Random Commands

Had a health fair at work so I took a screening see how I’m doing.

I try to take a baby asprin morning and night, to ward off the big D (diabetes) and HD (heart disease) given family history, so take that into account with the below results.  The glucose was a fasting screening hadn’t had anything except water since midnight.

Mundane details below the fold:

Read more…

I know, I know, I’ve been ignoring my blog, during this last final season of madness.

I’m sorry.  To the four people that read this blog, I know, I’ve let you down.

But maybe I’ll turn it around and start my random digressions (it might be another di-word) as there are plenty of good things going on to write about.

Like how I started WeightWatchers March 30,2010 and have lost 10.8 pounds as of last week. 

Or, like how I started walking, with the intent to jog. I’ve walked/jogged/treadmilled 24 miles in the last two months.

I’m still Editor-in-Chief-ing at LOSTblog, but have a bunch of awesome helpers to keep the blog fresh, they want to do a full series re-watch, so I’ll be part of that, but not every episode.

I’ve got 9+ months of recovery under my belt, with the end in sight of my Celebrate Recovery step study that’s been really helpful in my examining my life, my emotions and a fruitful productive output for my sometimes self-destructive side.

So I have some boring things to write about, that I must tell the internet.  So stay tuned!

I understand, I do.  You want answers, and you think that you’re not getting them.  You’ve waited all this time, and you think your entitled.  But let me put a chink into the denial that is camouflaging your LOST answers addiction.  The answers you want (or that I want) don’t matter to the majority of the main characters. 

Like who got shot in the canoe, our LOSTies flashed in and out of the time frame so fast, they had no idea who was shooting at them, or who they shot.  So, while it would be cool to pull a LOSTie loop and have Juliet gun down Sawyer, it just isn’t important to the remaining LOSTies who was in the canoe.  Chalk it up to Widmore goons and be done with it, for you own good.

While you let the denial fade over your answers addiction, here is a modified Serenity prayer just for you.

Damon and Carlton (or your own higher power) grant me the Serenity
to accept the answers that you have written
the courage to develop some answers of my own
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Watching one episode at a time
Enjoying on scene at a time
Accepting character arcs as their pathway to peace
Taking, as all fans have, this wonderful show
as it is, not as I would have it
Trusting that the show will be incredible
if I surrender to it’s awesomeness
That I may be reasonably happy in this season
and supremely happy with rewatches of the DVDs
forever in the future.

Namaste

Shamelessly reimagined from this

originally posted at LOSTblog

Last night Jeff “Doc” Jensen published his long teased theory of LOST as a reflection of a recovery program in his article: ‘LOST’: A Shot at Redemption. It is a wonderful article, and the theme of redemption and recovery resonates with me partly because of where/when this build up to its ultimate season occurred and how it has affected me personally.

Before you read any further, this is not a humorous look at “LOST addiction.” My hope is to start a very real discussion of real life addiction, and how recovery programs have made a difference, not only in my life, but in a great many others too.

Read more…

What’s next for the petition?  After a week’s worth of internet flurry with mentions from here to there across many sites, I need to find something to DO with this petition.  My goal is to get to 5000 signatures then get the Petition printed out in a neat format and sent to a friend in Hawaii that will take it to the LOST On the Beach premiere.

PetitionOnline provides a printing service at the low rate of one red cent per signature. Which is nice to know, but my pocketbook currently lacks red cents (or blue cents, or green cents, or …) that isn’t already allocated to the needs of a 6 member family.

So I’ve plopped a PayPal Donate button over in the sidebar ————————>

If you feel led to donate, I’ll make sure all proceeds go towards the printing costs for the petition and shipping to Hawaii in time for the gala opening.  If I can’t get that level of support, I’ll keep the petition open for another LOST event down the road when my pocketbook is more able to handle the heavy lifting.

If through your generous donations, the giving exceeds the need, my plan is to send the remaining funds as a donation to my church’s youth group mission fund, to support summer camps and the like later this year.

Thanks for all your support and enthusiasm for this petition.

There he goes again, blogging about the *sing-song* LOST Disney Attraction Petition.

