June 2010 Archives

Got in the office a bit late this morning (had to hit the bank) and found that the back half of the room with the scene laid out below.

This morning I even thought about wearing shorts but said to myself, "no, I'll be inside a cold office for 8 hours a day and only really have the opportunity to be outside for 1, there's no sense in freezing my legs all day for just not being too hot for that one lunch hour."

Oops.

Yea, so after 12+ hours of cursing screaming and cursing the name of Microsoft, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer... yea, as I was running out of the house this morning I remember that to try to get the SATA drives recognized by Spinrite I switched the SATA access mode from AHCI to IDE in the computer's BIOS, rebooted and voila, Windows boots up just fine. Ooops.

As an extra bonus, my Drobo seems to be talking to the world again just fine. I'll plug it directly into my Mac when I get home tonight to run a disk check on it again to be sure, but I think maybe just having it's bits twiddled by the various disk utility software got it back up and going properly.

Sometimes as I'm finding, the problem is just me....

So I spent all weekend running seagate and spinrite diagnostics on the drives in my Drobo, because it's been doing odd things (again) lately and I'm wondering if it's bi-polar "I have your files / no I don't / yes I do / no I certainly don't" nature is caused not by a failure in the Drobo firmware or a constantly corrupting partition table, but instead something more simple like a bad disk that the Drobo just hasn't detected.

So after running the 4-5 hour test on each disk (and then some) and finding nothing wrong, I finally figured maybe it's just me and I'll reformat it and re-partition it. So I put all the disks back in the box and boot it back up (irony alert: now everything is there just dandy). Then I put my desktop computer back together (it was needed to attach the disks to it to run the utilities) and boot it backup. It boots to the Windows logo, and reboots. Reboots to the Windows logo and reboots. Reboots to the.. well, you get the picture.

Luckily the second time it reboots it gives me the option to go into the repair console, which is where it is now, with a little progress bar going slowly and sadly back and forth across the screen "searching for problems".

I actually ran it once already and I got tired and thought maybe I'll just try rebooting it and nope, that didn't work. So I'm back here, hoping that I don't have to run a disk utility on my desktop machine, which, before being opened to run disk checks on other disks, was running absolutely fine.

Some days I really want to just toss all this stuff in the trash and start over.

Hopefully soon it'll come back and tell me that it's found something wrong, fixed it, and I can now reboot back to my computer again.

Two entries in a row? Madness. That was what I thought about watching two movies in a row, first Karate Kid and then the new A-Team movie.

This one is going to be even quicker though, no high fallutin' prattling on with them big reviewers words. Get your buddies, go out and have a pizza or burger and the local fast food joint, have a beer or two, then go see the movie.

That preview you've seen with the crazy stuff with the plane and the tank? It's all like that. Not the questionable CGI, but the pure unappolagetic fun of a crazy over the top movie that doesn't care about a thin plot or cardboard characters (even though the plot and characters are surprisingly good IMHO), but just wants you to sit down and hang on for a ride. The actors are good matches for their 80's TV originals, the plot is a combination of origin story and first adventure, and the shit blowing up is just fun. So go see it, you'll like it. Unless you're the sort of person who wants to go see Sex in the City 2, in that case you're probably not going to like this movie at all.

Well worth it, see it in the theatre for the full effect, two thumbs up.

Went to see the new "Karate Kid" movie last weekend. Some good points and some bad. The story, overall, is pretty much the same as the 1984 classic except it's a short black kid named after a rapper instead of a tall white kid, they move to China instead of California, he's taught by Jackie Chan instead of Mr. Miyagi, gets beat up by a gang of Chinese kids instead of white kids and he learns Kung-fu instead of Karate.

The mechanics of the plot are the same, predictably so... even the end fight is pretty much the same. Still, not bad all things considered. The biggest plus for this movie was it felt like a travel video for China. Sweeping landscapes, colorful people and places, beautiful scenery, etc, all made me really want to go there with about $10k in camera gear and no deadlines. Saying it's like a travel video isn't a bad thing, it was still a movie of course, but they seemed to pay special attention to the cinematography to show just how beautiful the country is.

Sadly the biggest letdown for me was the acting from Jaden Smith, it had a few cringe-worthy, or at least almost cringe-worthy parts, and he only mostly managed to pull it off (says the guy with no acting experience ever). It really felt like maybe his parents were both big stars and wanted to create a movie to be a vehicle for him to rocket to stardom.

My vote, not required for the big screen, but if you've got the time, hey, why not, it's not that bad. Better yet if you've seen the "real" Karate Kid movie so you can catch the homages to the original (or you might call them "this worked last time, may as well do it this time as well").