I just got back from seeing Episode II and am happy to say that I really liked it. My Star Wars list from favorite to least favorite currently is:

While I'm in an announcing mood, I want to publicly state my love and gratitude to my dear wife Laura who's given me nothing but happiness in our first eight years of marriage. Happy anniversary sweetheart!

Well it has been over a month since I last posted. Many things have been happening in my life to contribute to this. The first has been work and alot of it; we're pushing towards an end of May handoff and work has been eating most of my desire to do anything with a computer after work. With that said that brings me to excuse #2 which will seem to be at odds with excuse #1. I built a new main machine and rearranged my old machines. I've been slowly getting everything back together. Normally I would have does this quickly except for excuse #1.

Last but most important is excuse #3: last week my wife and I had our third child!

Jonathan Daven Mau born May 4, 2002 at 3:31PM CST 9 pounds 11 ounces and 21.5 inches long

If you want more pictures and the details of the birth checkout his birth story. As you can see by the picture above he's a little angel. He's really been good so far, Phoebe and Andie (his sisters) love him, and Laura's healing up nicely. Except for the end of May work deadline, all is well in the Mau household.

My friend A.T. dropped me the bit of code that will apparently crash any version of Windows 2000*. Not your plain run of the mill crash but a full kernel-faulting blue screen of death crash.

#include <stdio.h>

int main( int, char** )
{
	printf( "Go\t\b\b\b\b\b\b" );
	printf( "Boom\t\b\b\b\b\b\b" );
	return 0;
}

Update: John sent me a note saying that WinXP is not bothered by this code.

*I've only confirmed it with Windows 2000 Pro w/service pack 2 installed.

My Ceiva rebate check came in today! I wish RebatesHQ.com was more like Microsoft.

They said it would take 6-8 weeks. It showed up in 5 weeks. This is the way rebates should work.

My It's Walky piece of limited edition original art (#2 of 10) showed up today. I't alot nicer than I thought it would be.

This morning I noticed that my Ceiva rebate check status has changed to "Fulfilling Reward". We'll see if/when I get it. I sent it off in early December. By their reckoning it's been 6-8 weeks. By my reckoning it's been 15-16 weeks.

Tonight I noticed that I could no longer launch MP3 playlist (.m3u) files from Internet Explorer or Netscape to Winamp. Winamp would launch but it would only play the default Winamp sound clip (the Llama one). If I downloaded the .m3u file it would play fine. Checking the filetype registration showed that it was associated with Winamp correctly.

Remembering a previous problem I had I tried emptying my temp folder (24 Meg taken on a 37 Gig partition with 23 Gig free). Everything is fine now. Windows must do some kind of indexing or something in the temp dir because there was plenty of space free on the drive.

I realize that you don't really care but here's how my inbox looks like every morning at work. The sad thing is that this is the 25% that my spam filters missed.

I have stared into the darkness and found Microwave Pork Rinds staring back!

Also, judging from her posture while using Paint Shop Pro, Phoebe is becoming Ed.

This morning I've been playing around with ObjectBar by Stardock. ObjectBar is a Startbar/Toolbar replacement for Windows 9X/NT/2000/XP. It goes a long way to giving your OS a customized look and feel since so much of it is controlled by or displayed on it's toolbar(s). They provide several themes including one that looks like XP, pre-Mac OS 10, and QNX. They provide a web forum where people can upload and download additional themes.

For example, here's the MacOS one with the desktop as the focus:

...

The bars have many of the emulated OS's nuances. For example, with MacOS, the current application's menubar is displayed in the bar (in this case Paint Shop Pro).

Or in this case, Windows XP's taskbar multiple instance feature:

Now ObjectBar is not limited to emulating other OSs. They provide several custom themes for their own style and it comes with an editor. I need to play with it more, but it seems to be a pretty neat product.

From (well most of) an interview with Jolene Blalock (T'Pol on Enterprise):

So naturally they cast her as a Vulcan :-)

Thanks to Melissa's post I spent a good part of today trying to get this damn tune out of my head! If you're wondering, Hi-Ho is a Japanese ISP owned by Panasonic. You can't click only one!

