The Thing in the morning

September 09, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I mentioned a little while back that watching movies in the daytime feels a little odd. Today we watched The Thing from 11am-1pm. It's really weird to come out of a movie like that, stepping from a pitch-black theater to the middle of a really nice day. It just doesn't feel right.

if i had a time machine, it wouldn't be 1:45am

September 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Have you ever watched a movie that had time travel, and watched a whole complicated plot unfold that could have all been averted if the guy with the time machine just went back five minutes before everything started? Right now I'm writing a short paper / expanded journal entry on why that's ok for my speculative cinema class.

Update, 2:41am: The finished product is here, in PDF form.

thursday art walk

September 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Kathy and I went to the beach yesterday. I picked up a copy of the Downtown News in the lobby on the way out and read it through out in the sun.

One item of interest was the little blurb on Thursday's Downtown Art Walk. Being Area-Wide Resident Artist for Downtown, I figure I should start checking things like this out. The DN article made it sound like this was something that started just at noon, but Sean Bonner (and the downtownartwalk site) tells me it's really 12-9, so I think I will be checking it out. Also a little deceptive in the DN article is the claim that this is a walking tour. Yeah, you could walk the whole thing, but it's quite a hike.

it's break time

September 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson

You may have noticed that I've started posting less on the weekends. It's not intentional, but it's good to get away from the computer for a while, especially when you're around oneas much as I am.

Enjoy the weekend. Don't spend it online. After hitting up the beach this morning, Kathy and I are about to head over to Griffith Park and take advantage of the clear air today.

Mount Hollywood, here we come.

ah, the joy of having a fast computer again

September 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I mentioned Wednesday that I was finally going to update my computer. Well, that evening I went to Fry's and got scared by how many different motherboards there were to choose from. I finally ended up with a Shuttle AN35N-Ultra motherboard, an AMD Athlon 3000 processor, and 1gig of RAM. Of course I got it all home and realized that my power supply was too old to power it all... who knew that in the last 5 years they went to ATX12V power supplies?

Yesterday I picked up a $30 power supply at Staples and got the whole setup powered up. It took me a while to track down some performance issues (APIC and nforce2 don't play well together, or something), but last night I got that all settled out and got Linux running great.

Then, I had to go and try to get Windows XP running. Now, first off this got complicated because it turns out I don't actually have any XP installation media. I got XP with my laptop, but Toshiba only ships a recovery DVD that has a ghost image of the factory-setup drive on it. So I have XP on my laptop, and I want it on my desktop... How do I accomplish that? Here's how (on the laptop, in Linux):

dd if=/dev/hda1 | ssh 192.168.1.2 dd of=/dev/sda1

Now, you'll notice that I'm putting XP on a SCSI drive on the desktop (since that's what I had lying around). I don't run SCSI on my laptop, obviously, so first go round it presented an issue to try to boot off SCSI. I'd just get the boot menu and then it would reboot. But this morning I thought to install my SCSI driver on the laptop, then copy the drive over.

That worked like a charm. I now have a dual-boot desktop for the first time in like four years.

Just for posterity, the grub commands to boot windows off my SCSI drive:

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
boot