Chatter Of The Squirrel

Tech: Microsoft Hyper-V, unable to connect

Built up my Hyper-V system and the remote management console previously.

Then it broke.

When attempting to connect to the HyperV via the remote management console, I kept getting, “You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer.”

After a bit of troubleshooting, I finally found out that the password to the HyperV machine has expired.

Change the password on the HyperV server. Change the password on the remote management machine. (Remember that the username and password of both machines have to match, if you’re not using Active Directory.) Reboot both computers. And they work again.

Now… something else has broken my KnowledgeTree install. How do I want to fix this?

January Madness

1st January, 2010.
Parents are here, in transit for a couple of days. Sending them off to Melbourne for 3 months to be with their daughter. The angpao damage they will avoid from being in Sibu during CNY will more than cover the airtix to Melbourne.

2nd January, 2010.
CheeKidd & Charis’ wedding. Am the ‘co-coordinator’. Which means I run around clicking mice and queueing music while claiming too much credit for involvement in the wedding. It was an amazing garden wedding and there was perfect weather. Lots of old classmates showed. The event really deserved a bigger chunk of InsaneSquirrel instead of just a small blurb in a list… Maybe later.

3rd January, 2010.
Sent parents off to the airport.

4th January, 2010.
Met up with SoonYee, an ex-colleague from ABRIC. Interesting fella. Claims to have run a Starcraft Academy in the old days, employing deep mathematics to train a clan of undefeatable Starcraft cadets. Discussed a potential online business.

5th January, 2010.
Kuan from Kuantan, posted in KL for a month. Dinner.

6th January, 2010.
Was supposed to watch The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus. Was FFK-ed.

7th January, 2010.
Settled a dinner-debt with WeiYin from UM. And then, a second dinner with Ted at Jln Imbi. Primary school classmate from Brunei. Have only seen him one other time in the last 20 years maybe. He’s fixing his visa so that he can work in Italy stitching designer bags. Had a long chat about the impending dominance of China, and discussed the viability of various contingency plans in case our society devolves into anarchy. It will appear that knowing Chinese medicine and TaiChi will improve the odds of survival. Had to miss a farewell dinner with a colleague even. Figured that the 2.5 decade old classmate was the rarer event.

8th January,2010.
Me time on a Friday night. That’s one evening to myself all alone.

9th January, 2010.
Second attempt to watch Imaginarium with Suan. Couldn’t catch a movie cos she couldn’t catch a train. Then dinner with gamerz.

10th, January, 2010.
Guilted into skipping Kempo in favour of church. Then an afternoon with Moses looking at the 720p HD documentaries that he has been downloading but I can’t copy off of cos they’re such freaking large files!!

11th January, 2010.
My K10D isn’t reading my 16gb SD card. A little panicked, so went out to buy a new SD card. Luckily the issue was that 16gb card, and not the camera. *Phew* And while reading at Borders, I was buzzed by an unexpected call asking for help how to fix the strap on a brand new Canon 1000D.

12th January, 2010.
Dinner with the Technical Marketing Manager of Gigabyte. Another old pri school classmate from Brunei~!! What were the odds? He’s moved to Taiwan since forever, and was in KL to promote motherboards to the local techie media. Again, dinner in Jln Imbi and lots of talk.

13th January, 2010.
Third attempt to watch Imaginarium. Kuan made an excuse how seats were two rows from the screen, and went and bought tix for Old Dogs instead. Crap.

14th January, 2010.
SoonYee again. Portions at Williams have gotten bigger…

15th January, 2010.
Dinner with colleagues.

And January STILL has a lot more in store! This Saturday, an NJC-ian from S’pore days, whom I’ve not seen in 15 years, will be dropping by KL.

THEN, a roadtrip to Malacca on Sunday.

Oh, let’s not forget to mention the mountain climbing on Saturday too….

Movie: Old Dogs

Wild Hogs was a fantastic comedy. So the producers thought that bringing in another combination of old guys together will work equally well.

