WIJFR: Protector

Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission: save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before …

Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days – Brennan figured to meet that ship first …

He was never seen again — at least not by those alive at the time.

While flying to LA and back for Christmas, I finished Larry Niven’s “Protector.” This Known Space novel was a quick, easy, and enjoyable read at just over 200 pages.

“Protector” introduces us to the Pak, a long-lived species with three distinct phases: Child, Breeder, and Protector. The Tree-of-Life plant controls the transformation of Breeders into Protectors, whose sole purpose is to protect its descendants. If a Protector becomes childless, it loses the will to continue eating Tree-of-Life and eventually dies unless it can find a cause to keep it going.

In the first half of the book, Phssthpok, a childless Protector, has been travelling for some 33,000 years in search of a colony of Pak who set out on their own over 2.5 million years previously. He enters the Sol system and encounters Jack Brennan, a Belter who accidentally eats Tree-of-Life and turns into a Protector (as you can guess, humans are the descendants of the original Pak colony that settled on Earth millions of years ago).

The second half of the novel takes place some 220 years later. Brennan the Protector has learned of a Pak fleet on its way to Earth and is determined to protect his “descendants” (i.e., the human race) from possible extinction.

As with the other Niven novels I’ve read so far (i.e., the “Ringworld” series), the scale of time and distance takes some getting used to. I mean, we’re talking about events crossing millions of years (time) and light years (space). This book takes place a long time before the Ringworld books as well so there is no faster-than-light (i.e., hyperspace) travel … it takes a loooong time to get from place to place (like, years). The hard science is sometimes hard to follow as well, but that’s what I like about Niven’s stuff … it seems practical the way he describes it in such detail.

I’ve got one more Niven book on my schedule to read. For Christmas I got “The Gripping Hand” which is a sequel to “The Mote in God’s Eye” (written with Jerry Pournelle). First, though, I’ve got to brush up on my zombie war history. More on that later …

Rock Band … well, rocks!

I played Guitar Hero for the first time last Christmas at a relative’s house. Since then I’ve dabbled with the GH demo kiosk at Best Buy and played drums briefly on Rock Band at a friend’s house. It seemed like a lot of fun and really appealed to the air guitarist and table drummer in me (as it would to most men, I would assume).

So for my birthday this past October, my wife and daughter surprised me with Rock Band for the Wii. While this was a great gift, I knew that Rock Band 2 was just around the corner (at the time, just a month away). So I returned the game and pre-ordered RB2 through Amazon.

As time went by, the release date for Rock Band 2 kept being pushed out. At one point it was the second week of January! Amazon duly kept sending me e-mail updates as to when my game would be arriving. I had pretty much resigned myself to not having my birthday present until early 2009. Then, suddenly, earlier this week I got an e-mail from Amazon saying it had shipped! It arrived on my doorstep Thursday night.

Friday evening, my daughter and I unpacked everything. The drums and guitar are wireless, but the microphone is corded (it’s a nice long cord though). You have to daisy-chain the small wireless receivers to the Wii via USB connections, so it’s a little messy in that regard, but it’s worth it to have the convenience of wireless instruments. Once we had everything connected, we gave Quickplay mode a try, my daughter on vocals and me on guitar, both on Easy mode. Considering she didn’t really know the songs, she picked them up really fast. Before we knew it, we had “Eye of the Tiger,” “Hungry Like a Wolf,” and “We Got the Beat” down.

The one thing that bugs me about games like this is the requirement to “unlock” songs. The box lists all of these tracks (“plus many more!”) but when you start, you can’t play just any of them. My daughter, for example, noticed Blondie’s “One Way or Another” was on the box, but wasn’t available in Quickplay until we manage to unlock it in Tour mode. I had the same issue with Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party (though eventually I did get all the songs unlocked).

So Saturday night I spent about two hours playing by myself in Tour mode, unlocking more songs. It was addictive! I would finish a set (on guitar) which would unlock more songs, some of which I’d be like: oh, I’ve got to try that one! So I’d keep going and going.

Tonight I finally gave the drums a try, which was great fun too. This is just really a fun fun game. It helps if you’re musically inclined and know some of the songs, but seeing my eight year-old belt out “Eye of the Tiger” shows that anyone can play this game and have a great time.

