Daily Archives: November 2, 2006

Frontiers of Flight Museum – Anousheh Ansari

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A while back I posted about Lauren being able to talk live to space astronaut/tourist Anousheh Ansari. Tonight she is in town at the Dallas Frontiers of Flight Museum and has a special hour put aside simply for the kids that were invited to the previous event. It is really cool that they are putting the kids first, and making sure that they can all be seated, while the old fogies get stuck waiting outside. At least they have free internet so I can make this report.

If I’m lucky enough to be able to get a seat inside, I may try to live blog some of the event… if not… well this will be it.

I’m in!

UPDATE:  Here are some pictures of Anousheh Asari signing Lauren’s book and of her and Lauren. (click to embiggen)
ansarisigning.jpgansari-lauren.jpg

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Dusty tadpole

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For the past few months I’ve been a disgruntled laptop owner.  My beloved Dell Inspiron 700m was having the case of the freezes, and was verily unstable.  It was so bad that even booting the machine was hit-or-miss, and letting it stay on, or do some heavy processing was too much for it.  It is out of warranty and I had just changed out the motherboard in the last week or so of the factory warranty, so it should be working better.

I suspected faulty memory module, but the errors never mapped to a memory problem, and memory problems if they are present are usually consistent, and this was hit or miss.  I spent a few hours on the phone with Dell trying to get them to replace my memory module (lifetime warranty on that) but since the problem wasn’t consistent they couldn’t swap out modules.

So I’m stuck with a laptop that can’t go an hour without simply freezing, or if I moved it a bit here or there, it would freeze… I’d read here and there about dust and heat causing this kind of behavior, so I tried to change my processor throttling (easy to do in Linux) and use my fans more to blow the heat out.  Accoring to dkrellem the normal heat was over 50 degrees celcius and if it popped in the upper 60s or over 70, then a freeze would happen.

That worked for a while, but last night the latop (tadpole I call it) really hit the wall, couldn’t get it to boot up normally, to either Ubuntu Edgy Eft, or Windows Vista Beta 2.

This morning, I started to disassemble the laptop to get to the fan and see if I could make that work better.  A little daunting taking apart a laptop rather than a desktop.  But I got it apart, and the fan… she was DUSTY.  Blew it out with a can of air, and reassembled it… and ended up with the right number of screws…

Did some torture testing and normal temps are now dow in the low 40s, a full video transcode (100% processor for about 25 minutes) brought the processor into the low 60s, then it came back down to the low 40s.  It is mucho stabler, and I can even move it around while working on it.  The true test comes with booting up at home, on the couch.  That will be later tonight.

Jericho – Long Live the Mayor

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Or at least 12 more hours.

No recap, just thoughts.

Hawkins hid a barrel that sounds much like the one the cops were able to discover and disrupt, thus saving New York.  So the question is, why a nuke device in the little town of Jericho

Lots of little bits and peices.  Hawkins was probably in on some vast conspiracy to take down the U.S. government.  Jake was involved in a teft gone wrong that invovled Emily’s father and brother, and they feel like he blew his assignment, thus leading to his death.

Emily’s dad is a bad-guy, but might be a good man to have in a limited resources world.  Especially if things are as rough around other parts like Topeka.

Dale getting out from under the manipulative grocery store lady is a good thing.  Probably go and work for Emily’s dad, which would be a bad thing.

Mayor is gonna die, you heard it hear first, setting up a confrontation between the royal family and the usurper that has returned home.  Hawkins may do good to support the royals.

Mimi and the farmboy will be the love thing, and Jake gets kissed by Joan’s best friend.

Its holding my interest, enough for a pre-Lost show.