As I was viewing the trailers for upcoming film Beowulf, a sudden jolt of repulsion hit me. The graphics and cinematics were great… yes, it looked life-like, but it was too real (and yet, not real). Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins didn’t just look weird. They looked freaky. And I didn’t think “wow!”… I thought “yuck”. Which surprised me just as much, for I thought I should be impressed by the quality of the CGI and rendering.

Today while looking through BBC’s Day in Pictures, I felt it again - look at pic #4… I thought it rather unnerving.

I decided to find out what exactly it is that I’m feeling when I see these things, and I discovered the existence of the Uncanny Valley hypothesis:

Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look”… but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.

This chasm—the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori’s thesis—represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting. The first peak, moreover, is where that same individual would see something that is human enough to arouse some empathy, yet at the same time is clearly enough not human to avoid the sense of wrongness.

Source: Dave Byrant, The Uncanny Valley

More related reads:
A Walk in the Valley of the Uncanny
Monsters of Photorealism
The Undead Zone

One thing I learnt last Saturday was that the cheer really goes “Oggy oggy oggy! Oi oi oi!” and not the “Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi Oi Oi!” that my ears have automatically been trained to pick up on and respond to, and which I found sounded out of place when I first heard it being chanted by the scouts at the Lord Mayor’s Show. As a few British Scouts have kindly explained to me, the English version came first, and the Aussie one is a variant. Ahh…

Live07 was amazing. The atmosphere and the spirit of it all… it’s one big Scouting party with 3000 in the cast, and even more from all around the UK gathered in the now-O2 Arena then-Millennium Dome to celebrate this last major event in our centenary year. Through it all, and especially through one of the items (Through the Years), I have come to appreciate more the history and the culture of Scouting. What had essentially started as a very British institution, encouraging the ideals of good citizenship and all, has now extended its reach into every single country in the world, save for four. The basic Scout Laws… honour, trustworthiness, loyalty, courage, usefulness, thriftiness… it is these that make good a man. But as an experienced Scouter had lamented, times are a-changing. In light of the modern society, it is tough to instil these values into young people, “How can we do so, when even the adults do not possess these qualities?” Even more so, the Movement’s purpose and principles remain ever so important today.

Also heard God Save the Queen being sang out live with orchestral accompaniment for the first time. In the closing segment, when the symphony sounded out the first few notes from the anthem and everybody stood up from their seats, hands by the side and headgear removed, the sudden silence and respect I could feel they had for the occasion was immense. What a feeling…

More photos from the night here.

I think I went slightly mad back there, for I had to re-install Windows XP multiple times. The first time I did it, it gave me two options at systems start-up asking me which operating system I wanted to boot. There were two Windows XP Pros. Did some troubleshooting and it was the boot.ini file (again!!). ‘Corrected’ it and the blasted re-loop came back once more, even on a new installation! Threw in the installation CD and did it all over again, twice. First to make sure that I had every single partition in it was deleted and reformatted (I left one of them - the non-system files partition untouched during my first installation, but leaving a mystery EISA partition there since I read contained original system diagnostic tools). It didn’t work, so in my following attempt I removed the EISA partitions (yeah, one more had appeared) and just wiped the entire drive clean before proceeding. It worked. Got into my new Windows, and started looking for drivers and basic stuff. Had a bit of hit-and-miss there; my application panel wasn’t working, and my system could detect no audio device (despite having the appropriate drivers installed), and there were some conflicts with my wireless technology. Turns out there was a certain order in which the chipsets, drivers and modems and buses and what have you had to be installed. When approached in the wrong order, they won’t work. Now I think my lappy’s fine… almost back to normal. A spanking brand new normal.

It’s amazing how disruptive how a failing Windows can be. Almost my entire week gone… and now I’ve got a lot of emails and other stuff to catch up on.

One thing led to another. Seriously, this is getting way out of hand, occupying entire days…

Hardly a few hours after Windows had started operating as per normal, it then began to act quirky. The title bar of whichever window I had open in Windows Explorer started flashing and getting out of focus, pulling up ‘My Computer’ would take ages and at the end only to result in a blank folder, Safe Mode still doesn’t work and would only initialise a re-loop, all my System Restore points had disappeared, and worst of all, the whole system would stop working without warning and for no reason, sometimes when I am signing into Windows, and sometimes after I’ve logged on and am doing something. Anything. It would just freeze, and I’d had to do a hard reset. I could get nothing done.

Then came another surprise: it gave me a “Invalid Boot.ini” message upon reboot, and so I thought it could be solved by doing that trick through Linux again. But this time, it displayed yet another error: “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: Windows\System32\Hal.dll”. By that time I had managed to find an XP Pro installation disk, so I put that in and ran the Recovery Console, trying out almost every single tip there was to be had on the ‘net. Tried dumping in a working copy of HAL.DLL from another XP computer too, but it still couldn’t find it or load it.

I was thinking of giving up, and succumbing to a re-format and re-installation of XP, now that I had backed up all my files and had a copy of the installation disk.

So I went ahead, through gritted teeth, and tried to re-install Windows.

