While doing some research, I found an interesting source of classic literature. I am already familiar with Project Gutenberg, but I noticed that the MIT collection had been lost to a hard drive failure. Apparently, theirs was more severe than mine, as it resulted in the loss of all their data.

Even more interesting, Google came to their rescue, restoring a majority, if not an entirety, of their collection. Google maintains cached copies of all the web pages it has crawled, and uses them in their searches. (It can also convert PDFs to HTML, as well as Word and Excel documents.)

It's kinda staggering to think about—the vast majority of all human knowledge, and its online creations of the past decade or so, contained within one company. Or perhaps a single server, or a hard drive even. It's also worth noting that the computers themselves, outside of their core functions, cannot yet make sense of any of it. What do the teachings of Aristotle mean to a computer, which sees only a jumble of binary bits, a stray piece of code here and there?

My hard drive is starting to eat itself. A day or so ago, I noticed it was getting a little sluggish. I imagined that it was a system problem, and proceeded to reinstall Windows. Before it finished, ScanDisk was saying that I had bad sectors. Surely enough, a surface scan revealed more and more bad sectors, until ScanDisk itself broke. A 160GB drive, shot to hell. Fortunately, I held onto my original 6GB, and the only significant things I've lost were some local copies of research articles and my storyboard images. There's a chance that I might even be able to recover those, but I don't know what to make of the drive itself. The one I'm using now has kept up with all the commotion of five or so years; the new one barely lasted a few months.

[update] A visit to the Maxtor site, and the other computer has assured me that everything is fine, if not entirely well. It probably got shocked by one of the power outages that plagues this neighborhood and zapped a few stray clusters. If anything, I can just reformat after school is done and give it a fresh start—clean installs, perhaps a new operating system. Most everything has made it intact onto the other drives available to me.

I may never heckle again.

A link that also appears in my TV Journal.

And how about the tablet? It seems to be doing its job:

So last week played out well enough to not worry me while in LA. I got through the TV lab without difficulty, but only after Diane and Cathy showed up at the last minute for casting. The acting was a little stiff by all (Dashiel helped out as well), but the performances were fine considering what little preparation they were given. Most everything on my side of the screen was fine, except for the commercial. I still have to find people to star in it and shoot sometime this week. The storyboards and final scripts are due later this week.

Of recent help is my new tablet, which is pretty much everything I hoped it would be. Now it's just a matter of learning how to control it. It responds precisely to your hand movements, as if you were writing. The problem is that when you write, you normally look at what you write—drawing without looking at what you draw normally makes for a mess of strokes. Learning how to relate what you scratch out with what shows up onscreen is a challenge akin to learning how to type without looking at the keyboard.

The pressure sensitivity is also troublesome at first—until then, no "human interface device" offers a way to translate anything of that nature. Various programs handle pressure data in many ways: brush size, stroke darkness, color variance, and so on. Here it's just a matter of knowing which combination of features you want at any one moment.

So back to the week: I only had enough time (and notes) to type out two answers out of the three on my midterm. Considering that my research paper for the class doubles as a third answer, I hope the teacher will understand things. I turned the paper in and left immediately to pick up the tablet from the post office and pack some bags.

I travelled with Manny and Booker on the way down. If I had realized that riding in the trucks was much more comfortable than the buses, I would have started many seasons ago. The pit truck travels about 200 miles on a full tank, so we stopped by for fill-ups and snacks three times along each trip. Judging from all the stories I've heard from travels past, we had one of the smoothest rides. Though the Penske was governed at 70 mph, we made good time with a minimum of hang-ups. The only things we could complain about were a minivan and its annoying driver, and a leak scare at the last station stop that turned out to be condensation from the engine.

The performance was pretty solid, and hopefully made an impact on the kids and parents present. However, for a show capped off with Class AAAA bands, there weren't many people present. Perhaps a thousand or two, but these were probably much more enthusiastic about our presence than the average football crowd.

Sadly, about the only action I was able to get into was a visit to the bank and coffee shop with Izzy. The girl in front of us was pretty stacked—she would have matched up well with him. Aside from that, all there was for me to do was watch others make fools of themselves.

Yesterday was decent, regardless of the morning. Rich, Bob, and Charles came down earlier from SJ, and they were eager to walk over to Disneyland. Considering I only had a pair of hours of sleep from the night before, a less firm approach to my waking would have been appreciated. We had intended on going to Magic Mountain, but others noted that its opening off-season and incoming weather kept most of the rides closed there.

I would have preferred to do other things with $80, but we did well enough to ride as many rides as we did. The entire way through, I found myself critiquing everything I saw—the quality of the animatronics and mechanics, the stylizations and caricatures of the characters and people, the commercialization of youth and storytelling, the various methods of pacing. I was hoping to be somewhat free of this, which usually happens on the Matterhorn and (the closed) Space Mountain, engaging experiences at their most primal. To help alleviate this, we found other, unexpected ways to have fun.

A simple megaphone can turn a mundane situation into pure joy. This is most evident at the Gilroy In-N-Out. On both occasions—one happening on the way down—the wage-earners were quite fascinated with the device and our freedom in its use. One first cashier turned it upon his workmates and barked orders. Another cashier ran into a little trouble with my order—he called out issues over the intercom, which I responded to from our usual tables near the door. I'm pretty sure everyone else had fun watching all this play out.

All in all, the weekend was a fun diversion, capping off a pretty hectic period in my semester. I look forward to more of these.