Month: January 2009

“Jughead”

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Now that I’ve finally seen the episode, a few Random Thoughts:

  • Watching the stream from ABC.com wasn’t half bad. HD quality picture, 30-second commercial breaks…if I didn’t have to wait until Thursdays, I might watch Lost this way every week.
  • I have such a crush on Elizabeth Mitchell.
  • Does Faraday really love Charlotte, or is he just trying to distract her from what he knows is going to happen to her shortly?
  • The woman on the island that Faraday says looks familiar – I’ve seen some hypothesize that it’s his mother, but I must say that if I ran into my own mother 50 years ago, I’m pretty sure I’d recognize her. Of course, much has been made of Faraday’s memory problems. Still, it seems a stretch.
  • Faraday doesn’t seem the type to me to put a girl in a time-traveling coma and skip to the States.
  • Des and Penny named their baby after Charlie. Aww.
  • Speaking of Charlies: young Charlie Widmore on the island! Quite a revelation. How does he know the island better than anyone else, as he claimed? Where did he – as well as Alpert and the rest –  come from?
  • Faraday’s plan is to bury Jughead. Could this somehow be tied to the fertility problems in the island’s future? Could that be the reason for the radiation suits worn around the Swan? Was entering the numbers into the computer every 108 minutes resetting the bomb’s trigger in some way?
  • Now we know why Alpert visited the hospital when Locke was born. When will we find out the meaning of the objects he showed him later in his childhood, and why he was so disappointed when John picked up the knife?

Man, I love this stuff!

Don’t You Hate It…

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…when you tell your TiVo to Season Pass Lost, and you check the settings to make sure that it only records first-run episodes, and ignore that the default setting is to only keep three episodes at a time, and you neglect to delete the three hours from the week before, and ABC calls the premiere “Because You Left/The Lie” so tonight when they broadcast “The Lie” before “Jughead”, your TiVo thinks it’s a new episode so it records it, and now you have “Destiny Calls”, “Because You Left/The Lie” and “The Lie” recorded and that’s your three episodes, so “Jughead” isn’t recorded? Don’t you just hate that?

Mouse Bits

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I lurrrvvvvvv Walt Disney World!  I could probably do a whole blog about various aspects of the parks…and maybe someday I’ll take on that challenge.

But today I’m just going to steer you to a site that helps give me a WDW fix when I need it.

Mouse Bits is a fan site filled with hundreds of user-donated torrents of  audio and video files of park music, ride-throughs, promo material and the like. They don’t allow files with commercially available material, so you won’t find the latest official Disney releases, but it’s a great source of high quality fan recordings of hard-to-find goodies.  If you love the parks as much as I do, check this out. You won’t be disappointed.

Kate and Ben?

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So I’m into the Season 4 DVD set of Lost, and I’ve made it as far as the Bonus Features. One that I just finished is called “The Ultimate Flash Forward”, which is a generous sampling of the FF from last season (and the Season 3 Finale) presented in chronological order.

Something that jumped out at me: when Jack and Kate met at the airport, he told her that he’d been using the Golden Passes they’d been given. He’d jump on a flight, have a meal at the destination, then fly home. Kate asked him why. He said because he was hoping the plane would crash.

FF a couple of days to Ben and Jack in the funeral parlor. Ben says tells Jack he hears that Jack has been flying a lot lately, hoping his plane would crash. Huh? Who told him that?

And when Ben tells him they all have to go back to the island, and Jack says “Sayid–I don’t even know where Sayid is.” (Pause) “Hurley… is insane.” (Pause) “Sun blames me for…” (Pause) “and then Kate…She won’t even talk to me anymore,” Ben quickly assures him, “Perhaps I can help you with that.”

Am I looking too close at things that aren’t there? It’s easy to do…

My Faraday Theory

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(This entry requires a basic knowledge of the ABC television show Lost. If you’re not familiar with it, keep moving, because you won’t know what or who I’m talking about!)

OK, so I’ve been thinking about this, and I had an “Aha!” moment earlier today while discussing last night’s episodes with an online friend.

If you watch, then you know that an episode last season opened with Faraday weeping while watching a news report about the discovery of the fake 815 (the so-far unidentified woman with him is referred to on several forums and wiki sites I’ve seen as his “caretaker”). What would cause such an emotional reaction? He said he didn’t know why he was crying, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t know.

Anyway, something I have yet to see any comments on occurred during “The Constant“. When Faraday was explaining to Desmond what a constant is, he says (this is a direct quote, found on a Lost transcript site), “When you go to the future, nothing there is familiar. So if you want to stop this, then you need to find something there…something that you really, really care about….that also exists back here, in 1996.”

At the end of the episode we see Faraday open his journal to the following page:

If Desmond is Faraday’s constant, Daniel must really, really care about him. What’s up with that?

My guess: we’ll learn that Faraday is either Desmond’s father, or his son. With all the time traveling he does, I don’t know for sure which it is, but if he can show up at the Orchid when it’s under construction in the ’70s, then he certainly could have fathered a son of Desmond’s age.

Thoughts?

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Read The Directions? Ha!

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I’m composing this entry slowly but surely on my iTouch. Why not my trusty PC? Well…

If you follow tech news, you know that Microsoft has made public the current beta installation of Windows 7. I’ve been reading good things about it, particularly from an online friend who’s very enthusiastic about it.