BUT when I got to those dreaded blue screens, I was told “Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer” and could proceed no further! Turns out that my laptop was using a SATA controller that isn’t natively supported by XP. Again I turned to Google for the answers… tried a couple of things, and found one which worked - a technique called slipstreaming which allows you to incorporate drivers into a bootable installation disk.

Hurrah for my old S2020 with dual-boot Windows and Linux for acting as my technical ambulance ops centre, without which I’d have been thoroughly crippled.

I’m now midway through re-formatting my drive… if the installation does not come through, I’d really go crazy!

There is a teeny weeny bit of stubborn hope left but no joy, no joy at all thus far. Am working between my old S2020 (which has just powered itself off for no good reason) to look for solutions, and the current S7110 running Linux live to back up all my Windows files on the same system. Such a demanding and high maintenance child is Windows! Oh why can’t I find my XP installation disk…?

Yesterday afternoon, I was trial-and-error-ing with some freeware for removable media recovery. After a few rounds of installing and uninstalling new programs (since none of them seemed to work), I realised that the box that should appear when I right-click a file or folder in Windows Explorer keeps failing to turn up, and instead, Windows would automatically start its InstallShield Wizard thingy and ask me to install Norton Anitvirus. Suspecting malicious activity, I promptly mobilised antivirus and antispyware scans. But to my horror, the *.exe files of those applications were missing. I tried uninstalling the existing copies and re-installing from the original files. It kept turning up errors, and the .exe file could not be created. And I was to restart my system. I did so… and what ensued was another long struggle with Windows. All very familiar.

I tried rebooting in safe mode, and it prompted: “Press ESC button to cancel loading of sptd.sys”.

I did a search. It had something to do with either Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%. The problem could be solved, according to some tech forums, by simply removing said driver from the WINDOWS\system32\drivers folder (and if possible, editing the registry keys).

And there were several ways of doing it…

Run in safe mode and get to command prompt to delete that problem file. But safe mode (and all other modes) still got me back to the {splash screen - blue screen - advanced options screen - splash screen} infinite reloop.
… failed

Next option would be to get a Windows XP installation disk and run from the recovery console. Didn’t have any installation disks in sight.
… no-go

Perform brain surgery - ie. remove the harddrive and hook it up as a slave and access it using another laptop. But my drive is a SATA drive, and all my external-HDD attachment connectors were for IDE… so I couldn’t get my harddrive accessed via USB.
… no-go

Create a bootable USB stick, formated as a MS-DOS startup disk. Tried three thumbdrives, and used Avira’s NTFS4DOS and FreeDOS. But even after tweaking with BIOS setup to read from USB memory first, all it gave me were blank black screens.
… failed

Build an Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, or burn an Linux OS live CD and boot from the disk. My other, older laptop refused to burn disks, so I had to wait till this afternoon to borrow KT’s laptop. Burnt an Ubuntu live CD… went through the terminal and got it to access the NTFS partition and stuff, and got into my Windows folders and navigated to where SPTD.sys was. Removed that file.

Re-booted… and the reloop was still there, only that this time after selecting to load into Windows, it didn’t show the loading of the SPTD.sys file, but instead it paused mid-way and went immediately to the splash screen, and then flashed the BSOD again.
So… failed

Frantic searches on Google for troubleshooting tips and solutions. None were helpful.

Loaded into Ubuntu again. Tried to find out if it was possible to edit Windows Registry files through Linux. Turns out to be quite impossible. Desperate then, I looked at whatever Windows system files there were that I could possibly tweak.

I decided to take a risk with boot.ini in the root directory, since I figured that if anything, Windows re-looping probably had something to do with its boot file. Backed up the existing file, then opened and replaced its contents with the default Windows boot.ini commands.

Logged off Ubuntu, and restarted in Windows.

It worked! I wonder why I didn’t see this solution on the web. Was I merely lucky?

So now I’m back in Windows, and trying to install my antivirus software. Still the same old case - the executable application file can’t be created during installation. I don’t know what’s wrong, and alternate antivirus programs have done a thorough scan of my system and have found nothing suspicious. At the moment I’m extremely hesitant in restarting Windows…

When nothing else works for the moment, when there isn’t the time and the mental capacity to allow for that framing of the mind, for the the working out of the rationale of staying a hand or holding a tongue, and when you can’t do nought, it helps. As I’ve realised from time to time. Rare times, but it does happen. Rather that muttered under the breath and released in a steady stream of heat, all the while engaged in a displacement activity of some sort, than a head-on all-out blow-up. It may not be refined or to be expected of a genteel woman, but heck, it does work. Not that I’m advocating the use of such expressions, but as researchers have shown, it is a quasi-proven outlet for stress.

When angry count four; when very angry, swear. Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. ~ Mark Twain

I’ve heard of guide dogs for blind people (’seeing-eye dogs’) but not of hearing dogs before. Aye, shame on my ignorance.

We had visitors today during Cubs - a representative from the charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, as well as a lovely hearing-impaired lady and her even-lovelier hearing dog. Very impressed with them dogs… they’re so smart! First time seeing the kids this well-behaved, and a few even did ‘good turns’ on their own initiative. I suppose it does help, meeting face-to-face with the beneficiaries of the funds we’ll be raising through the stamp fund.