Graduation at East High

I took my daughter to see “High School Musical 3: Senior Year” this afternoon. I guess everyone who wanted to see this saw it opening weekend, because this was only the third weekend of its release and the theater was pretty empty … and all the kids were girls under 10, as I expected.

“Senior Year” follows the now-familiar (to anyone with a young daughter) characters of Troy, Gabriella, Sharpay, Ryan, Chad, Taylor, and Kelsi as they finish their last year at East High and face graduation and moving on to college.

Like the first two films, this one has some snappy song-and-dance routines but is a little light on story/plot (but I guess HSM is about the music after all, right?). My daughter’s favorite song was “The Boys are Back,” sung by Troy and Chad in a junk yard scene where they reminisce about being kids pretending to be ninjas, superheroes, etc. My daughter particularly liked the part where they turned into 8-year old versions of themselves. I didn’t really see anything “big budget” about this movie compared to the originals which aired directly on the Disney Channel. I guess doing a full theater release was just one more way for Disney to rake in the cash before the end of the franchise (like they won’t make a ton on merchandising and tie-ins anyway!).

It’s an amazing world our kids are growing up in: when we got home after the movie, I purchased the HSM3 soundtrack from the Amazon MP3 store (for $4 less than the DRMed version on iTunes) and then burned it onto CD so she had it for her bedtime listening enjoyment. Incredible.

If you’re a parent who’s seen HSM3 (or any of the HSM movies for that matter), you owe it to yourself to check out the “Night School Musical: Senior Year Equivalent” sketch from Saturday Night Live.

WIJFR: Ringworld

Four travelers come to the Ringworld: Louis Wu – human and old; bored with having lived too fully for far too many years. Seeking a challenge, and all too capable of handling it. Nessus – a trembling coward, a puppeteer with a built-in survival pattern of nonviolence. Except that this particular puppeteer is insane. Teela Brown – human; a wide-eyed youngster with no allegiances, no experiences, no abilities. And all the luck in the world. Speaker-to-Animals – kzin; large, orange-furred, and carnivorous. And one of the most savage life-forms found in the galaxy. Why did these disparate individuals come together? How could they possibly function together? And where, in the name of anything sane, were they headed?

My latest read was the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel by Larry Niven, “Ringworld.”

Two humans and two aliens are brought together to investigate an amazing artifact: the Ringworld is a ring (duh!) built around a sun. At six hundred million miles long and a million miles wide, it has roughly 3 million times the area of Earth. It’s spinning around the sun at 770 miles per second, so it has gravity. The air is held in by thousand foot high walls on either side. A series of shadow squares also orbiting the sun give it night and day (but when the sun is out, it’s always high noon). Niven does a great job of visualizing the Ringworld and what it would be like to stand on the surface (I loved the Arch of heaven).

As usual in these posts, I’ll refrain from major plot summaries or spoilers and just make some general comments. It took me a while (just like Louis Wu) to wrap my mind around the scale of Ringworld. It’s HUGE. But Niven makes it seem plausible. The characters were fun (Speaker-to-Animals reminded me of the Kilrathi Hobbes from the old Wing Commander games) and the plot really moves … it was a hard book to put down. Unfortunately, it seemed to wrap up too quickly, almost as if Niven was in a rush to finish and just stopped. The ending left me wanting, so I guess I’ll have to read “The Ringworld Engineers” next (although I’ll probably stop after that because I’ve heard the last two books in the series are not that great).

One thing to consider: is it possible to be so lucky that you’re unlucky to the others around you? Think about that. If you read the book, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

Experimenting with virtual machines

I’ve been playing around with Microsoft’s free Virtual PC 2007 product at work lately in an attempt to keep an old Visual FoxPro 3.0 application running on newer hardware. This particular application refuses to run on any machine with more than 256mb of physical RAM. That’s right, 256 megabytes. Needless to say this is not really feasible in today’s computing environment, but legacy apps need to be supported. Placing the app into a virtual machine seemed to be a good solution: the VM runs on the user’s current modern hardware, but can simulate the 256mb of RAM required by FoxPro.

Setting up a Virtual PC is incredibly easy. The wizard walks you through the initial setup (location of the virtual hard drive file, memory allocation, etc.) and then it “boots” and you install the OS like you would on a fresh PC. For my FoxPro app, I installed Windows XP SP3 from our slipstreamed CD. All of the hardware (CPU, network adapters, USB devices, etc.) from the local machine running Virtual PC are available to the VM. Once the install was done, I configured the VM like any other PC on the corporate network: joined it to the domain, installed the basic corporate utilities, and then finally copied over FoxPro. It works great and is a lot faster than running it on the old Pentium II 350MHz machine the user was running the app on before.

