RANT: Weezie has encountered internal error 2739

I've had a LOT of problems with Microsoft this week both on a personal and professional level. What's that saying, "fool me once, shame on me..." Well, Microsoft is on about their hundredth iteration and I don't know who's the fool or where the shame should be placed. There's one relationship with them I can't avoid (Windows-related unless I sink a ton of money into a Mac and repurchase all the software I have) and another situation I keep getting caught up in (work-related) which affects a lot more people other than just myself. I can't talk about the latter (yet), but I can certainly vent a little bit about the former.

In order to finish up some web development, I had to finally purchase a version of Photoshop more recent than 6.0. Since I can't afford to shell out $600 for CS4, I decided to get CS3 which is "Vista-compatible." I stuck in the disc and instantly got this error: "Setup has encountered an error and cannot continue. Contact Adobe CS for help. Internal error 2739" - OK, this is actually an Adobe problem. I'm not entirely sure why they just can't put a little more text in the error and tell me what it actually means. They obviously know what it is if they're telling me to ask them about it! As an aside, at work, we routinely ask our programmers to provide more information in crash errors so that if it's something we can fix easily without their assistance, we can go ahead and take care of it. This is one of the secrets to productivity: providing clear explanations of problems to empower individuals to fix problems without a lot of outside dependencies.

After a little research on the Adobe forums, I discovered that the problem was with a couple of DLL's. DLL's are Dynamic Link Libraries which end users like myself or my Dad or anybody else should never have to deal with. In fact, I always imagined that Vista would somehow make these problems disappear. Instead, they still definitely exist, but Vista just doesn't really report them, so I guess they did kind of disappear, huh? Another great example of this is when Vista just goes to an infinite black screen during the load process because a DLL is having a problem. Since I have a little bit of experience with DLL's, I opened up a command prompt and set about fixing the problem when I ran into this error:

call to DllRegisterServer failed with error code 0x80004005. - what the heck does that mean? Well, after some more research, I discovered that it means I'm trying to do something without administrative permissions. If that's the case, how come the error can't say that? Furthermore, how do I run a command prompt with administrative permissions? Well, you have to fire up a little something called an elevated command prompt. This isn't something that just appears in the Vista start menu. It's buried. When I finally found it, I was able to change the DLL's without any further problems (other than the fact I have to do it in the first place).

Next, after finally being allowed (on my own computer) to install Photoshop, I got this error: "This application requires an Intel Pentium 4, Intel Celeron, Intel Core Duo or Intel Core 2 compatible processor. (0/6/5894)
This application may perform poorly. Are you sure you want to continue?" - Again, a Vista problem (http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/12/64_bitswhen.html. The answer, just select yes and "don't show this message again."





I'm tired of Microsoft. Everything is on their terms no matter how supportive they pretend to be or how many times they promise to improve things. They're like a girlfriend who you think everything is fine with and then she says, "We need to talk."

Excuse me, but I'm taking a pole....

OK, first off, I promise, this will be the last political post unless I run into another stupid white person.

I was at the Saddle Room last night saying goodbye to Matt and enjoying crappy, cold bottles of Budweiser. Chris (who is full of all sorts of great ideas and I really hope I get to work on the Bakersfield SWAT game with him some day) was just at the end of telling us about monkeys going crazy at a Bakersfield party when this guy who wasn't part of our group butted in.

"I'm taking a poll guys and I wondered whether you guys would answer a couple of questions. One. Do you think McCain should attend the debates on Friday and, two, who are you voting for?"

Aw crap. I took a look at the guy and saw all sorts of things that reminded me of the other jackass I had to deal with a couple of months ago: older white guy, baseball cap, not particularly intelligent sounding, etc. I seem to attract these guys for some reason. With our conversation interrupted, some of us pretended to ignore him by watching the football game while the rest of us answered unanimously: "Yes he should attend the debate and we're voting for Obama."

Let down by his fellow white men, the guy took the opportunity to update us on some news that might sway our collective opinions, "Did you guys know that Joe Biden has a terminal disease that's going to kill him in a couple of months and then Hillary Clinton is all set to step in and be Obama's vice president?"

"WHAT?!" we all voiced simultaneously. "Where did you hear that?!"

"The bloggers are all talking about it," he said. BLOGGERS?!

"Dude, I have a blog," I said. "I'm a blogger. My blog is full of all sorts of bullshit."

