EGC Clambake for May 31, 2008 – “Listening and Puking”

Here is the direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for May 31, 2008. I play a song from Corb Lund; I talk about playing poker and why I love it; I talk about my podcast listening queue and shows that I am both loving and not loving; I talk about my travails trying to get City of Heroes set up on my MacBook; I talk about my first ever teaching gig in the new media world; I tell a story about and then play a song from Boiled in Lead and then walk myself out into the heather to do what needs to be done.

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Time Machine

Earlier today I bought a Maxtor OneTouch 4 500 GB external drive. I have a LaCie external, but it is smaller than the hard drive of my MacBook so I needed a little more juice than that. My original plan was to plug it in, make a bootable Super Duper backup and then proceed. However, when I plugged it in for the first time I got a dialog that asked me if I wanted to use this drive as the target for my Time Machine backups. I said yes and then it took off. This was quite a bit simpler and easier than I was expecting it to be. For some reason I thought Time Machine only worked with the Apple Time Capsule hardware so this was a pleasant surprise.

The main goals of this endeavor are to get my LaCie data migrated off so I can give it and my old iBook to my wife. The second is so that I can feel comfortable setting up Boot Camp and XP on this laptop. The goal of that is to see if I can once and for all get City Of Heroes running on this machine. Thus far it has failed on both VMWare Fusion and Parallels. Since VMWare can use BootCamp partitions, after I get this set up I will delete my existing VM partition and reclaim some space that way.

Mostly I’m happy that going into this long holiday weekend, the first task I attempted on my long list of things to do was actually significantly easier with a better result than I was shooting for. Here’s hoping to a bunch more like that.

City of Heroes

On a complete impulse buy, earlier today I picked up the install DVD for City of Heroes at Big Lots. At least one person on Twitter thought it was odd that I would be involved in such a thing when I’ve gone on record as being underwhelmed by things like Second Life. My problems with Second Life are that the interface sucks and has a serious learning curve, that it is hard to figure out what to do and that the aimlessness of it is a barrier to entry. The conversation goes like this:

Me: “What can I do with this that is interesting?”

Second Life Dude: “Oh, it’s wonderful. You can do anything!”

Me: “Ooooooooooookay.”

As I said earlier, if I’m going to fart around with any MMO, I want to be able to punch bad guys through walls. My hope is that this has enough structure than unlike Second LIfe I’m not stuck wandering around boring things wondering what to do. If anyone reading this wants to join up and do whatever one does with other people, let me know. I have yet to start up the game because I first installed the program it had 1.8 gigabytes of updates to download. I assume that the MMO part means that I can hook up with friends to go on missions or what have you. Come join up with me and we’ll fight bad guys together! I don’t know how to do that yet, so it’s all learning curve.

Update: I’ve tried this under VMWare and Parallels and neither one runs it. This might be an epic, or it might be an EPIC FAIL!

FInal Update: Neither VM solution nor running under Boot Camp allows me to play City of Heroes, so this is done. Sorry guys, it sounded like fun but I am saved from myself by my MacBook.