Monthly Archives: April 2006

Get it off me! Get it off me!

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I finally got my computer dual-booting into Windows, and everything I need for work installed on the Windows partition. That only took two days. It’s not Apple’s fault; BootCamp couldn’t be simpler or easier to use. And I guess it’s [...]

Get out of him, you bitch!I finally got my computer dual-booting into Windows, and everything I need for work installed on the Windows partition. That only took two days.

It’s not Apple’s fault; BootCamp couldn’t be simpler or easier to use. And I guess it’s not Windows’ fault either, since once I had an official install, it worked without hassle. It’s just that it’s been so long since I’ve used a machine that didn’t already have everything pre-installed, I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass it is to get everything up and running. Even if it is just a matter of clicking “Next” and waiting an hour.

So far, everything’s worked pretty much as expected. A couple of crashes and failure to boot, but that’s included in the “working as expected.” I installed a virus scanner (and on its first scan, on a clean install of Windows XP I’d done just one day ago, it reported four viruses found — no joke) and Firefox and everything I need for work, and it all works fine. For yuks I installed Civilization IV, and that works fine.

I also tried out that Parallels Workstation. Even in beta, it works exactly as advertised, allowing both OS X and Windows to run simultaneously. I’ve already uninstalled it, though, since at least in the Beta version, it can’t access any of my Mac files or even the Windows files on my other partition. Which makes it, at least at the moment, a non-functional novelty. (But a very solid one, I’ve got to admit).

And I got out of Windows as quickly as possible. Call me an OS snob; that’s a fair accusation. Windows just feels all underpowered and ugly now. Maybe Vista will improve the experience, but everything I’ve seen just looks like Microsoft trying to do OS X. Even if they succeed, why should I care? All of the apps I need that are Windows-only are still going to be as ugly and kludgey in Vista as they are in XP. And the home-user stuff that Vista’s emphasizing — photo viewers, music players, etc. — don’t promise anything I’m not already getting from iPhoto and iTunes and the like.

Crimes Against the Internets: The Re-Imagineering Blog

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The internet is full-to-bursting with self-important nerds who are simultaneously obsessed beyond reason with the minutiae of their chosen hobby and convinced that they could do a better job than the people currently in charge of that hobby. This isn’t [...]

Mickey's not going down with the shipThe internet is full-to-bursting with self-important nerds who are simultaneously obsessed beyond reason with the minutiae of their chosen hobby and convinced that they could do a better job than the people currently in charge of that hobby.

This isn’t breaking news. It happens with movies, comic books, television series (somehow, Joss Whedon remains exempt), and I imagine it happens with stuff I’m not a nerdy fan of myself. I’ll bet that the world of Civil War re-enactments has its own little dramas playing out, with people resentful at the ego-maniac glory hound who insists on playing Grant with copper buttons on his uniform although any real devotee of history knows that Grant insisted on bronze buttons because of an incident in a copper mine when he was three.

So if this behavior is all just part of the natural gestalt of the internets, why does reading The Re-Imagineering Blog make me want to hit the writers of that site repeatedly over the head with a manure-filled sock?

Because, as we’ve learned from Robert Louis Stevenson and countless Lifetime TV movies, we fear the darkness that lives within us all. And I hate the Walt Disney World version of the Enchanted Tiki Room, and I think that the WDW version of The Tower of Terror is infinitely better than Disneyland’s.

I just don’t think you’ve got to be such a damn douche about it.

These guys call their blog “Re-Imagineering,” but they don’t do much other than bitch and moan, and parrot back public-relations quotes from Walt Disney about magic and imagination as if they’d just won some kind of argument. You could make a pretty convincing argument that the greatest talent of Disney (the man) was in selling himself and his ideas. As much as we like to believe otherwise, the real world doesn’t reward you with such a long-lasting legacy and reputation based on talent alone — you can be the greatest visionary the world’s ever seen, but it’s not worth anything if no one listens to you.

So all the Disney quotes and truisms that get passed around do have some genuine value. It’s just not so much value for making a theme park, but selling it. Of course, that’s not all that Disney did — he had great ideas and very importantly, knew how to find the guys who knew how to make those ideas work, and get them on his side. Any idiot can just say, “Disney theme parks should be magical.”

