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!

To me, Tya is a fusion of Enigma and Deep Forest. It combines Enigma’s mysterious and melodic quality with Deep Forest’s worldly tones, with very interesting results. I’ve actually only downloaded a couple of his songs–Akwaba and A Place to Rest, both from his album Akwaba –but am seriously considering others. This is definitely consistent with my rather non-mainstream musical tastes, but it’s still cool to be a nonconformist, right?

By the way, I discovered this artist on Pandora. What a great service. Between that and the musical interludes on NPR, the world can be your musical playground!

OC Remix

Every so often, I head over to Gametrailers.com to check for a new AVGN episode, via ScrewAttack. In the main window, I saw a graphic of Ryu from Street Fighter II, of the famed Street Fighter series, throwing out one of his trademark fireballs, and could not resist clicking.

I’m still recovering from the fallout of what I came across.

I proceeded to watch a HD video review of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and was stunned. Of course, the newly redrawn, updated characters were very well done and look splendid in high definition, 1080p goodness. However, I was actually more struck by the music playing in the background, which had updated and remixed versions of Street Fighter II’s very memorable character music. It sounded awesome! Surely they released a soundtrack for the game; maybe I could find it on Amazon and download it? As I continued to watch the video, the speaker casually commented that it was a nice touch that the soundtrack was done by OC Remix, as if this were a common household name that I should be intimately familiar with. Impressed with the quality of the music, and very curious about this group, I naturally turned to Google for all my answers.

After a brief glance at OC Remix’s website, I quickly realized I had struck gold. According to its wikipedia article, “OC ReMix is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and tribute of video game music through interpretation with new technology and software, as well as various traditional means.” First of all, the fact that there even is such a group is just amazing. Second, its incredible website is laced with extremely high quality remixes of video game tunes, and they are all free. For a video game music junkie, it just doesn’t get any better than this. Simply amazing! So, OC Remix is a community of highly talented musicians, who happen to be massive fans of video game music, posting their remixes for others to enjoy. Wow. Oh, and that awesome soundtrack for Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix? A free download from OC Remix’s website, and it even includes tracks losslessly compressed with FLAC! These guys are so in the know. I cannot believe I only just discovered this site.

Oh, and since I know you’ve been waiting for it, here’s a little clip I put together comparing Ryu’s theme on the Super NES to the remixed version. How far we’ve come!

Bond… James Bond

This week I watched my first James Bond movie, Casino Royale. Yep, first Bond flick ever, no joke. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve never really gotten into the James Bond films. I know, pretty strange to hear, but it’s just the way it… was. Having watched Casino Royale, I am now officially hooked on the Bond franchise, and I spent 15 minutes earlier today queuing up all the Bond films on Netflix (in chronological order, of course). I intend to give the Bond franchise a fair chance at completely winning me over.

By the way, this is my favorite Bond quote from the movie, delivered during the scene when Bond meets Vesper for the first time. Such wit!

DownloadHelper

Since this post is getting a bit long, I’ll make this quick. DownloadHelper is a fantastic Firefox add-on that makes it incredibly easy to download videos that you’re viewing in your browser window. The most obvious areas of application are for your typical videosharing websites (YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.) but you can also use it to download flash videos at CNN or MSNBC. Good stuff.

So, that’s it. Oh, and happy new year ‘n stuff.

There is an amazing assortment of digital music players on the market, and I have to confess that at times I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by all the choices. Chosing the right digital music player can be a bit of a process, and you probably don’t want to venture forth into this journey without a guide, or at the very least a sherpa. Anythingbutipod.com has helped a lot, and has a great compare feature, although I think there are some bugs in it. Anyway, for a while, I was intrigued by Microsoft’s oft-touted Zune–the wireless syncing feature seemed like a nice upgrade–but had to nix that idea after discovering it doesn’t even support Ogg Vorbis, my preffered audio compression format and the format in which the majority of my digital music library resides. Ultimately, I decided that it was pointless to find a new brand when I was so happy with iRiver. I’m very very close to settling on the iRiver LPlayer, pictured at right. It’s got all the features of my current player, with some added enhancements of course (auto FM tuning, wow–yes, I still want, and use a lot, the FM tuner on my player, to get all the NPR nuggets of knowledge that I can squeeze into the day), lots more size, and has very modest dimensions, something that is coming a bit of a de facto requirement for my electronic gadget purchases. The LPlayer also uses the nifty D-link navigation method – basically, you use the frame of the player to navigate menus and select options, which seems innovative to me. If it weren’t for all the new iRiver players that have been announced for CES 2009 this year… I would’ve gotten this player already.