Have you seen those recent car commercials on TV where they show all of these classic toys (the Big Wheel, Sit-n-Spin, etc.) and then show the adult in the new car, correlating the feeling of those new toys on Christmas morning to driving that new car? That’s sorta what playing Rock Band 2 is like for me … growing up playing air guitar, drumming on the steering wheel in the car, now realized as a video game in my living room. It rocks!

WIJFR: The Ringworld Engineers

20 years have passed since Louis Wu’s escape from the Ringworld. Now, kidnapped by the mate of Nessus, their two-headed alien companion of the previous voyage, Louis and his catlike ally Chmeee are transported back to the Ringworld – now spinning dangerously off-center – in an attempt to discover the cause of the aberrant rotation before the world grazes its sun. Searching for clues to the design of the structure’s long-vanished original engineers, they encounter various hominid and other races before finding the barely feasible, wholly appalling solution hidden beneath the “Map of Mars.”

After finishing Larry Niven’s SF classic “Ringworld” last month, I moved on to the sequel, “The Ringworld Engineers.”

“Engineers” was written 10 years after the original and was mainly a result of the popularity of the first book and fan support. It picks up 20 years after Louis Wu’s escape from the Ringworld and attempts to address some of the engineering/technical issues introduced in the first novel.

The Hindmost (leader) of the Pierson’s Puppeteers has determined that the Ringworld has wobbled off-center from its sun. In a year or so, it will brush against the star and be destroyed. The Hindmost wants to salvage any available technology left on the Ringworld before this happens, so he kidnaps Louis Wu and Chmeee (Speaker-to-Animals) and forces them to once again explore the Ringworld looking for the rumored transmutation machine. With their lives depending on the results of their mission (the Puppeteer would leave them stranded on the world and save himself, if necessary), Louis and the Kzin begin their seach for the Ringworld’s repair center. Can they save the entire world and the trillions upon trillions of its inhabitants?

I enjoyed this book just as much as the first one. The sheer scale of the Ringworld and the technology required to keep it “running” are both mind-boggling and intriguing. Niven does a decent job of answering some of the questions raised in the earlier book (how does the meteor defense work? how did the superconductor-eating virus that caused the Fall of Cities come to the Ringworld? why are there “maps” of other known worlds in the Great Ocean?) along with describing a whole new set of problems and their engineering solutions. Of course, the biggest surprise (to me anyway) was who actually built the Ringworld and why (hint: my next read will be Niven’s “Protector.”).

This marks the end of my journeys to the Ringworld. There are two more books in the series (“The Ringworld Throne” and “Ringworld’s Children” but the reviews I’ve read say they’re really two half-books each that Niven really didn’t put as much effort into. So, I’m going to go back to some of Niven’s older “Known Space” works instead.

Ready for spring

I can’t wait for March 2009 …

My brother and I went to our first Cleveland Indians spring training game at Chain of Lakes Park back in 1999. Since moving to Florida in 2001, I’ve been out to see the Tribe in Winterhaven at least one weekend every March.

Sadly, this past year the Tribe ended their stay in the Grapefruit League and will be returning to Arizona for the 2009 spring camp.

If you can’t continue one tradition, start a new one! This March my brother and I will be heading out to Goodyear for a four-day Spring Training ’09 vacation trip. We’ve been planning our travel arrangements for the past month or so now and today Indians tickets finally went on sale, completing the last piece of our planning puzzle. We’ll be seeing the Tribe take on the Milwaukee Brewers in Maryvale on Thursday, and then the Oakland As and the Los Angeles Dodgers (will Manny still be wearing a Dodger uniform then?) in the new Goodyear facility on Friday and Saturday.

Cactus League, here we come!

I did it!

Last night I reached my goal in Wii Fit: my BMI is now 21.86 and I weigh 166lbs. This is down from a BMI of 26 and a weight of 200lbs when I started my new fitness “program” back in May.

It wasn’t all due to Wii Fit. Let’s face it: just buying a Wii Fit is probably not going to make you lose a lot of weight (Brian Lam over at Engadget came to the same conclusion). I also changed my eating habits, which was the hardest part. Mainly I became more “calorie-aware” and started a) eating less at meals, b) consuming less calories c) generally eating healthier. This meant getting a 6″ sandwich (no cheese or mayo) at Subway instead of a foot-long; or a salad at Wendy’s (with fat-free dressing and no croutons) instead of a spicy chicken sandwich and fries. I also found myself compulsively checking nutrition labels (which drove my wife crazy sometimes). You’d be amazed at the calorie counts on some things! I had to train myself to eat smarter so that I still felt “full” (or rather, satisfied) but wasn’t consuming thousands of calories in a single sitting. I also tried to be better about late-night snacking. All of this was really difficult at first, but once I was in the habit, it became a lot easier.

