In all likely hood it will be a few days before I post again, but you never know. Okay, so it's not like I post every day anyhow - so it won't be a massive departure from the norm. I'm heading to Texas tomorrow evening to visit an old friend, Brandon, for the long weekend. The good part, he's my Brother from another Mother. The bad part, I have to fly there.

Airports suck, and planes suck. I'm not a huge fan of being a damned sardine - but at least it's only about 4 hours or so in the flying can.

We have to behave since he lives in Texas now too, I mean we wouldn't want to have to meet up with Walker in a back-alley somewhere no would we? Any way, I'm looking forward to the trip. I have never been to Texas before, just flown over it a couple of times, so it should be a fun weekend.

It's the good ol' days, back when I was in Junior High, full of spunk because we just got a new color monitor and ditched the Amber Screen that we opted for over the standard green with our XT. Good times... Good Times! Now you too can relive the glory days of computing, be transported back to the Tombstone of the OS wars, and let your cup runeth over with the bliss we all felt with the release of Windows 3.1.

Install Windows 3.1 with Virtual PC

Virtual PC has been around a while, and has become quite stable and an excellent resource to have as a developer of any kind. It's far better to hose a virtual machine than your daily production box. Since Deep Pockets Billy has seen fit to make Virtual PC free to the world, there's no reason to not download it and give it a whirl. It's a small executable, and runs pretty tightly. It literally takes seconds to install, and mere minutes to configure a new Virtual Machine.

Once VPC is installed and working, Click New.. and get going. Click next through the welcome screen, and select Create a virtual machine. The options here are well explained and easy to decipher, if you already have a .vmc file - then use it; if not create a new one. Click Next >.

Now give it a name, and a home. Just use the default location on your c drive; it creates a My Virtual Machines directory in your My Documents folder - so unless you have a 20 gb drive, default is fine. Since I used it to install Windows 3.1, that's what I named it; Windows3.1. Again with the Next >.

Now you get to choose the operating system, notice that Windows 3.1 is strangely absent from the list.... so here we select Other. Yup, click Next >.

For the RAM allocation I left it at default which is 128mb. Now you come to the Virtual Hard Disk options. This is the bit that actually holds the data for your Virtual Machine. Since we are not adding an existing one, Select A new virtual hard disk and click Next >. Now select the same location as the.vmc file, unless you intend on giving it a truck load of space, then by all means place it on a secondary local drive. I would also take note of the Enable undo disks. This can be helpful if you are doing any development that could frag your VHD. This could save a bit of time and hassle, since you might be able to recover your disk from a previously un-fubared version. For my purposes I set the hard disk size to 650 mb. Click Next > & Finish.

That's it. You just created a new virtual machine. Now just select it, Start it and install your OS normally.

Where's the beef?

To make it easier, and since I am pretty sure it needed to be there first, I installed DOS 6.22 onto the partition. Again, Microsoft has graciously made DOS 6.22 available for a free download. One thing to keep in mind if you have to download the disks, and don't have the OEM disks - the disk labels must use all of the available 11 characters, so the labels must be DISK      1, DISK      2, DISK      3 - or the install will not work. There are 6 spaces between the word DISK, and the disk number. As I have original disks, I didn't need to do this.

I should also say it took me a while to get to this point. I tried to get a clean install of Windows 3.1 onto a laptop, and failed. The drive wouldn't read the DOS disks, or the VGA driver failed install, or the DOS boot disk wouldn't work or some other damned thing. It took me a bit to wade through all the muck and get this to the final end point of Virtual PC. Thanks to Scott for some tips, and various other sites and blogs.

Once I got the disks stuffed into the drive (it helps to if your floppy drives works properly, and actually reads the disks) DOS installed quick and easy - I mean what could really go wrong? It's only 3 3.5 inch floppies... Next Up Windows, Disco ball version. Okay, not quite that old - but you get the idea.

The first thing that really struck me as I started to install Windows, was that the flippin' setup window is almost exactly the same as it is today for installing Windows XP. I don't remember if it is or not for Vista, but since companies like Lenovo is recommending a downgrade, I'm not terribly likely to refresh my memory any time in the foreseeable future. The DOS setup screen isn't a whole lot different either, but it didn't hit me until I started the Windows install.

Not too much to say here either, I had little trouble with this 6 floppy swapping install - in fact this time around I had no file failures. The first time one of the fonts was unreadable and I had to set the display to Super VGA instead of VGA.

Run, Forest run!

Let's see... it's been what? 20 minutes? That's about it. Now you are set and get to kick it in the retro OS world of Windows 3.1. It just slays me in fact - this is a riot. I'm a geek and I know it - and if I didn't my wife would be sure to remind me. Naturally it runs screaming fast, in fact it took like 5 seconds for it to load. Man! How nice would that be with XP? I'm not really sure what exactly I did this for other than it seemed like the thing to do - but there it is.

If you want to get more stuff for your new toy, check out oldOS.org for Windows 3.1 downloads.

Right around 6pm this evening a swirling blast of Tornado like chaos descended upon Bradford and decimated what was left of quite a nice day. Not even 10 minutes before was it sunny and warm; in fact I almost left to go up to the State Park to shoot some more images today - that's how nice it was. I am very glad I did not.

