Leonard Cohen

I've been a fan of some Leonard Cohen stuff for years. Honestly, it first started with the soundtrack to Natural Born Killers where a couple of his songs appear. Definitely one of the top 10 movie soundtracks ever and includes Waiting for the Miracle and The Future from Cohen, but also a great cover of You Belong to Me by Bob Dylan. So I've been somewhat familiar with his stuff, but just recently got a lot more familiar as my little lady was choosing songs to sing at performances this summer and fall. Turns out she kept picking songs that he wrote. These include Halleluha (you'll know this from the Shrek soundtrack as covered by John Cale) and Suzanne, which again lots of people covered, but the Judy Collins version is the one she was into.

While familiar with him, I didn't actually have any albums. His stuff is pretty popular to cover, so I've got many songs he wrote, but nothing of his. I just grabbed a couple and am even more impressed. Awesome lyrics in just about every song. His voice is one of those that is give or take (think Bob Dylan or Tom Waits), but it's good music to play while working.

So go pick up The Essential Leonard Cohen two CD set. Now. Go. Great stuff.

First MINI modification

In what may be a long series of upgrades for the MINI, I made my first modification. I replaced the standard antenna with a little stubby one. The stock on is about 18" long and skinny given the car that RC look. So I ordered a replacements that's just 4" tall. It tapers a bit as it goes up, but the bottom bit is the same size as the stock one.

I order from MiniCarParts.net where we've order a few other things (hat, clothes, etc.). The tiny envelope was delivered by DHL and I was caught off guard. I don't know why, but I expected something larger than an envelope you might get a CD shipped in. Timidly I opened it up to find the packing slip and the tiny little antenna. But no installation instructions, which worried me for a minute until I saw the threads at the bottom.

Installation was trivial. I just reached over and unscrewed the stock one, screwed this one on, then stuck in they key and turned on the radio. Reception was fine. And it looks cool.

A search after the fact reveals that this antenna will fit a lot of late model cars besides the MINI:

• MINI Cooper
• Volkswagen Jetta,Golf and Rabbit
• Mitsubishi EVO
• Scion tC and Scion xA
• Nissan 350Z
• Audi A4 or S4
• Honda S2000

So why did they put that goofy looking thing on the MINI to start with? Surely the 350Z doesn't have an 18" remote control car looking thing on it! Even though I do see that the Scion tC comes with the same stock one as the MINI does.

Corrupt Registry!!!!

Oh my, two blog posts in one day. But this one had me sweating quite a bit (not that Forza 2 doesn't )

After playing around installing and testing some old games for my son to play (he's into StarCraft now, but I was always more of a Command & Conquer fan). So I installed the second in the series - Tiberium Sun which had a good story line and much better graphics than the original. But for some reason it wouldn't run correctly, so I uninstalled it this morning (not long after my blog post). I also uninstalled a few other things I don't use while the control panel was open. A dialog wanted me to reboot, but I always decline because I'll do it when I want to. But then my system started acting a little odd, so I obliged and closed everything up and rebooted. And I see the following:

Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

along with a suggestion to boot from a Windows XP CD and select 'r' to repair. In my experience, this never works, but I tried it anyway. It didn't work. After some poking around and lots of other things, I found an MS Knowledge Base article that gave me the right clues. Luckily I have a clue with these things and knew not everything was kosher here, so let me outline my fix for anybody else with this issue and also for myself when this happens next time!

The article suggests that you back up your current registry files, which I did and I recommend doing yourself too. Boot with an XP CD and choose 'r' and let it complain about the registry - but it then drops you to a command line. Now just copy the 5 key files: DEFAULT, SAM, SECURITY, SOFTWARE and SYSTEM from c:\windows\system32\config to somewhere like c:\windows\tmp. We can always return to this broken configuration if we need to.

But the next step says to restore backup versions of these files from c:\windows\repair. The problem here is that all these files are dated on my system from when Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released - May 2005. Which means overwriting my corrupt files with these basically blank registry files will reset my system to largely a fresh installation. All the user files will be gone and you'll need to re-install everything. This is not what you want to do unless everything else has failed.

Instead, you want to find more recent versions (un-corrupted hopefully) of your registry files to repair. This is outlined in Part Two of the article. Dig into c:\System Volume Information from the command prompt in the recovery console. Change into a recent _restor{} directory and you'll see a bunch of subdirectories with names like RP815, RP816, etc. Be careful and check times because if you grab the absolute latest, it may be corrupt too -- or if you tried the first suggestion from MS will have the old 2005 registry with new dates. Look into the highest RP### directory under the 'snapshot' directory. Hopefully you'll see a bunch of files with names like _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SYSTEM. If not, move to the next newer restore point -- not every restore point will have a backup of the registry. I had to go back two or three versions to find them. Now, do as the article suggests and copy the 5 files again to c:\windows\tmp so you have another place to restore to. From there, copy these guys to c:\windows\sytem32\config and rename them to their proper names.

