredible space elevator) it broaches some interesting scientific, technological, environmental, cultural, and political subjects. The novel follows the first colonists on Mars and over a span of 40 years tells the story of how the small scientific expedition becomes embroiled in a miasma of issues they did not expect.

The problems begin shortly after The First Hundred arrive on the red planet. It becomes quickly apparent that everyone did and said what they had to in order to pass through the rigorous process back on Earth to get selected for the expedition to Mars. Three different factions begin to emerge: those who think Mars should be left in its pristine state for study and research (the Reds), the terraformers who want to start transforming Mars into a human-habitable planet as quickly as possible (without regard for the current environment), and the “new Martians” who believe that a new culture, religion, and way of living in harmony with the planet needs to be established.

As the years pass, more and more people start arriving on the planet as conditions back on Earth continue to worsen. Most are sent by the huge transnational corporations back on Earth who want to exploit the planet (in blatant disregard of the international treaty set by the United Nations) for its wealth of natural resources that are running out back home. Mars becomes the new frontier with towns and cities being established all over, but due to the environmental constraints of having to live inside domes and tents, they quickly become overcrowded and start to exhibit the same problems as Terran cities. Shortly, whole groups of people start disappearing, supposedly joining a faction of the First Hundred known as the Areophany that are living somewhere in a hidden colony.

Will human history repeat itself on Mars, or can the First Hundred manage to keep the peace on their new home? Can a middle ground be found for all interests involved, or will revolution and war consume the red planet?

I really enjoyed this first book of the trilogy and have already started the second book, “Green Mars.”

Long(er than necessary) travel day

This morning we checked out of our hotel and then headed to the Holiday Inn next door to have breakfast with the happy new couple and the other wedding guests. We bade farewell to family and friends and then it was off to the airport for our flights back home.

We were slightly delayed leaving Cleveland due to some mechanical jetway issues, but we still had enough time once we got to Charlotte to hike from the E concourse to our connection in the B terminal. Other than that, both flights were uneventful, which is always good. Little did I know what I was in store for …

Looking out the window on our approach to the Tampa airport, my wife noticed a lot of traffic on the Howard Frankland Bridge southbound. It looked like two lanes were closed and the backup was pretty bad. We made a mental note to take the Courtney Campbell Causeway home instead. Unfortunately my mental notepad didn’t work properly (too much partying over the weekend?) because by the time we got off the plane, gathered our luggage, and got out to the cars in the parking garage, I had totally forgotten about the traffic. My wife left the garage before me but was going to swing by the airport post office to drop off some mail. Thus, I ended up passing her and getting onto the ramp from the airport to I-275 South first.

stuck in traffic ... 7:30pmThe first indication that I was making a huge mistake was some guy driving backwards on the ramp towards me. Coming out of the airport to the split into the various highways and roads can get confusing to visitors (and even those of us who live here) so this backwards driver didn’t register as an omen of a larger problem ahead (again, my mental notepad breakdown). I figured he had just taken the wrong side of the split and was trying to correct his mistake (I gave him an angry honk on the way past anyway). A few seconds later, though, I realized why he was going backwards … the ramp was backed up with stopped traffic. At this point, I knew I was going to be stuck so I quickly called my wife and reminded her to take the other bridge … just in time. She was able to get onto the Courtney Campbell and she and my daughter got home at a normal time.

still stuck in traffic ... 8:10pm

For me, though, the only progress forward I made in the next 90 minutes was from other cars leaving the ramp by either driving in reverse (or turning around and driving backwards) back into the airport. I am not one of those drivers who will risk a moving violation (or accident!) and go the wrong way on a road even if it means being stuck in traffic. I saw more near-crashes take place as people were being stupid and impatient (at one point I heard a really loud squealing of brakes and was sure we were all going to domino crash forward into each other). I just sat in my car (turned off) and read on my Treo, watching the occasional tow truck zip by on the (now closed) southbound lanes of I-275. Finally, traffic started crawling forward but it took another 30 minutes to creep off the ramp and through the single lane on the bridge, surrounded by tow trucks and police cars. By this time (8:30pm) it was dark so I couldn’t see much but there were a lot of cars off to the side of the road. I was just happy to finally be moving again.

