Bare Naked Larry

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Guessing Game

FGL asks where I've been so I guess I'll at least start a post tonight and see where it goes. As things are going my posts are probably going to be a little intermittent for awhile. I haven't gotten a new girlfriend if that is your first thought or question, just a lot of little activities eating up my time. I had also hoped to give some deep thought before posting seeking to improve the general quality of the postings -- maybe wait until I knew where some recent threads in my life are heading. But I have found I'm not very good at going back to document past activities if too much time has passed. I guess this is just the nature or peril of blogging. Events often don't play out in a definitive or conclusive way or on a convenient schedule. I tend to want there to be some point to writing before putting things down, though real blog readers probably enjoy having real stories play out over days or weeks. As a writer I worry a story might not go anywhere. Hopefully true blog fans will enjoy the occasion dead-end.

About my nights out on Wednesday and Friday -- I danced some and I met a couple of nice women. I doubt that anything will come of any of this, but you never know. I'm having just enough social success out lately that I'll just stay with my current Wednesday, Friday, Saturday routine and see if leads anywhere. Not so much of interest happened this week though as to be worthy of a "Larry's Life" entry.

Saturday I didn't actually make it out, I was just too tired from staying up too late on Friday and I got up early Saturday to deal with some computer issues. A new friend Hillary (not a girlfriend) came over to help troubleshoot the problem. The problem turned out to be that my 250Gig external drive was FAT32 file system and not NTFS. This had Hillary stumped for a little while as well, but she definitely gets credit for the fix. She told me to reformat to NTFS and I would be able to copy my video files to it. FAT32 can only handle up to 4-gigabyte (2^32) files, while NTFS can handle 16-exabytes (2^64). Of course I might have a little trouble fitting a 16-exabyte file on a 250-gigabyte hard-drive.

We didn't get all my computer issues fixed however, as my digital camera wasn't uploading files to my computer. Hillary was convinced it was a Trojan virus, but I'm pretty sure it isn't/wasn't. I had thought the hard-drive was related to the problem, but that proved to be a red herring as well. I tried to takes some pictures today and found I couldn't do that either. The problem turned out to be that the memory stick wasn't firmly seated in the memory slot. With that fixed the camera works fine both taking and uploading.

The error messages for both these problems were extremely unhelpful. When trying to copy NFST files to my FAT32 disk all the Windows would say is "Not enough disk space to perform copy" while both disks had over 100 Gig free. A more appropriate message would have been "Cannot copy file larger than 4 Gig to a FAT32 device. Recommend backup and restore as NFST file system device." The camera would not launch the camera wizard without the memory stick seated. In this case there was no error message, but a message like "Memory Stick not detected, check slot" would have helped me zero in on the problem.

A large portion of Saturday was spent looking for materials for a project of mine with Hillary along to help and advise, so that shot the rest of Saturday and put me out of the mood for going out at night on top of it. Hillary is fascinated by my project idea and is hoping to see me pull it off. Since I had specifically mentioned not having a new girlfriend, but have never mentioned Hillary before, I will say a few words about her. She is married, but her husband is in the military. She is a closer friend to my close friend A.C. who I have mentioned before. She has become a good friend quickly, but it is definitely platonic, and is mostly driven by her wanting to see my project finished before she heads to South Carolina to be with her re-stationed husband who has been in Iraq.

Oh, yeah the project -- what is it? I had said I was going to make it a guessing game. The picture shows some of the items collected so far. The bike looks like an unrelated background object, but it isn't. The yellow thing that looks like a kite, isn't a kite (it is fabric on a frame). The empty spools may or may not end up in the final construction. The little un-powered toy rocket definitely will end in the final project. Let the guessing begin. Tomorrow I hopefully will collect the last couple of items to finish what I'm working on.