Well when you get a reference from OC Weekly, Yahoo! Buzz, Perez Hilton and the Orange County Register, taking a cue from The Other McCain, you milk it for all it’s worth.  This blogging business is a rough and tumble world, and the only thing you can really do to generate traffic is to.. well, blog. 

So this is in response to Disney-O-Rama’s post: Should Tom Sawyer Island Be Turned Into LOST Island

Apparently a group of hardcore fans of the ABC show “Lost” have started a petition to persuade Disney to create a “Lost” island at Disneyland. The “Lost” attraction would replace “Tom Sawyer Island”, which is seen as being outdated, even with its newly created tie-in to “Pirates of the Caribbean” film series.

While I consider myself to be a hardcore fan of “Lost” as well, this is a bad idea in so many ways.

First, thanks for your support and linking to the petition, next time, try reading it, I’ll help you out, the short preamble says:

LOST is one of the best television series to ever be broadcast on television. Disney should give this awesome show it’s[sic] due and create a LOST Island attraction at one of it’s Disney theme parks. Just think of the locations that can be immortalized in a Disney location.

While it does say Island, it is not specific to Tom Sawyer Island.  It’s more a reference to the location that LOST is centered on “LOST Island”.  The petition isn’t trying to define where in the Magic Kingdom it should be placed, but that the idea be considered by the powers that be to include some LOST themed something.  Heck, most LOST fans would probably be thrilled at a Dharma snack bar, selling Dharma branded concessions.  Executive Producer Carlton Cuse thinks an E-Ticket ride is a better idea.

You may think turning Tom Sawyer Island into LOST island is a bad idea, and many agree with you, but that doesn’t discount the concept of a LOST attraction. I admit that my first impression was centered around using Tom Sawyer Island, and Damon Lindelof tweeted about putting a Polar Bear on the island, so I don’t think it’s a terrible idea.

I haven’t been to Disneyland in 15 years (give or take 9 months), so I’m not up to date on the layout of the park or changes that have been made.  My memories of going to Disneyland in my youth (30+ years ago) have very fond memories of exploring Tom Sawyer Island, hiking along the trails, going into caves, checking out the neat forts, pretending we had guns, and the sailing ship circling the island.  As a “hard core” LOST fan, all of those elements that I remember of the attraction of Tom Sawyer Island, are repeated concepts in the mystery of LOST island, and recurring themes in the plots of the show. 

Do kids need to know all the deep mysteries of LOST to have fun on an LOST themed island.  Just as kids don’t have to wade through or even be familiar with Mark Twain’s character to enjoy the current rendition of the Island.  My two boys (7 and 10) would LOVE it, maybe their friends down the street might be clueless about the theme, but they’d probably love the imaginary games they could play exploring the island.

Adults would come to the attraction, but that’s one of the things that Disney does extremely well, is create experiences where generations can share their enjoyment.  Examples: Every Pixar film made.  When Disney gets off it’s game and starts shooting solely at a younger generation, well I have two words for you: Miley Cyrus. (that’s a joke, Hoss).

I’m glad you do agree with the concept of the petition (I’ve shown it’s not TSI specific) and agree with the points you make here:

Don’t get me wrong – I think the idea of a “Lost” style attraction where fans can physically experience what they have watched for 5 plus seasons now is a great idea. I just don’t believe that Tom Sawyer Island should be sacrificed in the process.

If the Disney powers-that-be take this petition seriously, maybe more suitable locations would be “Disney’s Animal Kingdom” in Orlando or possibly the new Disney resort that is being developed in Kapolei, Hawaii.

The Hawaiian location would be a supreme location for such an attraction, so I do hope you’ve signed the petition.

Thanks for taking the time to form a well thought out response to a self-admittedly kinda silly idea.  Your post is proof that the silly ideas (like a theme park in Anaheim of all places) can generate some real ideas, and some awesome fun.

I was very surprised to see an email from a reporter for The Orange County Register asking if she could contact me for an interview.  I remember as a teenager, going to High School at Los Amigos High (Fighting Lobos) in Fountain Valley seeing the paper on the dining room table at breakfast.  This was twenty plus years ago, so the memory is hazy.  (Yes kids, back then they printed the news on actual paper.)

