The Brad Hole

The Fantastic Four is, without a doubt, my favorite comic book series. One of my first comic-book memories as a kid was a copy of FF #187. It featured Reed without his stretching powers, Klaw and the Molecule Man, and one whopper of a cliffhanger for an ending. It was years and years later before I finally found out the resolution to that cliffhanger.

To this day, the Thing remains my favorite comic book character, and I've really enjoyed Michael Chiklis in The Shield, so I was looking forward to that part of the movie. However, I'd read many reports and reviews about the movie that seemed to indicate it was going to suck, big-time.

Now having seen it myself, I have to say that I really enjoyed the movie. I thought they totally botched the entire character of Doom and made him a wealthy pretty-boy wuss with weird superpowers instead of an intelligent, ruthless, disfigured dictator. However, they caught the essence of the FF themselves perfectly. The interaction between Johnny and Ben was spot-on, and you got a pretty good sense of the brooding Ben Grimm. Stan Lee even had a nice cameo as Willie Lumpkin, the mailman for the FF.

Here's to hoping for a FF sequel, and to hoping that they make Doom into the super-villian he should be. If they want to rock-ify the Thing to his current form and size and make a solo Thing movie, that'd also be fine by me. :-)

Posted by bradman at 01:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

...it's some kind of miracle.

About a month or so ago, I noticed that the internal hard drive on my G4 (that'd be the main boot drive) was making some alarming "thunk-sqeak" noises in rapid succession, locking up my Mac in the process. Usually this noise would repeat for about 30 seconds. I took this as a sign that the drive was failing, got a 300 GB external Firewire for backup and started a nightly backup schedule.

Last Friday, I had to restart my G4 and it appeared that the drive had finally given up - it wouldn't start up to that drive and would make those awful noises when trying to mount the drive. No problem - I had a backup, and I used it. :-) Now here's where irony steps in.

I was happily using the backup until yesterday afternoon, when I decided to update to 10.4.2. I should preface this by saying that, using the backup, I was unable to install system software updates for iTunes 4.9 and the iPod updater over the weekend after having switched to the backup full-time. I chalked that up to backup weirdness. But when I went to install the 10.4.2 update, I got an alarming message that the update couldn't install and that it had been deleted. I decided to restart with the hopes of clearing out any voodoo. Unfortunately, that was instead a sign to the voodoo spirits to invade en masse.

Long and brutal story short: simply plugging my "backup" Firewire drive into any Mac causes it to kernel panic instantly (ditto if I try to use the USB2 interface on the drive), so I can't access any data on it. My failed "thunk-sqeak" drive has been repaired with DiskWarrior and is now limping along, sans backup. The internal CD drive on this G4 is also shot - it won't see most CDs, including the DiskWarrior repair CD and the various system software install CDs. It's probably been that way for a while as I hardly use this Mac for anything more than e-mail, chat and testing nowadays. I was able to hook up an external firewire CD/DVD drive and use that to get this far.

One interesting side effect of all this is that this blog is hosted on the near-death G4. When it goes down, my G4 is likely down with it. I hope to rectify all this within the next 2 weeks, but I don't have time to mess with it now. I've desperately got to finish up some networking stuff in Tiger Woods 2005 so we can actually ship it (hence the need to get this stupid G4 limping along), fly to Austin for a few days then immediately fly to Vegas for a mini-vacation.

Posted by bradman at 05:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)