And they do, repeatedly, all over the internets. There’s all kinds of moaning and hand-wringing and people saying, completely without irony, “What would Walt think?!?” But if the guys on this blog are putting themselves forward as “Pixar and Disney professionals,” it’s not enough to just complain about how things just ain’t like they used to be. They need to put up or shut up.

And, incidentally, stop being so long-winded, pompous, and sanctimonious. Everything I read from the writers of that site reminds me of the Achewood strip where they prank call Garfield.
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Intel Aside

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As it turns out, I’m weak. The lure of a faster Mac and a laptop that runs Windows was too much for me to resist. I ended up getting a MacBook Pro. What finally sent me over the edge was [...]

As it turns out, I’m weak. The lure of a faster Mac and a laptop that runs Windows was too much for me to resist. I ended up getting a MacBook Pro.

What finally sent me over the edge was realizing that I wasn’t just making some rationalization — it really is a legitimate business expense. That I can write off on my taxes and everything. Every time I go Down South I’ve got to make excuses about not being able to run stuff on my laptop because it’s Mac-only, and if I’m going to be at the theme park for weeks at a time at the end of the summer, it’s going to be essential to have a Windows machine.

For now, though, it runs World of Warcraft really well. (Note to auditors reading this blog: I’m only going to write off half of it as a business expense). Everything else seems slightly faster, but that may just be my imagination.

As for actually running Windows on the thing: I can’t report on that yet. Turns out that they’re serious when they say you need to buy a full, dedicated Windows XP SP2 install. I imagined that I had tons of Windows discs lying around, but was unable to find one. (Something tells me that there’s going to be some future crucial bit of Mac tech that relies on having an AOL installation disc, and I’ll need it right after I’ve thrown out the last spare one I have…) The version that came with my old Dell got me all the way through the two-hour-long install process, only to fail at the end because of some missing USB driver file.

So I ended up having to buy a new copy of Windows XP, which I swore I’d never do. (At least the dual boot thing qualifies for the license of the OEM version, so you don’t have to buy a full blown retail version). Once it comes in the mail, I’ll be able to say whether I have any success with it.

One thing I did notice during my installation attempts last night: Windows sucks. Sure, I use it every day for work, but that’s in an OS-agnostic IDE. And I use it mainly for games, which don’t care about the OS anyway. Actually using Windows — in particular, setting up network connections and organizing files and such — is just unpleasant. I was wondering if that was part of the impetus behind BootCamp in the first place, to take all of us complacent OS X users and remind us just how good we have it.

I can’t even put my finger on what it is exactly that bugs me about using Windows now; it just has this vague off-brand feel to it. Like eating a bunch of Oreos and then biting into a Hydrox. Or seeing an episode of “Alias” with Hilary Swank instead of Jennifer Garner. Or watching a movie for Natalie Portman and then realizing you got one with Keira Knightley instead. [and btw, thanks to NBC for saving us from having to search the web for "borrowed" NBC highlights!]

Still: hot damn! I got a new computer!

See ya!

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Everybody should take a minute to watch this, the greatest fight scene in movie history. I haven’t seen the movie it’s from (and thank goodness the IMDB is there to provide the all-important Chinese title for this action classic), but [...]

Everybody should take a minute to watch this, the greatest fight scene in movie history.

I haven’t seen the movie it’s from (and thank goodness the IMDB is there to provide the all-important Chinese title for this action classic), but I’m hoping it answers the questions this clip raises:

  • How come it sounds like our hero and villain are made out of bookcases?
  • Why is Stingray dressed like a pharmacist? And how did he get out of a lab coat, shirt, and tie so quickly? And get all greased up?
  • What did Stingray do that was all that bad? Other than grimacing and licking knives? Was it bad enough to warrant such serious eye trauma?
  • How come our hero is such a wuss that he’s fighting a guy who only has one hand free and he still needs to get rescued by one-armed Felicity Huffman from Transamerica and a towel?
  • Couldn’t they have taken a few more minutes to come up with some better quips? Like, “Here’s looking at you, Stingray!” or “Enjoy the ride, Stingray, but be careful you don’t get hooked!” or “At least now you won’t have to look at your own god-awful poodle mullet every morning, Stingray!”

And to answer the guy who posted it on YouTube in the first place: yes. Yes, it is.

