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“That was totally wicked!!!!!!!!” (Batman Begins Surprise)

John has been looking forward to seeing Batman Begins for a very long time, and planning on seeing it for his 17th birthday, which is today.

Doug and I first scared John into thinking he was in some serious trouble by calling him upstairs just before 11:00 p.m. last night. He was standing in front of Doug and I was off to the side. We made it seem that he’d done something wrong (but only for a minute, if it was that long).

What John did not know was that Doug had purchased the tickets for the midnight showing online and had the printout behind his back.

John looked very concerned, and after some dialog between us, Doug pulled the tickets out and John couldn’t believe that we were kidding.

Batman Begins was awesome! John and I went to see it together and I will have to say that it outdid the first two Batman movies. I can’t wait to go and see it again. I was planning on staying home with our kids so Doug could take a group of John’s friends to see it on Friday. Well, now I’m hoping to be there to see it with them. It’s too cool to pass up.

Ah, Batman Begins … another opening night showing. I can’t wait to see it again.

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All I Want Is a Half-Decent Sombrero!

Sadly, last summer, my $12 sombrero ranchero purchased in Mexico in 2003, was accidentally squashed during our return from vacation in Moultonborough, New Hampshire. (If one is a cowboy, rather than a farmer, that same hat might be called a somebrero vaquero.)

Six months later even I, with my less-than-excellent fashion sense, had to admit that it was time to retire the hat, so I’ve switched to a Kronos-issued, “100 Quarters of Revenue Growth,” baseball cap.

Although a cowboy hat is certainly unusual in New England, there is nothing better for keeping the rain, snow, and sun off of one’s head. I find I can weather the most severe rainstorm without a jacket with the proper headwear, and a ball cap just doesn’t cut it. I’m also a bit picky about what type of hat I get. I don’t want one that is so fancy or obviously expensive that it will label me as an outsider during my trips to Mexico.

I’ve toyed around with purchasing a new hat online. Long-distance co-worker Ricardo Castillo, who works for Kronos in Cleburne, Texas, referred me to Cavenders, which seems to have a reasonable selection. I spent an hour searching for similar sites online, and found only one or two sites that fit into the “reasonable” category. Most had a truly horrible selection. Only one had affordable prices. My biggest letdown is that none of them seemed to include the traditional Mexican four feathers in the brim. Still, I should be able to remedy this by sending my wife to a craft store. (The feathers consist of one each of green, yellow, and red, plus one smaller, spotted one. I assume the colors are linked to the Mexican flag, although its major colors are green, white, and red, in that order. It may be the yellow feather is used to better contrast against the typically off-white color of the hat, or that it is easier to dye a feather yellow than bleach one to white. Maybe yellow has better color retention. Life is full of small mysteries. I did find this link about cross-cultural palettes.)

Part of the problem might be the same reason most people would be hesitant to buy shoes online. The buyer wants a hat that he knows will fit well and look good, and there is no substitute for being able to try the item on and handle the materials. So, clothing—especially certain items—purchased online would probably have a very high returned item ratio, and could, I surmise, dramatically harm the profit margin.

So, imagine my delight when, while we were up in Manchester, New Hampshire, I spotted a store, El Cowboy Pasedo, with two huge Mexican flags in the windows. After our bus visitation work, Nichelle and I eagerly entered the store.

Inside was a variety of Mexican clothing, including some very attractive sombreros.

I found an excellent hat nearly right away, confirming at least the size I need, and asked what it cost. (Hover over the text for translations.)

“Dos ciento.”

“¿Docientos dolares?” I asked, incredulously.

The sales clerk went on to explain that some of the hats were only $150.

I explained that the hats were indeed very beautiful, but that I was accustomed to spending only about $12 in Mexico, but that these were of finer quality. I would easily spend $25 or $50 on one like this, but that $150 to $200 was simply unaffordable.

The search continues….

