May 2008 Archives

OMG, the latest Zero Punctuation review is possibly the funniest yet.... ROFL, LAMO, etc.

After seeing this offer I'm wondering if there's any reason now not to buy a DROBO? My file server is constantly at 95% full and being able to buy the DROBO unit, and the drives, at about the price I had figured for the 4 x 1TB drives alone ($500+ savings?!?!?!?!)

Pros

• Comes with full size drives.... if I were go to with the 2TB version it would be 2 x 1TB drives, not 4 x 500G, restricting upgrades later.
  
• Would be able to downsize the case that naked is in from a 10 drive bay monster to something much smaller.
  
• Would no longer be terrified of rebooting the file server for fear that the EVMS/LVM/RAID multi-disk hodge-podge stops working.
  
• The drives in the current system are ooooooold, and are no doubt approaching the time to be replaced anyway.
  
• Quadruple my current disk space, meaning lots of headroom.
  
• The magic-disk-swapping-we-don't-care-about-drive-size technology.
  

Cons

• What happens if the next size up of drive over 1TB isn't SATA, but some other connection that's not compatible?
  
• The tests on engaget show less than stellar data transfer rates (will have to compare that against copying to/from my current fileserver).
  
• Would have to still get the $200 NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit to share files on the network directly instead of going through my server.
  
• Are the included drives going to be really crappy quality due to the cheaper price?
  
• Is the magic-disk-swapping-we-don't-care-about-drive-size going to be a frequent enough activity to justify having that ability? Especially with 4TB of space?
  
• Is it really 4TB of space, or is that theoretical due to the data-protection magic?
  

So am I crazy, or should I just do it.

Below a plethora of pics... kittens now three days old.

Thing 1

Click through for more...

Busy last couple of days. On Friday Zoon gave birth to two black, tiny, healthy kittens. Both happened while I was out of course, as I had a bit of running around to do. I'm glad she finally popped, and two is a good number (though that makes total cats in house at 6, which puts me squarely in the "crazy old man with the cats" category). Below is a pic of the first one less than an hour old (still wet). The second kitten was born almost two hours after. The only difference between the two so far is one is a tiny bit less black than the other and has a white spot on it's chest.

Other than that yesterday was a day of yardwork, mowing the lawn (not all, because apparently that clump of weeks are not weeds), cleaning out the carport (though some of the cleaning seemed to just be moving from one spot to the other, though in the end it was cleaned out and I could actually park my car in i!), and starting work on the back yard. This also means we can start work on the deck, so the big party BBQ will happen sometime this month (in theory). It was slow going though because the back yard has basically gone completely ignored for the last 2 years. There was lots of progress made though, and in the end we took out a pickup full of stuff to go to storage and a pickup full of garbage. That's a lot of stuff to get rid of!

Anyway, more kitten pics tonight.

Presented without comment, my kitten casserole, and apologies for not posting more kittens, all the time.

I have resolved to not read any reviews, spoiler-free or not, of the new Indiana Jones movie. I'll be seeing it Friday or Saturday (or Sunday, or all three in fact) regardless of what anyone else has to say. It's Indy, and I'm not going to let any random review taint my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the movie.

Scary thing is just how long it's been since the last one.... The Last Crusade is on TV tonight and watching it I realized that I remembered watching it before the family trip to England and Tunisia between grade 8 and 9. That's a damn long time ago.

Apologies to friends who are older than me thinking "my god, in 1989 I had already graduated university, you were only just in high school!?" I'm sorry :)

Ugh. Still, looking forward to seeing the movie. Anyone want to join?

Wow, Firefly really does know how to make a rum and coke. Wonder if she knows that there's supposed to be more coke than rum!

Wibble wibble wibble.

1. Hot..... 29c today
   
2. Long weekend means filling my tank cost $70 (yea yea, $4 a gallon in the states, I'm sure there are way worse off folks than me, but this is a car that at the end of last year was a $50 fill), and you know that just cause it's up for the long weekend doesn't mean it's going to go down anytime soon.
   
3. On call, so on this long weekend I'm tied to being close to the work phone and the computer. Ugh.
   
4. Neck, back and butt are killing me :( No doubt due to continued days of 2 hours on a train with bad seats, 7 hours at work with bad seats, and a couch when I get home.
   

   In other news, whine whine whine :) Oh, and no, no kittens appearing yet.

This has been going on for a while. The symptoms were:

• Windows Media Player (wmplayer.exe) was running on boot, not visible of course, even after creating a new account
  
• Sometimes when playing an MP3 with WMP it would play, but when losing the WMP window the mp3 would continue playing (and wmplayer.exe would still run)
  
• Sometimes MP3s playing die off after 10 or 20 seconds
  
• This happens even though "media watching" is turned off in WMP
  

With a bit of help from Dana I figured out that wmplayer.exe was being run via mobsync.exe. Going to All Programs -> Accessories -> Sync Center opens up the Mobil Sync Center. Even though I had nothing set up under "View Sync Partnerships", going into the 'set up new sync partnerships' on the lefthand menu I found that my SDHC card reader and my USB key were in there.

Now my assumption was that if I didn't set up something, it would leave them alone, however if you right click on each device in the list and go to "Setup" (WMP will pop up for some reason or other) and then un-check the sync this device automatically option.

After doing this for each device listed and rebooting, I found I didn't have my wmplayer.exe issues anymore! Wooo!

So it looks like Vista is trying to be really helpful, and preemptively getting WMP ready to sync up any new devices you plug in. This means that on boot it sees the device, runs WMP to watch the media or whatever it's doing, and there for the slug that is WMP is running all the time for you (no, I'm not saying that iTunes isn't a beast as well).

Hope this helps someone out there, I searched to find how to fix this to no avail before.

No, not really. I did a shoot of "formals" for a friend's daughter's sweet 16 party. I detailed all the gory stuff over at my K20D blog. Definitely a lot of fun, in amidst the terror :)

Zoon is still either preggers or fat, if the former I hope she pops soon so I can get her fixed the next day this time, instead of waiting 8 weeks or whatever it was last time that let that little tart go get herself knocked up again. And mother's day is tomorrow too, happy mother's day in advance mom!