More images are up on the set on flickr.]]>
Now the big question is a) are there other Firefly nerds on the train who'd notice it and b) is it too far out of the norm to wear as a "normal" hat :)
Many thanks again for Elf for her great work and shipping things all the way from the other side of the continent to me!
]]>Then repeat the last 3 steps for the rest of the season.
It's rough going from a week of nothing to doing stuff, I do wish I had been a bit smarter in prepping for the early mornings instead of going from waking up at 9 or 10am straight to 5:30am. Though I'm still (mostly) lucid this morning somehow.
My biggest piss off is that over the week all the content creators on the Internet that I read and listen to (ie: podcasts) didn't stop, so now I have about 17 hours of podcasts that I feel I have to listen to and can't just delete. That's not even counting the remaining 17 hours of the History of Howard Stern (act III) 10 day retrospective series of the Howard Stern Show... those at least I'm willing to let those wait until I've finished listening to the daily radio show from there. I think I have a problem of sorts in the respect of feeling I have to listen to things.... it's probably a medical condition.
Hopefully work over the next few days will be slow enough that I can just sit and let the talk of tech, Apple, Microsoft, photography and whatever else is in the queue flow over me while I work. Work really hard that is. Yea, that's it.
]]>So Firefly got some work lined up with the newly-falling snow doing snow removal from parking lots. Someone setup something with someone and it basically came down to "we'll probably call you, and it'll probably be in the middle of the night" (to get ready for holiday shoppers no doubt). So we go to bed around 11 (myself a bit later as I was getting Christmas cards done) and I can't sleep anyway, most likely due to the high octane coffee they have at work. So finally just about when I'm ready to get to sleep, the dreaded call comes in.
12:08am
Horrible time, but all things considered, expected. There's talking on the phone, and then rustling around to get the 18 layers of clothing required to run a bobcat in the snow in the middle of the freakin' night. In all of this there's also a lot of burping and sounds of someone not 100% on their game. So being that I was barely asleep anyway, I'm up and about to see what's going on. She's not feeling all that well, but hard to say if it's the fact she was jolted out of sleep to talk on the phone about snow removal or something else. So tea is drawn, a mandarin orange is eaten, and after a while I find I don't need to overreact and my loverly wife is feeling back to normal again, and ready to drive a huge truck, plus trailer with bobcat on it, to Coquitlam (luckily she does have someone driving with her and knows not to push it so I don't have to go all mother hen on her).
Almost time to go back to bed when she's back at the door from the snow/slush/rain combination falling in the -4C temperature to see if I had an ice scraper. Keys to my car are handed off, and then I end up going out to help because they're having problems finding the key hole and making sure the stupid thing is un-alarmed properly (last thing I want is my car alarm going off at 1am).
Let me tell you even with the blubber I have on, and even with the heavy duty housecoat I was wrapped in, that wind cuts right through the exposed skin like you wouldn't believe.
Luckily now they are bundled in a big truck to go off on a bobcat riding adventure and I have noted down the adventure to bring value to this oft-ignored blog and to hopefully let whatever caffeine is still in my system deplete enough that the next 4 hours will be blissful sleep.
]]>Question: Do you ever worry about your cat getting annoyed at you for petting it while it's trying to sleep, and it not being able to sleep because you keep on petting it?
Answer: I wouldn't worry about it. Think about this. When you get home from work after a twelve hour day and find your cat sleeping on the bed, realize that it's probably been there since you left in the morning, with only minor interruptions of turning around. Keeping him or her from sleeping because you keep on petting the little bugger to hear them purr is the last of their worries.
]]>Oh the movie? Oh it was fine actually, the world blowing up with great special effects, and a minimal of that silly character development stuff (actually it did have some pretty good characters in it) made it a fun ride.
The rest of the experience however, aims to make me want to justify a big screen TV and blue-ray plwyer so I don't have to deal with the other humans in the movie theaters as much.
]]>I've emailed off to Data Robotics, and I will gladly pay them the $100 (or hell, $500) support license I decided not to renew last year (because of course everything was going fine) if they can magically get it back for me.
Of course, if it does come back, will I now be able to trust the device? Or will I have to build a new system with another wack of disk space to act as a backup for that (blah blah best practices of course blah blah)? Or should I just dump the $1000+ worth of computer hardware and build another Linux box with RAID5 or buy a Windows Home Server box that does similar things.
I hate computers. Especially now as the Drobo was something that was rock solid and had had zero issues in the time I've had it. Data Robitics, or Cali Lewis, help me, you're my only hope!
Seriously, this is completely bummed me out.
Update: After a few back and forths with Valorie at Data Robitics, and the end result of this being "just run the disk utillity", plus running a couple of other mac data recovery bits, the Drobo seems to have righted itself somehow. It told me first it couldn't recover anything, but after a bit more mucking around I suddenly noticed a "Storage1" (the name of the partition) sitting on my desktop. Drilling into it I could see my data, and drilling down farther I could (wait for it!) access my data!
Yay!
So now I'm frantically backing up, though I'm not sure if this really needs a backup or not. I'm also going to be picking up a 1 or 2 TB secondary backup tomorrow to have a backup for my backup, just in case. However, my data, my precious data appears (so far) be be alive. The backup is going to take about 5 hours it says, so we'll see if it makes it through that without incident.
