More Hidden Treasures

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I just found a list that summarizes everything I possibly wanted circa 1997.

  • U2 CDs
  • 64 megs of memory
  • Awe 64 Sound card or USB speakers
  • Mark 6 alto saxophone
  • Stereo:
    • Radio turner and mixer
    • CD Changer
    • Turntable with stereo output
    • Double tape deck
  • Books: anything by Isaac Asimov
  • Cool mousepad
  • Flatbed color scanner
  • 3D video card
  • Computer games
    • Quake II
    • Starcraft
    • Command and Conquer II: Red Alert
  • Fast CD-ROM with digital support
  • Cool speakers for Dolby 4-channel surround sound
  • Big Monitor
  • Caller ID
  • USB Port

By the metric of this list, I’ve achieved almost 100% success. It’s remarkable how the material things we want can change so much over the years, and how material things in and of themselves can become so much less important. I wonder if I made a list now, how would I look at it in five years?

I Won!

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I’m cleaning up my room, as I always do when the weather starts to get cold, and going through a drawer I found the most remarkable piece of paper. Apparently I had made a bet with my friend Lucas that George W. Bush was going to run for President. For posterity, here’s the entire text of the letter:

On 11-20-98 [we weren’t Y2K compatible] in World Geography with Mista [sic] Molloy, Lucas and Matthew made a $2 bet that George Bush Jr. will run for president.

[signature] Matthew Mullenweg | [signature] Lucas Spath

Matthew says he will
Lucas says he won’t

The person who is right gets the two dollars ($2)

We must have been quite bored to make the language that specific, but I guess next time I see Lucas I should hit him up for the money. I need to make more bets . . .

8 Ball, Corner Pocket

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Just got back from Cue and Cushion, a nice pool hall on Shepard. Tonight was especially nice because I actually won. The music was good, thanks to Jaime, and everything was fun. Alex was making some really nice shots, but luck seemed to turn in my favor towards the end of every game. I’ve put some cool pictures from the pool hall, as well as a frog that lives at my house that I see sometimes. I’ve always heard stories about how my grandfather was very good at billiards and played it all throughout college, and part of me wants to emulate him and get really good at it. This night was definitely a big improvement, but I haven’t quite nailed down what I was doing different. Oh well, practice makes perfect.

Pun-A-Day #13

Humor

Two brooms were hanging in the closet and after a while they got to know each other so well, they decided to get married. One broom was, of course, the bride broom. The other the groom broom. The bride broom looked very beautiful in her white dress. The groom broom was handsome and suave in his tuxedo. The wedding was lovely. After the wedding, at the wedding dinner, the bride broom leaned over and said to the groom broom, “I think I’m going to have a little whisk broom!!!”
“IMPOSSIBLE!!” said the groom broom….

“WE HAVEN’T EVEN SWEPT TOGETHER.”

Pun-A-Day #12

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A lady was filling her tank at a gas station, smoking a cigarette, even though all the signs say not to. The fumes that came out of the gas tank ignited, severely burning her hands, and the fire
crawled up her arm. Instead of rolling on the ground to put it out, she panicked and took off
running down the street! A police car was at the intersection where it happened and he tried to stop
her to put out her arm, but she just kept running and screaming. So the officer shot her. This took everyone by surprise. The officer ran over to her and put the fire out, then called for an ambulance. When questioned about his course of action to stop her the officer said, “My only thought was for everyone’s safety. After all, she was waving a fire-arm.”

Best Dialog Message Ever

Humor

This lovely gem comes from Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum, and shows when you’re erasing a CD-RW

The remaining time listed is only an approximation. Some erases may take up to 10 minutes longer than what appears on the progress bar.

Update: Okay, I’ve decided this actually not the best dialog box ever even though it struck me as quite funny at the time, and anything will have a very hard time beating this message I got earlier this year.

RoboForm

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I like software that just works, is set up once (or not at all) and forever goes about its tasks, quiet and unassuming. Right up there with the Google Toolbar, some of my favorite browser software is RoboForm. What does it do? It makes the tedious process of filling out the hundreds of forms web users are presented every day a breeze. I’ve tried form fillers before, but I was always turned off by them not , being flexible enough, not recognizing a form element if it didn’t have the exact same name as one you’ve filled out before. The Internet Explorer Autocomplete feature is the same way. RoboForm fills out whatever personal details you want to put in the form, remembers your logins and passwords, generates good passwords, and best of all has no adware or spyware like some of the other products in this category. I’ve set up multiple profiles that I use depending on what information I want to give where ever I’m signing up, for instance I have a “Spam” profile that gives the form my throwaway email address and no personal information.

