I was playing with my Sony portable, formatted the hard drive, and it started clicking each time the drive spins down. It is a PCG-GRX500P.
The solution is to go support.intel.com download the Application Accelerator (version 2.2.2 because they removed mobile chipset support from the most recent version) find the disk drive, and change the drive power management setting to “Maximum Performance”.
The clicking was parking the drive (I think) every time activity dropped for for a few seconds.

This is an excellent show – and good for kids as well.
I like the premise and the execution. It is both a comedy and a touching story. It is both an “acting out – bad boy” and a voyage of discovery.
I loved the supporting cast of his roommate and his room mate’s girl friend. She did such a great job that she may be type cast forever. The tension between then three characters was so very real and palpable.
Joan Cusak was excellent – I have seen others talk of this as a breakout role for her – Huh? This is still part of her classic type-cast insane librarien thing. That is too bad for her – but she did do a super job in creating her character. Too bad for her and us that she only gets these type of roles.
Overall rating: 5 out of 5 – Go see it at the movies, rent it as soon as it comes out and then buy the DVD to see it over and over again. I have seen it three times and will still buy the DVD when it comes out.
Criticisms: Sometimes Jack Black was too intense – in a few places it seemed as though he overacted a bit – it was impressive acting but a little scary at times. It shows he has amazing range – wow.
I did not like the plot transition when the cops came in on parents night. The transition from that moment to the morning of the battle of the bands was way too “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”. I think that there is probably some explanation that ended up on the cutting room floor in the interest of time. But if one were to do it over instead of just cutting stuff out (my hypothesis) it could have been much more believable.

I am at the Holiday Inn in Urbana, IL. The wireless and in-room networks are toast so I am typing in using my tMobile V300 as a modem. Very cool.
Next three days are all about getting the NEES data efforts all lined up and ready for landing in June. We are in good shape but I am sure there will be a few surprises along the way.
Read the Sakai Database report at breakfast this morning – sounds like they are making good progress – I missed their meeting yesterday cause of double booked ness.
Tonight is Chicago.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Microsoft Word grammar and spelling checker. Of course it allows me to power-type and catches me making all kind of grievous errors.
But there is one thing that annoys me – it is that I cannot use the word “which” in a sentence. This is a turn of events which I find very frustrating. (In the previous sentence, the monster would blow a gasket and demand that I change the “which” to “that”. Aargh!
I am sure that some one decided what the right way to use which and that – as far as I can tell the simple rule is always use that. The problem is that the word “that” is such a yucky-sounding word – “which” just sounds classier and more intellectual.
Read the following aloud, read the first with a hint of British accent and the second with a hint of Southern accent.
This is a turn of events which I find frustrating.
This is a turn of events that I find frustrating.
See – you sound like a yokel when you say it properly and when you say it wrong it sounds like you are a smooth cool dude. So you now understand my frustration and my growing hate for the grammar checker. I type sentences which sound intellectual, and the software insists on dumbing them down.
So I finally beat the checker. Type the following sentence into your Microsoft Word (I did it on the Mac).
“Part of the strength of the approach is that the activity is cross-disciplinary, involving the resources and talents of many people.”
It will highlight “cross-disciplinary” and suggest that you change it to “cross disciplinary”. Go ahead and accept the change. Then the checker will highlight it again and suggest that it be changed to “cross-disciplinary”. And back and forth – so it goes.
Now you may not think of this as a victory over the unfeeling, unyielding, beast known as the “evil that remover” – but for me, this is much like the end of the movie “War Games” – because the software is in a loop, I assert that no matter how powerful the computer is, we humans can still out-wit them is small ways.
Ha!

It is hard to code with your fingers crossed. David Gehrig
I like my wine like I like my software – inexpensive. Charles Severance
Humility and true talent are often colocated. Charles Severance
I come up with / hear neat sayings all of the time. I often think I will write a whole blog entry about them – but never get around to it. So I will just put the sayings in and blog about them later if I have time / inclination.

Rating: 4 out of 5 – Go to see once at the movies – no need to buy the DVD
Fun movie. Excellent homage to the 1970’s – lots of fun. Three scenes were a bit racy – but my 13 year old handled them fine. One of the racy scene’s (with the cheerleader chainging clothes) was almost as good as Mike Myers – and the fact that two actors were playing off one another – it was fun to watch – I would have improved on by having them gain and lose focus more rather than just spending all of the scene in a dazed state. The actor who played the cheerleader was excellent in her pacing and completely deadpan – which made the scene very funy – “what do you say to a naked lady?”.
Ben Stiller is a heck of an actor – the scenes where he mistakenly ends up on coke are pretty intense and well done.
The bad-guy is pretty well played – just bad enough to be believable and yet funny too.
Editing is excellent – pacing is good.
In a way, there were elements of a movie shot in a 70’s style and that was fun as well. It is actually more fun to watch it sort-of like 70’s style rather than actual 70’s movies.
The only strangeness in terms of quality is in the last big car scene where they go flying off a pier. For the in-car cut aways, the lighting was really bad – clearly all in-studio work. It almost looked like they had either switched to 35mm film (grain was very obvious) or they used an SFX house which did not keep the quality high enough or added too much fake grain. But the thing that absolutely bugged me the most was the lame lighting – this is so lame becuase it is one thing that folks *know* how to do – duh. I always wonder if there is a story behind this – like they ran out of time or something.
If I were to comment on the writing – the only thing (and it was a small thing) that bugged me was how they portrayed Hutch as doing illegal stuff at the beginning – like he was a bad cop. I think that they could have established that he was a maverick who treaded in grey areas without going quite so far.
All in all, a fine film to watch.

Whew!
My biggest worry was actually running out of time. The Demo went fine. I messaged up and pressed the wrong button.
Now I can think about a zillion other things and not the presentation.

Well the NEES Meeting at RPI has started. We have a few demos this afternoon but things should go smoothly. RPI is pretty cool – we have good networking and the local folks are great.
In a way, we might just miss all this – this is the last big meeting for this project where we will do demos, etc. The last time that we all meet for breakfast to make sure that all is working – the last time that we celebrate after they all work :)
There will be lots of work, lots of software developed and released, but this is the last big – stand-up-in-front-of-people and make it all make sense and make it go.

Here we are hanging out at RPI getting ready for the NEES meeting. All is good – found parking, found coffee. This is a picture of Sridhar working away in Chris Dupre’s office.

Free Internet – wireless – good signal strength – immediate DHCP addresses. Can’t lose.
From the Albany, NY Hilton Garden…