Getting rid of ufo.exe

My system and flash drive recently contracted a worm under the name of UFO.exe. These instructions were most helpful. Hopefully search engines will rank the page just a little higher if I link to it here.

Virtual possession

This past summer I purchased V-Ray for Rhino directly from the programmers, and the software was delivered not through the mail, but through the internet. Not having any physical manifestation of the product seems a natural fit for such a small, easily downloadable program. This week, however, I took the plunge and purchased my first music download, and I remain far from convinced that music fits the model nearly so well.

Saul Williams's The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! was released online on Thursday, and unlike Radiohead's In Rainbows, no CD release has been forecasted. The lowest quality MP3s are available for free, and higher quality MP3 and FLAC versions are available for $5. Ever the archivist and wannabe audiophile, I opted for the FLAC files, and made my own (LAME-encoded) MP3s for convenient listening.

The music is great, and I like having the liner notes as a PDF, but having to keep the massive FLAC files in a safe, easy-to-find place on one of my many hard drives is a nuisance that I'm having trouble getting past. I can always back up my CDs if I want, but I can't make a nice physical manifestation that will always be easy to find. (A pile of CD-Rs with labels in Sharpie is probably even worse than a folder in Windows.) At this point, I think I'd much rather have paid five more dollars and gotten an object that I could add to my library.

Platforms and packaging aside, I'm very impressed by the music. Like Rage Against The Machine's The Battle of Los Angeles, this is a work that feeds off of rap, rock, and hip-hop and uses each wisely. Williams and producer Trent Reznor know just how much thump to put into each track and how to shift between slam and song without losing the thread that keeps it together. All of rap's familiar profanities are here, but they seem purposeful. The recently buried n-word is featured prominently in many songs, but always as a reflection of a prejudiced world and never as a mere nickname as Lil' Jon and so many others are wont to do. It's all around quite good, and it's available for free. Give it a listen.

Glass half full

I'm trying to better my rendering skills this semester by integrating V-Ray images into any class that I can. I'm cooking up some animations for my video diary, and I thought I'd share a work in progress still. The scale is a little off, but I'm fairly satisfied with the overall look.

DIR a:\british_library\ /s /b | FIND "relevant information"

I've just returned from the British Library, which has an amazing collection, accessible to the general public free of charge. For obvious reasons, this service comes with heavy restrictions. Card application is like a trip to the DMV, requiring multiple proofs of ID and a lengthy wait for service. Items may be brought into reading rooms only in clear plastic bags. Water, pens, and cameras are prohibited. Books may not be removed from the library. And essentially all stacks are closed. This last restriction is the one that crippled my efforts for the day. I found the online catalog to be rather crude, and without being able to browse shelves, I was rather hapless in finding sources.

It really felt like trying to work in DOS without any proper experience. Most libraries are at least partially GUIs, navigable to some extent with the eye alone. The British Library is 100% command line interface. CLIs are efficient and often preferred by those who know what they're doing, but its a suffocating experience for those who don't.

SDRAM sadness

I finally got up the motivation to re-set my second gig of RAM in my laptop, which I removed when I sent the Alien in for servicing. After checking with two of my neighbors for Phillips screwdrivers, I finally got the card installed, only to find that its presence prevented the computer for booting. Close inspection under a bright light revealed a hairline crack in one of the eight integrated circuits, which seems to be enough to ruin the whole SO-DIMM. I've had to take it out a number of times, but this was the first time that I had to travel with it outside of my computer, and apparently my precautions were insufficient. This saddens me not only because of the inconvenience, but also because the SO-DIMM was a rather generous and timely Christmas gift from my parents in 2005.

Good luck and 660GB

FedEx came by with Plumtree earlier than anticipated, and I was still in bed. Nate, who overslept and missed his bus, happened to hear the knock and was able to sign for me. UPS showed up with the new hard drives soon after, miraculously catching me between my shower and my departure. So, by great fortune, I have my computer (mostly fixed!) and enough disk space to last me the rest of 2007. This seems good.

