Cliché, I know
This is oh-so-funny in that tired and predictable way…
Entries Tagged as ''
World Cup on my desktop
I found a program called TVUPlayer. The trial version lets you watch ESPN for free.
That means I get to watch the Ghana vs. Brazil match! Woo-hoo!
Light Rock Express
Snapping a few random pictures at the Light Rock Express show at The Big Top produced this rather interesting shot.
It looks as though someone let the Löwenbräu genie out of the bottle…
Either that or Gene, the drummer for Molly and the Ringwalds and William S. Graham, Manager of the Light Rock Express, are smoking from a Löwenbräu hookah of some sort.
And what’s that glowing orb above Bill’s head?
Could it be the ghost of Shoeshine Charlie himself?
Insert “snakes on a plane” joke here
As I have mentioned before, I have quite the fascination with snakes. I have owned them and I consider myself quite knowledgeable on the subject and even considered pursuing a career in herpetology once upon a time.
Cynthia, on the other hand, has an understandable fear of snakes. She will watch in horror as that Australian nut job “The Crocodile Hunter” pulls the tail of of a Mamba or some other poisonous snake in one of his cable shows.
I recently learned of the Houston Zoo’s Walk on the Wild Side Tour - Texas Snakes event from my friend Wyndi and commented on how cool that might be to attend. Wyndi asked if I would be joining her and her sister as she had made reservations. I kind of dismissed the notion and said I would mention it to Cynthia but I did not expect that she would want to put herself in a position to be around snakes in any capacity.
Imagine my surprise when Cynthia expressed an interest in attending the event.
I went online and made the reservations. The event was this past Saturday and Cynthia had a blast. The transformation from fear to fascination was remarkable. She even held a snake for the first time in her life and didn’t freak out one bit.
I doubt we’re any closer to being able to keep a snake in the house, but Cynthia has come a long way and does not exhibit the same repulsion she did previously and that’s pretty remarkable in my book.
Saturday night
Headed over to the Stag’s Head last Saturday night to see a light version of The El Orbits featuring David Beebe, Jim Henkel and a new young drummer who is just out of high school and doing a musical internship with David. He’s quite remarkable and I suspect he’s destined for great things, musically.
After that Jim and I went across the street and hung out at the 59 Diner eating chicken fried steak and speculating on the nature of the universe. We talked for a quite awhile before heading back over to the Stag’s Head to catch Houston’s only B-52’s cover band, The Aqua Velva.
By this time the bar was pretty full and Jim was pretty tired so we both said our goodbyes and prepared to hit the road.
Snapped a few pics of the band but is is the only one I liked:
This should tide over the David Beebe fans who skim my web site after Google searching him.
Hurricane season readiness
It’s time to start thinking about our hurricane supplies.
Found these on sale at the H.E.B.
You gotta admit, thems a nice pair of jugs.
Googleplex
Picked this up at the Grooveblog
THE DALLES, Ore., June 8 — On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky.
When I mentioned this to Bill Shirley he asked the question; “Does it show up on Google Earth?” and that got me thinking and we all know that can only lead to trouble.
The article above indicates that the location of the complex is in The Dalles, OR.
I brought that up in Google Maps.
If this is correct, the likely location would seem to be east or north/west of the airport.
I tried to zoom in various areas but was greeted with this:
The thought plickens!
Trained professional on a closed course - Do not attempt
As I have mentioned before, I get computer questions in all flavors. Some relatively simple,
others far beyond the scope of the service I provide as a free service in e-mail.
Every now and then I get one that sparks my imagination.
A few weeks back I got an e-mail from one of my readers. His dilemma was that he had 8 floppy diskettes with some important data on them that he could not access. As luck would have it he copied the data to the diskettes using Windows 95 and employed a feature known as DriveSpace which was the Windows 95 version of DoubleSpace.
DriveSpace was a compression utility that would would, in essence, double the capacity of any drive that it was used on. Unlike compression utilities like WinZip which allowed you to compress files into a single archive and recover them, DriveSpace created an archive on the disk with the compressed data and used a virtual disk to view the data and extract it on the fly. Basically a 1.44 MB diskette appeared to be a 2.88 MB diskette.
You could also use it on you hard drive. Imagine the glee of expanding your 100 MB hard drive to 200 MB!
I never trusted DriveSpace and in my early tech days when Windows 95 first came out I saw drives that were “DriveSpaced” go belly up on many an occasion. Microsoft abandoned the technology after Windows ME.
So this guy e-mails me and wants to know if there is a utility that will extract the data from these 8 DriveSpaced diskettes. He had a Windows 98 computer but it won’t let him get at the data on the diskettes. It only reports that the diskettes were created in Windows 95 and the DriveSpace that came with Windows 98 would not work.
After I dug around and exhausted my research options I came to the conclusion that the only way this data was going to be retrieved was to load Windows 95 and get after it.
I negotiated with the guy and said I was open to the challenge and told him to deliver the diskettes to me as well as an install CD for Windows 95. If I was able to retrieve the data he would pay me X number of dollars. If I failed I would charge him nothing. He agreed.
When I got the disks and took them home I had a plan. I use VMWare on my main PC. This is an application that will let you load a guest operating system inside a window of your main system. Loading the operating system is basically like installing an application. When you are done you can remove it and your base system is unchanged.
It took some wrangling. My system has no floppy disk drive nor floppy disk controller and Windows 95 requires a boot disk to install. I had to make a DOS boot CD and start up the virtual machine and then swap CD’s in mid install.
You old timers remember how long it took to install Windows 95 when it came out?
It took about 10 minutes on my modern system once I got it going.
Behold!
Windows 95 running in a window of XP on my 3700+ AMD XP system!
You’ll notice Internet Explorer 3 and Microsoft Internet Mail and News (the precursor to Outlook Express). IE 3 displays Google very well. It blows up on the Java intense sites like Yahoo.
The mail program is barfing on the rich text HTML message from my friend Lenicia.
As cool as this is, there was still the matter of recovering the data from the diskettes. Since I have no diskette drive and no means to hook one up I figure that I’ll just copy the raw data to a CD and then try to extract the information inside my virtual Windows 95 machine.
After meticulously copying the 8 diskettes worth of data to a CD it’s the moment of truth. I load the CD and start the DriveSpace program and….no dice. From what I can gather, DriveSpace will not work on a “read only” disk, even if you are only using it to view and extract the data. This is most unfortunate.
I finally opted to just install Windows 95 on an old system I had been using as a backup. I used a spare drive and loaded it up. I pretty easily extracted the data at this point and copied it to the drive. I then swapped the original XP drive back into the master space and booted it up and was able to access the files using Windows Explorer. I burned them to CD, delivered them to their owner and collected my fee.
I would have liked it if my virtual Windows 95 system would have worked to recover the data.
Curse the death of the floppy disk!
Still, what trip down memory lane and what a trip to see Windows 95 again.
**UPDATE** I just discovered that VMWARE will work with a USB floppy drive.
Too bad I discovered this after I went through all of that.
Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars, if only you could bar wars, let this one stay…
This is well worth the 4:30 minute viewing time.
During the 2006 AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to George Lucas, William Shatner sings a modified version of “My Way” as part of the opening ceremony. The genuine look of surprise and confusion on Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hammil’s face as he takes the stage is priceless.
Watch it all the way through. You won’t be disappointed.
-
-
-
Stats