But aside from that, Wii Fit gave me the routine and structure I needed to get started on the path and is still helping to keep me on it. I can do a 20 minute free-run while watching a 30-minute show on TiVo (thanks to commercial skipping) and then a few other exercises in Wii Fit to round out a 30-minute execise session.

My first big challenge is coming up: the holidays! I reset my goal in Wii Fit to gain no weight in the next month … let’s see how that goes.

Ubuntu on the Eee

photo_112508_001-781456I had some free time over the long holiday weekend so I decided to experiment with running Ubuntu on my EeePC.

Out of the box, the Linux version of the Eee puts a simplified UI (called Easy Mode) on top of a stripped-down version of the Xandros distro. It also employs the unionfs file system which basically cuts your available storage capacity in half (which in a system with only a 4gb SSD is not much to begin with). Since getting the Eee back in April, I’d done a lot of tweaking and customizing in Easy Mode and had it working pretty well. Even my wife could boot up the Eee and get on the internet through an available WiFi hotspot when she needed to without any help. I’m never content to leave well enough alone, though, so I decided to give Ubuntu Eee a shot.

The “current” version of Ubuntu Eee is built on 8.04 (Hardy Heron) which is no longer the current Ubuntu release since 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) was released last month. However, a new version of Ubuntu Eee (due to be renamed due to trademark issues) is supposedly coming out on January 1, 2009.

First, I made a full image backup of my Eee using George Foot’s eeebackup utility. That way I could go back to my original configuration at any time (if necessary). I then downloaded the Ubuntu Eee ISO, extracted it to a USB thumb drive, and booted my Eee from that thumb drive to start the installation. The install was quick and simple and within an hour I had Ubuntu Eee up and running.

By default, Ubuntu Eee uses the Netbook Remix interface which is nice but too much like the old Easy Mode that I was trying to get away from, so I disabled it to get the true Ubuntu desktop experience. I also had to download and install a different madwifi driver specifically for my Eee model (the 701) to get wireless working. After that, I had the basic stuff all working.

Next up was installing my third-party applications, like TrueCrypt and JungleDisk: both installed smoothly using the default Linux versions from their respective web sites (no more having to compile TrueCrypt from source!). The next part was a little more complicated, but I was finally able to tether the Eee to my Treo 680 over Bluetooth using this handy guide from the Ubuntu Community documentation.

Booting takes a little longer than Xandros (about 50 seconds from the initial BIOS screen to Ubuntu’s login screen) but I can live with that. Also I now have about 1.4gb free on the SSD, roughly double what I had left under unionfs.

I still have some customizing and personalizing to do, not to mention familiarizing myself with Ubuntu as a desktop OS (I’ve really only used the command-line server version up until now), but so far switching to Ubuntu Eee seems like a good decision.

TiVo Mobile … finally!

New TiVo Mobile web site allows TV fans to browse, search, discover, and record television shows on the go, adding another great value to the already invaluable TiVo service

Announced by TiVo this morning (and picked up by most of the gadget blogs I read), you can now schedule recordings and browse TV listings from your mobile device. Yes, you could do this before by accessing TiVo Central Online from your browser-enabled phone, but it was clunky and not easy to navigate. I was able to use it a few times from my Treo to schedule a recording in a pinch, but it wasn’t my first choice.

Available in beta form today, simply point your mobile browser to m.tivo.com (it may or may not work for you, based on my experience and its beta status). Once I got the page to load, I was able to login with my TCO credentials and see my list of TiVos:

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Then I was able to search for a show:

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And schedule a recording:

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I ran into a few problems while trying out the new site. For example I had to sign in again after selecting “Record this episode,” Blazer (the Treo browser) kept complaining about an invalid security certificate, and my attempt to schedule a recording actually failed saying the show did not appear in my DVR’s guide data. But hey, it’s still beta, right?

Anyway, TiVo Mobile seems to have all the same functionality as TCO packaged in a nice-looking, usable mobile format, finally! Thanks, TiVo!