tdog blog

Baaaaaaaar Code

One day after work the sun was casting this erie light through the smoke of the wild fires. These photos are not retouched.

Bring on the moblogging!

Wordpress iPhone App

This is a bit dated, but I have been meaning to post this for some time. When I got an iMac, I was still using the ol’ windows box for games (Half-Life 2) and our finances (MS Money). I wanted to unify the desk, so I opted to do the new cool (geeky) thing — installing Windows on an Intel Mac. Here’s how I did it:

1. Grab the old WinXP disc
2. Realize the XP disc isn’t “SP2″ which is required to install with bootcamp
3. Research “slipstreaming” which is a way to apply the service pack and recreate a bootable install disc
4. Download free crappy tools to make a bootable cd image
5. Download trial burning software (can you do anything on Windows without buying more software?)
6. Make slipstream disc — success!
7. Open Boot Camp
8. Burn Apple Boot Camp driver disc
9. Boot into Windows installer
10. Begin install process
11. Installer asks for previous version of Windows, CRAP! This was an upgrade disc!

This is where things get really sticky. Of course the installer suggests I eject this disc, and insert a valid previous version. The iMac has no hardware eject button on the slot-loading DVD drive and pressing the eject on the keybord doesn’t work because the windows installer doesn’t understand those mac specific keys (that’s what those Boot Camp drivers are for.) I am determined not to go buy yet another copy of Windows. I have purchased no less than 5 valid copies of Windows. That doesn’t even include student-discounted copies I got of every single Microsoft OS they had made up to 1997. It also doesn’t include DOS. So anyway, I came up with an idea to just burn a disc with Windows XP and Windows 98. That way when it looked for a previous version it would find it… If it was even possible to fit on one disc. It was crazy enough it might just work!

12. Research and confirm my idea will work as long as the second copy of Windows is 95/98/ME. And a bootable DVD is possible and compatible thus space isn’t a problem.
13. Discover I had just thrown out all my old windows discs not more than 3 weeks earlier. Damn!
14. Screw it! Download a win98 image off bit torrent — I am a legal owner of a license, I just don’t have a disc… right?
15. Burn DVD with WinXP, Win98, and secret special boot sector stuff.
16. Reboot and cross fingers
17. It worked!

I can hardly believe it myself. Now months later, I have decided to remove it — Orange Box and iBank have solved my needs for now.

I was blown away by this quote today. I had probably read it when I was younger but something like this I doubt I understood until now.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less’. ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things’. ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master - that’s all’.

– Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carrol - Through the Looking Glass

So, this morning, I was shopping around online for some mechnical pencils I like. I’m partial to the Pentel Twist-Erase model (the original, not the current series III version, which looks like ass), but they’re hard to find… I think because they’ve been discontinued. Anyway, I decided to try Pentel’s website itself. Sure enough, they have an online store. They don’t carry the Twist-Erase in black, but they have some translucent, color versions that seemed OK. So I went to place my order, which required me (as is so often the case with unenlightened online stores) to create a new user account. Sigh. Sad but not unexpected…

Except: the very first question of the new user form asks for your gender. No, wait, it requires you to specify your gender.

To order pencils.

Huh?!

Now, asking for gender in an online form is in poor taste in any case. It’s such a transparent marketing ploy that it’s just kind of absurd. But to require it takes some kind of crazy. I’m sure there are people who click the appropriate radio button blindly and just proceed with their order. But not me. I found the pencils on Amazon and got them from there instead. Pentel, meanwhile, got an angry email from me.

But here’s where it gets bizarre: The Pentel store’s customer service email is Pentel@desertarc.org. You’ll notice that it’s not hosted by Pentel.com. Curious, I went to desertarc.org to see what it was. I don’t want to ruin the surprise, so go ahead and click on that link. I’ll wait…

Yes. Pentel’s online store is run by “Foundation for the Retarded of the Desert” — a name so strange as to appear phoney. (No “The”?) But it’s not! Their mission statement reads,

The primary mission of the Foundation is to increase the choices, capabilities and independence of the persons in the Coachella Valley and the Morongo Basin who are mentally and physically challenged by offering vocationaltraining, community awareness, and opportunities of recreation and development of social and personal skills.

So, bully for them. I’m sure they’re doing good work. (They seem to be thorough too, since all their employees are screened for drugs, and through the Department of Transportation, the Department of Justice, and the FBI.) But what the hell are they doing running an office supply company’s website?

At dinner the other night Rachel, Heather, Tom, and I were talking about stories in which something cataclysmic happens: a nuclear war, a plague, etc. This got me thinking about the books I know of that deal with an apocalypse of one kind or another and how many of them are among the best books I’ve read.