At the gym today, I was reading Entertainment Weekly which has a great interview with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Jon Stewart says something that really struck a chord with me, "...the take on Al Gore was he's too smart. Even if you're satirizing how wonderful they are, that hyperbole is setting them up for an expectation to fail, especially within the American political system now where authenticity - and apparently mediocrity - are the manna that the populace feeds upon. To set somebody up as if they're above us, and elitist... my God, you couldn't do anything worse."

Responsible Voting

Ah, it's that time again when I tell you all to vote responsibly this November. To reiterate what I say time and time again, I don't care who you vote for as long as you vote intelligently. That means no gut instincts or personal biases or falling prey to political smearing or scare tactics. That means, no voting for (or against) Obama because he's black. No voting for Palin because she's a woman. No voting for McCain because he's an old guy. No voting because Obama sounds like Osama. No voting for John because he's a Vietnam veteran. No voting for somebody based on their spiritual beliefs (unless it's directly part of a policy). No voting because somebody is too young or too old. No voting for the cutest candidate or the hockey Mom. It means that you take a look at each candidate's policies and plans for America and vote according to which of those aspects make this a better country for everybody. SO, here is what you should be looking at in order to choose the next President:

John McCain's issues: http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/

Barack Obama's issues: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/

A non-partisan comparison of the issues: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/06/03/obama_mccain_on_the_issues/

Follow Your Instincts TM

Tonight I went to my buddy's birthday party. I decided to wear Derek Jeter's Driven Black: a mysterious blend of exotic saffron, blood orange, and precious woods. I have two words for my experience: WOW!

Watchmen Motion Comics

Alan Moore ranks highly among my favorite writers and Dave Gibbons has been one of my favorite artists ever since I saw his Dan Dare work in the 2000 AD's my Nano (UK Grandma) used to send me from England. Watchmen is an amazing collaboration between Moore and Gibbons and one of the finest pieces of contemporary fiction I've read. Don't let the term "comic book" or "graphic novel" dissuade you from giving it some of your time and consideration. Time Magazine even placed it in their list of the 100 all-time novels (in the company of the Great Gatsby and Animal Farm), so that's got to give it some credibility amongst people who wouldn't normally pick up a "comic"!

Anyway, Zack Snyder of 300 fame is directing the big motion picture version of Watchmen that comes out next year and it looks fantastic!




Which brings me to the promotional Watchmen Motion Comics that my buddy Jake Hughes is working on. Jake has worked directly with Dave Gibbons to do an animated version of the comic book which is rendered panel by panel with 2D / 3D elements augmenting the original art. It's pretty damn impressive and really brings the story and art to life in a unique way. The first one is available on ITunes right now if you search for "Watchmen" or you just follow this link: http://www.ew.com/ew/static/watchmen/watchmen.html. Anyway, this is a support the peeps moment that I can't recommend highly enough!

blah blah blah

"I'm an intelligent man," he said giving me a wild stare that begged me to challenge him, but I was already in the process of tuning out; focusing my attention over his shoulder on a cheap clock on the wall that he said would be the "probable target of anybody who wanted to break into his home for a quick fix." When I was a lot younger, I learned a trick in college speech class: if you get nervous when you have to address a large crowd, you look over their heads so that you don't have to make eye contact. Your audience thinks you’re looking straight at them. "I don't watch the news because I don't like anybody telling me what to think," he continued, "I mean, I'm a reasonably smart guy and I don't need anybody to tell me what somebody's saying when I can just listen to them and decide for myself."

There are times in my life when I just have to shut up and listen and this was one of them. Without realizing it, this guy knew every button to push on me and I had to sit there and put up with that. Well, I didn’t have to, but this day wasn’t about me and I wanted to be supportive for Mel while she visited with some friends. That’s what love is, y’know? To be honest, I’m pretty sure this guy was focusing on me because I was the only other white guy in the room. It started off innocuously enough with him telling stories about “Sweetie”; an ancient, rust colored, miniature poodle with a lazy eye and a bad temper that he cradled in his arms and petted softly like Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Things rapidly took a turn for the worse when he asked me who I was voting for at election time. “I haven’t quite decided yet,” I said trying to defuse the situation before it started.

“You know that Obama is a Muslim, right? It’s right there in his book, the Audacity of Hope. Hold on, I’ll show you.” He took his dog in another room and then returned moments later with a print-out of some email. The email was one of those bullshit things that people send around with a bunch of half assed facts and quotes on it about any number of topics. Steven Colbert refers to this particular style of information as "truthiness" which is a “a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts." George Orwell called it "doublethink"; “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” At the bottom of the email was a single quote highlighted in yellow, “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.” He nodded his head slowly at me as I read the quote.

