Somerville

The new building a couple of doors down from mine is apparently going to be a Marriott ExecuStay. It looks like they’re almost finished with it. It seems kind of weird to have an upscale extended-stay hotel just down the street from me. Are there really a lot of people out there who’d want to rent a room in Somerville like this? I have no idea how much they’re charging, but what I’ve seen of these places is that they’re usually $99 a night, or something like that, with a 30-day minimum. I guess there are probably a fair number of people who stay in Somerset County for business reasons for a month or two, maybe working for one of the pharmaceutical companies around here, and I suppose downtown Somerville would be a nice place to stay, versus staying somewhere on Route 22 or 206.

Hey, maybe I can talk one of the maids over there into coming over and cleaning my apartment!

back from WonderCon

Well, I’m back in NJ. It was snowing a bit as we came into Newark, so I really feel like I’m back home now, after the great weather in SF. Sunday at WonderCon was pretty uneventful. I went to the “Art of the Cover” panel that Mark Evanier has been doing for the past few years. It was once again very enjoyable. I bought a few more comics, but not a lot. A few discount manga volumes, a couple of half-price trade paperbacks, and a set of “21 Down” 1-12.

Off to bed in a few minutes, then back to work tomorrow.

WonderCon, day two

I left the con early today, largely because I was weighed down with so much stuff I could barely move, and also because I’d hit a lull in the programming where there really wasn’t anything I wanted to sit through at that point. I may head back in a bit to catch a panel with Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra, and Tony Harris. I’m not sure I’d be able to claw my way back to the Moscone Center, though, since the streets are starting to fill up for the Chinese New Year parade already.

I picked up a bunch of stuff today, mostly at pretty good prices. I got The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, which is a book I’d been meaning to pick up since it came out, a couple of years back. Really oddball stuff in there, including contributions from Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore.

I also got several Powers collections, volumes 5 to 8, at various discount levels. I’d read the first four volumes some time ago, but hadn’t gotten around to picking up any more. Looking at the dates on these, I guess I’m still not up to date, but I’m a bit closer. It’s great that Bendis continues to work on this. It’s different from his other Marvel work, and always a good read.

I haven’t been following Civil War at all, but I’ve been curious, and now that it’s done, I figured I’d try and pick up a set of 1-7. I found someone selling a set at right around cover price, along with a set of Civil War: Front Line also at right around cover, so I went ahead and got both. I’m not generally seeing Civil War back issues selling at below cover, so I guess people are still interested in this storyline, and some (like me) are just jumping on the bandwagon now that it’s over.

What would a con experience be without picking some stuff out of the quarter bin? Incomplete, I say. Brian K. Vaughn, during his spotlight panel, mentioned that he’d done a Ka-Zar annual early in his career, and I managed to find that in a quarter box. I also found some of the Jeph Loeb / Tim Sale Challengers of the Unknown mini-series, which Loeb talked about during *his* spotlight panel. I would have liked to get the Ka-Zar annual and one of the Challengers issues signed, just for laughs, but I may have missed out on my chance for BKV and Loeb autographs at this point.

WonderCon

I’m here in San Francisco at WonderCon right now. In a (perhaps) interesting example of Old Ways meet New Ways, I picked up Nextwave 1-7 from a dealer yesterday, for $15, then went on eBay last night and bid on a set of Nextwave 7-12. I won the auction at $7.50, so I now have a complete set of Nextwave 1-12 (with an extra #7) for a pretty reasonable price. Now, I need to go looking for Fell, another Warren Ellis series that flew under my radar, so to speak, when it first came out.

KeePass

I entered some more stuff into KeePass tonight. I’m up to the letter “B” now. Hoo boy, do I have a way to go. In looking through my Vault database, I realize now that I’ve been using Vault at least since 1999, which certainly explains why there’s so much stuff in there. In all that time, I’ve never had a problem with Vault’s database getting corrupted or anything like that. Oh, and I’ve always been able to run the program just by taking my c:vault directory from one machine to another. Nice and easy.

I’m almost talking myself into keeping it, but I need to remember that it does absolutely no encryption and isn’t cross-platform. Of course, now that I think about it, I haven’t tried KeePass on the Vista laptop yet. I should probably make sure it works under Vista before I enter too much stuff in there!

password managers

I was going to try copying all my passwords from Vault to KeePass tonight. I really like Vault, but it uses an unencrypted database, and it’s not cross-platform. KeePass runs on both PC and Mac (via KeePassX), and uses good encryption. Unfortunately, I just figured out that I have a little over 200 passwords in my Vault file. It’s going to take quite a while to do all that copying and pasting. Vault isn’t really structured like KeePass either, so there’s no easy way I could cobble together an export/import program. I have to decide whether or not I want to bite the bullet on this right now, or wait. I guess it’ll only get worse if I wait, right?

burning coasters

Well, I tried to burn some files to CD-R on my Vista laptop for the first time. I didn’t look too closely at what I was doing on the first CD; I just accepted the defaults. It looks like Vista now defaults to burning a “live” CD in, apparently, UDF format. On the second CD, I looked more closely at what I was doing, and noticed the UDF thing. The instructions seemed to indicate that the CDs would be readable under XP, though, so I went ahead with the burn. When I tried the CDs on XP, though, they appeared to be blank. I tried them on the Mac, just for yuks, and they were totally unreadable. I did some digging, and I figured out that I can read them under XP if I have a proper UDF reader installed. Here’s a Microsoft KB article on the subject. Digging a little deeper, it looks like maybe Vista uses a newer version of UDF that’s incompatible with the UDF reading capabilities built into XP? After reading up a little more, I figured out that the latest Nero InCD would probably read the discs. I’d been meaning to upgrade my Nero install from 7.0 to 7.7 anyway, so I went ahead and did that, and made sure to install InCD. I can now read the discs. I wish Vista had made it clear that the discs wouldn’t necessarily be readable under a normal XP install though.

WonderCon

Mark Evanier has posted the list of panels he’ll be hosting at WonderCon. Looks like some good stuff, including a spotlight on Gene Colan, one of my favorite artists.

The main WonderCon site has an updated program schedule posted. They’ve got a Pixar panel on Saturday that I’m definitely interested in, with Brad Bird and Patton Oswalt.

I’m a bit worried about what the weather might do to my flight out of Newark, but it’s looking like the snow and rain will likely clear up by Thursday.

desktop Vista upgrade?

Just for yuks, I re-ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my desktop machine. It seems that a few of the issues that were present the last time I ran it have been straightened out. And those that the advisor still listed are probably correctable. There are drivers for my scanner and audio card now. And there are new versions of Nero and Retrospect, which are really the only incompatible software packages on my system.

This leaves me in the frightening position of being able to upgrade this box to Vista, if I really want to. I wasn’t planning on upgrading this thing to Vista any time soon, but now I’m tempted. Especially since I just did a full backup. I really think I need to resist the urge for another few months though. I’ve got the new laptop to use to learn Vista, and there’s really no reason I need it on the desktop. I can wait for other people to work through some more of the oddball problems out there.