RoboForm is free for personal use, and the free version is more than good enough for pretty much everything you do. I plan to buy the full version soon not so much because I need the features it offers, but simply because I want to support the authors of this software. My main warning with this software is that it can have the same effect on your online buying habits as the Amazon one-click system can. In the past filling out those forms gave me a little time to consider my purchase, but now you can having something being Fedexed to you before you know what happened :). This is another one of those products that goes in my “Indispensable Web Software” category, so check it out.

Google Toolbar

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The Google Toolbar is always one of the first things I install when I work on a new computer because it is simply one of those tools that is so elegant, well done, and useful that you can’t imagine how you functioned without it. Unfortunately it is only available from Google for Windows users running Internet Explorer version 5 or over. You can use it straight “out of the box” and be quite happy, but I tweak it a little to make it fit my experience best. If you click on the Google graphic it will bring up a menu where you can select “toolbar options.” This is where they hide the good stuff.

Once you’re in there it actually loads a page that lets you customize your toolbar experience. The first thing I do is change the search box size to wide, because I’m running at 1600×1200 and have plenty of screen real estate, I also uncheck the box that keeps a search history because I don’t like the dropdown box, and I also seldom search for the same thing twice. Next I kill the descriptive text for all the buttons; they’re pretty well designed and even if you haven’t used the toolbar before you can figure out what they mean in a few minutes. The text also takes up too much space. Then I add the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, because that’s just fun :). I add the voting buttons, which adds two buttons that let you vote up or down for whatever page you’re browsing. I don’t know if that actually makes any difference to anything, but I’m all about spreading Google karma to good pages so I use them anyway when I find something nice. Finally if you go into “experimental features” you’ll see an option to suppress the onUnload javascript event, which I think is annoying and also kills a few popup ads. Isn’t that cool?

One of the more useful features of the toolbar is that it lets you type things into the search box and then search for those terms within the current page, even if it hasn’t been indexed by Google. This can be a huge help on big pages that I know have the information I need, but it could be buried anywhere. I can just jump right to the spot on the page that has the information I need. It’s functionally identical to the “Find (on this page)” function under the Edit menu, but much easier to use. Optionally using the highly button you can also highlight your chosen terms on the page, which works just like if you look at something in Google’s cache and it highlights the terms you searched for. If you ever look for stuff on the web and you meet the system requirements, you should get this. It’s going to be an invaluable tool in helping me rebuild my computer.

How It Was Fixed

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Well, now that I’ve gotten the Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed and running successfully. I think the main problem with my original installation was that I had Lilo loading the operating system rather than a Windows bootloader. When I tried to reboot after the SP1 installatiion I would just get an endless string of “40” on my screen, which is really hard to explain so I put up screenshots (taken with a camera) and a video here. I tried repairing the installation using my Windows XP installation disk, but that didn’t touch the bootloader. What I ended up doing was installing a fresh version of Windows on my second partition, which did recreate bootloader and redetect my installation on the C partition. I thought that would be all I need, but when I tried to boot to the installation on the C partition, it would go into an infinite reboot sequence, which, needless to say, was quite frustrating.

It became obvious that the installation on C was beyond repair, literally, and so I made the always tough decision to scrap it and start fresh. This was a very big deal for me, because I abhor having to reinstall programs and losing settings and such. On my last desktop it was actually upgraded incrementally from DR-DOS through early versions of Windows, all the way to ’98 when I was forced by a hard drive failure to start from scratch again. I used Windows before they messed it up with a graphical interface :). I’m hoping that like a phoenix this new installation will rise from the ashes of the last and turn my laptop into an ultra-efficency machine that is easy, intuative, and functional.

So I backed up everything important from the drive and did a “clean” install of XP over the current one, deleting all the past files in the process. Then I downloaded the 134 MB network install of SP1 just to be safe, and installed it on a almost perfectly fresh Windows. It worked fine, and I’m appreciating some of the new features already such as the Bluetooth, and the “anti-trust” addons.

Now all I need to do is delete the installation of Windows from the D partition, because it’s just taking up valuable space that could be better used for some movies or music. Also in hindsight I probably should have just formatted the C partition because now I have a Program Files directory chock-full of stuff that isn’t actually ‘installed,’ though maybe when I reinstall programs they may pick up their old prefs. Cross your fingers.

Whew!

