nik

A friend of mine who was an air traffic controller once said, "It's tough as hell to

get to planes to collide." That's sort of a testimony to how uncrowded the

skies are.

It's not that the skies are so uncrowded, but that when planes need to land - essentially

compressing a three-dimensional space into two - it's a bit harder to find enough

room on the ground.

The Emperor's Birthday (currently December 23) is probably the closest thing Japan

has to a national holiday.

That was great! I'm going to have to show that to my dad - Fat Benny Washington.

Most people who know me would be surprised to find that I love Reggae. I don't go out of my way to buy too many CDs, but I have a few Reggae recordings. Nice stuff!

It's not a big deal in Japan. The Japanese aren't too much into candy anyway. In

Tokyo, some American bars have Halloween parties.

I don't know. More often than not, TV movies turn into cheap imitations. Every time

I think of a TV movie, I think of those dang Star Wars Ewok movies with Wilford Brimley.

Besides, the episodes are so good that I almost think of them as short movies, or

some of the theatrical movies as long episodes.

In the past, I've used RedHat almost exclusively, but recently bought a new computer and switched to the Knoppix distribution. It's an extremely nice, well-packaged

distribution. I think Knoppix could really give Winblows a run for its money. One can

download the boot image (free, of course) and boot and run off of the CD-ROM. Of course, if one likes, one can easily configure for HD boot and running, which I did in

about 20 minutes. The nice things about this distribution are that it has auto-hardware

detection capabilities (something that's sort of been a sore spot for Linux in the past),

as well as a boatload of software (in a KDE environment) like KOffice - Linux's

stable answer to MSOffice, utilities up the wazoo, games, StarOffice, install wizards,

etc.

SoCalTom is right, too. Linux beats XP any day in terms of speed.

Currently, I've got XP installed on an NTFS partition (for those in my house who

swing that way), and Linux on an ext2 partition. The majority of my disk space

is maintained as a FAT32 partition, so it is accessible by XP and Linux. That's sort of

nice if I need to share files between the two operating systems or it just makes a

big repository accessible by both systems. The only thing that worries me is

the security involved with running XP. Linux is pretty immune to virus and worm

attacks, but if someone is using XP, a virus might get in that way. If I'm lucky, it migh just blow out the XP partition, but I'm also worried about the FAT32 partition.

Nice essay. I really agree with the comment about T'Pol. As a guy, that's all I

see in T'Pol when she's on screen - her body. It is quite distracting.

Have a day.

insurance, and pharmacutical companies are nothing but oportunistical, coniving, theives.

Yeah, you're right. People are getting killed (literally and metaphorically) by HMOs becuase the blood-sucking lawyers who never took a biology class are telling

physicians how to do their jobs. When my son was born a few years ago, he had to

spend his first week of life in the ICU with a tube down his throat and in great pain because of an injury incurred during birth. I had fine insurance too, and they

denied the claim - an astronomical amount of money. After reading through the policy, I found out that my son was covered. I called them, and they covered the expenses and gave me very little resistance. I talked to a lawyer friend of mine, and he said that many companies automatically deny claims because many people don't call their bluffs on it, and they can get away with not paying a bill. Isn't that fraud?

If you think you're getting jacked around by your insurance company, I would really

call them and ask what the heck's going on. In many cases, they may be dealing

from the bottom of the deck.

I use Linux as well. At work, I need to do some pretty intense data analysis on data sets pushing 1Tb, and there is nothing out there that will work in a Windows environment. Linux is extremely versatile and powerful. It has the stigma of

being non-intiutive, but with many of the "X" environments, it's no longer really a problem. It's also extremely stable. In fact, the place I work uses Linux systems excusively for it's data acquisition becuase we need 20 high-speed servers tranferring huge amounts of data 24 hours a day every day. (By the way, it was invented by a guy named Linus in Finland.)

Currently, I'm using a dual boot maching with XP (a very

expensive virus) in one partition and the Knoppix distribution in another.

Dual boot means what it sounds like - the user is able to boot one of two operating systems. (A few people I know have triple boot or more, for some reason or other.) It's typically accomplished by "partitioning" the hard drive(s) - meaning that one

creates logical (or even physical) divisions in the drive so that the computer

essentially sees two distinct areas, but it can be accomplished with less orthodox methods.

I used to partition my drives the "old fashioned" way - "by hand" with fdisk or something similar. However, I just got ahold of Partition Magic 7.0, and partitioned a drive, and installed the Knoppix distribution in about 40 minutes (most of that time

spent twiddling my thumbs while the drives spun). There's some preferences involved in partitioning drives, so you can discuss those.