Watching the news that evening, I discovered I had been stuck in the aftermath of 19 separate crashes involving 64 different cars on the bridge, apparently caused by heavy traffic leaving the Bucs game in combination with some heavy rain. The first crash occurred around 4:53pm, almost a full hour before we landed! If they were closing the highway, why didn’t they (the FHP) also close the ramp from the airport!? What a crazy way to end a really fun weekend.

Preparations, rehearsal, the ceremony, and the party!

Whew, what a couple of days! It’s late Saturday evening and my little brother is now a married man. Congratulations, kids! 🙂

Friday morning started with a family breakfast, just the siblings and our parents … something we haven’t done for a very long time (years). The restaurant we had breakfast at was the location for the rehearsal dinner (as planned) so after eating we set up the back room for later that night. Then it was time for some random errands before heading over to the hall where the reception would take place and doing some more prep/setup there. It looked great:

We had a little down time after that, so I helped my brother replace the hard drive in his laptop and also install a new dual-DVI graphics card and wireless card in his PC. We ended up running a bit short on time so before we knew it, it was time to clean up, get dressed, and head to the church for the wedding rehearsal. After the “practice run” we all went back to the restaurant for the rehearsal dinner and a little socializing.

Saturday morning dawned gray and rainy. 🙁 I had breakfast with my brother and the rest of the groomsmen at IHOP (mmmm, pancakes!) and then went looking for orange umbrellas for the wedding party in case the rain continued (couldn’t find any, not even a Cleveland Browns one!). Once again, the morning flew by and suddenly I was rushing to get into my tux and get over to the church on time. It was a beautiful and touching ceremony.

(That’s me, second from the right). By the time the wedding was over, the rain had stopped! It was still overcast, but it was enough to be able to get some outdoor pictures of the bridal party at a local park and on the beach of Lake Erie. Right as we were finishing up it started raining again, but it was time for us to get over to the hall for the party anyway.

The reception was a blast! Great food, great music, the great company of friends and family, and a photo booth (which was a really cool idea)! When the party was over, we reluctantly cleared out, headed back to the hotel to change (my rented shoes were killing my feet by the end of the night!), and then grabbed a few beers with the happy couple in the hotel bar (just in time to see Notre Dame win a thriller over Purdue).

The weekend went too fast … time to head back to Florida. At least we’ll get to see everyone again for breakfast tomorrow before we leave.

Heading to Ohio

I’m flying home to Ohio today for my brother’s wedding on Saturday. Right now I’m in the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport (CLT) waiting for my connection to Cleveland.

It’s been a long time since I’ve flown through Charlotte, so I had forgotten what a nice airport it is: rocking chairs, free WiFi, a nice center food court/shopping area. One weird thing I didn’t remember though: bathroom attendants. Ugh, I hate that.

Anyway, the two hours I have to spend here shouldn’t be hard at all. Looking forward to seeing the (entire) family this weekend …

Wii puns go mainstream, still not funny

As investigators searched the home near Lakeland for drugs, some drug task force members found other ways to occupy their time. Within 20 minutes of entering the home, some of the investigators found a Wii video bowling game and began bowling frame after frame.

I saw this headline on the local paper this morning: “A Wii bit distracted.” Yes, I’ve done this twice myself (here and here), but that last one was over a year ago. This is the first time I’ve see the use of “Wii” in a major print publication in place of “we” or “wee.” I’ve never claimed to be a good (or proper) writer, but I guess I expect more from the professionals.

All that being said, the headline did what it was supposed to: grabbed my attention and made me read the article.

Testing Windows 7 RTM and XP Mode

I’ve been using the release candidate of Windows 7 at home for the past few months but now we’ve started testing Windows 7 at work. This past week I “upgraded” my laptop and desktop at the office to the RTM version of Microsoft’s latest operating system. Actually, both were clean installs since they were previously running Windows XP (you can only do a true upgrade from Vista).

