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!

I liked the movie. I thought it had a decent plot, surprisingly acceptable acting, good pacing, fantastic special effects, and overall was very entertaining. It was exactly the shot in the arm Star Trek needed, and I’m grateful that the movie’s success will likely translate into a rejuvenated franchise with new fans, and lots of spinoffs (I’d love to see Star Trek on television again). The franchise really went out on a whimper (Nemesis was panned at the box office and is generally regarded as one of the weaker movies, which is so unfortunate because the TNG cast deserves a much better swan song) and Enterprise was cancelled after only four seasons (TNG, DS9, and VOY all lasted seven seasons) so I’m glad the new movie has been such a hit. After years of franchise fatigue, it’s nice and refreshing to see Star Trek making a comeback.

However, I am also a Star Trek purist. One of the reasons (maybe the reason) I am such a huge Star Trek fan is my highly geeky, somewhat excessive knowledge of the Star Trek universe. Star Trek has a massive and, for the most part, internally consistent universe. This is what many fans have come to deride as “canon.” Canon means that, for example, if the episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (one of my favorites, by the way) establishes that the Battle of Narendra III was a catalyst for the signing of a Federation-Klingon peace treaty, this becomes an established fact in the Star Trek universe that a later episode of Voyager cannot change and must adhere to. I love that. I love the fact that I’ve been a dedicated fan for nearly two decades, and that my dedication to the franchise, through good times and bad, rewards me with a level of knowledge about the universe it has created that allows me to enjoy it on many different levels and in ways that casual fans cannot.

This brings me to why I can’t say that I’m gushing over the new Star Trek movie. In what probably seemed to them as a clever, creative way to acknowledge canon but free themselves from the shackles of established Star Trek history, the writers created an “alternate reality” where events can now unfold in an entirely different way and where they can subsequently develop a new history of Star Trek.

From an artistic standpoint, I understand this decision entirely. I’m the first to acknowledge that the Star Trek universe can be maddening, and there are far too many fans who consider any deviation from canon to be tantamount to treason and will therefore refuse to embrace any new creative work that does not adequately respect canon (Enterprise, to a large degree, suffered from this). By creating a new, alternate reality, the writers can get the Best of Both Worlds; they can develop new stories as they see fit, while sprinkling in references to the original history (or “Star Trek Prime“, as some fans have taken to referring to it) thereby satisfying new and old fans alike.

And yet, this feels a little cheap (perhaps almost cowardly, but that may be too strong of a word). The Star Trek universe may be unwieldy, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat it with respect. I sincerely hope that the decision to wipe the slate clean and essentially start over after 50+ years of history was an insanely difficult and weighty decision for Abrams and his team to make. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those fans who will shun and nitpick to death every new Star Trek creation that isn’t consistent with canon. I’m happy to see Star Trek move in fresh new directions, and I look forward to seeing what Abrams churns out over the years. And, I’ll even agree that, after 50 years of Star Trek, the universe has a lot of twists and turns that can be very difficult to navigate while trying to create new and interesting stories and remain true to what “Star Trek is really about.” But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at least try. I think there are still plenty of interesting stories to tell within the established Star Trek universe. The fact that Star Trek still has such a dedicated following means that the fans also believe that. Was tossing aside the established Star Trek universe the only way to enable Abrams to tell the story(ies) he wants to tell? What kind of message does this send to the legions of fans who’ve stuck with Star Trek over all these years; to see all the scaffolding that has formed the basis of their dedication tossed aside? Of course, as future movies are unleashed unto us, we’ll see plenty of elements from the old Star Trek universe (tribbles, lots of interesting alien races, maybe even some well-known storylines) but there will be no getting over the fact that things are different and that we’re seeing a watered down version of what had been a cultural phenomenon. True, Abrams’s movie may not be my father’s Star Trek, but guess what: a lot of people came to and still do love that Star Trek. Like the TNG cast in Nemesis, the Star Trek universe itself deserved a better swan song.

But remember, I liked the movie. I think it’s a fun movie that I’ll probably see in the theaters again, and I’d even venture to say that my opinion of it will probably go up after a second viewing. I’m glad it’s brought Star Trek back into popular culture, and thanks to the success of the film, I’m sure we’ll be seeing and hearing about it for many years to come. I just want to make sure that, before all the new money begins flooding in and we bask in the glory of new action figures, burger king commercials, highly illogical rap songs, and all the other requirements of mainstream commercialization, we pause for a moment to consider the weight of this moment and how this movie changed (erased, really) some of the most fundamental underpinnings of Star Trek. I want to make sure we give due respect to the Star Trek universe that became a cultural phenomenon, paved the way for this movie, and that still rightly occupies a special place in many people’s hearts.

First. I was listening to the January 18, 2009 podcast, and during the first segment, the caller was given a trivia question about Ricardo Montablan’s unfortunate recent passing. After the caller answered, Peter Sagal launched into his usual background and banter on Montablan and at one point noted that he played the over-the-top villain in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. At that point, the always-entertaining Charlie Pierce chimed in and noted “and in the Original Series episode Space Seed,” and then almost immediately someone from the crowd shouted “YEAH!!!” in an obvious display intended to both congratulate Pierce for knowing that Montablan appeared in a Star Trek episode, and, of course, show some solidarity among Star Trek fans! Simply awesome. If you want to listen, the segment starts around 7 minutes into the show.

Second. This one is from yesterday’s (January 24, 2009) show. At about 3 minutes and 45 seconds into the show, Sagal notes that he still feels like he’s in a science fiction movie when he says “President Obama.” To demonstrate this feeling, he exclaimed “President Obama promised a strong response to the invasion of the Corellian fleet!” Did you catch it? It’s a reference to Star Wars.

In short, these guys are geeks. What a great show.