Author: Tom Kern

Singles awareness day…

I’m not a huge fan of most holidays… I like the summer ones where I get a day off of work and almost have enough time to take a short vacation, and if I do it right I absolutely do (thanks again to Boulder County / FoCo crowd for putting me up). I’m not a fan of the holidays where some obligatory amount of money is spent on a person simply in the name of being spent (I’m looking at you birthdays) I will admit it I do like spending money on others at Christmas (when else can I walk into a liquor store spend $300 and no one thinks anything about it?).

My level of apathy to Valentines day has always been low. I would think of all of the “Hallmark” holidays that I would hold the most anger and angst towards it. It’s the one holiday where the only reason I know it’s getting close is those little white bears start showing up at work at the desks of people who are not married but in some sort of relationship. I have bought flowers on valentines days for a woman before, she was worth it, it was early in the relationship so it seemed appropriate if nothing else to show that I had some sense when it came to close interpersonal relationships (boy did I fool her with that one). The following year it was a different woman and she at the time seemed worth it but proved herself not to be on multiple levels.

As for the here and now… it’s same as it ever is. Not much other then a seemingly causing a small avalanche of people to join a facebook group called “I hate Valentine’s day” and lets be honest if a 6 pack of beer showed up at my door every year that said “from your valentine” I would totally drink it. And I would probally like this day a whole lot better because I got beer.

And that’s why they call me Bad Company….

Not only do I drink all your beer and eat all of you food… I blame the tall lanky engineer that is generally with in a seat or two of me either direction.

Ok so last time I posted I was extolled the virtues of how great the iPod Touch w/ Google active sync integration was right? Yeah I’m pretty sure that was me since I’m the only person that writes anything extolling the virtues of Apple devices 6 to 12 months after they have been released.

I would like to amend that statement now. So facebook on the iPod Touch is fully integrated by default with the address book on the iPod Touch which when you have active sync integration turned on (aka exchange integration) your address book is also integrated. Which is fine and all but I’m really one who likes to keep the various pieces parts of my life compartmentalized… if I wanted my facebook to talk to my iPod Touch I would ENABLE IT…. call me old school but when something goes out to talk to another device shouldn’t have to enable that? I don’t know maybe it was there and I just glossed over it but I’m still not real happy with that little snafu.

Ok so why am I not happy with that Snafu? Well there is a picture that I attached to a Outlook contact to a friend back in the days of “Prometheus” (for those of you keeping score at home “Prometheus” was my main computer from 2002 to 2004) Anywhoo that was 2 main computers ago (not including laptops). Well said picture made the transfer to Gmail when I started to migrate my contacts and mail off of Outlook and onto there (so whenever that was…. lets call it the first half of 2007) In October of 2007 I had the great crash of Heretic (Lost the CPU and as it would turn out didn’t exactly have the most complete backup). In that crash I lost a few pictures that hadn’t been uploaded to various websites or services. 99.9% of these pictures were of no great meaning and I could have cared less but this one picture I had picked for my friend and I though fit her perfectly was gone off of my computer but still in my gmail contact. Until last week when the iPod Touch doing what it was told… synced my contacts with facebook and then my contacts synced with Google. Which then destroyed the picture. And it’s gone… am I whining? Yes… why basically because I don’t think that syncing contact pictures is the most efficient method or use of resources… but what do I know I’m just some dude who lost a totally awesome picture for a friend.

As for the other reader who has a facebook… I removed yours from Gmail… I like you gtalk icon way better even if it is a touch weird.

So to sum up… Active Sync integration is still cool… I just wish that I had thought it through a little bit more.

It shouldn’t have to be that hard….

So I got a iPod Touch (32GB) for Christmas, it’s a 3rd gen touch and really quite nice. I’ve written of my love of Apple devices before (something about fighting with a Mac and windows 7 comes to mind) and once again this device has captured my attention. I fully understand why people who use iPhones love their devices. As a phone it’s OK at best, but as a personal pocket computer it’s a rock star.

