Liver and iPhone

First of all, sorry Steve, I still worship Apple tech from afar....

But...


Me: Steve Jobs liver is replaceable...but the battery on the iphone isn't
Chris: it is replaceable just like the liver it requires a very technical procedure
Me: ahh, true
Chris: using specialty tools and
Chris: liberal use of medications
Me: the liver or the iphone?
Chris: yes

Craigslist

I know I promised a post about Firefox/Chrome/Safari, but I've not been able to get to it...

So here is Weird Al's new video!

Back up and running

Fry's accepted the return on the defective HDD, and I was able to replace it. For good measure, I picked up a second drive to use for storage so that I have a place to back up to. Everything is reinstalled that needs reinstalling (except Firefox, more on that Monday).

As you may recall previously, when I moved to the new digs, the C drive on Hermes went out, and I had to start relying on my main desktop for everything. Thanks to an Ubuntu LiveCD, I was able to pull all of my data off Hermes. It was here that I found a backup of Bender dated at the end of March, so I do have most of the data I was missing.

So, at this point, I have Bender up and going and a 2nd PC with a bunch of HDDs. Now, previously, I'd've rebuilt this and re-Christened this "Hermes". However, I'm not going to do that this time. I put in all my spare HDDs, my oldest video card, and my PCI WiFi card. My intent? I'm looking at FreeNAS and I'm going to try to set this up as TRUE network attached storage (until I can get a drobo) to throw backup images on.

FreeNAS has a JBOD solution which will make all those cheap discs seem like one large/huge disc. I'll be sure to post my results!

A disk read error occurred

Nothing like "The volume appears to contain one or more uncoverable problems" when trying to boot.

At least the HDD is within the 30 day return period. However, this means I'll be somewhat distracted for the next few days while I TOTALLY REBUILD MY SYSTEM FROM SCRATCH!

What's the really fun part? I didn't have a drive big enough to backup to....so, no backups right now.

Ah well, guess it was time for a good spring cleaning anyway.

Bacon!

The gauntlet was thrown.

As he says, " Inflation (2%) plus unemployment (9.4%) = 11.4 as of today."

I'll take the thick cut, Southy....

PISSED AT AT&T

WWDC today sang the new features of the new iPhone OS that will be released on the 17th.

Of course, two of the big features I want are being screwed up by AT&T: MMS and Tethering.

Yes, when I had the pay as you go t-mobile plan, I could send a picture via Text message. But I can't on my iPhone. Well, while the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS fixes this, AT&T has indicated that us backwards US citizens will have to wait until "Late Summer"...gee, thanks.

Oh and Tethering? "Its coming, No ETA for US AT&T users".

U-Verse is nice....this is bullshit.

Friday Poem

I don't know where this originally came from, but

I have a spelling checker,
it came with my PC.
It plainly marks four my revue,
mistakes I cannot sea.

I ran this checker threw it,
I'm sure your pleased to no.
It's letter perfect in every weigh,
my checker tolled me sew.

Deep Thoughts Thursday

I was working this morning and a bit of wisdom occurred to me...

"Every day is a gift...somedays that gift is a pair of socks"

Mandola Estate Winery and Trattoria Lisina

This past weekend, the Trophy Fiancee and I decided to head down to Driftwood, Texas to the Mandola Winery. If you live in central Texas, you know that this time of year is absolutely gorgeous so we had a beautiful drive down and back in the 'stang.

The winery itself is still relatively young, but it was a neat little trip. There is a 10 minute tour (yeah, TEN minutes) that shows you the basics of the winery and there is a tasting room. Five dollars lets you sample all of the wines they have. I didn't care for most of the wines they had, except the Canto Felice.

However, the reason to go there is Trattoria Lisina. This is the BEST italian restaurant I think I've ever been to. We each go a glass of the local wine (she got the Pinot Grigio, I got the Canto Felice) which was quite nice. The meal started off with a foccacia like bread brought to the table with some local olive oil that was out of this world.

