Hurricane prep

hurricane supply closetThe 2009 hurricane season starts on Monday so we spent some time today re-stocking our hurricane closet. What, you don’t have a closet in your house dedicated to hurricane supplies? 😉 Well, you can’t be too prepared here on the Gulf coast. Should we ever need to evacuate all we need to do is throw all of those bags into the car, grab ourselves and the dogs, and get out of town.

No plywood needed this season either, since we got the windows replaced last fall. Still, let’s hope this season is a quiet one.

Star Trekkin’, JJ Abrams style

We wrapped up work a bit early today (Memorial Day) so I decided to walk over to Times Square and catch the new Star Trek movie. I’m a fan of the original series and I have to say I was skeptical of what this “90210” version of Star Trek was going to be like.

Well, I really enjoyed it. You can’t have a good Trek movie without lots of space battles, explosions on the bridge, and some sort of time travel. Luckily, this movie has all of that and more. Some random thoughts (warning, possible spoilers ahead):

  • nice opening sequence! off to a good start …
  • Vulcan bullies? Bullying doesn’t seem logical.
  • why don’t Romulans ever look consistent in any of the movies or shows?
  • love the look of the Enterprise: classic and yet updated and modern
  • the audience is cheering and applauding at every classic line
  • umm, Spock and Uhura … WTF? 😮
  • Spock’s Sylar moment

And some final, longer, thoughts.

On the matter of red matter: anyone who was a fan of JJ Abram’s “Alias” television series must have about choked on their popcorn like I did when Nero’s red matter turned out to be nothing other than a Mueller device! At that point I just about expected Sydney Bristow to show up (dressed as a Romulan agent of course) and start kicking ass. Maybe the smoke monster from “Lost” should have had a cameo as well! 😀

As for the reboot: I haven’t read a lot about this (and I don’t want to put in any blatant spoilers) but it seems clear to me that this is a reboot of the franchise and obviously the vehicle for more sequels to come. The methods they used to achieve this will probably anger or alienate some classic Trek fans, but I think it was a neat way to do it. It probably helps that I already went through this kind of anxiety with Ronald D. Moore’s re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica. I loved the original series as a kid and really hated the pilot movie for the new series when it aired in 2003. The Cylons look like humans? Special effects cop-out! Starbuck and Boomer are girls!? I don’t think so. I almost didn’t watch the series at all (in fact, I was right here in New York, on a similar business trip when I watched the first three episodes on my laptop because I had nothing else to do!). I’m glad I did, though, because it turned out to be a fantastic, gripping show (well, except for the end). I can see the same thing happening to this new series of Trek movies. And as long as they’re still fun and exciting, I’ll keep going to see them … the even-numbered ones, anyway. 😉

The Statue of Libery and Ellis Island

The system upgrade was going well so the team decided to take today (Sunday) off and resume work on Monday (Memorial Day). That was a nice surprise because I got to spend the day with my wife and daughter in Manhattan.

Since the ladies had already visited a lot of places in the city while I was working on Saturday (American Girl Place, Central Park, Times Square, etc). we walked down Lexington Avenue to Grand Central Station and took the subway down to Battery Park. After purchasing our tickets and waiting in an extremely long line, we boarded the ferry to the Statue of Liberty.  I remember climbing those twisty steps to the top of Lady Liberty’s crown with my dad when I was about my daughter’s age, but my hopes of sharing that same moment with my her were unrealized because the monument is currently not open to visitors (except for the pedestal). We still had a great time walking around Liberty Island, taking in the views of Manhattan across the harbor, and of course the statue herself.

After a light lunch, we boarded the ferry again and headed over to Ellis Island, to which none of us had ever been. It’s a really amazing museum and has some great exhibits about our country’s immigration history. We spent some time in the American Family Immigration History Center researching our respective families, trying to see if we could find any records there. They have scans of passenger manifests, ship images, etc. It’s incredible. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find any definite family links, but it was a spur of the moment thing and had we been better prepared with data we might have had better success.

By then it was getting on late-afternoon so we took the subway back to Grand Central and then walked back to the hotel to rest up before heading out for dinner. All-in-all, it was a perfect little family vacation day in the big city. My wife and daughter head back to Florida early tomorrow morning and I still have five days to go here in New York.