The nice thing about Linux is that it is usually free. Also, nearly all the software used in a Linux environment is free. You can get Windows emulators to run Windows stuff on Linux, and many Linux users would respond with "Why would you want to do that?"

You might want to check the huge volume on information on the web, and maybe

even download a distribution. Many distributions can be booted from a floppy or

CD-ROM, so you don't really risk anything by trying it out without installing it. Which

distribution you use is personal preference.

I would recommend the following websites to learn about Linux:

Linux Website

GNU website for Linux/Unix documentation

Sourceforge = One of the MANY websites

where one can download FREE Linux software.

What about the observation deck of the NCC-1701-A? That's not up there. The old

clipper-ship helm and plaque were very nice, I thought.

This isn't a Star Trek name, but along the same lines. When my wife and I lived in Japan, she was pregnant with our son. We were going to give him a fairly "Japanese sounding" name - Ryoda. To an American, it sounds like Yoda (you know, Star Wars...). We had a friend with a son who had the same name. After thinking about it,

we changed our minds.

Contrary to what other people are saying, I don't think Paramount will really have that big of a problem if it is a non-profit thing for fun. Yeesh, lighten up everyone. I wish you luck with this project, and I hope it is as fulfilling as it sounds to be. Can't wait to see some episodes.

 

ps. those special effects look great.

I agree. I bet Paramount doesn't care too much about what they probably see as just a bit of fan fiction. If anyone seeks to profit from it, it's the blood-sucking lawyers.

Well... Even if you do get the snot sued out of you, I hope you manage to squeeze out at least an episode or two for us to watch.

Good luck!

I also say Hale-Bopp. It was impressive. Also, I watched Halley's comet in 1984-1985, and I don't plan on that being a once-in-a-lifetime event.

As a child, I never really enjoyed Halloween. However, now that I have a three-year-old son and a one-year-old son, I might get into it this year. My three-year-old decided to go as a construction worker this year - complete with utility belt and harhat. The laboratory I work at has an annual party for those wishing to get involved. I think I will dress my one-year-old up as an Indian, and I'll dress up as a cop, and we will all go as the "Village People." I had originally wanted to all go as

pirates, but now that my three-year-old has made his choice, the Village People might

be amusing.

That is by far one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I watched the trailer, and it

was like re-living my childhood (of course, when I was a child, it was in those in-between years after TOS and before TNG, and all we had to live off of was the

TOS re-runs.) I hope you have a tremendous amount of success in this project. Good luck!

I have a friend who would buy several model kits and then salvage the parts from those kits to design his own models, and they turned out really good. Another friend of mine did the same thing, and one of his designs actually got noticed and used as a design in "Generations." It was the large rescue ship at the very end - the Bozeman, was it?

I'm skeptical.

Hey! I'm in that that list - postdoc!

My job isn't as bad as the description makes it, mostly becuase in my field (physics) postdocs have a fair amount of respect and responsibility. However, the long hours and high-endurance is certainly true. I easily put in 80 hours per week, and over the summer, I was working on an experiment and ramped up to 150 hours per week for about a month - catching a few hours of sleep every now and then on the floor of my office. The stuff about having no life is true also. However, I do manage to get a few minutes here and there to do things like writes posts on web sites.......

Nearly every cell-phone conversation I've ever heard has been mundane and

pointless. For example, someone waiting for a bus or an airplane might

get out their cell-phone to call someone and say, "Where you at?" Someone

in a grocery store might get out their cell phone to call home and say, "What do you want?" (They couldn't ask that before leaving home?) My impression is that people use cell phones as a status symbol, but they are not a status symbol anymore because nearly everyone has one.

I used to think of Picard as sort of a wimp compared to Kirk, but now I think of

him as a bit more of a diplomat instead. After watching how he held up against the

Borg and the Cardassians, it's hard to say he's weak. I think he's just a bit more

mellow than someone like Kirk. However, it would have been nice to see him lose

his temper a bit more often like he did in FC. A few more double-fisted shots and some

flying kicks would have been cool, too......

Captain Kirk: "Earl Grey... hot."

Captain Picard: "Wonderful stuff, that Romulan Ale."

Sorry, I've been out of the West for a while. Who is Kelly Osborne?

Have a nice day!

OK, call me blind, but what's the difference between the two?  I really don't see a difference.  Likewise, both images appear pixel-for-pixel identical?  Sorry....

There's 3 different logo's posted. The old one where the name is in a slightly different font and is a bit smaller. Then the new one with Red outlining and then in response to Alterego I posted a new one with blue outlining.

Aha! Now I do see a difference. For some reason, when I clicked on your spoilers, I got identical images..... odd. Thanks!