A few days ago, I was discussing Law and Order with my brother (a common topic, since we both love the show) and he started telling me why Ben Stone’s character was written off the show.  He didn’t know all of the details but he knew that the actor, Michael Moriarty, clashed with the creator of the show on the concept of censorship and and this directly lead to his departure.

So, naturally, we turned to Wikipedia for more details. It turns out that Michael Moriarty is nuts!  He did have problems with censorship, but it seems that most of his fears stemmed from a comment made by the Attorney General, Janet Reno, rather than from any actual censorship that took place.  The creators say that he was fired due to erratic behavior (perhaps due to his admitted drinking problem?).  Shortly after leaving the show, he went to Canada as a self-proclaimed “political exile” and eventually received Canadian citizenship.  He regularly writes about political topics and his views are rather eccentric (he equates the idea of abortion with the genocidal motives of Nazism and generalizes Islam as a violent, power hungry religion which may need to be dealt with using nuclear weapons).

To top things off,  he has expressed an interest in running for president in the 2008 elections.  He announced his intentions in 2005, so maybe since then he realized that he has no chance of winning.  Or maybe he is campaigning, but nobody is listening.  Either way, he won’t end up in the oval office.  But it is certainly a funny story!

Not too long ago, I read a post on another blog about how much better the Full Metal Alchemist manga is than the anime.  After reading the parts of the post that did not contain spoilers (at least I tried–I think I accidentally read a few small spoilers), I decided to take a look at the manga online.  After reading the first 37 chapters I came to the conclusion that she was right – the manga is much better!

I liked the anime but about two-thirds through the story it started to meander.  The end of the anime was less than satisfying and then the movie spent way too much time in “the other side” for my taste.  It turns out that half of the story in the anime is not even in the manga.

The first part of the anime sticks pretty closely to the manga, although it does take a few liberties.  But around the point that Dante is introduced (a character that, as far as I can tell so far, does not exist in the manga) the stories diverge sharply.  Furor Bradley (President Bradley in the ReadManga translation) is much more powerful and better represented in the manga.  The humunculi are far more ruthless and less sympathetic in the manga, but more interesting as dark, disturbed characters.  Roy Mustang is more effective and also has less control over the Elric brothers.  Archer, a character I did not like in the anime, does not even exist.  Have I convinced you yet?

Anyway, I went to Barnes and Noble today to see if they had the Hellsing Vol. 8 manga.  Since they did not, I bought the Full Metal Alchemist Vol. 1 instead.  Eventually I’ll get around to buying all of them, but first I’ll finish reading the online versions.

My backup server is up, running, and storing backup data for all of my computers plus backing up the data from this site.  I have a nice script that will run most of the backups from the backup server itself, with the exception of my main PC (with all my Vista problems, I did not want to add an SSH server).  To back up my main computer (the new one), I can run a backup script from it that will push the data over to the backup server.  The only task left is to add the scripts to the Windows Task Scheduler so the backups run automatically.

All of the programs I am using in my setup are free.  The only costs associated with the setup are for the computer (in my case, I had to buy a new hard drive because the old one was too small) and a Windows license.  If, however, you wanted avoid that expense, you could easily install a Linux distribution and my setup would work just as well (probably better).

Rather than bore any non-technical readers with my setup, I wrote up a nice long tutorial on how to make your own centralized server using freeware software.  It is still pretty rough and does not have content in the section for automating the backup on a schedule, but it has enough information to get backups running on-demand.  Let me know if it’s useful to anyone out there.

Episode 4, Part 1, has been released at Pivisuals.com.  Part 2 is already over halfway finished, so the rest of the episode will be available in the near future.

Check out the episode at this link:  http://www.pivisuals.com/univstate/episodes/ep4-pt1.php

Now that I have been running Vista for over a week, here is an update to my Vista experience.  After turning on the Aero interface, Lightwave has been running pretty smoothly.  The GUI is nice and fast (thanks to the new hardware, not because of Vista) and the application has not crashed yet while working in it.  I have rendered out some test frames without issues and I even rendered out a scene using ScreamerNet with my new Vista computer acting as both the render controller (via Layout) and a render node at the same time.

Everything is not rosy with Vista, however.  Some applications just do not run on Vista.  I have already given up on a few applications and I installed them on my old system so I can continue to use them.

All in all, I wish my computer shipped with Windows XP rather than Vista.  The new flashy design of Vista does not give me any advantages in my general workflow, but the major hurdles that Vista introduces to programs and drivers has hindered my work.  I hope that Microsoft fixes the OS to improve the user experience.

I checked the official Adult Swim schedule today to find out when the Friday night programming starts, what will be on Fridays, and when Lucy, Daughter of the Devil begins. Things I found out which are actually interesting to me:

• Friday night programming starts in the first week of July.
• The Friday night schedule is the same as the weekday schedule.
• The weekday schedule will also change then, starting at 11 pm Eastern instead of 10:30.
• Lucy starts August 5, although it is odd that they aren’t re-airing the pilot before then.
• It looks like Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law has 2 new episodes in mid-July (or maybe I’m misreading that; I thought that show was over).
• Home Movies re-runs are ending August 18 (again? stop messing with my re-runs!).
• There is another Futurama marathon on August 25.
• Voltron has been airing in the 5:30 am slot (not that I’m going to watch it, but I loved it as a kid).