Mmmmm … gnocchi!

Today I spent most of the day in the office here in Manhattan working on the fixed assets system upgrade. My wife and daughter came by (after flying into JFK that morning) to pick up the hotel key and then ran off to spend a day in the city.

This evening, I met up with my family and my colleagues from the office working on the upgrade and we all headed to dinner at Nino’s Positano, one of Nino Selimaj‘s six restaurants in the city. My favorite Italian dish is gnocchi so of course when I saw that on the menu I had to order it. That was a good choice because it was fantastic.

After dinner my wife and daughter headed back to the hotel and I went back to work to do some more coding. So far, though, the upgrade is progressing smoothly.

Never a good sign

FDNY outside the hotel

It’s never a good sign to come back to your hotel and find the lobby swarming with firemen.

That’s what I found tonight when I got back to my hotel here in Manhattan: three ladder trucks and the chief’s vehicle parked outside on the street and at least 15 to 20 of FDNY‘s finest in full uniform carrying hoses and other implements of their trade. I must have missed most of the excitement because the concierge told me it was fine to go up to my room. I didn’t want to ask what had happened since I figured he had probably been asked that hundreds of times already. It was almost like I had walked into an episode of “Rescue Me.”


Heading to the Big Apple

Do they still call it that anymore?

I’m sitting at Gate A12 at the Tampa airport waiting to board my flight to New York’s JFK airport. I’m heading up for there to do an upgrade to the fixed assets system that I am responsible for at work. As is the usual for this type of project, we will be working over the long holiday weekend, keeping Monday our standby day in case we need extra time (or something goes horribly wrong, which it won’t 😉 ). I’ll be coming back home to Florida next Friday.

My wife and daughter will be flying up for the weekend to go sight-seeing in the city. Hopefully things at work will be going smoothly enough that I’ll have some time to spend with them. I haven’t actually been a tourist in New York since I was about my daughter’s age.

My new Eee PC 900A and Windows 7

Last week I stumbled on a deal over at Woot!: a refurbished Asus EeePC 900A (1gb RAM, 4gb SSD) for $160. My addiction to shiny things had me clicking on the “Buy” button before I could stop myself. Considering my original 4G Surf cost twice that (albeit over a year ago) it was too good a deal to pass up.

The 900A has a 9″ screen (running at 1024 x 600 resolution) and is overall slightly larger than my 4g Surf (it still fits nicely into the neoprene sleeve case, though). Like my 4G Surf, it also lacks Bluetooth and the webcam.

EeePCs: 900A and 4G Surf
Out of the box it had the Xandros Linux distro installed but I wasn’t about to go back to using that. From the moment I ordered the unit I had plans to put the Windows 7 release candidate on it.

The first thing I did was a quick disk image using eeebackup just in case I should ever want to put the clean Xandros image back on it. Then it was time to research how to install Windows 7. Cramming a full Windows 7 install into 4gb of hard drive space requires some creativity. Luckily there are a lot of creative hackers out there. I ended up using a combination of various blog and forum postings (see the end of this post for the links) to create a bootable, vLite‘d version of the Win7 RC on a thumb drive and then used that to install it on the 900A:

Windows 7 installing on the Eee 900A
After some post-install configuration, cleanup, and compression, I had a trimmed down (but functional, even with Aero effects!) version of Windows 7 on my new Eee with about 1.4gb free on the SSD.

Windows 7 on the Eee 900A

I still need to put some more software on it (like AV software, Firefox, and maybe Office) so that final free space number will most likely be smaller. I’ll probably end up having to use an SD card for cheap, extra storage.

I think I’m taking a performance hit since I compressed the entire drive. Windows 7 isn’t super snappy, but it runs. I’ll give it a shot for a while and see how it goes before I consider switching to Ubuntu like I did on my 4G Surf.

Install Windows 7 on Asus Eee PC 900
Easy direct install from SD card to 4gb SSD
How to vLite Windows 7 Beta 1 and install it on a 901 using an SD card
The noobest noob guide to install Windows 7 directly on your Eee PC

Cleveland tourism videos

I can post these and laugh because Cleveland is my hometown. Unless you’re from there, you’re not allowed to snicker at these! 😀

Though humorous on the surface, they are a sad commentary on the current state of the city … the Flats used to be a really cool place. I have fond memories of going to the Powerhouse or Shooters on weekend, hanging out by the river. Or catching an outdoor concert at Nautica. And you can’t have lived in Cleveland in the early 90s without remembering the Free Stamp controversy.

