Author Archives: Jon Stueve

Watching LOST from the beginning (Update)

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It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about anything.  That’s because I’ve been a bit busy with life.  But if you follow me on twitter, you’ll know that steadily for six months now, I’ve been tweeting about LOST episode by episode as a group of us have rewatched the show.  I even started a separate twitter account (@LOST_WFTB) to keep track of the whole thing.  Please allow me a moment or two of navel gazing as I write a few words.

Season 5 Finale aired on May 13th, 2009.  We started rewatching the following weekend, and by Monday had an official re-watch schedule to watch as a group starting with Tabula Rasa (S1E3) on Monday May 18th.  Last night we completed the strike shortened Season 4 with a rewatch of There’s No Place Like Home Part 2.

My number of tweets since I started the @LOST_WFTB account stands at 9,833.  While not every tweet is about LOST (many are promotional and scheduling oriented, some are about Bones or other TV shows) the majority are from rewatch nights.

I’ve gained a following of 599 other tweeters, and have followed back 540, of which the majority are dyed in the wool LOST fanatics.  I’ve been fortunate to be listed in 77 of Twitter’s lists (a feature that didn’t even exit when we started six months ago). I’ve met some fanstatic people and have enjoyed every moment of the show.

Starting this twitter group has allowed me to meet and follow some amazing people, keeping tabs on my favorite show, and living vicariously through all the lucky bastards that got to go to ComicCon in San Diego and then tweeted about it.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all the devoted tweet addled addicts like me, that have joined in.  The group has ebbed and flowed through the six months, but as a whole, I think we’re all mostly upto date on the re-watch.

Now, we are taking a pause.  The Season 5 DVDs get released on December 8th, and that night (I plan on making a Walmart run, if not watch one of my archived episodes) we’ll kick off Season 5 rewatch.  The schedule has us finishing up Season 5 on January 15th, which gives us 5 days of rest until Season 6 premiere (if the start date for S6 doesn’t change).

So if you’ve slacked off on your re-watch, fallen behind, life has thrown you a curve: Now is the time to catch up.  You can even just start new with Season 5 rewatching on twitter.  Follow me @LOST_WFTB and I’ll keep you upto date on scheduling with irritating reminders.

Thanks so much for participating, and stay LOST.

Dell Mini 10 vs. WHS

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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).

LOST – Black Rock and the start of the loophole

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It’s been a while since I’ve blogged or theorized. I’ve done some smatterings of this and that on twitter, but once in a while you need to write more than 140 chars… so, have a seat.

The frustration on the face of the Man in Black (henceforth noted as MiB) in his discussion with Jacob at the start of The Incident shows, to me, that he was plotting something. With the Black Rock bobbing like a cork in the distance, I think his plan started then, with the crew of the Black Rock, and the current location of the Black Rock has a lot to do with what happened.

This could be rather detailed, or it could be hinted at flashbacks, or it could be entirely wrong. For all I know the paper in the back of Darlton’s pocket could be the script for the Black Rock spin-off to LOST that they’ll announce at next years ComicCon. But with those caveats, lets hit some details.

The core of the mysterious properties of the island is that it sits a top of a ball of magnetic energy. This is what Dr. Pierre Chang is studying, the cause of the incident, and the source is primordial, meaning that the source is probably present while the Black Rock was still floating, but not tapped or used quite yet.

The island isn’t fixed in time or space. That we learned from Ellie in the Lamp Post station. We assume that has always been the case, but I think a good case can be made that the island was dislodged from a fixed location at some point prior to 1954. I’m theorizing that point is around the time the Black Rock sailed the troubled waters around the island. Then after that, the search for the dislodged island, by the Hanso family, started.

Chang stopped work on the Orchid when they started getting too close to that magnetic pocket, the scan showed the Darlton dubbed Frozen Donkey Wheel in silhouette. Here I speculate, that the FDW isn’t primordial, it was placed there somehow, and I think the Black Rock is it’s source. The details we’ve seen of it when Ben then Locke applied pressure to it is it’s build seems nautical, wood and metal. The size of the wheel is too big for a helm, but about right for an anchor capstan. Could the FDW be the Black Rock’s capstan?

What does a capstan do? Well it uses applied man/muscle power to raise the anchor chain and coil it along it’s axis. There is obviously something dangling off the end of the rope of the FDW (IF it is a capstan). Perhaps the anchor is still attached. Perhaps manipulating the anchor through the magnetic pocket is what ‘moves’ the island. Just like hauling in an anchor chain moves a ship closer to the anchor drop point.

