Sundries

There have been enough random occurrences and serendipitous discoveries of interesting odds and ends in my life to constitute sufficient content for a blog entry. So here goes!

Computer Problems

A few days ago, I had a bad computer day. After getting home from work last Friday, I started going through my usual checklist of post-work items, including turning on my desktop computer. I went back to my bedroom to change, opened up the shades around my place, and went through the mail. About 15 minutes later, I came back to my computer and noticed that the monitor was still blank. Perplexed, I checked the power button to see if it was illuminated, which it was. And yet, nothing was happening. Very odd. I restarted the computer. Nothing. I did it again. Again, nothing. At this point, I started to get a bit annoyed. I checked the cords in the back. Nothing out of the ordinary. I cycled the computer again. This time, the progress bar on the BIOS screen loaded about half way, and then froze. Now I was getting worried. I tried opening up the DVD drive, which worked well enough. What the hell was causing this? I must’ve cycled at least three more times, all to no avail. So, by now I’m pretty pissed, and wishing I backed up my hard drive more frequently. But, there was still one thing left to try. I grabbed a screwdriver, unscrewed the side panel on my computer, and proceeded to, again, check power cords to make sure everything was securely fastened. After that, I tried one last time – and it worked. So, I guess that means, somehow, something had worked itself lose? You’ll often see instruction and troubleshooting manuals telling folks to make sure that all the connections are secure and what not, but this was the first time I actually experienced (apparently) a lose cord. I never did narrow it down to the specific cord that was causing the problem, but I’m guessing the SATA cord connecting my hard drive to the motherboard worked itself lose somehow. In any event, I fixed it, I’m very proud to say! This can be a lesson to folks who are afraid to rummage around inside their computers; it’s really not that big a deal, and it apparently can solve problems!

Alas, that was not to be the end of my computer troubles for the day. Later that evening, I went to use my laptop. After Windows loaded, the hard drive apparently decided to stop working and turned off, causing my laptop to freeze. Okay. I cycled the laptop and it seemed to be working. However, a few minutes later, the hard drive again shut off, but this time, it sounded like the read/write head stopped, um, doing its thing, while the platters continued to spin, causing a very… interesting (and frankly disturbing) sound. Again, I was forced to cycle the laptop, but now, as a result of all these fun and games, Windows XP will no longer load. It starts loading, but at some point hits a snag, and then simply reboots, over, and over, and over again. So, it’s in an endless cycle now. Great. I hate endless cycles. “There is the theory of the moebius . . . where time becomes a loop.”

Of course, having not learned my lesson from my recent desktop fiasco, I hadn’t backed anything up recently, and I was forced to buy an IDE adapter for the hard drive in my laptop that will enable me to hook it up to my desktop so that I can hopefully pull the files off of it. I’m not quite sure if the hard drive itself is completely dead or if it’s just the boot sector and operating system files, but I’ve had many a hard drive crash in the past where the hard drive made all sorts of strange noises, but I was nevertheless able to pull my files off. I’m keeping my fingers crossed! (And yes, I’ve since backed up the crucial files on my desktop computer… third time’s the charm).

The silver lining here is that I finally have a good reason to buy a new laptop. Generally, my philosophy on new purchases like this is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” so I guess this means I finally get to give in to the upgrade bug. I’m 99% certain I’ll be purchasing the Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T, which is Acer’s new glorious ultraportable, long-battery life notebook line. Apparently, this laptop delivers 8+ hours of batter time (which has happily been independently verified) which is a huge selling point for me, because I have been putting up with dreadful battery life (1 hour!) on my current laptop for 5 years now. This Acer also looks incredibly awesome because it’s basically the same weight and dimensions as my current laptop (very thin and light) and comes with an internal optical drive. So, basically, it’s everything that I’ve been looking for in a laptop – and it’s only $899 to boot!