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IBM DeathStar / Down in the Dumps

I don’t usually write about my mood, but today I woke up feeling really down. Thankfully, I haven’t been sent into massive panic attacks over the issues described below. (One of the ironic points of living with an anxiety disorder and being a computer Geek is that a trigger point for my anxiety is problems with my own personal computer.) I am grateful that God convinced me to make a critical backup at just the right time, so everything important is intact and backed up.

It looks like I’m going to have to replace the old IBM drive on my primary computer. I noticed last night that it was an IBM DeskStar drive, which my friend Charlie Dunn said was so prone to failure they nicknamed them “DeathStars” when he was working in IT.

At first it looked like I had a problem with overheating—and that still may be the problem—although it seems to be getting worse. Last weekend Nichelle compalined that her e-mail was missing for a period of several months, but after rebooting the computer, everything was fine. I took the precaution of backing up our photos (most of which are already on CD as yet another backup), financials, and documents folders to a nonused partition on a drive I’d added in December.

A couple of days ago, I logged in to the computer and was notified that numerous updates were ready to be installed to Java and Windows XP. These updates had already been installed, and it was rather obvious what had happened—the primary drive, from which we have been booting for nearly all of the lifetime of the computer had disappeared, and the machine rebooted to an imperfect Windows setup on the second drive. (That setup was toasted, apparently, by a bad power supply, now replaced, that caused some data loss.)

Part of the time the IBM drive isn’t being recognized at all. After a certain amount of time—perhaps due to overheating, perhaps due to another type of drive failure, it won’t be recognized at all. Rebooting the system sometimes catches it and boots to the original drive, especially if the whole system has been off for a while. On a really hot day, or after a period of high disk activity, the drive will fail again and the system will reboot to the bad partition.

I’d like to try copying the image over to a new drive, using Ghost or whatever comes with the new drive (I’m leaning toward Seagate), as it would get me instantly up-and-running without having to reinstall. Of course, I do not have that much hope that the old drive will “hang in there” long enough for such a data-reading-intense operation to happen.

If that doesn’t work, I’m willing to bite the bullet and do a reinstall of XP Pro. However, there is a drive size limitation (I think it’s 120 GB) in the initial release of XP Pro (pre SP-1), which is what I have. Installing from an SP2 CD would be even sweeter, and less prone to failure than upgrading to SP2 from a previous version.

:: sigh ::

Editor’s note added June 13, 2005:

It looks like the drive is only flaking out when it overheats. I think it may fail soon, but letting it cool down with the machine off so far makes it recover. In the mean time, I’m keeping my data backed up daily, and when the drive does fail, I can boot to my “February” installation, and still run all my apps, so replacing the drive is now less urgent, and I can plan for this at my convenience.

Editor’s note added June 21, 2005:

No, it’s not necessarily related to overheating. Or, if it is, the drive is “overheating” at a temperature far below what its temperature sensor would indicate shoud be a problem.

Last night I was running at a reasonably cool 35 degrees C, when the whole things went kablooie. At first I had the usual trouble recognizing the drive. Then, when I finally got it to recognize, it was dog slow, and told me that Windows couldn’t boot because windows/system32/system was missing or corrupt. I had just finished backing up everyone’s e-mail, pictures, etc., except mine.

This morning, after leaving the system off overnight, I got the drive to be recognized by leaving it running for a few minutes, and everything seemed to be fine.

So heat may be playing a factor, but I think it’s time to just retire the drive.

I’m also looking at putting together a new system that would kick butt for as little as $500, but I also need to get this one back to a reliable state.

Editor’s note added June 27, 2005:

Wednesday night after church, I went out and grabbed a 120 GB Seagate Barricuda drive to replace the boot drive. On Wednesday, the IBM DeathStar drive seemed to fail completely, and I was looking at rebuilding my system.

On Thursday evening, I decided to give the IBM drive a few more tries, and got it to recognize at startup!

Hurriedly, I rebooted with the Seagate drive, hoping to be able to copy my IBM drive over to the Seagate drive, which would become the new boot drive, and save me from having to reinstall everything.