“I’d like to know what the context of this quote is,” I said, handing the paper back to him. “Have you read the book?” He shook his head no. “I’m a smart man. I don’t need to read the book. Everything he needs to tell me is right there.”

Sure it is. Here’s the full context of the quote taken directly from Obama’s book: “Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during WWII, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." That sounds pretty good to me. Nobody stood up for over 100,000 Japanese (a huge percentage of them U.S. citizens) who were interned after Pearl Harbor. How about all the U.S. citizens who’s lives were ruined during the era of McCarthyism?

The conversation (as one-sided as it was) continued to develop like a fart in an elevator.

"You never got into that Dungeons and Druids or Devils or whatever, do you?"
"That's Dungeons and Dragons. No, I don't currently play it, but I played it a lot when I was a kid."
"It's an addiction and it's sucks people in and twists their thinking."
"I'd say it's first and foremost a game that people enjoy. Personally, I liked the narrative elements of the game and the sense of community. It's a game that expects you to think in a manner that combines creativity with analytic thought. If you're somehow addicted to it, you probably have other problems that are unrelated to the game."

"You don't go to San Francisco, do you?" Again with the expectation that somehow we're akin due to our skin color or religion. "Yes I do. I enjoy going to the city. I've applied for several jobs in the city and I like the culture and nightlife."
"Hmm. Well, the only reason I go to San Francisco is to drive right through it. Lot's of crazy people up there."

"Freedom is not free and Obama and Hillary hate the military. They want to disband the military. They don't understand that you have to fight for what we have here."

It's weird to hear this type of thinking so close to home. Usually I hear it when I turn on the radio around Bakersfield or when I channel surf past Fox News. To be honest, I respect everybody's right to have an opinion, but I draw the line at opinions that can't be substantiated in any way. The world doesn't work so great on gut feelings and popularity contests. As I left his house, he waved in an encouraging manner to me and assured me that we'd hang out again soon. Fair enough. If we happen to hang out again on my turf, then you'll have to listen to me.

Indiana Jones ATKOTCS review (non-spoilerish)

With the exception of an overly anthropomorphic monkey (a portent of awful things to come like Jar Jar Binks and a nuclear gopher family), Raiders of the Lost Ark was a terrific piece of film making that successfully paid homage to 1940's cliffhangers without becoming a parody. Its follow-up, the Temple of Doom, was a large scale screwup that largely ignored everything that made its predecessor enjoyable in favor of a Goonies style sidekick (I know Goonies came out the year after, but Jonathan Ke Quan played identical parts as both Short Round and Data) and a high concentration of Troma-style visceral visuals (chilled monkey brains anybody?). The Last Crusade was an overall enjoyable film with a great first act followed up meandering father / son schtick and, finally, a satisfying ride off into the sunset to end the series. Which brings us to the latest entry in the series: Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull.


I set my expectations really low prior to watching the movie. From the look of the trailers, the movie already seemed to be suffering from the Lucas-style clash of visual noisiness and thematic clutter that were prevalent in the Star Wars prequel trailers and were more than telling of their respective final products. As evident in the Star Wars original trilogy special editions, Lucas has a problem with subtlety (something that budget constraints imposed on the original Star Wars) and, left unchecked (he is the world’s richest independent film producer), his particular form of narcissistic creativity tends to drown out the entertainment value of his films rather than improve them. Three minutes of the Fifth Element’s congested skyline has far more impact than thirty minutes of various planets suffering from ten times the amount of traffic.

In the first twenty minutes of the movie, we’re quickly reintroduced to Indiana Jones who has been captured by Nazi-like communists (only Cate Blanchett’s Russian purr and Dora the Explorer haircut differentiate her villainous aspirations from Raider’s Major Toht) and forced to locate a mysterious artifact buried somewhere in a labyrinth-like warehouse in Area 51. Luckily for him, her mother-country-renowned mindreading skills (which never manifest themselves again for the rest of the movie) fail to purloin the artifact’s secrets from his archeological mind, but do ensure that the audience will have to endure two more hours of mumbo jumbo to reach the same conclusions together.

One of the biggest problems with the movie becomes evident in the first big action scene. In the original Raiders, much of the movie’s fun was watching Indy make mistakes both intellectually and physically and suffering as a result. This thematic throwback to pulp-grade heroes made his victories and successes that much more exciting. In the Crystal Skull, much like the relaunches of Die Hard and Rocky, Indiana has become less of a hero and more of a superhero where any amount of damage inflicted by stunt and set piece is shaken off with an incredulous been-there-done-there smirk and a quip. This imperviousness to any sort of damage makes it difficult to connect to the character since there’s never any real sense of danger. It’s almost like age has inured his body rather than slowed him down which puts the believability of the conceit on the audience rather than the character. Personally, I didn’t buy it.