We ordered Artichoke fritters as an appetizer. They were served with a tomato basil dip and another white dip that I don't recall the details of. These were so tender and mild as to almost taste like a high-quality fish dish.

The main course was Cannelloni which we split. We often split entrees so that we can get appetizers and dessert. The cream sause actually had a light and fluffy quality that few restaurants ever achieve.

Finally dessert was a Tiramisu that was absolutely wonderful.

With a glass of iced tea and a cappuccino, the entire meal was $55 even before tax.

For the quality of food you get here, it's well worth the price and the trip. If you are looking for a romantic date location, this is the place to go.

Now, tonight - Ruthie Foster at Blues on the Green!

BUSY MUSIC SUMMER!!!

Just saw this year's KGSR Blues on the Green Schedule. It looks like The Trophy Fiancee and I have plans every other Wednesday starting on the 3rd of June! See the lineup HERE!

On Wednesday, I'll try to post about this past weekend's events....

One other thing - HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHRIS!!!!

Friday Fun

Contains Profanity, MAY NOT BE SAFE FOR WORK!

New Credit Card Laws - watch more funny videos

Yes, It broke my blog....I don't care.

What are your favorite QoL apps?

With the move, I've been forced to rework my way of interacting with my computers. I was hitting my limits previously with my other setup, but I finally hit the wall and needed a solution. So, here is a short list of applications I use to make my life easier. Best of all, they are FREE!

SYNERGY
Got multiple computers? Got a Windows PC sitting next to a Mac with a Linux box near by but you don't want to deal with 3 or more keyboard mouse combos? Check this out. It lets you use your keyboard/mouse on one system and move your mouse to the computer right next to it, as if it was a single desktop spanning multiple monitors. Right now, I have it set up so that my Vaio is sitting to the left of my desktop, but I can copy paste between them and just use my main keyboard that is on my desktop.

Sun Virtual Box
I ranted about this WONDERFUL piece of software previously, but it is fast approaching the top of my indispensable apps. Today, I took its usage a step further an started working with "seamless" mode. In other words, I have my Windows 7 IE8 running on my XP Pro system and you don't have to juggle desktops.

MSDVM
Those who know me, know that I'm a big Unix fan. One of the things I love (that windows doesn't natively have) is Virtual Desktops. The idea is that you can have multiple workspaces on a single system. If you run a lot of apps, its nice to have. Linux and Macintosh also have them. Well, if you dig through the MS website, you can find an implementation of it for Windows. When you start working in Virtualbox it really unlocks the power of your system.

Magic ISO
A "virtual CD Rom" that allows you to just point at an ISO file and mount it like a CD. Saves lots of money on blank CDs.

Google Reader
This is the main Google App I actually use. I channel all my RSS subs through it and use that as a primary news source. It has a nice iPhone interface as well.

Trillian
I can't get my friends to agree on IM software. So, I need a singular solution to keep up with all my friends. Enter Trillian. If you are familiar with Pidgin/Gaim then you get the idea. I wish they'd include GoogleTalk support.

iTunes
Not something I was planning to include as it's not a "QoL" app per se. However, I use iTunes as my "Radio" when I'm working. I have a list of several Podcasts I download.

What apps do YOU use?

Run pee!

As many of my readers know, I have the bladder the size of a walnut. This presents a real problem when I go to the movies.

Enter runpee.com

Excuse me, I have to go...

Primitive Internet and Big Disks

The new home does have DSL. This makes it possible to work and do light surfing...VERY light. According to speedtest.net: Download: 2.58 Megabit, Upload: 0.39 Megabit. In my previous location, I was using Time-Warner's RoadRunner Turbo. I rather consistently got about 20 down and 2 up. This, coupled with the fact that my connection tends to drop 4 to 5 times a day for about 5 minutes, makes this really painful. Its no good to have a conference call drop part way through when you are getting critical information.