For fun, I even created a VM running the latest Ubuntu 8.10 release:


This has got me thinking … what other cool things could I do with virtualization? Hmmm …

Impeccable Intrepid Ibex Installation

Tonight I did another in-place upgrade on my server, this time from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Like last time, I did the upgrade through PuTTY over an SSH connection and it was flawless. I just had to clean up a few configuration files and put back my installation of Gallery 2.3 (since Intrepid comes with a slightly older release). I love it when upgrades go smoothly.

Pointless side note: I upgraded to Hardy on 6/11 and upgraded to Intrepid on 11/6. 🙂

Second pointless side note: an ibex is a species of wild mountain goat.

One way to fix Vista: buy a new PC

I’ve complained about my Vista woes here before since I upgraded from XP back in April. Well, apparently the solution to my Vista problems was just to buy a new PC.

Thanks to a 20% off coupon found through my slickdeals.net RSS feed, I purchased a “built-for-new” (i.e., not refurbished) Dell Inspiron 530 desktop from the Dell Outlet. For under $450 I got a system with an Intel Core2 Quad 2.4GHz processor, 3gb of RAM, 640gb hard drive, 16x DVD+-RW dual layer burner, 19-in-1 media card reader, built-in wireless, keyboard, mouse, Vista Home Premium, and MS Office 2007 Home/Student edition. Not a bad deal!

Once I had the new box running, I moved over my ATI Radeon 2600HD video card from my old PC so I could still have my dual-monitor setup. Then I spent a few hours over the weekend copying over gigabytes of files, documents, music, photos, videos, etc. from the old PC (via crossover cable) and also re-installing and configuring my applications and utilities.

Ok, so I have to admit that Vista runs a lot nicer on my new PC. I haven’t run into any of the problems that plagued me before (especially the annoying disconnect my iPod, lose the wireless network one) and the OS has been running pretty smoothly so far. Only time will tell for sure, but at least for now I’m happy again!

One small thing I didn’t plan for: the 530 has no PS/2-style keyboard or mouse ports. As a result, I was unable to connect my old Logitech Cordless Elite Duo wireless keyboard/mouse combo as the charging base/receiver used a PS/2 connector for the keyboard. I didn’t have a PS/2-to-USB converter handy so I ended up just using the Dell-supplied keyboard and mouse for now. The keyboard is actually a lot smaller than my old one (due to the lack of all the various multimedia buttons, none of which actually worked under Vista anyway) and a lot quieter, so I’ll probably end up sticking with it.

WIJFR: Boiling Point

When the US goes broke, the states break loose and people across the country get caught in the chaos. The Lakota rise up in the north and Texas breaks free in the south. Meanwhile, Steve just wants to get back to Illinois with his love life intact. Mack, an Ozark militia member doesn’t want his friend to sign up but knows they can’t succeed without him. And a Texas Congressman struggles with his conscience and a manipulative Governor. Can the country stay together? Can the people?

“Boiling Point” is a novel written by CNET’s Tom Merrit. I listen to Tom on the Buzz Out Loud and East Meets West podcasts (and occasionally TWiT) where he’s mentioned the book quite a few times, so I decided I should check it out. I grabbed the PDF version and converted it via iSiloX so I could read it on my Treo in my spare moments.

The premise was interesting: North and South Dakota break off from the U.S. under the leadership of the Lakota Nation, which prompts Texas to seceed as well. From there it’s a series of falling dominoes as other parts of the United States join together and break off into separate countries. The book follows the path of several characters in different parts of the deteriorating United States of America and their experiences as the country changes around them.

I didn’t really enjoy this book, however. Maybe it was because I read it in spurts on my Treo when I had the time, which made it a bit disjointed. Maybe it was the multiple first-person narratives which I found made it difficult to track who was doing what and where. Maybe it was the premise which I found unrealistic (I know, I know, it’s fantasy but I still didn’t “buy” it). Maybe it was because the book seemed over-heavy on dialog (a lot of the backstory is told via transcripts of NPR-like radio broadcasts). Maybe it was all of those things.

It reminded me a bit of “The Man in the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick, in terms of an alternate history story, but I didn’t find it as gripping. If you’re a politics or history buff, it might be worth the read but overall I just found the whole experience mediocre.

Tampa Bay Rays: 2008 ALCS Champs!!!!

What an ALCS series … Boston tried to come back from another 3 games to 1 deficit but couldn’t quite pull it off. They had the bases loaded in the 8th but David Price shut them down and then finished ’em off in the top of the 9th. Final score: 3-1. Fantastic! Congratulations also to Matt Garza, the MVP of the 2008 ALCS.

Anyone remember this Sports Illustrated cover from back in May? 😉

Bring on the Phillies!