Lee.org

I got sloppy and….
Partition Magic ate my hard drive! AAAHHHH! My last backup is from March 6th! AHHHH!

Oh please oh please let me be able to recover everything alright.

The first couple rounds of recovery tools haven’t gotten me going yet.

• Windows Recovery Console – can’t read C:
• Spinrite – clean bill of health
• Chkdsk – (at the suggestion of some website (I’ve got error #1518) has been at it for an hour now with another hour or three to go. I’m terrified that it’s doing more damage than good.
• Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro – next up. (though it’ll be a bother to set up because it needs a working PC with a bad secondary drive to work from and I don’t have a SATA controller in the PC that’s still working)

If anyone could throw me some good juju right now, I’d appreciate it!

update: The influx of juju is having an effect! She’s booting up again! Woot! A 1 hr long Chkdsk did it. Right now, it won’t boot in Safe Mode but it will boot in normal mode. TIME FOR A BACKUP AND REINSTALL!

All this came about because I was trying to repartition my C: drive… It’s a 150 gig drive. With the 137 gigabyte limit, I had a 130 gig partition and an unallocated partition. I was trying to make two 75 gig partitions. Partition Magic burped on me during the resizing operation.

Once again, thank you, universe, for that extra bit of juju just when I needed it.

another update: This is just a side comment. 200 gigabytes sure takes a long time to move! While I watch the progress bar go from 18.001% to 18.002%, I’m contemplating how much information 200 gig is. Multiply it by 8 and you realize that my little desktop computer is moving 1.6 trillion pieces of data… trillion with a “T”. That’s 1.6*10¹² bits of data! Just for giggles, I should note that the data transfer has so far gone perfectly. That means the system is at least 99.999999999% accurate.

Ok, enough gee-whizzing for today. Back to it!
:-)

(see update below)
“24” jumped the shark in season 4 between 4 an 6 pm PST. Up until then, the scale of how things unfolded was large and seemless. The terrorists had comandeered 106 nuclear power plants with a remote override control. I had nightmarish visions, wondering feverishly if America’s nuclear power plant system could be so suseptable to a single directed attack.

And then…. Ta-da. only 6 plants were under attack. And then 1. Yes it’s sad that a nuclear plant had a meltdown but they averted a disaster that literally would have destroyed America and the people involved didn’t get so much as a wayward smile… instead, they instantly became worried about the next great threat… well, there weren’t any next great threats so they worried about other, much more petty things. At that moment, the walls of the set fell down for me. It stopped being real-ish and started resembling (just a little bit) like The A-Team with constant nonsensical action, snide remarks, pat cliches and cardboard acting.

The clincher was Jack’s phone number. In a recent episode, Jack gave somebody his cell phone number. It showed on-screen for a couple seconds, 310-597-3781. So of course I called it. How could I pass up an an Easter Egg like that?!

Hurumph! The message on the voicemail is:

[female vmail voice]The mailbox belonging to [man’s voice] Nextel phone for twenty-four [female vmail voice] is full. It cannot accept any more messages. Please try again later. Goodbye.

TVTome.com says that at one point, stagehands and such on the set of the show picked up the phone. That sounds tremendously cool… but now that the folks on the set have gotten bored of answering the hundreds of calls a day, they’ve just left the phone off with nothing fun for anyone else. At least have Mr. Sutherland or someone could leave a short message there.

update: After a bit of googling, I found several message threads talking about how they called and got through to people on the set. – – – – Ok…. I’ll admit it. That’s cool. There could have been better follow-through, but that was cool.

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I still watch, but now it’s just for the sake of completeness.

Update 5-5-05
Grr. Ok, maybe I spoke too soon. Maybe I’m weak willed, but I just watched 2am-3am and it was terrific, like really terrific.

Ok, so they had a lull, and the pace had a weird hiccup, and there was a slipup and how the plot flowed in one storyline for a moment. But darn it, that’s good TV!

I got a message from an aquaintance a few days ago.

The backstory: If I recall correctly, he and some friends used my website Guestbook for a couple weeks to have a rude conversation… the kind of conversation a bunch of rude high school freshmen would have on a message board. I tracked their IP addresses to the Roxbury Latin School in Boston and gave the school a call. I got a short “Thank you” note from them and heard no more.

After I got the message below, I googled him and found that he’s a senior and (I assume) graduating in about 1 1/2 months.

Here’s what he sent me on Saturday:

Hey lee. 5 years ago i posted an obscene message on your message board, and you felt the need to contact my school, roxbury latin and tell them about it. you got 15 kids suspended and i think you’re worthless.

I hope you realize how worthless you are and that you really have no real friends in your life. your website is even worse than it was 5 years ago. keep it up pal.

you’re worthless,
-[removed]

I responded today:

Own your failures as well as your successes. You’ll be 10 times the man you thought you could be.

All the best for graduation.
Look forward and look up!
Lee

I had always wondered what was on the other side of Stratton. I practically grew up skiing there… most every weekend in the winter for several years..

I knew that the Sun Bowl wasn’t completely on the opposite side of the mountain… but what was? Would Stratton ever expand out that way? Well, this picture says, “nope”.

You can just make out that the mountain doesn’t strictly have a back side. It doesn’t decend for 1/2 a mile, and then into the town of Stratton…. (original image)

Some people run on caffeine and nicotine.
I run on hope.

I’m registered at Clucas-moe.

I saw The Matrix Reloaded tonight on HBO. The last time I saw it, in the theater, I was sorely disappointed. I think I blogged that a long while ago but I’m too lazy to look it up.

“Hype” is such a strange animal. You see, this time around, I really liked the movie. The action was eye poppingly realistic (except for the multiple-Agent-Smith parts where it was terribly noticeably computer animated), the storyline worked for me. And the thing I most suprised myself with was that I actually was kind of digging “The Explainer”.