Installation

My main work machine is an older Sony VAIO laptop (Core Duo 2.0GHz, 1gb RAM, 80gb HD). To prepare, I ran the File and Settings Transfer (FAST) wizard in XP to back up all my documents and settings to my external hard drive, which took a long time. Then I ran the Windows 7 installation from the DVD within XP. The basic install took just about 90 minutes.

Once I was logged into my fresh new install, I ran the Windows Easy Transfer (WET) utility to restore my saved settings from XP. What I learned, however, is that I had misread the “upgrade” instructions. I was supposed to run the WET wizard from the Windows 7 installation media to back up my XP settings because the backups created by FAST are not compatible with WET (it’s meant for upgrading from XP to Vista)! Thus, after my clean install, I was unable to restore my documents and settings. I ended up working around this by restoring my FAST backup to a spare XP laptop and then using WET from the Win7 DVD to back up the settings again and finally transfer them back to my laptop.

Also, I chose not to re-format/re-partition my drive during the installation of Windows 7. The result of that was Windows 7 went into the standard C:\Windows location and the installer moved the old C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, and C:\Documents and Settings folders to C:\Windows.Old. Thus, I was able to retrieve all of my documents from there as well, in addition to retrieving some settings and files not handled by the WET utility.

If you’re “upgrading” from XP, the only benefit you get by using the WET utility is an easy (but not quick) method to transfer your documents and files (but depending on how much you’ve got to save, you may need a pretty large external drive). There aren’t that many “settings” that get transferred, from what I could tell, other than your actual account setup. You do get a nice report from the wizard, however, that shows you what applications you might need to re-install along with what was transferred. So if you’re going to format/re-partition your drive before installing Windows 7, WET is the way to go. Otherwise, I say just copy your stuff out of C:\Windows.Old after the install is complete and don’t worry about taking the extra time to back all that stuff up to an external drive (unless you want a backup just to be absolutely safe).

Drivers

After the initial install, I had basic SVGA (800×600) resolution and no Aero glass effects, as the installer did not find a suitable driver for the nVidia GeForce Go 7400 card in my laptop and the Experience Index was 1.0 due to low scores for the Graphics/Gaming Graphics items. The Windows 7 driver package (beta) from nVidia’s site did not contain a driver for the card either. I tried using the Vista driver package, but when I ran the setup program it told me a compatible adapter could not be found. Argh! I eventually was able to go into the Device Manager and manually update the driver, pointing it to the directory where the nVidia installer had extracted the Vista drivers. This gave me back the ability to use the native 1280×800 resolution on the laptop panel and also turned on all Aero Glass features once I re-ran the Experience Index (which went up to 3.5, still hampered by the low scores for graphics).

Most of the internal laptop hardware seemed to be functional, like the built-in wired and wireless network adapters, but I still had a few “Unknown Device” items listed in Device Manager. One turned out to be the built-in webcam and the other was the Memory Stick slot. The Windows 7 driver wizard was able to point me to the proper drivers directly on Sony’s web site to get these working, which was nice. My first run of Windows Update also pulled down a driver for the biometric device (fingerprint scanner).

Not every driver worked properly, though. Since the Sony Notebook Utilities wouldn’t install, I can’t use the Fn keys to control screen brightness, volume, LCD/VGA output switching, etc. I’m also missing the switcher utility that allows me to independently turn off the wireless G and Bluetooth radios. Sony’s Windows 7 page for the VAIO just says to check back once Windows 7 is officially released, so I’m hopeful this annoyance will eventually be resolved.

Post-Installation Configuration

I had made a list of everything installed on my laptop before I started this process, but it still took a lot of time to re-install everything and tweak it all back to just the way I liked it (Start Menu configuration, shortcut keys, shared drives, network printers, etc.). While annoying, this gave me the chance to leave out all of the stuff I hadn’t used in a while. Once I was done, I removed the C:\Windows.Old folder to free up the disk space.