Seagate’s drive setup software is supposed to be easier to use than Western Digital’s. I actually didn”t find that to be the case. They both are about the same, but there were some nonintuitive points that I had to keep hitting the help file and documentation for. Once nice thing (which I did not need) is that Seagate lets you print installation instructions that are customized for what you’re actually doing.

It took hours for the drive to copy, mostly due to the read errors (all were being corrected, but it was having to perform each read multiple times) that SMART was reporting. Copying also appeared to be slow because of Seagate’s verification process, but getting an exact drive copy is far more important than getting a fast copy.

I only found three problems:

  1. Trying to access the System Restore tab crashed. It turned that is always caused by a drive copy process, and all I had to do to fix it was disable the System Restore service, then re-enable it.
  2. The next problem was a missing FrontPage icon (the link would work, but the icon itself was the default rectangle). It was looking for something under installs that clearly wasn’t around any more. I simply replaced the shortcuts with new ones.
  3. Lastly, the icons on my own logon are weird. Unless I run in 32-bit color mode, I get ugly 2d, 8-bit icons. It seems to happen only on my account. I find it disturbing, but it can’t be described as much more than a cosmetic issue. Some of the menu colors are off as well. Again, it’s no big deal, but it does bother me.

Other than that, the machine is working perfectly. My friend Phil Luchon came over and brough his machine. We played WarCraft and StarCraft. The Lego Star Wars game, which the kids play every moment we will allow (one hour on weekedays, 2 on weekends), which had been very prone to crashing and lockups, has not had a single failure in 3 days.

Everything involving disk access is much faster on the new drive: booting, loading big programs, virtual memory swapping, etc.

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Early Memories of Our Children

Isaac:

I found this note in our cellar, originally from May 13, 1993:

Today Isaac was talking about Andrew (my newphew/his cousin) and asking, “Is he three?” while holding out three fingers. I said, “No, he’s thirteen.” Isaac immediately asked, “Where’s the thirteen finger?”

Isaac has a host of interesting things we could write about. He surprised us at 18 months by identifying and naming the letters “O” and “A” on his alphabet blocks. Before he was 2, he could name every letter of the alphabet, and recite them in rapid fashion if one pointed to a word. (He was at least 4 before he mastered the alphabet song.)

We tried to raise Isaac to be “weapons-free.” (We were naive parents.) At age 2, he ate his toast into the shape of a gun, and said, “Look, a toast gun. Bang!” After that we realized that there were just things, like playing army, that are normal for a boy’s development. David now has a huge arsenal of toy guns and swords. Naomi enjoys playing with them as well.

July 2, 2005 (in reference to sometime in 1995): This was what life was like with a newborn.

  • This morning I knocked a book off my nighttable—Nichelle thought I dropped Isaac.
  • A couple of days ago I brought some work home to do on my computer—I fell asleep at the computer, and didn’t wake up until midnight. Then I had to work until 2:00 a.m.!
  • One night I fell asleep when I was feeding Isaac.
  • Nichelle always wakes up, and can’t remember that she put Isaac to bed. She panics momentarily because she can’t find him.

David:

When David was somewhere around 4, he believe the opposite of incorrect was outcorrect.

John:

We adopted John when he was 10 years old. One of the things we really miss is that early childhood history. His sister has given us a few old photos, but there’s nothing to substitute for a decade of missing information. (Even his medical records were woefully incomplete.)

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So, You Wanna See Star Wars in Digital?

There aren’t very many digital cinemas, nationwide. There were 83, if memory serves, when Star Wars Episode I opened. We were fortunate enough to live near one.

Try this digital cinema finder, from Texas Instruments, the folks who bring you DLP, to see if there is one near you.

DLP is, quite frankly, an amazing improvement over film. I have heard that there are some theaters with a newer DLP projector that has even higher resolution.

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I Told You I Had Other Children, Too!

Below are school pictures, taken a month or so ago, of David, Isaac, and John. The picture company, LifeTouch, has been to school twice this year. Given how nicely the photos came out, that was great, but we bought the smallest possible packages both times.

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Mi Hija Méxicana

I bought this dress for Naomi several months before she was born, on my most recent missions trip to México.