the clueless american

This week I'm in Alaska for work, and I've been visiting all of the popular restaurants in town including Humpy's and The Moose's Tooth. Yesterday my buddy MS took me to the Bear Tooth Theatrepub. It's a movie theater run by the Moose's Tooth owners. In addition to standard movie fare, they have a full kitchen with sandwiches, appetizers and the famous Moose's Tooth Pizza. Inside every other row of seats has been replaced by tables. There's also a bar inside the downstairs area, while unaccompanied minors are restricted to the alcohol-free balcony.

Yesterday we saw 10,000 BC there. It wasn't that great, but how can you beat a movie with a delicious pizza and locally-produced draft beer in front of you? I definitely should see about opening one of these at home!

Did you know that you can buy silence for $0.89? Check out this album where Amazon helpfully offers to sell you all 60 silent, 4-second tracks from Lady Jane Grey's self-titled album for $0.89 a piece! That's 53.40 for 4 minutes of silence!

I've always thought myself fairly knowledgeable on computers, but I'm starting to feel a little behind the times. It all started when I finally got around to unpacking my Windows box from Turkey and trying to set it up. What I initially thought was a little ding to the case turned out to be that the whole front of the case was smashed in.

I decided to buy a replacement case since it seemed the case was not salvageable. The first case I ordered from Newegg arrived with the front panel completely sheared off. There were six little cylinders on the front panel that were supposed to snap in the metal part of the case, and they were all rolling around the inside of the case, having been neatly sheared off in transit. I asked Newegg if they'd just ship me a new front panel like they did the last time this happened, and after a few days they agreed. Much to my chagrin, the new panel arrived without any of the 6 posts that were supposed to connect it to the case. In other words, it was broken exactly like the one I already had. I got frustrated and completely returned the broken item to Newegg--on their dime much to Newegg's credit.

After a 2-week pause where I was alternately too sick or working too much to work on the computer, I ordered another, sturdier-looking case from Newegg. The case arrived, but again due to work it was over a week before I had a chance to work on it. Now, to back up a second, when I discovered the damaged case I powered up the computer long enough to see that it did in fact work properly and the hard drives seemed ok.

Jump back to the present, or at least a few days ago. I had some time to work on the box, so I carefully disassembled the old case, unplugging and unscrewing everything as I went along. I then carefully installed everything into the new case. I was impressed by some of its features but won't get into a review here. About 6 hours after I started, I fired up the computer for the first time and got...nothing. Turns out I forgot the video card had a power plugin. I fixed that and started again. The CD/DVD lights came on like a normal boot and then the computer just started clicking. The LED on the network card was blinking in time to the clicking and the power seemed to be dimming slightly with each click. No POST, nothing on the video...

After much searching on the net, I decided my motherboard must be fried. I need a new one anyway because after I installed everything the CPU heatsink fell off because the plastic holding it on had also been damaged and gave way after I closed the case up. Not my day, you know?

So, I started looking for a new motherboard. After a fair amount of searching I've determined that Socket 478 mobo's are all but gone. In addition, AGP video cards are likewise toast. Finding a board with both is near impossible. Fine, I said, I'll upgrade the mobo, processor and video card; been wanting to upgrade that old P4 3.0GHZ anyway. Guess what? The first 10 or so boards I checked out have only one IDE connector for my 4 drives!!! Now I'm willing to upgrade my mobo because it's broken anyway, the cpu because I must and the video card likewise, but I am not upgrading to SATA hard drives when my IDE ones are working just fine for me!

So now I'm stuck looking through each type of board because for some reason IDE (PATA) isn't a search option on every motherboard page. I need to find a reasonably priced board that will work with everything I own except the processor and video card, and then I need to find those two items that will work with my board. I don't want to spend too much but don't want to fall too behind either. I don't really feel like going through every spec of the board and learning what the new terms mean, but I'm going to have to if I don't want to "upgrade" to a completely new system. Yikes!

Even after reading some bad things about it, we decided to give Lady in the Water a try tonight. I don't know what kind of crack M. Night Shyamalan was smoking when he wrote, directed, produced and once again made himself a central character in this film. Here's the secret revealed at the end of this movie: you just wasted almost 2 hours of your life! If Bob Balaban had lived through the whole movie, I'm sure he would have kept reading his lines to the audience to tell you what a bad film you just watched. Yuk!

So congrats if you have a good enough education to understand the blog :-)

Not that I expect too many people read this blog, but I finally fixed the error that has been keeping me from posting to my blog for over 2 months. In case this winds up on someone's Google query and can be of help, I was getting the dreaded 'Statement has no result columns to bind' error that was preventing me from using my site. After much trial and error I came across a site recommending that I clean up the MySQL tables. I went to http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/05/31/how-to-quickie-repair-mysql-tables-in-phpmyadmin/ for tips on how to fix my tables using phpmyadmin. In my case repairing the tables with overhead didn't help but I noticed my mt.log and tbping tables reported "in use" and the associated MYI files were dated Oct 18th where everything else was Dec 19th. I repaired those two tables and so far everything seems to be working again. Yee-haw!

I've been given the go-ahead to get a new laptop, partially because the house is under contract and hopefully will belong to someone else by the end of the month (yay!) and partially because my new job will likely keep me away from home a lot.

I've always said that if I get a job with a lot of deploying then I needed to get a new laptop with all the built-in goodness my 7-year-old model does not possess. After over a year of e's iMac, I was set on a MacBook Pro and nearly bought one when we saw it on the shelf in Germany. Just when I was working up the nerve to spend that much $, I realized that if it were to be my travel computer I'd need to be able to do work on it and that means I'd need to use my CAC to check email and PureEdge viewer to fill out the various gov't forms we use.

I was bummed for a while. I know there are solutions to run Windows on Mac, but the whole point is that I didn't want to run Windows. Still, I was resigned to getting a Windows laptop--got pretty close to laying out the cash for a Sony VAIO VGN-FZ180E/B--when I decided to do some more searching.

It turns out I'm not the only federal employee who'd like to use another operating system. It didn't take too much looking around to find "CAC on a Mac," a technical paper written for the Naval Postgraduate School which describes how to get the Common Access Card certificate working on a Mac. I'd previously used the article to flash the gov't card reader, allowing it to work under Mac and Linux.

I still needed an IMT solution, and the fact that e really wanted Windows for her two favorite traveling programs, AutoCAD and PhotoShop, wasn't making life easier. Then last night when I was ready to give in I found out that the gov't saved the day again. It seems there are a lot of government researchers who use other operating systems. When the grant application program went to the same PureEdge system used by the AF there was a mutiny because the researchers didn't want to buy new computers just to be able to fill out some forms. The government used its no doubt considerable leverage over IBM and convinced them to do what PureEdge had always refused to consider: develop an IMT viewer for the Mac. You can download it, appropriately enough, from grant.gov here. I'm hoping it's only a matter of time before someone ports the viewer to Linux. I'd really love a completely open-source laptop but I think that's not in the cards for me this time. Now, off to the Apple Store! Too bad they don't ship to APO addresses :-( Guess I'll have to wait until I'm up in Germany again or until we get back to the US.