Observations: Saturday, January 29th
Apple and I went out for dinner on Saturday night. I have to say, we had a great time, despite the restaurant we selected not quite being up to our expectations. As usual, though, the simple observations of life once again proved interesting enough to write about in and of themselves.
The restaurant—a Japanese sushi / teppanyaki grill type place—was about 40 minutes away, so we took the newly-opened north/south corridor that nobody has found yet. The traffic was great, as usual—it’s the only road in the county of which that can be said, even during season. The only problem was the Ford Lightning pickup ahead of us, which was hauling two refrigerators in its bed. The cargo wasn’t tied down whatsoever and it was too long for the truck’s liftgate to close. I hate following anyone carrying cargo, but when it’s not secured, it stops being annoying and starts becoming dangerous. I kept my distance.
The truck changed lanes, other vehicles merged in front of us, life continued unabated. But it wasn’t long before the van in front of us slowed down abruptly, and we soon discovered why: One of the Lightning’s refrigerators had fallen off the back of the truck and was now smashed in the middle of the road. Up ahead, the truck had pulled over, and the driver was probably cussing up a storm having just realized he’d destroyed half of his cargo because he’s a total and complete retard. Bully for him.
Battlestar Galactica Premiere
It almost snuck up on me undetected, but fortunately somebody alerted me to the fact that the new Battlestar Galactica series was starting last Friday on the Sci-Fi channel. It’s the new series that continues the grippingly dramatic story begun in the 2003 four-hour miniseries, which was incredibly good, and I’m pleased to report that the first two episodes of the series continue the unfaltering greatness.
Even as someone who is only a recent inductee into the 1970s Battlestar fanbase, I really appreciate everything the creators have done with the new series. It ties into the old canon just enough to make you feel like you’re watching Battlestar, but does enough things differently to give the show its own modern appeal. And by that I don’t mean that everybody’s keeping up with current fashion trends. The entire dynamic of the show is different—where the classic show was a campy adventure story with the ubiquitous comic relief and laser battles, the new series watches like a political thriller.
The first episode, “33,” picks up five days after the end of the miniseries and tells of how, in that span of time, the Cylons have been chasing the humans from FTL jump to FTL jump, always managing to find them in exactly 33 minutes each time. The crew of the “rag-tag fugitive fleet,” to borrow terminology from the old show’s closing, is obviously on the verge of collapse from stress and lack of sleep. Even Baltar acts zanier than usual, which is a stretch. But at no time does it ever feel silly. You know that the human race is going to survive the encounter, somehow, but it doesn’t detract from the suspense of everything that happens in between. It’s a great ride.
486 Saved by a Penguin
The core components of my Dell 486 have apparently bit the dust, but its hard drives remain intact. I’ve known this for a couple of weeks now, but it’s been beyond me to do anything about it. The smaller, secondary hard drive mounted fine in one of my other DOS boxes about a week ago, but there was nothing really on it. Just one extremely old revision of a story a friend wrote, an aborted “Nitpicker’s Guide to Knight Rider” that I started writing in ‘95 and abruptly gave up on (and for good reason, because it really sucks), and a zipped install of Windows 3.11 that used to be installed before I upgraded to Windows 95.
The main boot drive, however, was trickier. It’s a 1083 MB Western Digital Caviar 3100, cost me a whopping $400 back in 1994, and required the OnTrack Dynamic Drive Overlay to be installed before my 486’s BIOS would read past 528 MB of its capacity. The DDO is what was giving me fits—no modern machine could interpret it. A DDO installs extraneous software to a disk’s boot sector which helps older BIOSes get past their cylinder limits and such. But this means that the partition table, data and everything else on the drive has to be moved further in on the disk than normal, and no operating system expects that. I tried stuffing the HD into about six different computers, none of which would read from it. They all saw it was there—each machine’s BIOS never failed to detect it—but getting at the data was hopeless.
When I get really desperate, I post on message boards asking for help. So that’s what I did. Some guy suggested that I try a Linux live CD, and specifically recommended Knoppix. It’s an experimental German distro of Linux that can be burned to a bootable CD and run directly from your CD-ROM drive, no installation necessary. It’s really quite amazing. Anyway this guy on the boards said that Knoppix was adept at auto-detecting and mounting just about any drive, so he suggested I give it a go. Here’s where my story really begins. Read on only if you are a nerd supreme.