The first time through this movie… wooo-eeee, was I disappointed. But there were so many fairly subtle things I cought this time through. For one, after Neo gained is “The One” powers, I was initially really disappointed that the only super-power he had was flying. An ability he used very well to run away on a number of occasions. I even talked about this with others and they gruffly agreed. But now I noticed that he had supa-fly X-Ray vision, could pass his hands though solid objects (like Trinity), could reanimate someone (Trinity again), could stop a sword being swung at him full-force with the pinky edge of his open hand taking the full force and only bleeding a few drops, fly at about 4,000 miles per hour, fight 100 Agent Smiths at a time without bleeding, fend off an Agent Smith “copy” attack, destroy squids with the power of his mind (and I now kinda understand how that would be possible).

I did slow-motion through a couple fight scenes and they were total poetry. When fighting multiple opponents, each opponent was generally fighting full speed. Neo just fought faster. I say this because in many kung-fu movies, when the hero fights multiple opponents, the opponents are usually fighting poorly and taking a long time between strikes. Not so in The Matrix Reloaded. I’ve got to say that this is a great testament to Keanu Reeves, who was at the center of most of these tightly choreographed scenes.

Trinity riding her bike in the wrong direction on the highway… I did slow-mo through it and couldn’t tell how they did it. I mean, I know there is CGI in there, but it was totally seemless.

So forget your expectations, watch it again and enjoy it!

WBZ News
Century-old New York City subway gets a computerized facelift

“They’re going to be sending signals via radio waves,” said Councilman Lewis Fidler, a Democrat from Brooklyn. “I don’t want to find out that someone hacks into the system and makes a train disappear and another train rams into it.”

Such a scenario is unlikely, said Tom Sullivan, an independent transit consultant with Transportation Systems Design in Oakland, Calif., who helped design the L-line upgrade.

The data carried on radio waves are encrypted, so only an internal leak could compromise its security, he said. Though it’s possible to jam the radio signal, he said, that would only make the train stop.

So a bad person with a couple (or a couple hundred) $50 jamming radios in the right locations could completely paralyze the NYC subways system. Cool… err.. that’s awful! err… kew1.

I went I went to the East Coast Hobby Show in Fort Washington, PA looking to speak with manufacturers and remote control know-it-alls for a project. What a total frigging waste of time. The website and the advertising material blatantly lies about what kind of a show it is. It is billed as a “full line hobby show” but it is, in fact a train show.

Take a look at the photo of the poster I took (the odd vertical line in the photo is me merging two photos to get a good shot of the whole poster) Now don’t get me wrong, trains are well and good. But I came looking for… well, looking for what they said they had. Their sign says, “Over 200 of the largest manufacturers, distributors and publishers will be exhibiting.” Well, after I walked the entire show, I went to the info booth at the front and asked, “I was wondering if there are any manufacturer reps here like the sign says.”
The response, “There was one guy here yesterday.”
“Yeah, but yesterday was a dealers-only day.”
“Yeah, sorry.”

And it was a fine train show. There were hundreds of model train exhibitors, miles of track laid and thousands of 2″ tall trees and people and ity bity locomotives with fake smoke gleefully billowing out of them. There was a huge setup, taking up 100′ x 100′ with this amazing 9″ tall set (9″… is that HO scale? N? PG-13? I forget) with amazingly realistic Maersk and Sealand and double-decker containers just like I’ve seen rolling across the NJ Meadowlands. It was pretty cool…. except that it had NOTHING to do with what I was looking for. I drove a friggin hour and fourty-five minutes each way for nothin.

“R/C planes will be landing at the show” Ummm. where? The show is indoors. There was no space for indoor flight, no calendar of such events (no calendar at all, actually) and none of the 4 airplane exhibitors had anything that could fly.

Phoey.

Through all of this, a few good things still came to pass. While I was driving down there, a Computer Guy client of mine called me in need of help. I was happy to help, it let the time pass quicker. After a while, I told her where I was going and why. She came back with, “Oh really! My sister-in-law works with kids with C.P. They use all kinds of stuff like that. I’ll get you in touch with her!” Cool beans. There might have been a little kismet going on there..

After I realized the hobby show was a bust, I called PPG. She was in an art show called The Big Art Show in Asbury Park. Since I was “in the neighborhood” (a mere 1 1/4 hrs away) I decided to make a run for the coast! Also, my client was encouraging me to enjoy life a bit more :-). Well, the evening was quite a bit more fun than I thought it might be. I got to see PPG and Taco and Joe (who is also moving to the bay area soon) and meet some new nice folks. So there.

I am looking for a way to allow a cousin of mine to operate a toy remote controlled car. She is 14 years old, just about a straight ‘A’ student in a regular classroom, has cerebral palsy, is confined to a wheelchair, and has quite limited movement in her arms and fingers. Her name is Samantha.

Mostly what I’m looking for is a good interface for her to control a vehicle. So far, she has had only moderate success with the joystick for her electric wheelchair.

I’m hoping that using a remote controlled car will be enjoyable, let her be more mobile vicariously, help her master using her electric chair, and promote independence.

This doesn’t have to be an out-of-the-box solution. We’re willing to work on it and spend some money on it.

Many input devices could work. Possibilities I’ve thought of include:
– large, fairly hard to move joystick. (current RC joysticks require very fine motor control that she has trouble with)
– paddles on the upper arm
– something to squeeze as a potentiometer.

I don’t have the expertise to do this on my own. Do you know of anyone or any company that might be of assistance? I’ve been looking for help through RC car and airplane groups and haven’t come up with anything yet.

I just got back from the East Coast Hobby Show looking for controllers and remote systems. It was a total bust. Hurumph

Thanks