Most people's yards are either littered with what used to be their trees, or completely clean. Our back yard look like the big pine tree just up and decided it needed 10% fewer branches and started chunkin' them in tot grass. Some of them flew about 25 feet into the neighbor's driveway. There were trees in the road, power lines down all over town, trees leaning on lines not yet fixed and just general chaos.

The tank from ARG is what really blew me away. This thing is massive. All steel, and it can't be all that flimsy right? Nothing fell into the side of it. Hell, the crane is still standing right to the side. But its entire south/southeast side is caved in like it was made of tinfoil. We were really lucky, others not so.

The streets, even 2 hours later were just littered with debris. No real flooding, although had the massive amounts of rain continued it would have been really bad. Our ditch in front was almost overflowing due to the massive volume - and like I said, it really on lasted about 10 minutes. The Firemen will be working overtime tonight.

Crazy freakin' weather.

I've been reading a lot of science journals lately and some undergrads at MIT have been working on a security system based on an individuals DNA structure.... no. Not really. But I do watch Sci-Fi.

I turned on the TV to watch Eureka this evening and about half way through I was treated to this clip.

This is absolutely hilarious! I'm not sure how long it took him to come up with such an odd and obviously unnatural way of being sucked to the ground - but it really looks awesome.

The show is just about always goofy as all get-out, so this isn't really a surprise. I think I watched a dozen times. Priceless.

As a side not: I know I didn't use SWF Object to place my little Flash clip - but it wouldn't work by pasting in the stinking Wordpress Editor - so I took the easy route and used the Flash plug-in button....

I have been trying to drag my carcass out of the house more often to go for walks, since it's about the only thing I can do these days, yeah... Kenpo is still out since my transplant. Any ways, I tend to drag the boys with me since they run, and Dylan tends to be SuperFast!

We (the boys and I) were out at the Marilla Reservoir outside of town, and I started seeing Fungus with scrawling on them. The first one was near the main bridge crossing the overflow to the earthen mound we like to call a Dam - and someone had carved Serenity into the surface of it. Weird. I mean, who really ever thinks of carving up a freakin' toad stool - never mind with something as ambiguous as Serenity. Maybe it's a girl's name, either that or Malcolm dropped by for a visit while he was hiding out from the Reapers that live in the Asteroid belt.

I didn't really think anything of it until about half way around, I saw another. This time it was a large specimen and had more space to write, and following suite with having more canvas - more was on it. The whole Dowdy clan gouged their names into this hapless forest object - all 8 of them, they even saw fit to slap a date on it for posterity. This one I actually didn't see until the last time I was out, when the whole fam-damnly went for a walk in the woods. Okay, Litsa and I walked, the crazy-makers ran and occasionally fell, one time right on top of one another; which as it happens was funny for us: not for them.

The third one seems like a continuation of the second, some of the same names are on this as there were on the last  - so I can only assume that they didn't have enough surface area to get their entire message out into the wilderness so they had to inflict their time-capsule-esque desires unto another fungus. This is really quite amusing. I for one have never been big into scribing my name into anything - having never done it, nor have I ever had any desire to leaves me at a loss as to why people do. At least it's on this instead of black spray paint on the bridge or rock benches.

I'm going to have to keep an eye for more of this sort of thing as I wander around the area. These 3 may in fact be perpetrated by the same group of fungus-writers, but it's likely that other people will see it, think it's funny or clever - and then continue the trend elsewhere.

Several weeks ago I ordered the 300 Graphic Novel since I enjoyed the movie so much, and it was really quite the let-down. The writing was horrid, I mean it's not like the movie was a masterpiece, but geeez - my kid coulda' done better. Naturally there were the one-liners and quips from the movie that they splashed all over the previews, but other than that I think it took me all of 5 minutes to go cover to cover.

The story seemed very truncated and disjointed - leaving out far too much detail removing any epic quality to the journey. There was no history, build up or any of the usual bits you get in a good story; you know, the protagonist, the conflict and the resolution. The Protagonist was loosely set up as King Leonidas, and it continued to be paper thin from start to end. Insufficient history was provided for me to care in the slightest, and the level of detail seemed to be assuming the reader had already seen the movie: which is funny since the movie was based on the graphic novel.

Now, that's not to say it was a total waste of dough, because it wasn't. The artwork is excellent - that's really the only saving grace, had this been otherwise I would have been totally torqued-off.

That being said, it was a bit inconsistent from panel to panel with its quality and in some cases the style of the art seemed to drift. In some ways it reminded me of the old comic books where the important bits of the scene got most of the attention, and the rest seemed to get white-washed and completed just enough to get by. The image off to the right is definitely one of the best from the book. Lynn Varley did the color for the book, and she is an exceptional artist, her work in the Dark Knight Returns series was phenomenal.

The 300 DVD on the other hand, I would recommend buying. Its chock full of extras and the movie was visually stunning and very entertaining. Keeping in mind I was in full expectation of it not being a stellar movie when I went to see it - not thinking it would be as bad as Doom with The Rock, but not as good as any of the Bourne trilogy.

Overall, I still think that the 300 Graphic Novel is worth a look just to see the artwork, even with its short comings it was very well drawn.