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Well SP1 installed just fine, and a number of other updates did as well. Now the tricky part is going to be getting all the Sony laptop goodies back into everything, then the long and arduous process of reinstalling my software. My email is groovy though, because IMAP works like a charm, so I actually had no email downtime. I also discovered that Outlook Express works better with IMAP than Outlook XP does, so that might become my primary email client. There was also another one someone recommended to me that I’ll try, but I have to dig its name out of the archives. Outlook XP has a number of quirks when working with IMAP, and installing the second service pack for Office didn’t seem to make anything better, in fact it got a little worse. When sending and receiving the program doesn’t respond to any input, and it seemed to randomly disconnect from the server, and the only way to get it back on was to restart the program. Also it even have a button for purging deleted messages, I had to make my own. Outlook Express seems to do everything that doesn’t work with Outlook XP pretty well, and it just feels cleaner since it just does email. I keep all my organization things in Palm Desktop, which I would recommend people trying out even if they don’t own a PalmOS device.

It’s too late now to do anything else meaningful on the computer. Hopefully I can get everything taken care of tomorrow and get back to actual work, plus I won’t have to post from the ‘music’ computer anymore. (Yes, I do have a computer whose sole purpose is to play music. I still haven’t figured out why it needs a multi-gigahertz processor and a 3D accelerator card to do this. I keep telling myself I’ll play games on it sometime. Where’s the time?!)

There’s More

Music

Yep, I went back out. I had talked to David previously about checking his gig out, it was late so I knew they wouldn’t charge cover, and (on David’s request) I had told Kenny Garrett about the gig at Cezanne’s and he said he might check it out. He didn’t, but I can’t really blame him though because he was staying on the other side of town and was probably dog-tired from the gig. David was burning though, and there were a couple of musicians who went there right after the Roy Haynes concert who said that the music was just as good, which is a pretty amazing compliment considering how good the Wortham concert was. I just realized I have to reinstall Photoshop to fix up all the photos before I upload them, so I better get to that. First though I think I’m going to install Service Pack I again, so wish me luck . . .

Good News

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The good news is that I got my laptop working again, and I found a Sony Support page that has all of the drivers I need. I’m going to give SP1 another try. (I want the Bluetooth stuff.)

The better news is I saw an amazing concert at the Wortham with Roy Haynes, Kenny Garrett, Nick Payton, David Kokoski, and a bass player. It was really, really good. More on that later, with pictures!

Last Straw

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I have many wonderful things to post, exciting things to talk about, places to be, but unfortunately my life has grinded to a halt due to Service Pack 1 for Windows XP wiping my bootloader and corrupting everything. It actually gives a screen that’s very scary when I try to boot, which I took a picture and video of and will post as soon as I get my MemoryStick reader (laptop) back. So once everything is back up I’ll post what I think caused this, and how I (if I can) fix it. It looks like I’m going to have to reinstall all my software too, so maybe I talk about that to, try and turn this into something positive. Macs are looking mighty nice right now.

Productive Day

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I feel like I’ve had a very productive day, espescially compared to yesterday when it felt like I did nothing. Here’s a summary of the day thus far, with the boring parts (and classes) taken out:

  • Good breakfast
  • Human Situation Discussion class
  • Re-printed some business cards for a client, had to tweak design
  • Took David his graphics card
  • Checked if David’s processor was just underclocked or if they actually sent him the wrong one (wrong one)
  • Filled tank
  • Deposited some checks
  • Made some important phone calls, did email
  • Installed my $7 copy of Windows XP Professional bought using UH’s new site liscene (more on this later)
  • Had long lunch with Kel at a nice deli whose name escapes me, oogled at his iPod
  • Picked up Kel’s grandmother’s ten-year-old computer, which she’d like me to fix. We’ll see; I’m not a miracle worker 🙂
  • Took client her new business cards, decided on another change, talked about website
  • Spent too long in traffic, but it’s okay because I made a new mix disc
  • Finally arrived home at around 4:15 PM

Whew! I think now I could crash for the next week or so, but I’m waiting for a call from someone . . .

The Frontier Between Us

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Julie sent me an excellent article which I have to pull one quote from:

“In the next fifty years, computer science will give birth to a delightful new vernacular art form that combines the three great art forms of the twentieth century; cinema, jazz, and programming.”

Isn’t that great? I began investigating who wrote this and it turns out it’s the same guy who helped brainstorm the great movie Minority Report. His name is Jaron Lanier and I’m going to be on the watch for some more of his writing. If only he had a blog!