National Book Festival 2007

Donna and I went down to the D.C. Mall for the National Book Festival today. It was crowded, but for the most part not oppressively so, and there was a nice breeze all day too. We saw both Terry Pratchett and Harry Turtledove, and I've uploaded a couple photos of each to my Flickr account. We had to stand for Pratchett's talk, but he was delightful with a dry sense of humour. Turtledove's talk was less crowded than we expected - could have easily found seats even if we arrived as the talk started - but he was worth going to hear as well. He said his upcoming book is going to be on how the world would have been different if the Germans had put together an effective resistance to the Allied occupation after WWII.

Our conclusion was we would go again, but only if there was a specific author we wanted to hear speak.

I've also uploaded to FlickR a photo I took today of my tomato patch. The plants have really exploded, and I'm getting many, many tomatoes, but none of them are ripening to red yet.

For those still using Windows XP...

Donna's computer crashed today coming out of hibernation mode, and upon reboot it displayed an "lsass.exe - System Error, Object Name not found" error, then rebooted again - in a continual loop. I tried a number of different things, but what finally solved it was to follow the directions in this article: "Windows XP Crashed? Here's Help" by Charles White. Basically, the article walks you through using your system restore files to set the system back to a previous save point, but it does it via the command prompt in the Windows Recovery Console mode - and if you can't get Windows to load because its corrupted, this may be your best option. You still need a bootable Windows XP CD to get into the Recovery Console, but the article does a great job of hand-holding you through the process, and I think this can be used to solve a whole slew of otherwise-intractable problems.

I'm sure if I'd taken this to Best Buy, they'd have charged me hundreds of dollars, told me the system was a write-off, and reformatted the whole computer. Instead, using White's directions, the computer is working again good-as-before in a couple of hours - and most of that was finding the article online, once I figured out that was what I needed, the actual process took less than a half-hour. A valuable find!