In other news, I’ll be out of town for a while attending a wedding in the Domincan Republican. Oh yeah. This will be my first trip to a tropical island resort ever, and the first real vacation I’ve taken since I started working (that is to say, the first time that I’ve ever taken more than 2 consecutive days off of work for purely personal reasons). Needless to say, I am eagerly anticipating this trip. The camera is already charged, so pictures should be abound for this trip. And of course, while I’m enjoying the sun in tropical weathers, Seattle should be having its own personal time with temperatures in the upper 20s and snow showers. That’s fantastic.

Other random items of note: Charlie Wilson’s War is a very entertaining movie (although for some reason I keep referring to it as Charlie Gibson’s War…) and I was nearly speechless today when I was all set to pay $18 for a new version of Ryan Farish’s album Everlasting at the local CD store (yes, occassionaly I still buy CDs… mostly when Amazon doesn’t have an mp3 version available and I need to load up on my music before I set out on long international flights) and then I happened upon a used–yet pristine version–of the exact same album for $10. Sounds good to me!

By the way, have you heard of Hulu? Cool site.

The other day NPR played a very interesting music interlude during All Things Considered, so I went to look up the name of the piece (you do know how to do that, right?). Turns out the artist was Bombay Dub Orchestra and the song was Strange Constellations. It’s a great piece, so I went ahead and downloaded it, along with several others, from Amazon. They’ve got some good stuff – I recommend checking them out if you’re into downtempo/chillout music. Also, it looks like the third album from Conjure One is (finally) on the horizon. The first two were fantastic, so I’ve got high hopes for the new album.

Finally, although I’ve had a voracious appetite for everything related to this year’s presidential election, I’ve kept all of that separate from my blog. My one exception to that practice will be just to say, it sometimes feels like this, doesn’t it?

And you know, it sure is tricky to come up with descriptive titles for these posts that span multiple categories!

On a completely unrelated note, there’s a great new Top 10 Video Game Themes Video at Gametrailers.com that you should check out. As the name suggests, this video takes on the formidable task of attempting to rank the top 10 best video game themes of all time. I won’t lie, video games were a big part of my childhood, so I get a lot of enjoyment out of sites like these, especially when they’re focused on the 8-bit/16-bit era, which I believe was, hands down, the golden era of video gaming. Sure, kids these days can get their super-graphics intensive, 7.1 dolby digital sound, full motion video, 10-way wireless rumble pack fix from Playstation and Xbox360, but I remain firmly convinced that nothing comes close to the video game fanaticism of the late 80′s through late 90′s. That’s when the video game industry produced all the gems that we still revere to this day: Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Metroid; you name the classic and chances are it was conceived during this period. And who doesn’t love the Nintendo/Genesis rivalry from this era? All of that was my childhood, and I have very fond memories of it all. And for what it’s worth, I think there are quite a few notable omissions from the video (Castlevania, most prominently) but to each his own!

And on a final random note, the Seahawks’ season this year has unfortunately been nothing short of disastrous. But, given the depth of their injuries, I guess you really can’t blame them. I do feel for Mike Holmgren though, who most assuredly does not deserve to finish out his coaching career like this. But, on a much happier sports note, at least the Red Sox will NOT be going to the World Series! Huzzah!

Enigma has really played a central role in defining my musical interests. I’ll be the first to admit that some of his songs have really been hit or miss–there are literally only three songs on his previous album that I actually like–but I think it’s safe to say that Enigma has really pioneered a new musical genre. I thought about doing an album-by-album review here, but to do that properly would take an inordinate amount of time, and given the length of my previous post, I need to lay off the insanely large posts for the time being. So instead, I leave you with this sample from the album.

So let’s see, it’s been a while since I’ve written substantively on my blog. What can I report? Fall is back with a vengeance in Seattle. I am bathing in the glorious electronic glow of this new piece of consumer electronics. My diecast airplane collection has grown. I’ve recently discovered the wonderful and amazing Pandora. I also recently broke with my somewhat dated, but firmly-rooted-in-common-sense conviction that I would not pay to download music online unless I could download a lossless version (i.e., compressed with FLAC, Monkey’s Audio, or one of the many other lossless audio codecs available). In a perfect world, all the music we download would be lossless so we could transcode it to different (probably superior) formats in the future. But, then I realized that it was silly to think that I’d be able to tell the difference between a 256kbps lame-encoded MP3 and some as yet unreleased but amazing codec in the future. So, I caved and have now happily downloaded my share of (DRM FREE!) MP3s from Amazon.

And by the way, I should mention that I’m now running the latest version of WordPress thanks in no small measure to the WordPress Automatic Update Plugin, a very, very awesome and incredibly convenient plugin for WordPress that will automatically update your version to the latest from WordPress, saving you the pain and torture that is navigating through WordPress’s instructions to manually install.

Guess that’s it for now.