Today I picked up an ACOMdata 60Gig USB 2.0 external hard drive* and a Maxtor USB 2.0 PCI card. I'm reasonably pleased with both products. The drive is fairly large at 7.5" wide by 10" deep by 2.5" tall. The case is an attractive semi-tranparent plastic but has a nice solid feel to it. It has a built in power supply and fan. It weighs several pounds and is built to be stackable. It has a power button on the front with a bright hard drive access LED light in its semi-transparent case. My main complaint about the hardware portion is that it only has a USB input, no output, so daisy-chaining a set of stacked drives is not possible.

The Maxtor USB 2.0 card went in cleanly and after feeding Windows 2000 its driver diskette it simply worked. I plugged in my USB 1.1 joystick and it was recognized immediately.

The Acomdata hard drive was a little more challenging but it was not too bad. I plugged it in and turned it on. I ran the installer on the CD and it installed the drives. I then went to Windows 2000's disk management software and created a 60 Gig FAT-32 partition. After about 20 minutes of formatting it finished with a dialog warning "Volume size is too big". I tried several different sets of parameters to no avail. So I made it NTFS and a few minutes later I had a new drive F:

To be fair I think this is a Windows 2000 issue. I had a similar problem with a Western Digital 60 Gig hard drive in my secondary machine. However, since it was an IDE drive I was able to boot off a Windows 98 floppy and use FDISK and FORMAT to partition it and format it. Unfortunately FDISK does not work with USB drives. I may have to upgrade my copy of Partition Magic from 6.0 to 7.0 since it supports USB drives.

I was not expecting much performance-wise as it's a 5400RPM drive running off a USB 2.0 connection but I was pleasently suprised. It seems to have approximently half the throughput of my IBM Deskstar 75 gig drive.

Tests were run on a Dell Dimension 4100, Pentium III 800 MHz, Intel 815 chipset-based motherboard, 512 Meg PC133 CAS2 RAM, primary drive IBM Deskstar 7200 RPM 45Gig drive, secondary drive IBM Deskstar 7200 PRM 75 Gig, running Windows 2000 service pack 2. The large file test was a single 1.1 Gig file. The mixed-sized test was a 1.36 Gig directory tree composed of 11,472 files across 902 folders (average size 125K).

My intended purpose for this drive is for backup and for temporary overflow storage. As such I'd like to be able to format it FAT-32 so I could use it on Windows 9x machines in addition to Windows 2000/XP. I'll play with it some more and if I can crack that nut I'll report it.

*normally I'd provide a link to the product page but as you can see it currently features a picture of a firewire hard drive and has text describing how nice it is to have a CD burner.

Update: March 19, 2002

I wanted to do this last night but I was downloading something big so I could not reboot my machine. This morning I rebooted my machine into Windows Me and installed the drive there. It formatted to FAT-32 with no problems and seems to be fine under Windows 2000.

This and other pearls of wisdom can be found in Business 2.0's article "The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business".

I certainly appreciate Mr. Weinberger's point of view, especially being that he makes his living by working in the tax preparation industry, but I humbly submit that taxes should be simple enough that it should require no, or very little, prepartaion. I hate doing taxes. It's not because I don't like paying a reasonable amount of my income for roads, police, military, social needs, etc...

I hate the fact that it's complicated enough and a pain in the ass enough that people with fairly simple income scenarios need or feel they need a tax preparer or software to help them file their taxes. I hate the fact that it's a game where people have to guess what things that they can claim, what shelters they can use, and other strategies they can play to reduce their taxes. It's worse than buying a car. I don't want to guess, bargain or bicker. I want to know what I owe and to pay it.

I hate the fact that everytime I do my taxes, despite the fact that I have a regular job, I am the only person that works for an income in my household, our investments are simple, and I'm college-educated I still have a sinking feeling that I have not done my taxes right. If I cannot do them with confidence how can we expect anyone to do them right? There's a major fear-factor thing going on here. It makes me give credence to my more conspiracy-minded friends who say that the government sets up the laws so that everybody is potentially a criminal so if they decide that they want to start picking us up they can.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It helps to reinforce a us (the people) vs. them (the government) when we're really the same thing on the same side. It's a little more grease on the slippery slope of lawlessness (It's OK to break this law; it's an unjust law; it does not really matter).