While wasting my time talking to a Dell “technical” support representative, I was trying out different options in Vista as a last desperate attempt to get Lightwave to work correctly. I switched my Theme over from “Windows Classic” to “Windows Vista” and then switched my Color Scheme over to “Windows Aero”.  Suddenly, Lightwave works.

Why would a stripped down, simplified theme interfere with a 3D graphics program but the bloated, graphics intensive Aero features fix all my problems?  It almost seems like Microsoft knee-capped the old themes to force people to use and love the new Aero interface, which is obviously meant to compete with Apple’s MacOS.  It is all very suspicious.

Of course, the new settings didn’t fix the random crash problem I’m having with Lightwave.  If I grab a viewport’s edge and move it around quickly, after 5 seconds the program dies.  That makes me very worried about the overall stability of the program on Vista.  I guess I’ll have to install the program on my old system (the new backup system) just in case.

I tried to ask the Dell support representative (Adam from India) if I could buy an OEM XP license from Dell to downgrade my system, but he tried to explain to me that it is impossible for me to install Windows XP on my computer now that I have a clean installation of Windows Vista.  He also tried to tell me that my problems cannot possibly be related to my video card drivers because I already told him that the drivers are installed correctly.  They have a bunch of geniuses working over there.  The Newtek support person, however, was very friendly and helpful, even though she wasn’t able to solve my problem (because in all fairness, the problem is not with the Lightwave software).

One last Vista complaint, also related to drivers.  I have a very nice optical gaming mouse from Logitech with a bunch of extra buttons.  Now that Vista makes driver development so difficult, Logitech is using the built-in Windows drivers for my mouse.  Which means that I can no longer assign different functions to the mouse buttons except for those that Microsoft chooses, which are far more restrictive than what Logitech allows in XP and 2000.

My new Dell arrived Thursday and I spent a lot of time since then copying files, installing programs, and rebuilding my old computer into a backup file system. My new Dell runs on Microsoft Vista, the new computer operating system that Microsoft considers to be “cutting edge”. Well I’m here to tell you: it’s not.

Granted, the average user probably will not run into issues on this system and may find the new interface designs cool and fun. But as a power user, I am ready to throw Vista into the trash. I can make many small complaints that together wouldn’t make me give up on the OS (Vista’s constant security questions about performing tasks, the complete redesign of where system files are located, major changes in where configuration options are in the Control Panel icons, etc.). These are all annoyances, but after a while you just get used to the changes. But there is one major problem with Vista that I cannot get past: Vista has serious driver problems. The problems are so serious that I cannot use applications that run exceptionally well on Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

One of the main purposes for this new machine is to run 3D modeling and animation software, which relies on the stability and performance of OpenGL drivers. OpenGL is an open programming API used for graphic displays and is the main competition to Microsoft’s proprietary system, DirectX. Video card manufacturers provide OpenGL drivers as part of the video card and graphic programs can then use OpenGL to display graphics. Unfortunately, because of the way Vista handles drivers, it is much more difficult for a manufacturer to release a Vista-compliant driver (something I talked about in a previous post). And right now my video card driver, which was released about exactly a month ago, does not handle OpenGL displays well at all. On the main program I use (Lightwave), the program’s buttons are half blank and if I move the viewports around too fast, the application crashes.

I’m at the point now where I’m going to try a few more tech support calls (first with the software company and then with Dell) and if there are no solutions, I’m going to wipe the system and reinstall with Windows XP, which I know provides a stable platform for running my applications. Which means I have to do a lot more data copying and reinstall everything I spent the past few days installing.

When is Linux finally going to have a distribution that rivals Windows?

A couple weeks ago, a friend had a data disaster on his home computer involving data that he didn’t back up. Shortly after that, my brother’s secondary computer lost a hard drive under mysterious circumstances. This is the second time that his computer ran into this problem, but luckily this time around all of the data was already backed up on his primary computer.

Now, on my advice, both my friend and my brother are backing up all of their data over to an online backup company, Mozy. It’s a pretty good deal: $55/year for unlimited, encrypted remote storage. The only down-side is that you have to upload all of your data to their site, which can be very time-consuming for that first-time backup.

All this data loss around me has me thinking that I don’t have a very good backup system in place for all of my data. And I have a lot of data. I converted all of my CDs to MP3s years ago for convenience, and all of my new CDs get immediately ripped and added to the digital library. I have a large digital photo library that I’ve built up since I got my first digital camera (circa 2001). All of my personal data, 2D and 3D images and animations, wedding planning information, and who knows what else are all scattered across my hard drives and across different computers.

I now have a plan to fix my woefully dangerous data situation. I bought a new main computer, which should be arriving tomorrow or Friday (alas, it’s not a $12,000 computer, but it is still a nice upgrade from my current system). Once that arrives, I will work on migrating all of my programs and data over from my old computer. Once that is done, I will install a new 500GB hard drive (already purchased) into the old computer, reinstall the OS, and then turn that into my centralized backup server. I’ll try to come up with some automated method for backing up the systems, probably using Cygwin, rsync, and shell scripts, assuming rsync will work well with that much data (I don’t know, I haven’t used it much). And I think for even better security, I’ll use Mozy to backup the backups.

I’ll post more info on the final solution once I figure it out.

Wells Street Art Fair
Old Town Art Fair
Wells Street Art Fair
Flattop Grill
Wells on Wells
Wells Street Art Fair
Shenanigans
Bootleggers
Elm Street Liquors
Avenue M
Hunt Club

It was a fun night, but I’m exhausted today.  Time for a nap.