Update: Okay, I guess I didn’t read the IMDB entry closely enough. Apparently it is a Hong Kong movie, so the Chinese title is given first for a reason. And dopey guy isn’t the hero; Cynthia Rothrock is, which is why she has to come in and save the day. I imagine his drooling problem also has something to do with it.

I still say that this scene would’ve been a brilliant finale for Transamerica.

I Heart Hydrocodone

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I’m sure there are worse things than being alone in a nice hotel in the LA suburbs and getting a severe case of gastroenteritis. I think I still deserve some sympathy, though. It started Thursday night, while my imagination was [...]

I’m sure there are worse things than being alone in a nice hotel in the LA suburbs and getting a severe case of gastroenteritis. I think I still deserve some sympathy, though.

It started Thursday night, while my imagination was still filled with the promise of new dual-booting Apple computers. I’d thought it was food poisoning at first, but as we’ll discover later it was too severe and lasted too long for that. Incidentally, you know how basketball teams retire jerseys by raising them to the rafters? I’m building something similar with foods I can no longer eat because they’re the last thing I remember having before getting violently ill. Now, to the list of tequila (college stupidity), limes (same incident), avocados (stomach flu not long after moving to CA), and Northgate mall tofu curry (threw up on Barry Levinson), I can add hummus.

So I was violently ill in the hotel bathroom all Thursday night and much of Friday, stuff coming out of both ends of me in colors Pantone hasn’t even assigned numbers yet. I kept trying to get sleep in the meantime, and the beds in the hotel were really, really nice, so that’s at least one point in favor of being sick away from home. But I kept having these weird fever dreams and thinking I was in the bathroom when I was still in bed, and vice versa. The outcome of each is too gruesome to describe here. I think falling asleep on the bathroom floor believing I’d made it back to bed was a little bit better, because I could pretend I was Jimi Hendrix.

I left a $20 tip to the hotel cleaning staff. I don’t think it was enough.

I ended up missing hotel check-out time and then just sleeping through my flight time; I only woke up to either do something unspeakable in the bathroom, ask the housekeepers to go away, or answer the front desk’s phone call and confirm that I would be staying another night. Disney was able to reschedule my flight to Saturday afternoon, and I’d thought that 48 hours would’ve been enough time to get it out of my system and make it home safely.

Somehow I managed to return the car and take the plane and drive myself back home safely — still miserable, but at least the vomiting had stopped. Saturday night I finally had a bowl of soup, the first thing I’d eaten since Thursday, so I’d thought I was on the road to recovery.

No luck there. Even though I didn’t have to throw up any more, I sure did feel like it, and I kept having to go to the bathroom. And the stomach cramps had started — really sharp pains that had me convinced something had burst. I still had my old prescription of hydrocodone (Vicodin) from my last stomach-related incident — children reading this blog should be aware that I don’t condone taking unprescribed medicine that’s 1 year past its expiration date without seeing a physician — and while it definitely helped me sleep, it wasn’t quite enough to stop the cramping.

My parents were in a panic, and my mom had Safeway deliver a ton of groceries here. Finally on Monday afternoon, after falling asleep/passing out on the couch for three hours, I called Mac and asked him to give me a ride to the hospital. He gets 10000 karma points for taking early of work and driving me down there and sticking with me the whole time. They gave me an IV, which was kind of cool as I’d never had one before, some antibiotics and something to stop the stomach cramps, and even better, basically gave me permission to keep using the pain pills (even though they didn’t prescribe more, dammit).

So I had one last precious dose of that last night — they’re habit-forming, and although they’re awesome and I’m a huge fan of narcotics in principle, they didn’t really help with the stomach cramps, since those woke me up again at 6 this morning. And for the first time in a few days, I had real dreams instead of those weird fever dreams — in one I was on the Battlestar Galactica and had to fly a Viper back to San Francisco to catch the Olympics. That was cool.

Today’s been the first day of recovery. I’ve had an on-again off-again headache which I’m assuming is caused by the lack of caffeine, but that’s something I had planned to cut out anyway. I’m actually craving food again, although I can’t eat much other than bread and soup. I’m reluctant to say that the stomach pains have stopped, since every time I say that they come back, but it has been over 12 hours since the last one. I can actually see myself getting a good night’s sleep tonight.