New Music

Lately, I’ve been finding that I have a developing taste for trailer music. You know, the really cool, always epic sounding, incredibly moving and emotional music you hear when you’re watching a move trailer. I’m still getting the low down on this genre, but apparently it looks like there are just a handful of groups that compose and offer exclusively this type of music to music supervisors or editors and do not generally make their works available commercially. There are some exceptions though, notably Immediate Music which has released at least one commercial album (under the name “The Immediate”) and licensed the songs on that album to groups that do things like add vocals to them and the such. Another “group” whose music tends to get picked up a lot by TV/Film soundtracks is ES Posthumus. SoundtrackNet is a good resource for folks who are intrigued by the music they heard during a trailer and want to learn its source.

The reason I’m mentioning this is that I was completely blown away by the music from the third Star Trek trailer and just today discovered that it was by one of these TV/Film/Trailer soundtrack groups. If you haven’t heard it, you should give it a spin, it’ll knock your socks off. As you’ll see if you click on the link, the Star Trek trailer music was done by a “group” called Two Steps From Hell, which has quite a few CDs with some pretty amazing songs (none of which are commercialy available, sadly). Anyway, for more info, including a link to what appears to be a blog post by the geniuses from TSFH themselves, check out this link.

Of course, no new music entry would be complete without the obligatory sample! Here’s an incredibly moving sample of “Orchard of Mines” by Globus, which is also Immediate Music’s “Serenata Immortale” but with vocals. For a full version, with video, of this song, just visit Globus’s website… which kind of makes my posting a sample of the song on my blog pointless… but whatever.

I’m still a geek

Remember a while back I declared I was going to switch my default search engine in Firefox to Microsoft Live? Well, with the launch of Bing, I’m giving Microsoft another shot to woo me. It’s hard to shake that feeling that a search on Bing may not be giving me as good results as I’d get on Google, but, change is good. We’ll see if it can hold my interest. I do like that it gives you less search results rather than 12+ pages like Google does. Makes me feel as though the results I’m seeing really are the best ones. Here’s hoping for competition in internet search!

But that’s not all. I also recently discovered Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine.” Basically, it’s a search engine that answers factual queries you give it. So, for example, you could type “sunset Tahiti July 3 1922″ to see when the sun set in Tahiti on July 3 1922 (7:34pm Pacific!) or “Star Trek The Motion Picture gross” to see TMP’s total box office revenue. It’s pretty impressive, and fun to type in random queries to see the nuggets of knowledge it can spit back at you. Of course, as its name implies, it’s only in the Alpha stage, so we can probably expect a lot more from Wolfram Alpha in the coming months.

Finally, I’ll finish on some neato Google stuff (which feels kind of anticlimactic and.. almost lame, but oh well). I was able to make Gmail a lot cooler by adding labels and filters to my messages. Google, you see, is apparently quite opposed to folders (you can’t even create folders and sub albums in Picasa web albums) and thinks it’s much more efficient and better for people to use labels, tags, and other sorts of meta data to sort and organize data, rather than through a more traditional folder/hierarchical structure. I’m sure this sentiment is related to their anti-Microsoft mantra, but they may be on to something. However, it’s completely the opposite of how I’ve been organizing on Windows for decades, so it’s a little difficult to get used to. Nonetheless, I’m giving it a shot, and I’ll admit my inbox is feeling a little more organized — or at least, I have a better sense of how and where to access certain messages. Another nifty thing I’ve been exploring in Google is multiple inboxes, which you can access in the Labs tab under settings. Multiple inboxes is actually somewhat of a misleading name. Basically, it allows you to display multiple search results in your inbox. For example, you could, as I am currently doing, configure multiple inboxes to display your sent mail folder and starred messages to the right of your inbox. The sky’s the limit with this – you just have to input the search in the settings tab. It’s pretty convenient, and I like being able to see my inbox and sent mail folders at the same time. I think there is a way to truly display multiple inboxes (i.e., inboxes from different e-mail accounts) but I think this requires a separate add-on.

Finally, there’s Google Wave, which I just learned about today. I’m intrigued, although letting people see you editing an e-mail message in real time seems a bit intrusive, don’t you think?

That’s all, folks!