Now cross your fingers and type 'exit' to reboot the machine. Hopefully your standard startup screen will show up. Unless you were just doing a major overhaul when the registry was corrupted, you shouldn't notice anything different. Success!

Next step is to load up your backup programs and back up everything you care about. Everything. Go buy an external firewire drive if you need to. Back up everything now because you never know if the next crash will be worse or not!!!

Forza 2

I've been playing Forza Motorsport 2 for the last week or two. Unlike other racing games like PGR3 which are largely arcade-style racing, Forza is really more of a racing simulation. The idea is that it keeps track of lots of various aspects of physics and tries to model tire friction, weight balance, etc. Overall, it does a pretty good job. Running around in a Lotus Exige, if you lift the throttle slightly mid-turn, you feel the car start to oversteer, which is what you'd expect in real-world cars of this caliber. It also has various things like ABS brakes, traction control and stability management to keep the car planted; but you can turn these off and the difference is quite accurate to real life. This is much different than the arcade racers where you keep the gas pedal floored and bounce off the walls or other cars.

So if you're into racing sims, FM2 for the XBox 360 is a good one. But what prompted me to write today isn't my addiction to this type of game where I must win every event as quickly as possible before I go insane.

It's some of the artwork I've seen posted online of how people are painting their cars. At first, I thought, "pretty cool" and wondered of various themes I could possibly create (limited though they may be being my artistically-limited self). But then I read a tutorial, and my thoughts changed lines. First off, because the tutorial will easily draw out a TLDNR for those not interested, the primary point is that you cannot upload pictures to the game. That means all of this artwork you see of fancy cars was done by hand.

Now, there are some very talented people out there doing this stuff. And I certainly respect their talent. However, I'm just not on their page. Given my limited XBox time, I would rather play the game rather than draw pictures using primitive shapes and basic effects. Having said that, my kids will spend an hour or more in front of Microsoft Paint making random things, but I for one cannot. Sure, I'll pick an appropriate color for a car I've purchased -- dark blue for the Audi RS 6, please. And yellow for the Lotus of course. But beyond that, I'm just not going to spend the time.

I'll admit that if they let you upload graphics from the network or a thumb drive that I would be slightly more tempted to create something original (well, kind of, because I wouldn't have drawn the original source). But I refuse to use my gaming time to draw rather than race!

"These are the real heroes"

3 Hurt in Vegas Casino Shooting

Some local Vegas idiot starts shooting randomly down onto a casino floor. He managed to hit a few people, but luckily none of them were hurt critically. But the coolest part is that some bystanders saw this going on -- and they tackled the psycho and pinned him down. They were off duty police officers from out of town and two military personnel. Bravo.

"These are the real heroes. They saw him shooting and tackled him and held him," police Lt. Randy Sutton said. He identified those who stepped in as three off-duty out-of-town police officers and two military personnel, but he did not know their names.

I agree totally. I would like to have been one of these guys, but in reality if I was there I'd probably be one of the people knocking over chairs running for cover. I can't say I'd pull the George Costanza move of rushing past children and elderly women, but my mindset is not one to throw myself on top of a gun-wielding nutbar.

Roswell in the news. Again.

Here's a fox news story that came out today: Dead Airman's Affidavit: Roswell Aliens Were Real. It discusses a death-bed confession of a person apparently involved in the original story 60 years ago.

I admit and agree that these stories sometimes make one second guess what really happened out in the desert at the start of the cold war. But really, why would aliens who have mastered space travel be coming out her to monitor Earth? Why? Surely close to 100% of what they'd need to know could be gleamed from remote sensing, so why buzz us? If we found primitive life on a planet we would either get down in there and get involved or just put a satellite in orbit to observe. Whatever, the arguments are numerous.

But people will always be fascinated by the possibilities. I don't really doubt there's life out there somewhere. It's almost a statistical certainty. There's a recent article in Scientific American about the odds for life on Mars (slim) and Titan (better) - and those are just in our solar system. But being capable of space travel and actually coming to visit Earth to observe/abduct humans borders on absurd.

Google Maps' Street View

I read a blurb on Google's Street View not that long ago. I then went to New York to stay at a hotel that I knew where it was, but had never stayed there before. So I needed parking information and was doing my regular old "search parking" around the area. But then I noticed the little "Street View" box and started playing with it. Within seconds, I found the scene pictured above -- a parking garage right around the corner (basically under the hotel). Not only did I find what I wanted, but I could also see it so I'll recognize it driving down the street. Pretty freakin' cool. To be sure this was tied to the Sheraton, I called their desk and asked about parking, to which I was told about a garage on 52nd street -- exactly the one I found. Even cooler.

Since then, the thing has gotten very popular. But not so much for finding directions, but for picking apart all the random daily life scenes caught by the camera car driving through major cities. Here is the top 15 sightings.