I want a simple tax like a flat tax. Since almost all of this information is already sent to the government I want to have a simple tax option that we can opt-in to. By opting in I agree that my employer, bank, mortgage company, etc... may send the appropriate information to the IRS. In turn, early in the new year I want to receive a statement that is my filled out tax return. I can then either accept it or amend it and send it back. Given the information they should be able to come out within a few dollars of what I owe.

...or I can opt-out and file my taxes myself.

It does not have to be too complicated.

...and then your honor, that's when all of the Star Wars fanboys/girls wet themselves...

Today I received my metal-cased post-holocaust version of AOL 7.0 CD. I've heard that 7.0 has RUI* enhancements built in. Since AOL Time Warner already provides my internet access** through Roadrunner I won't be downgrading to AOL anytime soon. Seriously, how much of the Earth's mass has been coverted into AOL diskettes, CDs and cases? I guess it's a net wash as they've all gone back to the Earth in America's landfills...

*Roach User Interface
**Good contact list management guys!

Something tells me I need to clean my wallet out a little more often!

[17:55] MauMan: how loj vb

Well I had my speakers turned all the way up, was intently studing the image and was typing into Trillian to Pat "how long do I have to wait before something happens?" when, well, something happened.

Take the What animal best portrays your sexual appetite?? Quiz

Take the Affliction Test Today!

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET comes with five posters of class hierachies for a total of 62.5 square feet of reference posters if you count the fact that they're double-sided.

Well I've been working with Visual Studio .Net (release version) through the weekend. I've found it to be quite unstable, crashing frequently. Monday it hard locked my system. Even the mouse cursor would not move. I rebooted my box and Windows 2000 would not boot. To make a long story short my registry was corrupted and part of my NTFS file system was corrupt. Time to play my favorite game: reformat and rebuild.

To hopefully help me in the future I picked up a copy of Norton Ghost to image my new system. I've made several images of different stages of my install. I have not tried recovering them yet. I'll probably try that soon.

Initial impressions of Ghost:

Anyways it looks like I have a working system now. I still have a lot of things to install but I'm going to stick with what I have now and will try to get some things done with Visual Studio .Net.

Well I spent most of the day trying to and ultimately suceeding in installing Microsoft Visual Studio .Net. After reading the readme on the CD and uninstalling Visual Studio .Net beta 2 and the .Net Framework beta 2 I rebooted my machine. Then I stuck in CD #1. The installer then prompted me with:

Microsoft's installer and I played this game for a while as I verified that the disk that it was running the setup from was indeed disk #1. After a while I gave up on the nutso idea of installing from the CD and I followed the readme file's instructions for doing a network install. This worked better. This time the installer could find it's files since they were on a nice hard drive instead of a nasty CD. After running the component update portion of the install it stated that the .Net framework install failed. I ran the .Net framework installer by hand and got the reason why the installed had failed with this helpful dialog:

After digging through the system registry I discovered that the GUID 3BD60997-A7E4-4A55-9BA6-C7C9B27658DF corresponded to the beta .Net Framework software that I had uninstalled earlier. So I went to the Add/Remove Programs applet in the control panel and sure enough it was still there. I clicked the uninstall button and got the message "This program has already been uninstalled".

After playing around with Msizap.exe*, Windows Installer CleanUp Utility* and manually hacking entries out of the registry I still had the problem. After a while I came up with the idea of reinstalling the beta 2 .Net Framework. It installed cleanly. I then uninstalled it and it came off cleanly this time.

I tried installing it off the CDs again but got the same problem as before. I did the network-style install and this time it installed cleanly. At the moment it seems to work fine so I'm relatively happy. I'm glad the last thing worked. The next thing that I was going to try was to reinstall Windows 2000 and that would have seriously pissed me off.

I guess I'm Bill's bitch because despite it taking all f*cking day I'm happy to have the damn thing. The funny thing about .Net is that I hate the Intenet parts of .Net but love the application programming parts. Writing basic windows applications are a lot easier with C# and the .Net framework than they were with C++ and MFC. MFC was one of the most broken libraries I'd ever seen. Windows forms are much better in most respects (IMHO).