Wild Hogs worked because you can relate with the characters. There’s that faint possibility that anyone of us might one day go through a midlife crisis and buy a hog and go traipsing into the middle of nowhere.

Old Dogs has Travolta and Robin Williams as two bosses of a big sports company, and Williams suddenly finds himself to be the father of a pair of precocious bastard twins. Not exactly characters people can relate easily with. Not even a social situation that typical decent human beings will find themselves in. There’s an unnecessary scene with Bernie Mac and a technology that turns a person into a human puppet. And a Rocket-Man finale?

Old Dogs is just another serving of Disney family crap that convinces me that American kids just aren’t smacked often or hard enough. It also continues to prepetuate the Disney-generation larvae’s delusions that their mere existing confers upon them a mandate from heaven to rule over everybody around them through guilt and volume.

The only thing halfway amusing is Seth Green. It was amusing SEEING him in a film. He’s funny when he’s playing with his old G.I.Joe toys. Not so much in an actual film.

TV: The Big Bang Theory

Been getting a number of good props for this series, from oft trusted and credible sources. But yet when I sampled a few random episodes from the end of season 2, I was largely unimpressed.

Founded on the timeless formula of 2 neighbouring apartments with quirky room-mates. The gimmick here is the 4 geeks being an extreme condensate of the worst stereotypes of Otaku, MMORPG junkie, Trekkie, comic geek, science geek, sci-fi geek, video-game geek and all other manners of geekdom that the writers never lived and poorly imagined.

Yar, it’s quite amusing that many jokes incorporate random geek stuff. The Picard-Kirk debate. The Hadron Super Collider. MMORPG Raid-speak. Comic book superheroes.

Other elements the writers THINK are funny: the chronic shyness and social awkwardness of nerds, their cluelessness about sports, their lack of appeal to the opposite gender, etc.

The characters and writing is quite juvenile and unimaginative. The jokes are predictable. Admittedly, there was a hilarious ROFL moment when Sheldon divided mitotically, completely blindsided me. But one good laugh like this in 1.5 seasons… Needs More Effort. It’s like, Garfield hates Mondays but love lasagna. Alf likes to eat cats. Good gags. But it gets old.

I enjoyed the early episodes. But towards the end of the first season, it had become evident that the schizophrenic C-3P0 (ie. Sheldon) is the show-stealer. Whereupon the Kramer of the show outshone the Seinfeld. And that’s also where the writers & producers took the path of least resistance, pushed the whole show to C-3P0, and gave up developing any of the other characters beyond their offensive geek stereotype.

It’s like producing Scrubs, with one J.D., a half dozen Todds, and nobody else. The Todd is a gag character deliberately written to be one dimensional for comedic effect. Many of the other characters in the show slowly developed depth as the years went by. Not so with Big Bang. They accidentally found their Kramer, and are so excited about him that they’ve allowed him to be the entire show henceforth. After so many episodes, I can only remember the names of Sheldon and Penny.

I have lots of geek friends. Several of them socially awkward characters. I’ve been mired in borderline neurotic geek conversations many times. Any of them are more animated and more interesting than the writers’ narrow perception of “Geek”.

Tech: Nokia 5730 XpressMusic, language change

Cool phone. Bought a few months ago. Review pending.

Only today, I managed to get hold of the data cable for this phone, and was able to do interesting things to it.

I had purchased an Iranian copy of the phone. The only languages available are English, and probably Arabic, Kurdish or something.

Chinese would have been more relevant to me. And to enable such, I had to do the following.

1. Download NSS from B-Phreaks.
2. Disable Nokia phone suite if enabled. Plug in phone. Run NSS.
3. Click the Magnifying Glass to scan for phone. If all’s well, then Phone Info, then Scan.
4. Tick the Enable box for Product Code, change the code to 0576251. (Complete list of Product Codes for 5730).
5. Write.
6. Close NSS. Download and run the Nokia Software Updater, downloadable from Nokia’s website.
7. Run the update, and my phone now supports English, Simplified Chinese, Melayu, & Indonesian.

Can’t do anything about the Arabic letters on my Qwerty keyboard though.