Granted, cataclysm is a handy way to make a story interesting… it’s kind of fun to imagine what it would be like if the world ended, mostly because it seems so implausible. Except it happens all the time, depending on your perspective. Things like the bombing of Japan in WWII, the outbreaks of Ebola virus in Africa, AIDS, Darfur, and bird flu are all catastrophic. They may not be apocalyptic, but only because they’re constrained to only certain regions of the world or to certain groups of people unlucky enough to be affected by them. It’s not a big leap to imagine those threats spreading more globally, though.

The media helpfully reminds us of this fact every couple of months or so, but their handling of the matter is often crass, alarmist, and sensationalized. The books in the list below handle the topic more deftly, and without the obnoxious talking heads.

I think it’s worth visiting these themes now and then, if only to go through the mental exercise of imagining how we might act should we find ourselves in such an unfortunate situation. Would I be scared? Would I rise to the occasion and help my fellow humans? Would I be one of the first to go?

Of course, there’s no way to know until it happens. But I’ve found these books have helped me come closer to answering those questions about myself.

Blindness, by José Saramago. This book (which is soon to be made into a movie starring Daniel Craig and Julianne Moore—great casting) tells the story of a pandemic of “white blindness.” Everyone in a large, unidentified city is afflicted with a disease that renders them completely blind… except for one woman. Civilization breaks down, chaos ensues, chickens are eaten raw. Since there’s no way to literally recreate blindness for the reader, Saramago writes in blocks of prose that span multiple pages, with unusual or non-existent punctuation. It’s disorienting and sometimes confusing—probably what it would be like if you and everyone around you were blind.

World War Z, by Max Brooks. The story of humanity recovering from a years-long war against a plague of the undead. Brooks (author of the cheekier The Zombie Survival Guide) wisely avoids providing any scientific explanation for the cause of the zombie disease and instead tells the story as a series of entirely believable interviews with people involved in the battles: soldiers, politicians, scientists, doctors. While some of the depictions of the zombies themselves—violent and relentless—are creepy, what really left me weirded out were the measures the US had to take to save itself. (Imagine if the nation, and its entire infrastructure, had to rebuild itself west of the Rockies.)

Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson. A bleak story about a depressed, detached archeologist who uncovers a mysterious ceramic sphere, which when cracked open releases a cloud of dust that gradually infects and kills almost everyone in the region. The government first suspects that it’s a swine-born virus and summarily kills and burns all pigs. Then they go after birds. The author’s descriptions of a world rendered silent by the absence of humans and birds are downright haunting. One of a few books I’ve almost stopped reading because of its intensity.

The Deus Machine, by Pierre Ouellette. This sci-fi book from the 90s would probably feel out of date today, as much of it hinges on a supercomputer gone bad, but it still creeped the hell out of me when I read it. Said computer’s AI becomes sentient and begins spawning, via a networked system of biological systems, a series of increasingly horrid animal hybrids that threaten to wipe out the human race.

The Cobra Event, by Richard Preston. This sister novel to Preston’s marvelous non-fiction book The Hot Zone is an unnervingly realistic depiction of a cold-like epidemic that causes people to act out their aggressions and personal demons in bizarre ways. It contains one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever read (gory spoiler alert): a medical examiner peels the skin of his own face backwards over his head. Ick. Anyway, Preston’s thoroughly-researched, fact-based approach to the effects of a pandemic provides insight into what it would be like if, say, bird flu exploded.

Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke. Tim would slap me if I neglected to mention this classic. In short: a race of aliens who happen to look like the devil (or is it the other way around?) arrive on Earth, convert all the children into a singular immortal consciousness, then blow up the planet. It’s tragic and beautiful and has one of the best endings ever. (Which I think would actually make a really cool prologue in the movie version that Tim and I want to direct, but he disagrees.)

So, what are your most memorable stories of the end of the world?

Have you seen the new “Above the Influence” ad campaign to get kids to not smoke pot?

Well, I like this version better:

Also, whoever came up with this one was smoking pot himself.

So I use this nifty plugin for my Safari search field called Inquisitor. It auto-completes what I’m typing based on the most frequent Google searches while also showing me the top few hits while I type. It’s rad. But why am I telling you this?

Well, today I wanted to ask Google, “Where to buy Wii” because I’m just curious if anybody actually has these things in stock. I’m starting to think it’s all fake and the Nintendo doesn’t even exist.

Anyway, as I was typing you can see that when I only had the first three words, that Apple must be selling a lot of product this season — or perhaps we aren’t because people don’t know where to buy our products!

Either way, as soon as I started typing “Wii” I quickly found that people on the internet are more eager to find other W “products.”

So as you can see, no posts from Tim since Zack was born. We have a private blog and photo album chronicling our experiences as new parents — but as many before us have decided, it is password protected.

So this post serves two purposes:

1. Tell you why there aren’t any posts from me (in case you hadn’t guessed) and encourage others to post so I have something to read once in a while.
2. If anyone reading this blog doesn’t have access to the baby zack website but would like to have access, please email me and I’ll give you the name and password.

And if it makes you feel any better, I think I’ll start posting here again with other non-baby related stuff (if any non-baby related things happen to me.)