*Why does Microsoft have so many utilities to help clean up bad Microsoft Installer installations? Back when there were third party installers they just worked.

Microsoft is offering a $300 rebate for developers who upgrade to Microsoft Visual Studio .Net Professional or Enterprise if you have the Professional or Enterprise versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0. The only problem is, as far as I can tell, they don't state what you need a proof of ownership of Visual Studio 6.0 on their website or on the box. Once you open the box (which means you no longer can return it) the enclosed the coupon states that they require the box top from Visual Studio 6.0. If you're a pack rat like me this is not a problem. After four years I still have my box top to Visual Studio 6.0 but I suspect this may be a problem for other people. I'm really suprised that they will not accept the title page from the manual or the CD.

They also require the box top of Visual Studio .Net. I suppose when they come out with the next version of Visual Studio they'll require the box top I just sent them from this version too.

Last Thursday I ordered Visual Studio .Net from Amazon.com. With two day shipping they said my order would be here by Feb 21st at the latest. Well the order status did not change through the weekend or Monday but since it was a holiday I was not too worried. Tuesday morning I checked the status and it's status was something like "preshipping" or something else that made me think it was going to ship emminently. When I got home from work the status was delayed and it stated that I would not likely get my order until mid-March.

So I hopped over to Buy.com and ordered the damned thing at 6:30PM. With overnight shipping it was $8 less than Amazon (with two day shipping) and it showed up yesterday (less than 24 hours). I've had really good experiences with Buy.com in the past. I hope they figure out a way to survive. If they tank I'll miss them a lot.

TheraFlu going down is nasty. TheraFlu coming back up is indescribably nasty. I think I'm going to die!

I could not help but find humor in what is topping the best seller list on the Microsoft Developer Tools Store home page.

I watched Blood: The Last Vampire tonight. It was very good. It's story was not perfect but it's style of combining 2D and 3D imagery, editing and music was superb. Definately worth renting if not buying.

My bud Pat has lent me the Cowboy Bebop series on DVD. I've really been getting a kick out of it. So I could not resist... Which Cowboy Bebop Character are You?

You are Spike Spiegel A laid back bounty hunter with a mysteriously tragic past. You have a cool sense of humor and would do much for people you love.

Trust me. I'm as suprised as you are. I figured I'd be Jet or Edward...

Due to a promise and a series of unfortunate circumstances including but not limited to sick adults, sick children, holidays, visiting relatives, touble arranging for sitters, and weekend household projects I did not get to see Lord of the Rings until last night. Wow! I was very impressed! I think everybody involved hit it pretty much right on the head. It's hard to imagine a better translation of the first book to a movie. Not since the ending to The Empire Strikes Back have I been looking so forward to the next film in a series. At least Mr. Jackson won't keep us waiting for three or more years for the next one!

I really like the quick launch toolbar in Windows but I have been disatisfied with some of its limitations such has no subfolders and lack of separators. I was toying with the idea of writing a replacement for it this weekend but I decided to do some research first to see if someone else had already solved the problem. Well someone has. True Launch Bar fits my requirements perfectly. It allows me to organize my quick launch toolbar pretty much how I want to. It's primarily configured by context menus which might be odd for people who don't use them alot. However, it allows you a fine detail of customization. It's shareware and for $20 you get rid of the nag logo on the right.

Go Faeries!!
Take the What Faery Are You? Quiz!
This quiz was made by lia

Which Rocky character are you?

This morning while blowing away the Windows Explorer because it had locked up my desktop I had the following fantasy:

Last night I was helping a buddy recover a harddrive that was giving SMART warnings by copying it's contents over my network to one of my drives. There was one file that would cause his machine to reboot if we tried to copy it. So we bypassed the file.

Later, when we were copying the stuff back to his new drive I got an error from that file on my drive. It turned out that I had a zero length file on my drive with the same name. If I tried to delete it I'd get a "file not found error". If I tried to copy it I got a "source file does not exist" error. I could not rename it or adjust any of it's attributes. I tried rebooting my machine and scanning the harddrive with Windows 2000's scandisk (all options on) to no avail.