XP Mode

I wanted to try XP Mode in Windows 7 to see if I could use it to run some of the older programs we use in the office in a virtual machine. I downloaded and installed it from Microsoft’s site, but ran into a problem when I tried to run it on my VAIO due to a lack of hardware virtualization. Apparently Sony hasn’t enabled hardware virtualization in the BIOS of any currently shipping VAIO even though the processors support it, so Virtual PC will not run.

Luckily, I was able to enable hardware virtualization on my desktop (on which I had also done a clean Windows 7 install). Once you have the XP virtual machine running under Windows 7, you install your “legacy” applications normally (inside the virtual machine). For example, in the screenshot below I was adding IIS:

XP Mode in Windows 7

Windows 7 creates corresponding shortcuts for the applications under the XP Mode folder on the Start Menu of your PC (you can also add your own custom shortcuts to that folder by simply creating them under the All Users Start Menu within the virtual machine). When clicking on one of those icons, the application runs seamlessly on the desktop so the user is not even aware the application is being virtualized (except for the old XP Luna-style interface instead of the new Aero glass look). Using XP Mode, for example, I was able to successfully install NetMeeting (which I need to connect to the voicemail system console). It ran just fine “on” Windows 7, with almost no noticeable impact on performance.

It requires a little bit of advance setup but XP Mode seems to be a good way of running any legacy applications that won’t work natively under Windows 7 (assuming the user’s PC supports hardware virtualization, of course).

Labor Day Weekend @ Disney – Day 3

This morning we ate breakfast over at the Contemporary and then headed out to enjoy some of the pools at the resorts. My daughter and I swam in the pool at the Contemporary for a bit while we waited for the water slide to open at 10am. Once the lifeguards arrived and the slide was on, my daughter went down that a few times. “That was awesome!” was her reaction. 🙂

With check-out approaching fast at 11am, we walked back over to Bay Lake Tower so my daughter could try the water slide at that pool (I went on it a few times myself).

Then it was back up to the room to quickly, shower, change, pack, and check out.

We drove over to the Downtown Disney area to do a little shopping and grab lunch. On the West Side they have this huge hot air balloon you can ride (for about $15) 400 feet straight up and probably get a good view of everything. I realized I actually saw this thing from the parks the other day … that’s how big it was:

My daughter wanted to buy a Lego set with some money she had saved up so we stopped by the LEGO Store. It was fun to watch her try and decide between Indiana Jones or Star Wars. I guess playing the Wii games and watching the movies has had an effect on her. 🙂 She finally decided on the Indiana Jones set since it had Indy, Marion, two bad guys, a boat, and a car (as opposed to Anakin’s Jedi starfighter with R2-D2).

We had lunch at Fulton’s Crab House (another first for us, and it was very good) and then hit the road back home. There was very little traffic again, which was nice, so we had time to unpack and unwind once we got home.

It was a great vacation, but it’s back to work tomorrow. All good things, right?

Labor Day Weekend @ Disney – Day 2

The plan was to get to Animal Kingdom close to opening time (9am) this morning, so we had breakfast in our room and then walked over to the bus stop at the Contemporary. The last time were we at Animal Kingdom was back in 2007, so we were looking forward to checking out the Asia area.

I love roller coasters, so I had to ride Expedition Everest first.

Surprisingly, my wife and daughter came with me, since the standby wait time was only 5 minutes (a benefit of being there early). It’s a great coaster! It goes through dark caverns, it’s fast, and even goes backwards … I loved it! My daughter thought it was “ok” even though she kept her eyes closed the entire time (there are some scary parts that involve the Yeti). After that thrill, we went down the path to the Kali River Rapids and got totally drenched … twice. My daughter really loved that ride, so we had to go on it again at her insistence (no lines so we walked on both times). I swear my clothes were still wet at lunchtime hours later, but at least it kept me cool in the heat of the day. 😉

As we started to dry off, we walked through the Maharajah Jungle Trek to see dragons, bats, and tigers. Most of the animals were apparently still sleeping though, because we only saw one tiger (sleeping in some tall grass, I almost missed him). I did catch this huge bat doing his best Dark Knight impression, though:

We had 2:00 lunch reservations over at Epcot, so we walked back through DinoLand USA (where my daughter did the scavenger hunt at the Boneyard) and then went back to the bus station.