Oh well … at least we’re not Detroit … and the Cavs are still going strong in the NBA playoffs!

Thanks for the links, Jaime!

Windows 7 RC upgrade

This past weekend I decided to jump in and start using the Windows 7 RC full-time on my home desktop. Rather than do a (recommended) clean install, I wanted to try the upgrade from Vista Home Premium. To prepare, I made a full image of my PC with DriveImage XML earlier in the week (which took over 27 hours to back up 164gb wirelessly to my NAS … in hindsight I probably should have used a wired connection or backed up directly to another hard drive).

My first mistake was that I tried to use the wrong release candidate, figuring I would try the 64-bit version of the software. Well, you can’t upgrade from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7 since the upgrade starts from within your current version of Windows (and you can’t run a 64-bit app in a 32-bit environment). A clean install is the only way in that case. I didn’t want to start over so I downloaded the 32-bit RC and then started the upgrade process.

Everything was going smoothly (for about an hour) until the last stage: copying over user settings and applications. The process got up to about 62% complete when suddenly my PC blue-screened and rebooted! I was then stuck in a BSOD reboot loop! Watching closely during the BSOD, I was able to determine that the faulting driver was named inspect.sys. Some Google searching helped me narrow this down to my Comodo Firewall software. What kills me is that my PC passed all the pre-upgrade checks. It only warned me about a possible incompatibility with the ATI Catalyst driver. I couldn’t find anyone else having the same specific problem during a Win7 upgrade so my only recourse was to undo the upgrade.

Lucky for me, the rollback process was smooth, and fast! It only took about 20 minutes to restore my Vista configuration and my PC was back to normal. Well, except for this:

Windows 7 upgrade fail

Hoping the firewall was the only problem, I uninstalled Comodo and then ran the upgrade process again. This time it was successful and I was up and running on Windows 7 with my settings intact … whew!

Windows 7 RC

I was able to download the 3.9 RC2 version of the Comodo Firewall and that seems to be behaving just fine with Win7 so far. Another minor problem I ran into was that the new Security Center kept reporting that AVG Antivirus 8.5 (the free version) was “turned off” when it wasn’t, so I had to disable that particular check. Also, when trying to shut down, my beta version of Trillian Astra crashes and I have to force the shutdown.

The new taskbar takes a little getting used to. Running programs and quick launch icons are almost indistinguishable at first:

Windows 7 taskbar

It was driving me crazy because I would think Thunderbird was running and click on the icon to restore the window, when actually it was not running and my click just launched it. I can see now that running programs have the square highlight around them. In my screen capture above, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Explorer are running, but Microsoft Money and PaperPort are not. See the difference? I guess this is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s dock. The other interface tweaks are nice, though, once you get used to them. I really like the Aero Peek and Aero Shake features, for example.

So now I’m using Windows 7 as my main OS at home … at least until next year when this release candidate expires.

You hear maniacal laughter in the distance …

I found, via slashdot, this great article on the history of Rogue, a character-based dungeons-and-dragons computer game from the early 80s, originally developed for UNIX.

While I had been playing paper-based RPGs with my friends and computer-based D&D games (like the Alternate Reality or Ultima series on my Atari 800XL) all through high school, I didn’t encounter Rogue until college. This makes sense since that would have been the first time I encountered a UNIX system (actually, though, I was playing it on the university’s VAX).

Despite the fact that its graphics were limited (your character was @ and monsters were letters like ‘Z’ for zombie or ‘V’ for vampire) and the controls were a little hard to get used to (H and L for left/right, J and K for up/down), it was a fun game to play because it was different every time: you never knew what monsters you were going to encounter (watch out for those monster party rooms!) or what cool weapons, potions, or scrolls you would find.

My daughter loves playing iRogue on my Treo (although should I be disturbed that she likes playing as undead? 😀 ). There’s even an iPhone version. Portable retro gaming at its best.