I ended up dropping to the command line and deleting it with DEL. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.

One problem that I had after installing Microsoft Picture It 2002 Premium was the thumbnail view for .PNG files was replaced with the PictureIt icon. I finally got around to look for a solution and found it in this knowledge base article. In short I set this registry key/value on my Windows 2000 machine:

      Registry key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.png\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1} 
      Value: (Default)="{7376D660-C583-11d0-A3A5-00C04FD706EC}" 

Over Christmas I bought a Ceiva for my grandmother. It came with a $100 rebate. I mailed it off in early Decemeber. Today I got an email stating that my rebate had been received and accepted. It suggested that I go to their website and confirm the rebate. The page appears to give me an opportunity or get something other than my rebate, in this case either another Ceiva or a bundle of photo software.

There are several things that bother me about this. I think the idea is fine in principle but:

• It not clear how to just get the rebate. The red text on the first item is different from the second. Does that mean I get another Ceiva free? Does it mean I can get another Ceiva instead of my rebate? Does it mean if I select it I get my rebate? It's unclear. The first item should be send me the rebate check.
• Second there appear to be at least two security problems:
• The system is not password protected; they should at least send some security ID in the email that I need to get to the webpage.
• The rebate ID numbers are consectuative. This makes it a piece of cake to browse other people's rebates. It looks like anyone can pick my rebate item for me. Perhaps they have some security beneath this level but it really seems like they should have some front-end security too.

I am 23% evil.

I try to stay away from evil deeds but succumb to temptation every once in a while. I'm not quite on my way to hell but I certainly have some explaining to do.

Are you evil? find out at Hilowitz.com

Tonight I saw the 2002 edition of the Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Frestival of Animation. The bad news is that it's the weakest one in years with alot of not-so-good repeats. The good news is there're still enough good ones to make it worth it. They repeated Don Hertzfldt's Rejected from last year. That one was worth the price of admission alone.

After a great drought of device drivers with Microsoft Windows Update the cup now overflows. The only problem is that I don't have a Logitech input device or DYMO printer and I already have the NVidia 2.1.8.3 drivers. I guess two out of five ain't bad.

You tend to prefer your computer to any console, and you seem to be on the sarcastic side, especially when compared to your Penny Arcade sidekick Gabe, but that's okay. Cause you do do most of the writing and HTML work around there, and even if you get overshadowed Gabes art sometimes, you know you're the REAL genius around there. Just watch out for radio active scorpions...

Which webcartoonist Are You?

I have to admit I feel a sort of kindship with Tycho (Jerry). I find that I share his feelings about games and movies and I very much enjoy his writing style (which we don't share*). The results of this poll somewhat validate the homoerotic dreams I've had about him lately. I know he feels the same way.

Much to my horror my wife pointed out to me a tragedy that takes place in the three bears family in the insanely popular movie Shrek...

	Here is the last scene where we see the bear family together as mama bear poignantly reaches toward her child...
Later we see baby bear being consoled by papa bear. Why you ask?
	...because mama bear has been turned into a rug!
Papa bear's mourning is apparently short lived. He is last seen partying with Cinderella...

I guess the message to us is that if tragedy befalls us then turn to the arms of another species...

From the BusinessWeek article A "Speed Bump" vs. Music Copying:

Q: Which type of copy-protection technology is the best speed bump?

A: Each of the technologies lend themselves to different uses. Some try to prevent copying in the first place. Some try to detect it after the fact. Some technologies are not good at knowing who copied something but can track how many copies have been distributed.

For the right answer, you have to look at the whole system. Not just the copy-protection technology but what business model it is embedded in. Given that you'll never be able to prevent copying, the question is, what can you do to minimize it? What can you do to make consumers happy enough with legitimate use of the system that they'll be willing to pay for it?

According to the Which Sanrio Character Are You? quiz, I am:

My machine came with Microsoft Picture It Express. I was rather happy with it so I decided to buy my wife the full version, Microsoft Picture It Premium. I installed it on my machine to figure out how to use it before I gave it to her. However, the initial interface is completely broken however on Laura's machine it's ok. The main difference between the two machines is one is Windows 98 and the other is Windows 2000. The box states that the software is compatible with Windows 2000. Go figure.