When running on full is more like running on empty

Last night I brought to the computer lab Iaroslav, an 80GB LaCie which was the first of my line of external hard drives and houses my photograph archive, including a couple photos I needed but were not on Saint Gleb, which, as my newest 250GB addition, houses most of my current work. Theo, a fellow Minnesotan in this Masters program, asked me why I needed two. I told him that my archives exceeded the size of either disk, and he seemed a bit dubious, having been able to get his work from many years onto a portion of a comparably sized disk.  To make sure that I wasn't deluding myself, I checked Saint Gleb's remaining free space, and unpleasantly surprised to discover that I was down to my last 550MB. A quick trip to Amazon.com became essential, so I'm expecting another pair of 250 gigabyters within the week.

All my hard drives are named after the children of Vladislav I, ruler of Kievan Rus. Iaroslav and Mstislav came first.  Saint Boris and Saint Gleb made the second pairing. I think these two will be Stanislav and Sudislav, since I'm not quite prepared to honor Sviatopolk.  Maybe these two will be the last of this family.

Return to the mother ship

Plumtree is travelling back to the manufacturer today for a new motherboard. Hopefully for real this time. Sigh.

Abducted

I finally got my Alienware back after sending it in for repair on 18 December, and I'm sad to report that those dunderhead technicians proved wholly useless once again, as they returned the system unchanged.

The Return

On my way home I looked up into the night sky and watched a plane descending slowly for landing at Hancock, its magnificently bright lights casting beams a quarter mile ahead of it.

Plumtree is back from Florida. I'm back from L.A. It's time to get back to it.

Computer Over

The hard drive of plumtree, my primary computer, died today. I'm going to be stuck with quidnunc, my old Dell, for the next three weeks. quidnunc has no wireless, so updates to this blog before early October may be infrequent. (So what else is new?)

Wish me luck.

A Step Up From The 486 DX

I placed an order for an Alienware MJ-12m 7700 this afternoon. For those of you unfamiliar with Alienware, they're a Florida-based company that sells customized PCs via the internet. In many respects they are a Dell for people who want or need better hardware or service. They hype their gaming computers first and foremost, but unlike their primary competitors Falcon Northwest and Voodoo, Alienware offers professionals some more serious computers that have a little less styling and a little more bang for their buck. The MJ-12m 7700 is the current highend "portable workstation." The key specs of the system I selected are below; take a look if this kind of this thing interest you.

This is my second computer (I'm still getting along just fine with my 2001 Dell Inspiron 8000), but the fifth computer on which I've been a regular user. Our family got its first PC in 1993. It was a 486 DX (not one of those sorry SXs), although I was quickly frustrated that we had VGA graphics instead of VGA+ like my cousins did. (It actually did limit our software options substantially.) Perhaps the coolest feature our computer had this thing called a "cee dee rom" that the salesperson thought was likely to be quite important in the coming years. (He was correct, and we actually upgraded to a double-speed CD-ROM eventually.) It's funny thinking about how many copies of that computer would be needed to match this new laptop I'm getting. Probably it's only slightly less funny than thinking in the year 2017 how many copies of my 2005 laptop would equate to my new handheld.

Case Alienware® MJ12m 7700 Case with 17" WideSXGA+ 1680 x 1050 LCD Display with Built-in Camera
Motherboard Intel® 915P Chipset Supporting PCI-Express
Processor Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 530J w/ HT Technology 3.0GHz 1MB Cache
Memory 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SO-DIMM at 533MHz - 2 x 512MB
Graphics Accelerator Alienware® MJ12m 7700 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Go with 256MB of DDR3 memory
Hard Drive RAID 0 - 160GB (80GB x 2) 5400 RPM ATA100
Primary Optical Drive 8X Dual Layer DVD+/-RW / 24X CD-RW Combo w/Software
Wireless Network Internal Wireless 802.11a/b/g miniPCI Card

My neck of the woods

Ryan, the instructor of my Environmental Conservation course, seems to be a full out Mac-geek, and before class today I had developed a theory that his favorite toy is the 360°-panorama feature of Quicktime. He'd started two of the first three lectures by spinning us around a photographed landscape, and the trend continued today. This time we got the exciting opportunity to look around a farm in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, the suburb directly east of my hometown of Maple Grove. Ryan told us that it was an example of "regulation of landscape." I asked him why he had chosen Brookly Park of all places. He answered that there were only a limited number of sites that have been recorded in a panorama. I think my theory holds.