So at some point, the Black Rock gets yanked into the middle of the island, the dark territories says one map. Is it because the anchor got yanked into the magnetic abyss, pulling the ship along with it? Ripping the capstan off, until it got lodged in it’s current location.

So if that’s true, at some point, the crew of the Black Rock had to have gotten onto the island. Perhaps the crew members included Richard Alpert. Where he began his role as the right-hand man of Jacob, or who he thought was Jacob.

We still don’t know how Charles and Ellie and the original band of hostiles made it to the island. We know their presence was there in 1954, and they were fighting off a U.S. military crew that left behind Jughead. Are Charles et. al., descendants of the Black Rock crew? Charles certainly had a reason to bid on the log from the Black Rock.

I’m not sure how much time will be spent in season six investigating this ‘loophole’. I think Darlton will be more interested in completing the story of this set of characters, the Oceanic survivors than detailing Black Rock mythology. Perhaps they’ll leave enough hints in the Richard storyline to have one heck of a mini-series, feature film, about the Black Rock.

Okay, tell me where I’ve missed something.

Happy Anniversary baby.

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Was trying to think of something to move down the AWESOME vacationing at the hatch page, and my better half beat me to it…

So I direct all my readers (or what’s left of them) to her blog to see her 16th Anniversary Photo montage.

Yep me and Angie have been married for 16 years.  Which is a long time when you consider I’m 29 and she’s 25. *wink*

LOST Watch From The Beginning

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This is reprinted with permission from my post at LOSTblog.com

I feel a bit like I’m building an airplane while flying it, I just hope I’m more like Frank Lapidus than Seth Norris.

Shortly after the season five finale of LOST I made the decision to watch all the episodes from LOST again from start to finish. I shared that desire on Twitter and found a number of people also wanted to do the same thing. In a quest for the shared experience, I charged forward enthusiastically.

Then I did the math. *gulp*

LOST has 101 episodes. With an expected start time for Season 6 around the first part of January, that give us roughly 260 days to finish our quest. Divide 260 by 100 and thats an average of 2.6 days per episode.

Okay, that’s do able, but we’d better get started. So this past weeked some of us started watching and got through the pilot at roughly the same time. Then yesterday we had our first live tweet of episode 3 (Tabula Rasa) which was great fun. The experience of re-watching and re-sharing thoughts and theories of with like-minded fans is exciting. Though the format of twitter is made for this instant sharing, it has a drawback in coherence.

So I thought I’d start a blog to summarize the experience. Thanks to TheLOSTBlog an opportunity was made available.

So here we go, here is your opportunity to share in the experience and burn off the 7 long months til we get to the other side of the WhiteFlash.

What you need: A source to watch the episodes. Order the DVDs from Amazon, but them from Walmart, get them from Netflix, record re-airing off SciFi, or whatever alternative source you might be able to access.

What will help: Get a twitter account and follow @LOST_WFTB and @TheLostBlog; or search for the hashtag #WFTB (stands for Watch From The Beginning – really, be glad I don’t screenwrite.) And join the conversation.

What’s the schedule: We’re going to give ourselves 48 hours to watch an episode. Sunday is a day of rest (or catchup if your schedule gets interrupted). Live tweets for an episode will occur in the 48 hour period. So roughly Monday, Wednesday, Friday there will be some event (might go on Thursday night for you people with a real life). If you can’t make a live tweet, feel free to add a twee-cap (recap in twitterese) just include the #LOST and #WFTB hash tags. I’ll post any schedule updates from the LOST_WFTB account as we go along. (Flexibility is key, tell me if something needs to change.)

Who all is playing: me (@jstueve) and a few others. I’ll add them as they give me permission to announce them on this blog.

Okay, so cool, what else?: Well to add some coherence, I’m going to edit/condense/collate the live tweets and twee-caps into a blog post. Whether that is a 3 times a week or a weekly summary is left to be seen. But I think its important to give some chronology to the effort.

What do we get out of it: This should be self-explanatory. 🙂 You get to relive all 101 awesome episodes of the best show ever. AND share it with people (the best part in my opinion). So really I don’t see a downside.

So, read, signup for twitter, wait for more blog posts and get involved.

I look forward to completing this airplane real fast so we can fly it right.

Next up: Season 1 – Episode 4 Walkabout on Wednesday – Live Tweet 10PM CST – hashtag #LOST #WFTB