I have not seen any reports of other people having this problem. If you have any suggestions about what's going on and how to fix it please email me.

As of January 1, 2002 Texas has an official "no call list". If you live in Texas visit http://www.texasnocall.com/ for details.

After lunch today Pat showed me a quite remarkable flexible keyboard at CompUSA. This thing has to be seen to believed. It's waterproof and can be rolled up. The tactile feedback is a little odd but you should check it out. It's one of the more odd things I've seen.

They also have their own store brand Windows 95/98 Multimedia Keyboard. This marvel features a soft power switch right below the [Delete] key, a Sleep key right above the [Up Arrow] key, every key on the keypad overloaded with a "EZ shortcut" function (in addition to the shortcut keys across the top) and no less than 3 keys to put the machine in sleep mode. Someone way overthought this one.

Last, CompUSA is selling the Quake III: Team Arena mission pack for $4.99.

Personality Test:

These little frogs are grass-green colored, usually with a creamy colored line running from the jaw along the flanks. Males make a really loud noise thats a bit like quacking, which is sometimes known as a "rain call" because they tend to make a lot of noise before rains, but which can also be stimulated by external noises. They eat an assortment of bugs including crickets, moths, and flies.

Strawberry: 30/100 Pear: 20/100 Banana: 50/100 Tomato: 25/100 Lemon: 5/100

webkin

aaronr

Star

You realise the true meaning of Christmas and try to avoid the commercialism.

Christmas Tree: 0/50 Snowman: 0/50 Santa Claus: 10/50 Reindeer: 10/50 Mistletoe: 25/50 Star: 40/50

Take the What in Christmas Are You? test by webkin and aaronr!

This quiz says absolutely nothing about your personality. Take it!

Although I have to admit that I am very simpathetic to many of the ideas presented in the review and Lessig's new book I cannot help but wonder what would happen if someone "remixed" his book by making annotations to it and started selling copies of it on the internet...

All in all I really like Apple's new iMac which I lovingly call the iLamp. It's certainly distictive but unfortunately its sense of aesthetic does not quite match my own. However, I really like its feature set. Especially when coupled with MacOS X and the other default software it's quite good.

However, what's especially nice is the price. It's in the same ballpark as a Dell (a similarly configured Dell 4300S is $1,559.00) as compared to the $1799 iMac but the iMac can write DVDs in addition to CDs which is a big plus. This is Jobs' cube done right...

I have to admit this is the first Mac I have seriously considered buying...

For some strange reason I really dig the fact that the Apple logo on the new iMac is a cross between the old Apple logo and the Next logo.

Update on Jan 8, 2002:

While browsing at lunch I saw on Gateway's site you can build a similar machine (500C) w/DVD writing for $1988. The differences (other than the software) is that the Gateway's processor running at 1.5GHz instead of 800Mhz*, has DDR ram instead of SDR ram, and has an 80Gig harddrive instead of a 60Gig harddrive.

As all of my close friends know I take great comfort in the fact that the internet provides me with a constant stream of information that shows that I indeed have a life and am not a geek in relative terms. For example as compared to these two blokes who got in line Jan 1, 2002 for Star Wars episode II.

From the trivia section of the IMDB for the movie MASH:

Roger Bowen, who played Lt. Col. Henry Blake, died of a heart attack on 16 February 1996. The day before that, 15 February, McLean Stevenson, who played Lt. Col. Henry Blake on the TV series, died of the same cause.

I'm not certain why so many people are upset about the members of N'Sync briefly appearing in Star Wars Episode II. If he wants to blow away N'Sync on the big screen he certainly has my blessing! It's not like no one has ever slipped something fun into a movie before...

Note to the SWFBGN* membership: Get over it. If it really bothers you that much then vote with your dollars and don't see the movie. It'll free up a seat for me.

*Star Wars Fanboy/girl Network

I am a Thrust-ship. I am small and tricky - where you think I am, I probably am not. I can work very fast, but I tend to go about things in a round about way, which often leaves me effectively standing still. I hate rocks. Bloody rocks.

(If I were not a thrust ship I'd be an Asteroid)