Doug's Sounding Board

The past weekend was great! Nicole came back from the UK Thursday night and the Friday day we drove to LA for a family reunion on my dad’s side. Nicole held up amazingly well despite the jet lag. Our family met at the Laguna Sawdust Art Festival and wandered before going to the main Laguna Arts Festival and finally going to dinner. Everyone involved wants to try and meet more regularly so I look forward to seeing them all again soon.

The downside of the trip is that it wore Nicole out and now she has a cold.

The Illusionist – I loved the uncertainty it generated throughout the movie about what was real and what was illusion. Plus you generally can’t go wrong with Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti and I think it’s the first movie Jessica Biel is good.

Happy Gilmore – It’s been awhile since I’ve seen it but it’s still great. Also I think the deleted scenes from when his grandma’s house is being packed up should have been left in.

The Shaolin Drunken Monk (Shao Lin zui ba quan) – This film is capitalizing on Gordon Liu’s popularity from Master Killer/36th Chamber. The action is good, the drunken training is good, the voice overs are so bad they’re good.

The Bourne Ultimatum – The first movie was great, the second movie was fun but didn’t really have direction, this one was back to the feeling of the first one. It mirrored the first one in the action and look, had good suspense, good action, and was a good wrap to the series. I’d even see this one a few more times.

Poison Ivy: The New Seduction – Another movie where the third was better than the second. Not to say it wasn’t rediculous, but it’s entertaining similar to how the first one was.

Bandidas – Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz wanted to make a western/comedy and this is what came out. It’s a fun movie!

The Legend of Zorro – The string of good sequels ends here. Not that it was a horrible movie, just missing some things to make it flow together and when you see the deleted scenes you’ll see why. This is the first movie I’ve seen where I think all the deleted scenes should have been included. It’s clear that they were cutting to get the time down, but when you’re already at 130 minutes those extra bits don’t make much of a difference and the resulting movie would have been MUCH better. The only scenes not cut for time were the original beginning and ending. The studio cut those because they wanted to option for more sequels with the same stars, but seeing how long this one took to make that clearly isn’t going to happen. The framing from the original beginning and end would have improved the movie as well.

Stomp the Yard – I like movies about breakdancing and this is kind of one so I had to see it. Fairly predictable plot to hold the dance/stomp stuff; the dancing isn’t as good as You Got Served, but the acting is oscar-worthy by comparison.

Curse of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia) – Another awesome movie from Yimou Zhang! The sets are amazing, the colors are amazing, the cleavage is costumes are amazing! Really though, you can’t go wrong with Yimou Zhang directing Gong Li and Chow Yun Fat in a period piece.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – I hadn’t seen any Russ Meyers movies so I decided it was time to change that with three well known ones. The dialogue is awesome, the acting and action is laughable but it doesn’t matter. Generally low budget movies like this don’t look this good. I thought the guy who played the old man was great. Thumbs up.

Motor Psycho – Again, great dialogue and look and with better acting this time. Unfortunately even though it was only 75 minutes it started to drag towards the end

Supervixens – This one is in color and I think I liked Russ Meyers’ look in black and white better. This movie has more comedy in it and by the end it gets pretty strange. I thought the barn sex scene was really funny. After these three movies I have a good idea what to expect from his movies:

• Women with large breasts (but I knew that going in)
• Car chases and/or long shots of driving
• Fight scenes
• Maybe a rattlesnake bite/suck out the poison scene
• Lots of fight/death scenes
• Sex scenes
• People being blown up

This morning after I walked the dogs but before I went to work I saw the wasp again. It was trapped between the window and the screen actively looking for a way out and that’s where it’s going to stay for now. When I went home at lunch to let the dogs out it was still there but barely moving. Hopefully it will be done tomorrow so I can finally get rid of it.

Yesterday morning I was in the kitchen when I saw something flying with the corner of my eye. I turned to look and saw a black wasp making a course straight for my head. Recalling recent tales of swollen ears from wasp-in-hair action I dodged and ran out of the kitchen. It went back up to the skylight and I could see it from a distance that it was a paper wasp. I decided to give it time to find its way back outside the same way it got in. Two hours later I couldn’t see it any longer and a few trips through the kitchen were ok, but then I paused to pick up something and I turned to see it coming for me again. This time I knocked some things off the counter in my hurry to get away. A few hours later the wasp was still there and I was starting to get hungry so I went to the store and founds some non-poison flying insect killer (mostly mint with a touch of sodium lauryl sulfate) and the claims of “kills in seconds” was promising.