So a couple of days ago I had a really nice conversation with Sarah Tully, who writes for the Register’s Around Disney blog, which has news and information about all things Magic Kingdom (aka Resort Area of Anaheim where Walt Disney’s Disneyland is located, perhaps you’ve heard of it?)

The interview resulted in this article (click on through to give some linkage):

Tom Sawyer’s Island cabin could become Jacob’s cabin. A smoke monster could waft around Disneyland guests. Dharmaville barracks could go up in Frontierland.

If fans of the “Lost” T.V. show have their way, all would be part of a show-themed attraction at a Disney park. Preferably, Tom Sawyer’s Island would become “Lost” Island at Disneyland.

Fans are circulating an online petition to ask Disney to put an attraction based on the science-fiction show in one of its parks. See the petition HERE.

The organizer, former Orange County resident Jon Stueve, aims to collect 5,000 signatures by today so that a fellow “Lost” fan can deliver it to officials at the “Lost” premiere in Oahu, Hawaii. As of mid-Thursday, more than 3,000 people had joined the petition.

While I’m disappointed that Suzi Brown, a Disneyland Resort spokesman commented that Walt Disney Imagineering officials aren’t, “contemplating the concept.”  I’m not really surprised.  Imagineers are men of science, after all, and they’ll need some convincing from some of us men (and women) of faith.  So I’m taking a ‘whatever, dude!’ attitude, and just gonna enjoy the idea as it dances through the my ever decreasing grey matter.

Thanks again, Sarah for the article and taking the time to contact me, and listen to this hair brained idea.  It is the highest praise of a ‘hard core’ LOST fan to say to you – You All Everybody!

And it’s pronounced, as my Dad once wore on his church league basketball jersey: Stew-Vee

If you haven’t come here from Jeff “Doc” Jensen’s column, then let me post a picture of what I woke up to this morning.

All’s forgiven Jeff, my name’s been misspelled all my life, my favorite is “Stlieve” Ell-Eye? Really?

Once when I was at Naval Postgraduate School, I won a prize and the navy wife pronounced it like the Swedish Chef was trying to say my name. So I’m used to it.

If you’re here for the first time, I run the twitter rewatch, titled Watch From the Beginning (#WFTB) using my special twitter account LOST_WFTB. We’re currently re-watching the beginning of Season 5, with the next twitter re-watch happening on We3dnesday for Season 5 Episode 5. Tune into Twitter and re-watch with us. (And urge Doc Jensen to show up for once… Just one night…)

Peace, out.

Dear Jeff,

I can call you Jeff, can’t I? Since I’m one of fourteen of the people that you follow on Twitter, I could be presuming too much that we are now, like, BFFs? Maybe I should call you Doc? Or possibly Mr. Jensen. But that seems too informal, since I’ve been reading your LOST columns for many years, I feel like I know a little bit about you. Though I probably hardly know you at all, and so should probably be more formal than just Jeff, or, “Hey Doc”. Sigh, I seem to have gotten a bit circular, which having read your columns, I think your probably familiar with my dilemma.

Let’s just cut to the heart of the matter, shall we? I was going to title this post “A LOST fanatics guide to Twitter”, or alternatively, “Doc Jensen needs HELP!” But at the last moment, I’ve shied away from such vanity. Though I do feel a bit of responsibility for getting you set straight on Twitter, and how to use it’s cryptic but useful syntax and customs. I don’t want you to look too noobish, like Neal Patrick Harris, who apparently, while brilliant and was a practicing Doctor at a very young age, can’t quite count to 140. So I thought I’d help you out. Oooh! Just thought of another alternate title: “The Keys to the Hieroglyphs: LOST Twitter Guide” Yeah? Hm. Too presumptuous.

I’ll just start at the beginning.