This means a slight bit of a change in my plans for Internet. Instead of having my friend run the wires for me, I'm biting the bullet and having AT&T add the drops I need so that I can have the fat data pipe. Here is hoping it goes well. I'm told that unlike Time-Warner which overloads their routers meaning that during peak times you aren't getting full advertised bandwidth, AT&T DOES give you the same pipe all the time. If that is so, then the "Max18" will be very nice watching Internet TV and not having problems downloading.

I've also made a bit of a change in my LAN setup. As previously mentioned, "Hermes" boot drive went kaput. I was able to recover my iTunes library off of it and it wasn't used for much beyond that and Instant Messaging, so I've decided to make a bit of an infrastructure change. On Monday, I went by Fry's and picked up a 1 Terabyte HDD for $92, an amazing price. I installed that on my MAIN desktop (Bender) and made that my primary drive. Because of the prevalence of Virtual Machines and the CPU I have (Opteron 185 - a little old, but still somewhat peppy) I could reduce my hardware needs to a single desktop and single laptop. It seemed to me that this would make my network easier to manage and cheaper as I wouldn't need to be keeping up with 2 systems worth of hardware needs and reduce the amount of heat produced by my "Data Center". With this, my next task will be to attempt to balance two network cards and set it so that iTunes doesn't accidentally try to download data over my work's VPN.

It seemed to me that as I did this I would be able to test the setup I'm eventually wanting in the event I can get the MacPro that I want as it wouldn't be terribly dissimilar.

So much for Hermes

I've finished moving all my stuffs over to the new home and I've set up the desktops. Sadly, the computer I use for Instant Messaging and iTunes didn't survive the move. While it's only a dead hard drive, it is where the iTunes data lived. I knew the drive was going bad as it failed when I last tried to perform a backup, but I was really hoping to not have to do the hard data recovery.

Oh Well.

Next step will be to try to get the data off of it, so I can get my data off of it. I think I may see about using Virtual box to create a "virtual Hermes" to run on. It will be a move toward my "single computer solution" that I want.

Give Thanks....

Give thanks for the life and pray for the soul of Elizabeth. She will be missed.

If you pray...

Pray for "Elizabeth and those who love her."

VirtualBox

In my previous ramblings I've talked about wanting a Mac Pro, wanting to try Linux, and the pitfalls of Software Quality Assurance. I've recently come across an app that applies to ALL of these topics: VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is a free virtualization application. For the uninitiated, it is software that runs on your computer that pretends to be another computer to a "guest" operating system. If you are familiar with Parallels for the Mac or VMWare, you know what I'm talking about. I started toying around with this in hopes of coming up with an answer to the "I don't have the hardware to test that" problem, and I was rewarded. Using my works MSDN license (remember, I'm not using the Windows installations for anything but testing) I managed to install on my XP Pro box: Windows XP Home, XP Pro (different config from the host), Windows Vista, and Windows7. Just for fun, I also installed Ubuntu.

Here is a pic of it in action....



Top Left : Windows XP Pro - running IE 6
Bottom Center : Windows Vista
Top Right : Windows 7

As far as the computers on my network are concerned, these are just other physical systems connected. The Vista installation is running IE7 and the Windows 7 installation is running IE8. Not surprisingly, Vista seems to have some quirky behaviour when trying to operate in the Virtual Environment. It has a problem recognizing everything it needs to know about the "computer" it's running on. I guess that is to be expected.

The only real problem I've run into with this configuration is that it scoops up memory FAST. I have 3GB of RAM on my system (I run the 32-bit version of XP) and so I can't really install more memory.

Toying around with Ubuntu on a virtual machine is nice as I'm able to do this with a full safety net - something I previously could not do.

Virtualbox is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, if you are interested in hardware virtualization, you won't regret it.

SOMETHING TO SAY!

Star Wars: The Old Republic

• Trooper Class Revealed!
• The Threat of Peace - Issue 6

WOOTLES!

Nothing to say

Sorry, I'm tapped for inspiration at the moment.

Been moving - working - and such...

If any MMO news gets posted today, I'll update this with that.