Once home I verified the wasp was still there and then I just had to wait for the wasp to get within reach. I wasn’t about to get on a step stool since I figured I might seriously hurt myself in an escape attempt. I had to wait for it to crawl down to spray it, and then a second time, and then a third time, and then a fourth time. Kills in seconds is true when it’s about 1000 seconds. I was just outside the kitchen waiting when I heard it fall to the floor. I looked just in time to see it right itself and fly into the kitchen window where I lost sight of it.

I looked carefully in case it was just pissed off and waiting to strike, but I saw no evidence of a wasp. While I waited I munched on the snack food I bought when I got the bug spray so I wouldn’t be subject to another sneak attack in the kitchen. A couple hours later and I looked more thoroughly and still no sign of the wasp. My best theory is that it crawled under the window in the track but moving the windows hasn’t turned up a body yet. I’m satsfied I won’t be troubled by that wasp again.

When Nicole left I figured I would spend a day or two replacing the 7thsign hard drive using Nicole’s computer as the host for the two laptop drives. Her machine was too unstable for that so instead of upgrading her machine to be more efficient and quiet after the drive swap, I had to do it first. Then I had to figure out how to make the devices that aren’t there by default because it’s a parallel ATA drive on a serial ATA connection. The hard drive was copied without too much trouble though I forgot some that had me doing a second pass today.

Anyway, Nicole’s machine now has an energy efficient power supply and an AMD64 processor that tops out at 45W. With it slowing down when not in use, it actually spends most of its time using around 15W. Tomorrow I need to recycle all these boxes, donate the working old parts and take the rest to e-waste recycling.

During the past few months, when writing, I’ve had an urge to use a semi-colon. I resist and tell myself that it really doesn’t know what it wants and restructure things so that no semi-colon is possible. I don’t know where the urge comes from. I’ve read the rules on when they should be used but still I get filled with doubt when presented with the option. I stop and appreciate semi-colons in sentences written by people who know how to handle them. Today I gave in to the semi-colon, doubt and all, and there was no complaint on the receiving end. The urge rose up twice more but how much could I push my luck? Not yet being able to make peace with the semi-colon I had to go back down the road of rejection. Those of you who are semi-colon masters, how do you do it? Help me come to terms with this marginalized punctuation.

At least with regards to keeping current on technology. Before my computer died forcing me to upgrade now, I was planning on an upgrade next year which would have been a 7-year life-span. A few months ago I replaced my video card from 1998, which still worked well, so I could have two monitors. My cell phone is from 1998. My stereo receiver is from 1992 and needs replacing since the right channel isn’t working anymore. My laser printer is from 1994. My dvd player was from 1998, but it was replaced a few weeks ago with one that can play multiple formats including from USB devices. Without the USB feature I think I would have kept it awhile longer.

Hey, anyone want a Panasonic A310 dvd player? It still plays any non-recordable media I throw at it. It has a slightly chewed, but working, remote and still has the manual.

I was out for a week and a half and I feel like a feel red-neck with the old motherboard and power supply sitting out in the front yard, but I’m back! The hard drive getting corrupted wasn’t the problem, just a symptom of a failing motherboard. I pulled off the power connector from the motherboard in an attempt to try another power supply but instead I found four burnt out pins and a small bit of melted plastic. That explained the not-quite burning plastic/not-quite ozone smell I was getting for the few minutes my computer would stay on.

I found on some random hardware message board with messages from a few years ago discussing motherboards with similar failures. They were from about when I got mine (6 years ago) and the failure apparently was drawing too much current from the power supply, making sure to take the pwoer supply with it.