Yay!
]]>First of all, I did it completely wrong, and simply shut down the system, swapped the video cards and booted it up. The graphics, which were configured for the nVidia card completely failed when booting up, giving me just a flashing console as it tried to run X11 with a driver for a card that wasn't installed at all.
I was lucky and had a computer next to me that I could ssh into the linux system and do maintenance remotely, however if you don't have this, read this to find out how to edit the GRUB config on boot to enter single user mode.
To recover the video, the first step was to remove that customization from the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I have no idea why I had device specific configuration in there, as the last couple of Ubuntu releases have required only a skeleton file and will figure out your video cards for you. So the section I had at the bottom which looked like this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
was removed.
Next I removed the nvidia packages I had installed:
$ dpkg -l | grep nvidia | grep ii
[list of packages, for me they were the "173" version, you might have different ones]
$ sudo apt-get remove nvidia-settings nvidia-glx-173 nvidia-common nvidia-173-kernel-source
And then install the non-free, evil, binary only packages for the ATI drivers (in theory I could have rebooted, let the system boot up with the default video drivers and install the restricted drivers from the 'hardware' application under the system configuration menu).
$ sudo apt-get install fglrx-kernel-source xorg-driver-fglrx
Packages install, reboot, and voila, the system should boot up as normal.
]]>
Nothing special, camera on a tripod, lowest ISO possible for the best quality, 2 second delay for the least shake, my flash on camera (by the time I got it into wireless mode he had gotten tired of me and decided to go hide up in the beams). Here's another one to help you sleep at night.
Now I haven't had that many issues with Vista, but I tend to tell people that it's bi-polar. Half the time it works fine, smooth, easy, no issues at all, but the other half of the time it's stalling, crunching away, not able to delete files, sitting and doing nothing while blocking me from doing things, etc. But then you reboot (or reboot several times) and suddenly it's back to being completely normal and working beautifully.
So I managed to shanghai a legit copy of Windows 7 from my buddy in the Microsoft camp, and after finishing 3 triple redundant backups of my system and photos, I was finally ready last night to do the install. Memories of my Vista install were coming back now.
I opted to not upgrade as my Windows install was 3 years old and had, as Windows tends to do, accumulated a fair amount of software cruft, and a clean install felt like the right thing to do.
Read on....
]]> The InstallBooting from the DVD and getting into the install went slooooooooooooooooow. Once it got to the "Starting Setup" screen (basically what you get after the initial screen that you get the big "install now" button) it literally sat on that screen for 45 minutes to an hour. An hour! My hardware isn't old (dual core 2.4G with 4G RAM) or esoteric, and I've had zero issues with hardware and windows compatibility before, so this struck me as "odd". I was watching TV at the time so I just let it keep on doing whatever it was doing while I enjoyed the House season premier. When it did finally start up and get into the install wizard of course I hit the wrong button and missed the 'format disk' option so I had to hit cancel and go back and wait for it to go through the 'starting setup' screen again!
After some investigation it sounds like it was either the SATA controller mode (IDE vs AHCI) or it got caught up somehow slowly probing the USB card reader(s) that I have plugged into the machine. Either way by the time I figured this out the install had started and I was heading to bed to let it finish overnight, so I can't tell you how long it took or what happened during it. I presume it was normal and smooth though.
Initial Impressions
This is based on about 5 minutes of use over a bowl of cereal this morning before leaving for work and a bit of software installation done via remote desktop, so there's not a lot of "real world" stuff in there.
It's nice, I admit it. The initial desktop with the background is pretty, the subtle little effects when you change panes in the control panel for example are very smooth, and the overall display (I have a decent video card so I get the full Aero experience) is sexy.
Complaints So Far
What I don't like is some of the new Taskbar hotness. Microsoft changed the (default) Windows Taskbar to be more Mac OS/X Dock like, at least according to some, and when you have multiple windows open you still get just one icon in the Taskbar, but access to whichever ones through it. It does this by giving a little pop up "jump list" of windows above the icon when you click on it with multiple app windows open.
This works better with pictures, but it's just a quick post so I'll do my best.
When you have two Firefox browser windows open and they are both minimized, when you click on the Firefox icon you don't get the browser window like you'd expect, but instead a pop up from the task bar of the windows open and you get to choose which one you want to un-minimize. It's a bit annoying actually. Even if the window isn't minimized but is just not active the list doesn't get opened. Even more annoying is "real" Windows 7 apps like IE 8 where each individual IE tab is considered a separate window, so unless you have only one tab in a window, you have to click into the jump list just to get back to your IE window. WTF?! This isn't horrible with only a couple of tabs open in a window, but any geek worth their salt will have 30+ tabs open at a time, and this would be very unmanagable. Of course any geek worth their salt is going to be using Firefox anyway..... :)
I'd prefer a more OS/X type solution like to bring the most recent active window to the front and leave the "window list from taskbar icon" to the right click "jump list" menu. Might be something I'm doing wrong or it's just the default is off, or maybe it's a symptom of using it via RDP. I'll see how things go though as time goes on.
See, only one complaint so far! I'm doing well. Course, I haven't had that much time at it yet, I'm sure my cynical and complaining personality will find more to bitch about :)
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