Now, if you know me at all (and after all our time together, I would think you do), then you know I jumped on this right away. I made my way through three beta releases of Vista, so when it was finally released, I felt very comfortable with it while everyone else was complaining.

The Windows 7 beta is download only, and apparently Microsoft was overwhelmed with requests causing some server issues. But even when things were supposed to be moving smoothly, I still had problems. Off and on for three days I attempted the download (the file is close to 2-1/2 GB, by the way), but it would stop after less than 400 MB were downloaded. After a few days it dawned on me…Firefox is my browser of choice, and most MS sites won’t play nice with it. Sure enough, once I switched over to IE, my download problem ended.

The next step in this undertaking is burning the downloaded file – an .ISO file – to a DVD. My disc burning program of choice is Roxio Creator. I tried three separate times to burn the installation disc, receiving three different error messages. Of course, being the way I am, the thought of checking Roxio’s manual or online help never crossed my mind. Instead, I contacted my online friend, who suggested ImgBurn, a freeware burning utility. I downloaded and installed it, and on the second try, I had my installation disc!

(The first time I jumped right in and tried burning the disc after merely glancing at the instructions. Apparently I skipped a vital step.)

So now I’m ready to start installing the beta. My first thought was to install it on one of my external drives, which, of course, didn’t work because you can’t install an operating system on a removable drive. Huh. Who knew? Everyone but me probably.

Luckily, the hard drive on my Dell has a 10 GB partition, so I can install it there, right? No, because the beta requires at least 16 GB.

So we stick another partition in then. Of course, I’ve never actually partitioned a hard drive before, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

I searched Vista’s help pages and found what I needed, but the procedure they outlined didn’t work. For me, anyway.

Feeling frustrated, I searched Download.com for a freeware partitioning utility, found one that looked promising, and in no time at all I had it downloaded and installed.

The instructions looked simple enough, so I jumped in balls first: slid this here, renamed that there, and I was ready to go. All I had to do was reboot and I’d be ready to install Windows 7 on my new partition.

That was the last time I saw my desktop alive.

It boots to a certain point, and refuses to go any further. I’ve run diagnostic tests, checked the boot sequence, even bought it a nice glass of wine, to no avail.

I can get it to boot into safe mode, though, and the hard drive looks like it did before I started messing with it, but that’s the most I can do for now.

Hopfully a good night’s rest will do it some good. Tomorrow at work I’ll do some Googling and see what kind of help I can find.

And this time, I’ll be sure to read the directions.

UPDATE: The third System Restore did the trick. Yay! Now to proceed very carefully…

“Cat’s in the Cradle”

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I don’t want to be the guy in the Harry Chapin song. I have a 14-year-old son, Cameron. His mom and I divorced amicably a few years ago, and I live literally 5 minutes away. He alternates weeks at our respective places.

His mom lives in a nice neighborhood where his friends can come and hang out and he can ride his bike to his grandmother’s house if he wants.

I live in a small second-floor condo unit, in a development of mostly older people. What kids there are, are younger, so it’s just he and I hanging out when he’s staying with me.

Generally he’ll spend the evening in the living room on his Xbox, playing Halo 3 online with some of his school friends, while I hole up in my bedroom surfing the ‘net, playing guitar, whatever. Occasionally I’ll sit in the living room and read while he plays, but that’s not really spending quality time together; that’s just being in the same room.

One night a week we’ll go to karate class together (when it’s not soccer season), and we go out to a restaurant once a week, but I want to do more with him before he’d rather spend his time hanging out with his buddies. Maybe a game night, or bowling once a week, or something.

But I want to get something done before the day I say “Hey, let’s go do this” and he says “Sorry, Dad, I’ve got plans.”

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Happy New Blog!

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Blogs are like opinions: everybody has one, and nobody cares about yours.

So why am I creating one? Do you care what I think? Do you crave my opinion on various matters? Am I some vacuous celebrity who believes that my public awaits my every outpouring?

No, I’m just some guy, living a normal life, fighting the good fight to survive in today’s world. I just don’t get a chance to use words like vacuous or outpouring very often. Chances are nobody except me will ever see these ramblings.

I think I’m doing it because I’ve tried it before and failed to keep it up, and one of my 2009 resolutions is to finish what I start. So, unlike my various paper journals and my failed Xanga blog, I am determined to keep up with this thing, posting at least weekly, but hopefully more often.

What will I be blathering on about?

Well, let’s see. I’m the divorced father of a 14-year-old boy, so I’m sure I can throw in a few thoughts about relationships, parenting and dealing with teenagers. I love all sorts of music, and my son and I bang around on guitars (he’s taking actual lessons), so there’s that to talk about. I’m not a particularly political animal, so I’ll probably throw out a few uninformed political opinions now and again. There’s a plethora (another word I never can fit into everyday conversations!) of subjects that I know nothing about that I’ll discuss anyway.

Another thing I’ll do is share what I think are interesting websites. The first one I’m going to mention is the site that brought me here in the first place, 43 Things. You sign up for a free account, and make a list of 43 things you’d like to accomplish. You can keep track of your progress, and read “How I Did It” stories from other members who have done the task you want to do. Does it help? That’s pretty much up to you, isn’t it? Can’t hurt.

And look, I’ve accomplished my first task: starting a blog.

Hopefully I can follow through and post on a regular basis.

No, not “hopefully I can”…I will.