140 characters, that’s all you get. You could go to some services like twitlonger or tumblr to get more words linked to your tweets, but that’s a bit lame. IF you MUST be wordy, get a blog, or write a column for Entertainment Weekly, or something. Keep your tweets at 140 characters, that’s the LAW. Even @jacob_islandgod has to use 140 characters. Also the 140 character limit includes any of the names you’ve addressed in your tweet, so you might even have to edit more. I know, I know… it might be hard to do for a person that has a way with words, such as yourself. I don’t make the rules of the twitterverse, I wasn’t even consulted.

Some characters are more special than others, think of these of those that are on Jacob’s list. These characters are:

• @ – The “at” sign is like an address.  The @ sign is used to address a tweet at someone, or to have the tweet show up in their Mentions feed.  So, for example, any tweet with @LOST_WFTB shows up in a special way to me.  But you @EWDocJensen might not even realize that it’s been tweeted.  Also with the @ sign, if it’s placed at the very beginning of your tweet, it’s sent as a semi-private tweet to that one twit.  Kinda like when Ben used the mirror to flash a signal to Richard before turning himself into the Orchid Station.  People following Ben, (Locke and Hurley) knew about the message, and all of Richard’s followers knew about the message.  But Kemy and his posse, or Jack and his team had now idea about the message.  So be aware, that tweets starting with @LOST_WFTB will only be seen by those twitterers that follow both you and me.  Everyone else might not see the tweet.
• # – the ‘pound’ sign is called a hashtag in twitter.  It’s kinda old skool, but still very useful.  It can be used to ‘tag’ your tweets with a special symbol or sign that your tweet has something to do with #LOST or #FlashForward or #Fringe.  Such tags help people search and find topics.  There are no real rules, it’s kind of a make it up as you go along thing.  Ask @DrDreia the self confessed #queenofthebaroquehashtag for more details. Another special tag that I use a lot is #WFTB which means (to me) Watch From The Beginning.  Which is the name of my LOST Re-watch that is based on Twitter feeds.  More on that later… maybe in a special edition of post on this blog.
• D – This may look like the letter D, but in twitter at the very beginning of your post, it takes on great meaning.  It’s stands for Direct Message (or DM).  This is used with a valid username to send a private message to another user.  Think of it as Ben sending a min-tape to Juliet to communicate secrets without the prying eyes of other people listening in.  Of course, if your recipient goes ahead and retweets a DM then you’re screwed. Maybe.
• RT – This isn’t official, but it’s stilled used by all the cool kids.  It stands for re-tweet, and it’s a bit contreversial for people with nothing better to do than to worry about proper citation syntax.  You know, the kind that read the Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, or Strunk & White curled up next to the fire, with a glass of chianti and some fava beans (Or write the awesome iPhone app Tweetie). But for us cool kids, that really could care less we just tack on an RT (or use TweetDeck to RT old skool) at the beginning of our tweet to re-broadcast something that we like or think is cool.  This is like, well, remember in the Lord of the Rings, when they lit those signal fires on the tip-tops of the mountains (and boy, who are the losers that get that duty station?) Retweets are kinda like that, public rebroadcasts of good information.  Twitter went ahead with this concept and made it a feature, but it’s kinda different, and kinda lame, being that it’s officially sanctioned and all.  Kinda like roaming the halls of highscool with a hall pass.
• URL shortening services.  These are a must by the hard core twits, to keep the 140 characters alive with content, and less with the arcane url syntax.  So if you want to keep big long strings of URL’s outta your tweets (like http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20313460_20325436,00.html for example) use http://bit.ly or http://is.gd to shrink your URLs and unlock the code to better tweets. (Or use TweetDeck, which can shrink URL’s automatically.

Well Doc, that’s it, The secret of the Twitter codes and gylphs. I hope you enjoyed reading, and take this with the humor that I’ve intended.  Also, keep pushing the LOST Themed Disney Attraction petition… We’ve gotta get @DamonLindelof and @CarltonCuse to sign that thing.

To my faithful readers, who are legion:  What advice about twitter would you give Jeff “Doc” Jensen?  Put it in the comments.

This is a sad saga, because it really shouldn’t be this difficult.  I should be able to say, “Woo! WHS paid off again, thanks my little backup buddy!”

