January 2005 Archives

This year for Christmas my sister and her husband got us a great gift - a membership in a very cool club:

We laughed pretty hard when we got the introductory packet in the mail. Last week we got our first package of bacon - it's from the New Braunfels Smokehouse in south Texas. The Comal County Smoked and Peppered bacon is quite nice.

If you want to set yourself up with a membership, check it out here.

There aren't many bands that can draw me to a big arena show any more.

U2 is one of them. As I type I am hoping to get through Ticketmaster's TCP/IP ticket barricade to pick up a pair of tickets for Katy and me. I'm not hopeful. Ticketmaster's web site has telling me "Your wait time is approximately 15 minutes or more" for some time now. Tickets have now been on sale for 30 minutes, and I used up an awful lot of my U2 ticket karma on the 1992 Zooropa tour.

When they did phone sales only for the Sports Arena shows, I got through in the first five minutes and scored 16th row seats. (That concert was like a religious experience, I'm telling you.) When they came back through town and played Dodger Stadium on Halloween, I called two days before the show and picked up a pair of loge tickets that had been returned to the hopper for one reason or another.

I was going to make some observations about buying concert tickets in the pre-internet era, but I decided that was just going to make me sound old and crotchety. Does anybody camp out overnight for tickets anymore?

(This entry is rated Blog-MA for strong language - sorry Mom, had to do it.)

As you have undoubtedly heard, there was a major train accident in Los Angeles this week. The accident involved two Metrolink commuter trains. I ride Metrolink to work three or four days a week and can only imagine what the experience was like for the people on those trains.

Metrolink has scrambled to maintain some semblance of service on the affected lines. For the last couple days they have been bussing people around the crash scene to the station where I normally board to go home.

This evening my train sat in the station and waited thirty to forty-five minutes for these shuttle buses. While I waited I was treated to one side of a conversation with Metrolink customer service. These quotes will give you a sense of the caller's point of view:

"Why are they holding my train at the station?"

"It doesn't take 30 minutes to get from Glendale to Burbank on a bus."

"I missed the last train and this one is just sitting here."

"What are you going to do about it?"

What a fucking moron. Eleven people died this week on these trains. Eleven people. Unlike Mr. F. Moron with his cell phone and his limited awareness, they aren't coming home a little late - they're coming home in a pine box. Is it killing you to sit and wait for a little bit? Is your time so much more valuable than all the people coming in from the other station? Are you so shallow that the thought of spending a few quiet minutes with yourself fills you with dread?

(For those of you who don't like rhetorical questions, the answers are Apparently, You May Think So But You're Wrong, and Sure Looks That Way To Me.)

I didn't feel one bit bad when he stood up quickly and hit his head - hard - on the bulkhead.

Of course, there's a fourth option - "Insert credit card."

Turns out my data loss story has a happy ending. I will tell this story two ways:

Non technical -

I found a company online - BinaryBiz - that claimed they could remotely recover my drive. If they could it would cost $295, if they couldn't it was free. I tried it. It worked. Hurrah!

Technical -

The Maxtor DiamondPlus 8 series of drives is a line Maxtor inherited when they bought Quantum. Quantum did not make good drives. The drive I have is apparently legendary for it's platter problems.

Part of the firmware for these drives is stored in the external control electronics and part is written to the platters. The section of the firmware stored on the platter on my drive got corrupted and voila! the drive disappeared.

After two days of noodling around online looking for information and DIY firmware refreshing tips, I stumbled across BinaryBiz's website. I figured there was no downside to giving them a try and signed up. The next day they recovered my drive. Hurrah!

So, for $295 I got my data back and a fairly expensive lesson in How Much Not Backing Up Your Data Will Cost.

Yeah, right.

I recently bought myself a DVD burner. One of the main reasons I bought it was to do backups. I have been wrestling with the drive and the new software for the last couple weeks or so and today I seemed to be well on my way to burning my first DVDs.

I seemed to be, yessir. You betcha.

Right up until about 1 this afternoon, when I checked to see if it was finished. I noticed the computer was rebooting, which seemed strange. Then I noticed an ugly error message on the screen.

Sometime during the burn of my first DVD, my primary hard drive decided to quit. Oh, it spins up - I can feel the vibrations of the motor - but my BIOS does not identify it properly, and it won't boot. Adding insult to injury, a little web research shows that the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 series of drives is not the most robust data storage platform.

Crap. Forget simple backups, what I need now is a recommendation for a data recovery service.

I got some interesting email the other day.

It was a request for submissions from The Window Channel. Rather than try to explain it I will just quote the email:

The Window Channel(tm) (TWC) is a video image company specializing in long-play, native HD/HDV ambient, scenic footage. Each video 'window' is at least five minutes in length and captured from a locked-off camera position. The videos also contain the naturally occurring ambient sound, recorded in stereo, from the location.

They will pay $300 for native 1080i/60* HD footage and $150 for native 1080i/60 HDV footage. If I had such a camera I'd be out printing money er I mean shooting five minute segments right now.

*1080i/60 = 1080 picture lines, interlaced, 60 frames per second. For comparison, standard US televisions display 480 lines of picture, interlaced, at 29.97 frames per second.

Over the holidays we went down to Cameron's favorite theme park:

Legoland, of course. We had a great time - as it turns out, it was one of the few dry days we've had since Christmas.

My favorite moment of the day came as Cameron raced around Miniland USA, where you can see several regions of the United States recreated with Lego bricks. He turned to me with a huge smile and said, in one excited breath, "Dad - What if this were all one set and it was five and up and you said I could have it!"

It would be cool. Got to admit that.

Anyway, they had added a few holiday touches to Miniland. Here's the Secret Service greeting Santa after he landed on the White House roof:

(It wasn't clear whether Santa was delivering coal or gifts.)

Last summer the kids and I built a mini-catapult.

After we put it together I started thinking about building a small trebuchet. I decided that if we were going to make medieval siege engines, we should build one that could throw more than a 1" cube of wet sponge 5 feet.

It took me a while to get it all put together, but we finally did some test fires last month. I present this short video of our results:

Suburban Trebuchet (3.6 MB Windows Media movie)

(It needs a little work.)