I refrain from using Personal Digital Assistant since that implies a dumb device that only knows what it knows (generally from syncing or some other method of input). The PDA sector has not been that for several years now (really ever since the first windows mobile phones/blackberries/treo’s of the world). But even having used Windows mobile on my last PDA and Treo/Blackberry for the last 3 years I’ve never thought of them as more then phones with calendar and some extra functionality. Never once did I think of my blackberry as a “Pocket computer” I always thought of it more as a tool than anything else a powerful network enabled tool, but a tool none the less.

Now comes the iPod Touch and it’s this platform that is open enough to allow applications to be developed that there is literally a application for everything you can possibly think of (the one that tells you where the closest bar is located is my personal favorite) about the only thing I can’t do on my touch that I can do on my computer is play PC based games (I’m thinking MMO type games here) and honestly I think that is only because no developer has sat down and created a client for the iPod touch/iPhone for any of these games. It’s truly what I’ve been looking for (today) in a personal device.

I think the thing that finally pushed me over the edge from being “happy” with the Touch to being “wow’d” my it was I setup full syncing between my Gmail account and the touch… and when I say fully syncing I mean full exchange type Email, Contacts, Calendar between my touch and my Gmail account. Now I’ve been doing a bastardized version of this with my blackberry using a couple of Google apps for the blackberry, but it’s been a less than ideal situation (mainly issues with double contacts, keeping email sync’d, and keeping calendar appointments from disappearing from one or both calendars (actually putting events into the phone calendar and having them reliably show up in my Gmail calendar would be a nice start)) Now I realize that the blackberry is a “secure” environment and you need to have additional items setup to get things to work that seamlessly, but when my MP3 player can do better calendar/contact/mail sync then my phone which is supposed to do this stuff that well out of the gate I think we may have a issue.

Then again it may just be that paradigm shift that happens from time to time, no I don’t need all of this additional security I just want something that keeps my personal stuff organized as well as all of these tools do for my professional life I just don’t want the two parts of my life to cross any more than they already do. And I think that last sentence is the true crux of the problem.

Windows 7… Mac… And you… Part 2

So the Bootcamp Windows 7 install on the Macbook Pro (MBP) has been not nearly as nice as the original XP install in 2007. Research has turned up that the machine I have (at just under 3 years old) is right at the cut off for 64bit Win7 compatibility and if I were one rev newer I wouldn’t be having nearly these problems. So with that in mind, my experiences are far from typical. However in the hope to save some other poor soul who has the same model MBP as I (and this is my way of documentation in case I have to do all of this crap again) i present to you now part 2 of the MBP/Win7 saga.

After getting the ISO built the next trick is to install the OS which isn’t so hard you just kick bootcamp in MAC OS to start the windows installer and a reboot later your off and running. Where I had issues was after the first reboot I kept getting a hung install on the “completing installation” screen. The trick here is to have nothing but the power cord plugged into the computer and don’t touch the damn thing… If you see the three little dots (…) stop moving for more then 5 minutes… Start over with the install and do it again. I had to do it three times, I can’t tell you why it does it just that it does.

The good news is once the install completes and you start filling out all of the stuff to finally setup windows most all of the networking stuff is going right out of the gate. So now you have to install the bootcamp drivers for Windows 7 (bootcamp 3.1)… and here is where more fun starts.. you have to start with the Bootcamp 3.0 drivers on the MAC OS 10.6 DVD, but if your using the Santa Rosa Mac and a 64 bit install of Windows they 3.0 bootcamp drivers won’t work…. easiest way to get around that is to follow the instructions here…. http://blog.andersonshatch.com/2009/01/11/windows-7-x64-on-a-macbook-pro-guide/ And in case you can’t follow directions like me, you need to right click and run as administrator on the cmd.exe not the setup.exe on the DVD.

So after that… you now can load all of the updates to Windows

And hopefully be on your happy trails…

Windows 7… Mac… and You!

