I recently bought the Canon 300 LiDE scanner for $50 USD from Amazon. I removed the scanner from the packaging and plugged it into my computer. Windows 10 recognized the scanner. Vuescan recognized the scanner. When I tried to scan something, nothing happened. A lot of negative reviews on Amazon state that the scanner just doesn’t work at all. I did some troubleshooting and found a simple solution.
AMD made several announcements for their Athlon, Ryzen and Threadripper families of processors this week. I’m interested only in the Athlon 3000G, the new $50 budget processor that replaces the Athlon 200GE. Unlike the mistake AMD made with the 200GE last year, the 3000G is officially unlocked for overclocking. I’ll do a review of the 200GE and explain the advantages of the 3000G in a “Ryzen 3000 Ready” world.
After Walker Stalker/Heroes & Villains FanFest San Jose 2018 ended last December, there was no announcement for the 2019 show. Six months later, I started looking for a reason. I found an comment on the official Facebook page for Walker Stalker in March that there would be no San Jose show in 2019. A similar announcement went up on the unofficial Facebook page for Heroes & Villains FanFest San Jose in August. Reasons cited was the venue being unavailable for the desired dates and the show wouldn’t make money. That wasn’t the entire story. The organizers behind Walker Stalker Con and Heroes & Villains Fan Fest are in deep trouble with fans, stars and vendors.
We are one month away from Black Friday, the first official shopping day of the 2019 holiday season. Fry’s Electronics is supposed to be stocking up on new inventory for the holidays and give longtime customers confidence that the 34-year-old retail chain will remain open in 2020. Based on recent entries to The Layoff, customers at many stores are finding the shelves more barren of inventory and salesclerks are still claiming that they’re switching vendors. Three new developments may explain why Fry’s will continue to be a zombie retailer.
Over the Columbus Day holiday weekend, my friend and I saw three movies: The Addams Family, Jexi and Gemini Man. The Addams Family was faithful to the original New Yorker cartoons and still had the sense of humor from the 1960s TV series. Jexi was a sometimes funny and mostly cringe worthy tale about letting your cellphone AI become your virtual girlfriend. Gemini Man in the 60 frames-per-second (FPS) 3D version look like a BBC TV production, and the BBC could have done a better job with the script. Besides seeing three movies in one weekend, I was also excited to drink The Addams Family Spooky Black Cherry ICEE at two different AMC Theaters in Silicon Valley. Because of the blue food coloring to make the black cherry ICEE appear black, I had green poop for a week.
On Tuesday, October 17, 1989, the Loma Pieta earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area at 5:04PM. My father and I had gotten home from working in construction. Game 3 of the Battle of The Bay World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s was on television. After the earthquake struck and Game 3 postponed, we watched the news from around the Bay Area in stunned disbelief. We drove through the Cypress Street Viaduct on the 880 that later collapsed. We drove over 50-foot roadway of the Bay Bridge that later collapsed. We drove on the 280 Viaduct that later suffered extensive damage without collapsing. My Father and I remembered the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake for not where we were when it struck, but for where we were throughout the San Francisco Bay Area before it struck.
With this year being the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 manned moon landing, it’s not surprising that movies about astronauts are coming out. First Man, a biopic about Neil Armstrong being the first man on the moon, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2018 and went into general release in October 2018. First Man was a controversial movie because conservative politicians claimed that it didn’t show the astronauts planting the American flag on the moon. Never mind that the movie had plenty of flags, and the flag planting scene wasn’t relevant to the inner space of Neil Armstrong as an astronaut, husband and father. Another astronaut movie, Lucy in The Sky, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this year, and coming out in general release this month. Although the movie poster features the moon looming large in the background, the moon has nothing to do with the real-life event of a female astronaut losing her POOP on earth. While this made-for-TV movie is loosely based on the “astronaut love triangle” of 2007, the diaper scene was left on the cutting room floor.
The Bay Area Glass Institute (BAGI) held its annual glass pumpkin festival at Santana Row in San Jose, CA, from Friday, October 4, 2018, through Sunday, October6, 2019. Proceeds from the sales of glass pumpkins will fund the non-profit to help students learn the fine art of glassblowing.
A friend mentioned several weeks ago that Fry’s Electronics was closing the Palo Alto store after the holidays. We jumped into the car and went over to the Campbell store. The parking lot empty, the shelves barren, the customers few, and the salesclerks unhelpful as always. After I posted my montage video, I’ve gotten comments that other stores around the country were in better or worse shape than the Campbell store. Fry’s Electronics put out a statement that they weren’t going out of business, are in the middle of changing vendors, and plan to stock the shelves for the holiday season.
Storm Area 51 came and went with much ado about nothing on Friday, September 20, 2019. Only ~150 people went the Area 51 East Gate, ~75 people approached the gate, 3 were arrested for indecent exposure, a man arrested for peeing on the fence and a woman arrested for ducking under the gate. The cancelled AlienStock music festival at Rachel, Nevada, had ~2,000 people show up. That was the “best case” scenario for a crowd size that local authorities could handle.