At Epcot, we stopped into Innovations again, this time to register for the Kim Possible World Showcase Adventure. My wife and I love the countries at Epcot (especially the food!), but my daughter finds them boring. The Kim Possible adventure is the perfect family solution! The kids get a “communicator” which is basically an old LG flip phone. The screen plays video messages from the Kim Possible characters and sends you on a hunt in the various countries around the World Showcase to track down and stop the criminal masterminds. The communicator can be used to “activate” clues in the countries. It’s really slick. For example, our first “mission” took us to France, where we had to find a bookstore. Once in front of the bookstore, my daughter used the communicator to activate a fingerprint scanner. In the window of this bookstore there in France, a laser scanned the books and showed a fingerprint. This led us to another clue, and another activation. I was really impressed with how it was put together, all of these “clues” hidden in plain sight waiting to be activated by the presence of one of these mobile phones. One small drawback was that there were a lot of kids (and adults) running around with these communicators, so you kept hearing the sound effects and voices everywhere. It was hard not to spoil some of the locations that way. Once you complete the mission, you have the option of accepting another one which sends you to another country. When you’re done, the communicator directs you to a drop box to return the phone. This was a great way to keep my daughter interested as we walked around the World Showcase … kudos to Disney for that!

At 2pm we were at the Nine Dragons restaurant in China for lunch, which was good, but wasn’t great enough to earn a spot on our “favorite Epcot restaurants” list. We enjoyed a little more of the World Showcase after lunch and then took one of the Friendship ferry boats from the International Gateway (near France) over to Hollywood Studios.

Down Hollywood Boulevard we snagged FastPasses for the Rockin’ Roller Coaster, but they weren’t until 7:20 so we had a while to do some other things. My daughter and I went on Star Tours (a personal favorite, even though it’s old and somewhat dated) and eventually we made it over to the American Idol Experience and had front row seats. By the time we got out of there it was apparent we were going to get another mid-afternoon rainstorm, so we ducked into the Prince Caspian: Chronicles of Narnia walk-thru and avoided most of the rain. After dinner, we rode my favorite Walt Disney ride: Aerosmith’s Rockin’ Roller Coaster.

I love the loud music, the speed, and especially the launch (0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds!). This was my daughter’s first upside-down roller coaster experience … and she hated it. Oh well. I don’t think she minded the loops, or the dark (she did open her eyes a few times because she was able to describe some of the scenery) but she didn’t like how it banged her head around against the harness.

Immediately after getting out of the ride, we grabbed some ice cream and then headed into the Hollywood Hills Amphitheater for “Fantasmic.” This was another Disney show we hadn’t seen yet … we tried last year but were turned away because the park had closed, which was disappointing. Well, it was worth the wait because it’s an incredible show.

It took us a long time to get out of the theater due to the massive number of people, but eventually we threaded our way through the crowds and back to the bus station. We made it back to the hotel to catch the Magic Kingdom fireworks from our room for the third night in a row. Sweet.

Too bad we have to go home tomorrow …

Labor Day Weekend @ Disney – Day 1

This morning we got up early and headed over to the Magic Kingdom to meet some friends for breakfast. We caught the monorail over in the Contemporary and had our particular car all to ourselves.

That didn’t last, of course, as the monorail swung through the Polynesian and Grand Floridian resorts on the way over. We had 8:30 reservations at The Crystal Palace which allowed us to get into the park before it officially opened. That was really cool because Main Street USA was completely deserted, something you rarely get to see. My wife got this great picture of my daughter all by herself in front of Cinderella’s castle (she’s standing under the archway):

no one but my daughter at Cinderella's castle

The Crystal Palace is a Winnie the Pooh-themed buffet, so as we ate with our friends, the various characters (Pooh, Piglet, and Eeyore) stopped by for personal photo ops. The girls also got to march in the little parade around the restaurant.