I was planning to do the computer upgrade next year and wasn’t really prepared for this, but I kept in mind my goals for the new machine: to be quiet, to be energy efficient, to be relatively inexpensive, and to be upgradable. I picked up a low-end motherboard sporting AMD’s most recent CPU socket since they change sockets less often than Intel and upcoming processors will be backwards compatible. The CPU is an AMD X2 4600; I’m coming from a dual AMD 1900 world so the speed bump isn’t as huge as it might be coming from a single processor, but the tripling of the RAM speed makes the difference quite noticable. An extra bonus, my old CPUs were about 70-75W each, but the new dual core processor is just 65W by itself and it can be clocked more slowly when not in heavy use for even more power savings. The motherboard has pretty much everything built into it so I have no extra cards installed right now which also helps with cooling and air-flow though if I can’t get the on-board graphics to start driving two monitors I may have to resort to buying a video card.

The RAM was a good brand and on sale so I picked up 4GB. The only thing that kept the previous set of hardware from feeling old and slow after 6 years was the 3GB of RAM in it so I knew I didn’t want less than that.

I wanted to keep my hard drives since they have plenty of life in them. The only problem is that modern motherboards are all Serial ATA and I have old-school drive interfaces. So I picked up some adapters for them that I had only heard would exist when Serial ATA came on the scene. Despite seeming a little sketchy with not even a sheet showing what to hook up and just being a bare circuit board they work perfectly!

The new power supply is an Antec NEO HE (high efficiency) power supply. It’s definitely the heaviest PC power supply I’ve used. It is part of the new wave of pwoer supplies that is about 20% more energy efficient, which means it hovers around 80% efficiency. It controls its fan based on temperature, but with not enough noise that I can hear so far. Another nice feature is that you only plug in the cables you will be using in the system so there is no need to find a place to stash all those loose ends; yet another bonus for air flow!

The result? Something much faster, much quieter, much more energy efficient, and hopefully a platform that will last awhile. Oh yeah, a most of the components are RoHS compliant which means they don’t have the usual nasty stuff used for building electronics.

The final Price is Right with Bob Barker – I hadn’t watched the show in years and I mostly watched it as a kid. It was fun seeing this. The excitement of everyone on the show was awesome and a number of cars were won. The value of the final showcase was about $90,000!

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – I thought this was a good ending to the series, while touching on corporate influence on government and focusing on how corporations try to stomp on the rights of individuals. The final battle is also something I hadn’t seen before.

Night at the Museum – I thought this was going to be fairly light, but it ended up being solid fun all the way through. Dick van Dyke is over 80 and he can still dance!

Knocked Up – This movie had a lot more depth than I was expecting, and it was a lot longer than I was expecting from a comedy. It’s at its best when it’s playing for pure comedy or for the serious moments, when it can’t decide which one to choose it seems to be at its weakest.

Idiocracy – Have you ever feared for the future of society when you look at all the dumb-asses out there? This movie shows you a potential path things might take. I have to recommend this to everyone. It’s funny too, which sometimes makes you wonder if you’re one of the dumb-asses.

Transformers – Who doesn’t like giant robots?!

Anastasia – We watched this again just to make sure everything was hooked up again in the tv-room. It’s still has good songs, is well animated, has good voice talent, and is a good story.

Rocky Balboa – The finale to the Rocky series and it’s right up there with the first one. It gives a good feeling of his loneliness in his search and has been popping into my head in the days since I’ve watched it. If you liked the Rocky movies, or even just the first one, see this.

The Painted Veil – A relationship in the midst of a cholera epidemic. It starts in a broken place and the changes are smooth and subtle. It doesn’t seem like things have changed until you think back to where they were and that makes this one worth watching.

Thursday night I was playing chess with Peter when I heard a clunk-clunk from the hard drive. Then my computer was frozen. I copied down the state of the chess board and tried rebooting which the computer informed me was impossible becasuee it was an unmountable drive.

I tried booting into the Window recovery console, but that told me that I had no hard drives in my system. I figured I was going to be buying and installing another hard drive. I tried different controllers, and different cables to see if that would help but no change.

Finally I was resolved to trying to salvage data and get a new hard drive so I plugged it in as a slave on Nicole’s computer. That managed to boot after trying chkdsk and failing with something like: Unspecified disk error. That’s good for confidence building. I set it for the thorough fixing and had it reboot into that and after about an hour it repaired the file system! I lost all my bookmarks, but I had a recent enough copy that I was able to restore. Yay!