RoamingGecko

One of the creatures I came up with tonight while playing with Spore. So much fun!

The town of Blacksburg, along with police, fire and rescue, will be holding a MCI (Mass Casualty Incident) drill for training purposes. We are looking for volunteers to serve as patients during the drill. Volunteers will be asked to fill various patient roles from chemical exposure to traumatic injury patients. Specific details are being intentionally withheld to make the training as realistic as possible for EMS professionals but your role should you choose to volunteer will be fully explained to you on that day. This may include, but not necessarily, your being transported via ambulance to Montgomery Regional Hospital and/or the outdoor decontamination tent stationed outside. It would be an understatement if I told you water might be involved. For an idea of what you can expect from agreeing to volunteer to serve as a patient for this exercise, please see the photos here. If you would like to volunteer for this event, please email me or this site. Your help will be greatly appreciated and will go a long way to helping we EMS professionals maintain the high level of excellence you have come to expect. Thank you for your time.

Photos from a previous MCI training exercise

Well, I got a chance to play around with Spore this evening. Of course, I’m just talking about the creature creator. The actual game hasn’t been released yet. It’s was fun creating the various creatures and I have to say I am looking forward to playing the game once it’s released.

I think you could spend quite some time just seeing what you could come up with using the creature creator. Seems to be very intuitive and I was able to hit the ground running without having to read anything. It will be interesting to see what they come up with as far as game play goes but since I have liked all the previous Sim and Civilization games, I am sure this one will be worth the price of admission. Of course only time will tell if the game is any good or not but expectations are high.

(Click the related videos button on the player above to see the other dragons some “Sporians” have created.)

If you want to try out the Spore Creature Creator for yourself, you can download it by clicking the image below. It’s available for both Mac and PC users.

I’m going through the Angel series again. I say again because this must be the third or fourth time I am watched it through from season one through five. It’s is day time soaps for geeks, absolutely. But I still loved that show. Here’s a quote from one of the last episodes in season five. Just a little background I think you might need. Loren is a demon. A first class metrosexual demon to be precises. He kills me.

Angel (TV series) - Wikiquote

Eve: Why would we do anything to Fred? Why would we even care about her? (Lorne sucker-punches her)
Lorne: Ooh! ooh, oh, I’m sorry, that was a knuckle-buster. (chuckles) I’m Jake La Motta over here. It’s pathetic. Here’s the thing, Eve: You’re gonna sing for me and I’m gonna read you right now. And here’s one more thing: Winifred Burkle once told me, after a sinful amount of Chinese food and in lieu of absolutely nothing, “I think a lot of people would choose to be green, your shade, if they had the choice.” If I hear one note — one quarter-note — that tells me you had any involvement, these two won’t even have time to kill you. Oh, and anything by Diana Warren will also result in your death. Well, except “Rhythm of the Night”.

@girlinblack Ouch, that was harsh!

The name of this app is a little misleading because it isn’t advocating doing away with Flickr in the slightest. It’s just a viewer. Albeit, a viewer with quite a little bit a flare. I have been playing with Adobe Air applications lately, lots of neat things there if you’re interested, and I came across this one tonight. Very nice implementation of the UI. Any who, if you’re a fan of Flickr like I am you should check it out.

I’m not plugging Smartbeep by showing this commercial or beepers in general (Does anyone rent pagers anymore?) but I saw this commercial years ago and I remember I laughed so hard I was literally on the floor. A classic to be sure…

I went Asheville this past weekend for a little mini-getaway. It was my 4th trip down to Asheville and the Biltmore Estate. You would think I would be pretty bored with the place at this point but then again this visit proved to be another first.

Saturday was spent just walking around downtown. Asheville has lots of little shops to stop in and browse through. Eclectic and at the same time very interesting. I think you could literally spend days visiting them all.

The next day we drove out to the Biltmore Estate. As soon as we got out of the car I noticed something odd. There was this overwhelming hum, almost mechanical in nature but too consistent to be man made. I couldn’t quite place it. To be honest, the din from the countryside was a bit annoying. Just the right frequency to drill into your head. Once we got up to the “big house” it was all too apparent what was causing the noise. Cicadas. Billions of them. Ok, realistically it probably only numbered somewhere in the tens of millions but there had to be an insane number for them to be able to produce that loud, constant hum. There were more insects flying around than I had ever seen in my life. They were every where. In the car later that day I was hitting one every 4 or 5 seconds. It was almost as amazing a sight as the Biltmore itself. As always, the Biltmore was spectacular. American excess to the extreme to be sure, but still fascinating. If you haven’t paid a visit to Asheville, it certainly is a must see.

If you would like to see the pictures I took while on my trip, click the cicada below to view them over on Flickr.

I thought I would take a moment to describe how to fix a problem that popped up with my GPSMap 60 this weekend in the event it happens to someone else who might be using this model. I have to tell you, GPS’s are great tools when you are traveling unfamiliar roads but it’s no fun at all when they stop working. I know you all have been lectured on the proper way to shut down your computers by we IT people and you might not really understand why or even believe that you can corrupt your system by shutting it down improperly but I am here to tell you, it can happen. In the process of trying to turn on my GPS’s back light, I shunted the system and corrupted the software on the chipset. I turned the unit on and in an attempt to turn on the back light while driving and paying more attention to the road than the unit, which is a good thing by the way, I turned off the unit while it was still in the process of booting up. Instant chipset corruption! You will know when this happens because your unit will be stuck perpetually at the screen seen in the second image of this post.

Believe me when I tell you, your GPS will not acquire a satellite no matter how long you leave it on, no matter how long you leave it off and then try turning it back on, removing the the batteries or swapping out the unit’s SD card. The chipset’s software had been corrupted and it will not work properly until you have reloaded the chipset software. The easiest way to tell if you have encountered this problem is to check the software version of your GPS. If the GPS SW version is 0.00, then you have indeed corrupted the chipset and will need to reload the software. The third image of this post will show you what version number I am referring to.

As I have said, in order to get your GPS unit functioning again you will need to reinstall the chipset software. There are two ways to do this. You can use the Web Updater program that you probably installed when you first bought the unit. You will find it under the Garmin menu from your Start menu. The second way would be to install the chipset software manually using the the “G” chipset installer. The second method is the one I used as I kept getting a “Transfer Error” when I tried to use the Web Updater software. You can download this software directly from Garmin, if you can find it. I think they want folks to use the Web Updater software as they aren’t real up front on where to download the actual installer packages. If you like you can download the software from this site here.

Installing the software in fairly simple. Connect the GPSMap 60 to your computer using the mini-USB cable that came with your unit and then run the installer. Refer to your Owner’s Manual if you need further assistance. All that being said, I love my GPSMap 60 and this minor bump in the road has not changed my opinion of the unit. It’s been a great little unit and I fully expect it to remain so for years to come.

Note: The screens above are not the actual screens, just approximations I created in PS to give folks a visual. The actual screens will looks slightly different. I wrote this post to help others should they have this problem with their GPSMap 60’s as I didn’t find a lot of clear help on the web when I researched the problem. If you have more questions, please feel free to comment below.