But I can’t fully give a big *high 5* to the WHS, though it came out the winner, it got bruised and battered on something that ended up being easily fixed, but that fixed relied too much on me finding answers outside of normal MS channels.

First, some background. We have two kids with September birthdays.  We decided to pool resources with family and get them one big present, we got them each a Dell Mini 10.  Sweet little portable laptops.  (I’m ignoring the, “Wait, it isn’t September yet!” question, maybe another post, so put your hand down).  So they’ve been enjoying playing with them. 

In a fit of uncoordinated laziness, I tossed one of the power supplies to my youngest so he’d have it to recharge.  A bad throw followed on the heels of that bad idea, and the cute little charger hit the cute litte keyboard right about the letter ‘F’ which is right above where the hard drive resides (I found this out later).  Movie stopped working, reboot was met with a BSD.

*gosh* stream of thoughts follows roughly:

• I’m an idiot.
• Good thing I made sure it backed up to WHS (Windows Home Server) last night.
• Hard disk is probably toast.
• I’m an idiot.
• Should have gotten the SSD instead of the SATA hard drive, less moving parts
• I’m an idiot.
• I’d better call Dell, it’s still under warranty.
• I’m an idiot.
• Run the diagnostics first, so you can speed up the Dell support call
• I’m an idiot.
• Oh cool they have a Dell support Chat, I don’t have to SPEAK to anyone. FTW!
• I’m an idiot.
• Waiting for a Support agent, 67 in line.
• I’m an idiot (repeats 67 times)
• Oh hi, Mr. Dell Support person that types really good English, my hard drive is toast, please replace it.
• Thank you, awesome, cool.
• I’m an idiot (repeats 2 days while waiting package).

Hard drive comes and it’s pre-imaged with the software load, and they re-included the DVDs/CDROMs of software that is installed.  Nice touch, but since the Mini 10 has no optical drive, not really necessary and/or useful, a USB with the same content would be teh awesum though, please make note, Dell.

So while I quickly swapped out the drive, and restarted and the computer did it’s little ‘first time installation’ thingy.  I started creating a USB key to have it restore from the WHS.  I had to relearn some lessons:

1. To make a bootable USB key you need to use a Vista machine and use the diskpart, so I had Angie do that part for me.
2. Next is just copy the files from the Windows Home Server Restore CDROM image. I do this by loading the CD-ROM image with Nero Image Drive, rather than burn onto plastic, then copy.

After a bit, and about the time the ‘first time’ processes got done I had a USB stick ready to roll.  Plugged it in, booted up the Mini-10 attached it to the wire at the network switch and…

Nothing.

Dell Mini 10 couldn’t find the server.

Three hours later, and google searches galore, I got it to work.  Here’s a break down.

• Dell Mini 10 uses a RealTek PCI-E Ethernet driver.  The driver on the WHS Restore CD-ROM identifies it correctly, and it all appears to be ready to work.  But it doesn’t work.
• The drivers on the Mini 10’s installation, (XP NDIS variety) also don’t work (if you copy the c:\drivers directory to the usb stick and then scan for additional drivers, it finds them)
• The drivers on the WHS PowerPack 3 Beta restore image, also don’t work.
• The drivers for the Vista (Windows Server 2008) do work, but you have to download them from the vendor, (not Dell, Realtek) then extract and stuff the drivers into a drivers folder on the USB stick, and then scan for additional drivers.

So once I figured all that out, by brute force, trial and error, I was glad for my 8 years of education in computers and 20 years of practical education.  And if anyone else buys a WHS and then a Dell Mini 10, I’m sure they’d stuff it all in the trash and go live in the wilderness.

Though I understand that technologies change, and the Dell Mini 10 is new technology…  C’mon, Ethernet drivers shouldn’t be an issue!

The bright spot of the story, is the computer is back in the midget’s grubby little hands, looking and working just like it did moments before the power adapter harshed the hard drive’s mellow.  I just wish two things.  Drivers need to be easier, or at least an better error message on how to troubleshoot drivers in WHS.  And that they built hard drives at least as ruggedly as they do key-caps (no damage sustained by the failed lob).