Sunday, November 14, 2010
Thursday, November 4, 2010
A Thousand Words Isn't Enough
They say that "a picture is worth a thousand words". Personally, I think the value of photos is overrated.
No photo, digital or otherwise, carries the essence of the memories in real life that photo captures. As we travel down the river of time, our motion through it is like watching a film with the afterimages remaining in our trail behind us, kind of like light painting.
These "pictures" are one with the space-time continuum, and only someone with the ability to encapsulate this and peer inside could see the entire span of all these images across all time, somewhat like looking into a peephole from outside our realm of existence.
It is truly mind-boggling to think of the data storage requirements for that kind of recording, for every moment of motion of every iota of matter all across the universe for all time. If I were some Q-like being that could freely travel across time and make such observations and manipulations as an outsider, I'd probably go back to my physical life like a universe-scale photo album or video and play it back, in all aspects.
Alas, I don't have that power, but it's not like snapping a photo will do any better than my brain's comparatively feeble but nevertheless serviceable chronicle of my life. Whether a photo, a video, or the final, frantic firings of the synapses of my brain at death, "All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain."
No photo, digital or otherwise, carries the essence of the memories in real life that photo captures. As we travel down the river of time, our motion through it is like watching a film with the afterimages remaining in our trail behind us, kind of like light painting.
These "pictures" are one with the space-time continuum, and only someone with the ability to encapsulate this and peer inside could see the entire span of all these images across all time, somewhat like looking into a peephole from outside our realm of existence.
It is truly mind-boggling to think of the data storage requirements for that kind of recording, for every moment of motion of every iota of matter all across the universe for all time. If I were some Q-like being that could freely travel across time and make such observations and manipulations as an outsider, I'd probably go back to my physical life like a universe-scale photo album or video and play it back, in all aspects.
Alas, I don't have that power, but it's not like snapping a photo will do any better than my brain's comparatively feeble but nevertheless serviceable chronicle of my life. Whether a photo, a video, or the final, frantic firings of the synapses of my brain at death, "All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain."
Friday, October 22, 2010
Windows 7 Haunted Command Prompt??
I encountered a weird situation on my Windows 7 x64 machine where the command prompt window couldn't be closed.
I'd logged on to my domain account, and out of (admittedly bad) habit, I tried to right-click on the command prompt in the taskbar and close it. Usually, it goes away in moments, but this time it decided to hang around, and it was impossible to remove.
I looked in Task Manager, and although I could see the instance of the command prompt in the Applications tab, and even right-click on it and choose Go To Process, when it shifted me to the Processes tab, it selected nothing, or if I'd clicked on any other process in the list, it prompted me to end that process rather than whatever process remained which maintained this errant command prompt.
I would've liked to use a utility like PSKill to terminate the process (as described here), but if I can't find the process ID, that isn't an option.
I did notice one thing unusual in the list of processes, there were three separate instances of an executable named conhost.exe (Console Window Host). When I selected the first instance and clicked End Process, the command prompt finally closed.
I also ended the other two instances, as these don't normally hang out in my process list. I'm guessing that I might've thrown a monkey wrench into whatever this command prompt had been executing when I tried to close it, causing some process it might've been waiting to close to hang out in limbo.
I'd logged on to my domain account, and out of (admittedly bad) habit, I tried to right-click on the command prompt in the taskbar and close it. Usually, it goes away in moments, but this time it decided to hang around, and it was impossible to remove.
I looked in Task Manager, and although I could see the instance of the command prompt in the Applications tab, and even right-click on it and choose Go To Process, when it shifted me to the Processes tab, it selected nothing, or if I'd clicked on any other process in the list, it prompted me to end that process rather than whatever process remained which maintained this errant command prompt.
I would've liked to use a utility like PSKill to terminate the process (as described here), but if I can't find the process ID, that isn't an option.
I did notice one thing unusual in the list of processes, there were three separate instances of an executable named conhost.exe (Console Window Host). When I selected the first instance and clicked End Process, the command prompt finally closed.
I also ended the other two instances, as these don't normally hang out in my process list. I'm guessing that I might've thrown a monkey wrench into whatever this command prompt had been executing when I tried to close it, causing some process it might've been waiting to close to hang out in limbo.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)