The Crystal Skull’s story has too many problems to make sense of. It has the structure of a honey-do list where elements are checked off regardless of order, planning, or necessity: nods to the series prior installments are rattled off to please the fans, themes are introduced and then thrown away before they can develop, major plot points are revealed through prequel-quality dialogue that causes the pace to stall out, new characters are introduced with imposed familiarity and little relevance other than simple mechanics to drive disparate parts of the plot along. As with the Star Wars prequels, the burden of responsibility here falls on the screen writer (Lucas) since the cast is made up of some truly talented actors that are capable of much more.

Much ado has been made of the movie’s action set pieces which should be the icing on the cake and not the prime motivator for the entire picture. We have Capoeira Mayans, a nuclear bomb exploding, multiple waterfall drops, a Mayan surprise party, a jungle clearing truck (re-appropriated from the opening scenes of the Phantom Menace), sword fighting between moving cars, video game style crushing blocks, and a vaporized villain (which pales in comparison to past villains’ demises). By the time, the movie reached its Mission to Mars finale (which was actually nearly identical to 1983’s Wavelength), I finally realized that the movie would have been better split up into 15 minute mini-movies and shown on the SciFi network before Stargate Atlantis. There’s at least four different movies going on in the Crystal Skull and none of them are very strong.

My friend Stephen summed up the movie the best. Since the Last Crusade, we’re had entirely new franchises in the same genre appear: the Mummy, Tomb Raider, National Treasure, the made-for-TV Librarian series, and, to some degree, the DaVinci Code. None of these movies have improved upon Raiders of the Lost Ark, but rather than use the opportunity to show the audience how a real adventure movie can be made, the Crystal Skull has, instead, snuggled up with the new comers.

Last Thursday represents the last time I want to see the green, sparkling Lucasfilm logo pop up in a movie theater. I've been burned too many times and so Lucas and his works are now relegated to the same big budget, egotistical director's kid's table that Michael Bay and the Wachowski Brothers are sitting at while the adults do more interesting things. He'll be in good company until the day he decides to order off the menu.

Stench

The smell is insanely bad and leaving the windows open to air it out is not a great idea right now since the temperature mysteriously dropped this month. The bottom line is that something died inside my wall. In the crawlspace. That's the word from the building maintenance guy. In his words, "I'm going to have to hire some tiny Mexicans to get in there since I'm too big, y'know?" I just responded, "yeah, whatever." I mean, why not hire some tiny white guys? There's plenty of those over at Chili's watching ESPN.

So, there's a guy on my front lawn...

When I got home tonight, I noticed something unusual on the lawn outside of my apartment: a man. Maybe in his late 50's or early 60's. It was a little hard to tell because it's dark outside of my apartment when I don't have the living room lights on. He didn't seem to move when I passed by him to open my front door, so I went back to take a look at him.

"Hey man, are you ok?"
"Yes, I'm ok. I'm just resting. Do you know where the closest hospital is?"
"Palo Alto Medical Foundation is over on El Camino, but that's not really walking distance. Can I call you a cab or something?"
"I don't have any money. I'm pretty much homeless. I just need to get to a hospital."

At this point, I knew I would have to call the cops. Not because the guy needed to be busted or anything, but because he might need medical attention. I'm not a huge fan of the Menlo Park police department (see my earlier post on getting a click it or ticket) and I kind of feel like making the phone call is like calling in an air strike on myself or something. Anyway, I made the call, picked up a blanket, and headed back outside to wait with the guy while the police showed up.

"I brought you a blanket. It's cold out here. The cops will here in a few minutes to help out."
"Thanks. Do you mind staying with me?"
"Not at all."

The man was holding a couple of pieces of paper in his hand which he handed to me to look at. Two sheets of paper had various family pictures. They looked pretty old from the look of the clothing and hairstyles. Perhaps the 1950's.

"That's my Mom and family. Two sisters and a brother."
"Your Mom was a very pretty lady."
"Yes she was. Her and my Dad split up. Got a divorce, but not before he had her committed and she got shock therapy. She was never the same since."
"That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that. Is your family from around here?"
"No, we lived in Modesto. I'm just here getting help. I went out tonight to get some dinner and here's where I ended up."