So if you haven’t been keeping up on the Apple Blogs, bootcamp finally supports Winders 7!

I decided to jump in head first into this fun little adventure this evening…. and things…. well things didn’t go as well as I thought they could have gone… and there are more then a few landmines.

So here is the setup…. I’m running Mac OS X 10.6.2 on a Mid 2007 Mac Book Pro (2.4 GHZ Santa Rosa) bootcamped with Windows XP 32 Bit (20GB Partition)

If you read all of the docs from Apple they tell you to boot into Windows and do the upgrade from there… and just like a real Windows XP to 7 upgrade you have to do a “Custom/Advanced” upgrade to make the jump.

So I reboot the Mac and when I reboot I boot off of the DVD drive and select the Windows 7 x64 DVD and hit enter… I’m then presented with a option

“1.

2.

Select CD-Rom Boot Type:_”

OH and just to make it real interesting my keyboard doesn’t work… nor does my USB keyboard.

I do what any logical IT person would do… I reboot 4 or 5 more times… all with the same result.

So when your a IT guy and you have these issues there is really only one thing left to do… GOOGLE THAT SHIT!’

A couple of other folks have run into this same problem…

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/servervirtualization/thread/a8ae28ed-daf8-4e47-a356-84fb57cf9016/

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=467704

The basic cruxt is that there is a format mis-match between this MBP and a file in the EFI boot folder on the disk… A bit more googling and following links the best method to fix the file problem in the EFI folder is to extract the DVD to a ISO file and then reburn it to a new disk.

And the easiest way to do that is here…

http://sergiomcfly.blogspot.com/2008/04/select-cd-rom-boot-type-when-installing.html

At this point you have a burnable disk and should be able to proceed with the upgrade.

Stupid Mac…

Aftermath….

Did you know that the “Native New Yorker” on Dobson and Guadalupe has $2 pints of Fat Tire all day everyday?

NO?

Did you know that the “Native New Yorker” on Dobson and Guadalupe has $3 22oz talls of Fat Tire all day everyday?

No?

I knew they had great deals on tap beer… I didn’t remember them being that good…

I feel like I got hit by the Cardinals… all 53 of them… plus the coaches… except for Rackers he was in a hurry and missed the kick.

I don’t know how much more football my liver can take…

And so the cycle completes again…

As 2009 comes to a close we should take a moment to remember the good and how infinitely superior 2009 was to 2008 and how 2010 will be superior in every way to 2009.

Happy new year kids.

And the booze? Oh that’s just how I’m pretty sure 3/4 of you are going to be spending the next 24 to 36 hours so I figured I would give you some inspiration.

All I see are Blue People(ish)….

I’m pretty sure there were a few people who turned blue at some point today when the Cardinals tried to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again. My own personal musings are minor in the whole scheme of things, but seriously how do you blow a 17 point half time lead to a touchdown by the end of the game against the Lions?

I mean this is a match up I’ve written about in the past and used as a measuring stick of progress… I quote from December 8, 2002

The Lions played the Cardinals this week… the Cardinals won in Overtime… the fact the Cardinals won is a miracle… but it is only a minor miracle since they beat the Lions… The only team worse then the Cardinals.

The good news is there are now a couple of teams worse then the Cardinals. One of those teams even promised to “unleash hell in December” out side of a nice 2 minute drive not much hell has been unleashed. And the only reason I’m bringing up Black Jesus and company is I’m trying to goad a certain other blogger into posting her closet support for the Cards… Obviously she is above such trickery or she just doesn’t care. My money is on the second one.

Ok off of the football topic, I like talking about it but it’s not the playoffs and today’s win was ugly.

Don, Curtis, and I did a batch of home-brew last week. The good news is it wasn’t awful when I put into the keg yesterday. The bad news is there is still 6 weeks until it’s tapped for the Superbowl. Crap there is that football topic again.

I think I may have a new favorite topic… I wonder how much my posting is going to drop after football season?

Happy nine years of content…