By the time we finished breakfast, the park had been officially open for about 30 minutes and the crowd level was noticeably higher. We headed back to Frontierland to hit the rides there. As we were debating if we should get a FastPass for Splash Mountain, a cast member came up to us and asked if we were going to ride Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. I said we were debating which one to do first and she said ” if you follow me I’ll take you in the back way.” So we all followed her and she took us back through the exit to the front of the line for the ride! How cool! After riding the roller coaster, we went next door to Splash Mountain and walked right on. We walked off slightly wetter than before, but not soaked.  🙂

The rest of the morning was spent around the Magic Kingdom, letting the girls dictate pretty much what they wanted to do: meet the Princesses in Toon Town, visit the Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor, “shoot some aliens!” on Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, etc. By early afternoon we had done pretty much everything we wanted to do at the Magic Kingdom, so we hopped the monorail to Epcot.

Arriving in the park, we bee-lined it for Soarin’ in The Land to get FastPasses. That gave us some wait time to grab lunch and then let the girls play around in Innovations. It had been a while since I’d been in those buildings (I tend to stick to the World Showcase) but there were some neat new exhibits in there like The Great Piggy Bank Adventure (which teaches kids about saving money, and topics like inflation and diversification), and IBM’s ThinkPlace which digitizes you in various motions and then green-screens you into your own video game that you then get to play and e-mail to yourself. Neat stuff.

After using our FastPasses at Soarin’ we headed over to check out Test Track. The standby time was listed as 20 minutes so we decided to wait. It ended up being closer to to 40 minutes once we actually got onto the ride, but that’s always a fun one. Of course, it’s a big GM showroom at the end so we got to check out the new Camaro and Volt up close (except they weren’t letting anyone sit in those).

When we got out of Test Track, the weather had seriously clouded over and it was apparent it was going to rain in short order. It was about time for our friends to head home anyway, so we said our goodbyes and parted ways outside the gates. We then hopped on the monorail for the trip back to the hotel and that’s when it started pouring. Of course, we figured we were set since the monorail runs through the Contemporary, but we had forgotten that at the Ticket and Transportation Center you need to switch from the Epcot monorail to the resort monorail, and to do that you need to leave cover and run from the exit ramp on one side of the station to the entrance ramp on the other. So, unlike our Splash Mountain experience earlier in the day, we got totally soaked.

We picked up dinner at the Contemporary and took it back to our room to relax and dry off. The rain eventually tapered off, so we walked (gotta love staying in a hotel that close!) over to the Magic Kingdom and got some dessert from the Plaza Ice Cream Parlor on Main Street. By then, of course, the park was jammed with people getting ready to watch the parade and fireworks so we did a little shopping on the way back to the main gate and then walked back to the hotel and watched the fireworks again from our balcony … in our PJs. 😉

Labor Day Weekend @ Disney – Day 0

This weekend is Labor Day Weekend, so it’s time for our annual mini (or should that be “Minnie?”) family vacation at Walt Disney World. We drove over this afternoon after picking my daughter up from school and hit no traffic going through downtown Tampa or across to Orlando on I-4, which got us to our hotel by 5pm. We’re staying at the new Bay Lake Tower at the Contemporary Resort, which just opened a month ago. This is the first time we’ve stayed in one of the deluxe resorts and it is incredible! Check out the view of the Magic Kingdom from our private balcony:

Cinderellas castle on the left, Space Mountain on the right

Still no free internet access, though … what’s up with that? Anyway, since we had arrived relatively early, we had time to wander around the grounds and also check out the Contemporary next door. Here’s a view of the tower from the Contemporary, near the walkway that connects the two buildings.

After dinner and a quick dip in the pool, we enjoyed the Magic Kingdom fireworks show back in our room:

What an amazing view. So far, this vacation is off to a great start. Tomorrow, we hit the parks …