At this point, the cops showed up. There's not much more to the story. I do kind of wonder why none of my other neighbors came out to see what was going on especially when the ambulance showed up with its lights on. I also wonder how long the poor guy had been wandering around until he showed up on my lawn.

Feeling oldie

I've been distraught now for a couple of months ever since I realized that 80's music (an all-encompassing term I hate by its own limited value) is now being marketed as oldies. For example, here's a heinous compilation available from Varese Sarabande: Then-Totally-Oldies-80s-Vol which is a perfect example of the mentality that is smushing good and bad music alike into a one size fits all package for people whose musical diversity doesn't extend that far past the soundtracks for Valley Girl or Pretty In Pink. I mean, I don't know what sort of insane person's playlist would sequence Gary Numan's 'Cars' (which was actually released in 1979 on 'the Pleasure Principal') right after 'Jessie's Girl' by Rick Springfield?! Now if you happen to like both those songs, that's fine, but it reminds me of a Saturday Night Live sketch where Will Ferrell was on Who Want To Be A Millionaire. In the sketch, Will gets the first question right and wins $100. When the host asks him if he'd like to continue on to win more money, he smiles and calmly tells the host that he's satisfied with just winning the $100 and that's as far as he wants to go.

Now, I'm not one of those people who claim that the music they grew up with is the best music ever and all modern music is crap. Far from it. I actually grew up listening to Kiss, Styx, Electric Light Orchestra, the Kinks, and solo John Lennon which is about as far away from what I listen to now as you can get. The problem was that was that US radio was stuck on 33 with the same handful of 'hits' from these bands playing ad nauseum. Didn't any of these bands have other songs? Prior to our local radio station making the transition from rock to cutting edge rock, the only alternative I had were occasional tapes of the John Peel show that my cousins would send over from England. This is where I first heard Public Image Limited, Killing Joke, U2, and Siouxsie. When 91X (one of the local radio stations in San Diego) suddenly made the switch from classic rock to cutting edge rock, there was a virtual flood of new music (new wave if you will) which instantly shoved classic rock into oldies territory and probably disenfranchised an entire generation of music lovers who resented the reclassification. As much as I loved turning on the radio and hearing new music, I could also sense a huge problem: radio broadcasters were continuing with the same format of playing only the hits.

Let's cut to today.

In California, we have a trio of radio stations which used to have very diverse playlists and programming (you could hear ska next to punk next to techno next to rap), but cutting edge rock has been replaced by modern rock. The definition of modern rock (based on what I hear at any given time on any of these stations) can be summed up as a blend of California 90's punk, 90's grunge, and a smattering of newer bands that sound like they could have been from either of those first two categories. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stone Temple Pilots, and the Offspring constantly rotate around the clock like room temperature California Rolls at the Sushi boat. It's all very safe, very recognizable, very homogeneous and easily dismissable as background noise while driving to work or working out at the gym. If you like 91X in San Diego, rest assured, you can get the same blend in Los Angeles (KROQ) and San Francisco (Live 105). For example, at 12:25 PM, I just checked all three of those radio station's websites to see what songs were playing:

91X - Smashing Pumpkins 'Zero' (a great band, but they've produced a lot of other great music since 1996).

KROQ - Red Hot Chili Peppers 'Snow' (new Red Hot Chili Peppers sounds just like old Red Hot Chili Peppers).

Live 105 - Nirvana 'Polly' (at least it's the acoustic version).

Yep. That's pretty much the definition of modern rock.

Why is it that every generation of music has to fall prey to the same marketing driven neutering? 70's music should not be defined by disco and soft rock. 60's music should not be defined by classic rock and pop. Music should be defined by our own individual tastes and not by generic labels which dictate what we listen to by what's conveniently at hand. Bands are not just their hits or the singles that make it onto movie soundtracks. I can only imagine how much great music I would have missed out on if I'd just let marketing guide my musical likes and dislikes. So, the next time you listen to some 80's music don't dismiss it as novelty music (which it is clearly marketed as by concentrating on silliness like Falco's 'Rock Me Amadeus' and the Greg Kihn Band's 'Jeopardy'), but rather ask yourself why there's no possible way you'd even hear anything like Love and Rockets next to Madness or the Clash these days (unless your local radio station has a faux-nostalgic 80's show with some British accented DJ). How about using Pandora to find some other music you may like that you've never heard of? How about exploring an entire album's worth of material on I-Tunes instead of just settling for the hit? How about tuning into Nic Harcourt's Mornings Become Eclectic on KCRW which easily has the most musical diversity of any radio broadcast on the face of the planet?

End of rant.