September 2007 - Posts
Although completely off the normal topic, I find myself again spending evenings playing the piano for rehearsals of a local San Jose production of a musical theater production. I've been doing this sort of thing since, well, for about 40 years now. It's an expensive hobby, since I must schlep 180 miles from home (where I live, there aren't many community theater products that use full orchestras!), stay in a hotel during the day, and rehearse or perform at night. I figure everyone's got hobbies, and this is mine.
In case you find yourself in the San Jose area over the next three weekends (Sept 28 - Oct 13 2007), and are interested in such things, the Actors Theater Center is producing the 1991 show, Assassins, by the legendary Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, at the historic Hoover Theater. (Yes, it's really a musical that attempts to explain how, and why, anyone would attempt to assassinate a president. It's unlike any other show I've ever seen.) Yours truly will be covering the Keyboard I book in the orchestra for the entire run. Come by and say hello!
Recently, satisfying the goal of finding a small laptop for travel, I purchased a new Thinkpad X61 tablet. It's the only version of the X61 series that supports a higher-resolution screen (1440x1050), which I feel necessary to actually get work done on the road. It's a very nice machine, including 4GB of memory (and using Vista x64, I can USE all 4GB of memory!)
At the time I purchased it, it wasn't available with Vista x64 pre-installed, so I provided my own copy. The drivers are ostensibly available from Lenovo, but they're not all easily findable, and the video driver is old, and at the time I tried to install, the driver file available on their site won't extract. (It's interesting that I called them to alert them to this fact around July 15 2007, and as of a few days ago, they STILL hadn't updated the driver.)
If you want to install Vista x64 on your Thinkpad X61, you'll need a video driver. You can use the reference driver available from Intel, which you can download here:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all&ProductID=2800&OSFullName=Windows+Vista*+Business%2C+64-bit+version&lang=eng&strOSs=160&submit=Go%21
Beware, however, that the installer inside the downloadable file won't install on your Thinkpad. It tells you that your machine is the wrong type. Instead, you must simply remove the existing driver (resetting back to Vista's built-in VGA driver), and then manually update the driver by pointing to the appropriate folder in the extracted driver you downloaded from Intel.
This driver works fine, and hasn't caused me any trouble. Until Lenovo sees fit to update their own driver download, you can use this driver.
Recently returned home from
VSLive in Brooklyn, and had a great time. I always love visiting New York, but VSLive this year had a really great "vibe" and was a lot of fun. Attendees seemed to have a great time, and everyone was really into it. I did a workshop on Windows Workflow with Robert Green, and Brian Randell did a workshop on SQL Server 2005, in addition to various other sessions. Saw lots of friends, even a Broadway show. Much fun was had by all, and if you haven't been to a
VSLive show in a while--think about it. It's a great way to learn a lot, network, and have a good time.
For those of you who attended VSLive in Brooklyn (and those who didn't), you can download the Workflow demos that Robert Green and I did during the workshop (and the two Workflow sessions I did on my own, later) here. In addition to the slides and demos, AppDev, the company for whom Robert and I wrote the courseware originally, graciously agreed to allow attendees to download PDFs of the chapters corresponding to the sessions from their site. You'll find a link to their site (requires free registration) on our download site:
http://www.mcwtech.com/2007/vslive/nyc
If you attended the sessions, please make sure to download the demos and corresponding courseware.