Just another Weird site…
So for last couple of posts I’ve talked about moving from one mac to another… and well it appears the my windows PC reads my blog because when I was surfing the internet on Monday after work my screens decided to do it’s impression of a 3d effect trying to impress me it failed miserably….
So the good news is I’ve sourced a new video card… the bad news is I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep running the Boinc CUDA apps that look for aliens and fold proteins on that new video card.
In the Spring of 2009 I sacrificed my blackberry pearl to the NASCAR gods… a week later I got the phone back sans sd card and in a decent shape….
In the spring 2011 race I sacrificed a HTC Incredible with the help of the lower deities Coors and Budweiser….
I think I may need to find a new church… or at the very least stop taking my phone to NASCAR….
Where did it all go wrong…..
My guess is 30 years ago today…. only to be confirmed by the radio in Kingman today… at the top of every hour.
Honest to god this was on the radio in Kingman all day today…..
Well now Sesame Street is getting into the act….
I still like the “True Mud” better though…
So before I get to the main content of this post… a quick request. If this site is taking longer then 15 seconds to resolve and longer then 10 seconds to load on your Cable or DSL or FTTH connection drop me a comment with the approx times and your connection type. The site has been really slow for the last couple of days and I can’t decide if it’s just my internet or something else.
OK now on to the main cruxt of the conversation this evening.
So you may have heard that I started doing the gym thing on what amounts to a pretty consistent basis last summer. Now while I may sometimes say I was “duped” into going I really can’t say that since I was given every opportunity to say no on multiple occasions and duck out. Oh no… I went… and went… and went.
That started in August, it’s now March… I now get cranky if I haven’t had my gym time to burn off energy. I know this because I’ve had a couple of week long breaks in there (elk hunting, christmas, on call) (yes I take on call off from the gym…) and after about 5 days I start getting really angsty (not the best word but it’s the closest I can come up with). So I see this as a good sign since I’ve always have a certain amount of nervous energy that I’ve never really known how to burn off effectively. And I hate to say it but the time in does seem to have improved my disposition…. I’m not all sunshine and daisies, but at least now I will smile before I make a smart ass remark. So yes it’s been good.
In my time I’ve basically been doing cardio and some weight training, I’m not looking to go into competition more of build some muscle where it was just flappy before (mostly done at this point). For the last month or so I’ve been working on upper body (chest and arms) and to a lesser extent core, I’ve been not so good at mixing it up or the last couple of weeks and I felt myself getting just a touch bored which as we all know if the first step to the “ah fuck it I will go to the gym tomorrow” which ultimately leads to not going to the gym.
That is where I was about two weeks ago. I was talking to my partner in crime at work who is doing his own gym type thing and was having the same level of frustration starting to build. And it was there over lunch he remembered this nifty website for his Blackberry called “gymtechnik.com” and that help him over come his hump… ok I will try anything once, so I wander over there and sign up for a free account. And it’s actually pretty nice it’s just a online workout planner (which I had no idea existed until this website) and found a couple workouts that I could do on at my own pace that were hitting the same muscles in different ways. That and now I also have a way to track progress and what I’ve worked on which appeals to my analytical side (hmmm how interesting I work on curls in the weeks leading up to Nascar and football season… how very interesting)
So yeah, that gymtechnik site is pretty handy for me, yes there are others but none work as well with the Blackberry as that one and until I unload this phone that is the one I’m going to be using (so a solid 3 months minimum knowing me 🙂 )
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…
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…
So as is becoming tradition a new update OS X has come out and I have upgraded at the absolute earliest moment possible. And as is tradition I am having one problem that no one else on the internet seems to be having… My DivX movies have no sound! It’s only in QuickTimeX but it’s still damn annoying. Other then that the hype is true… I got space back on my hard drive (and not just because of how the OS reports the space the install footprint is smaller), things do move faster (not much but enough to be noticeable), and it’s totally worth the $30.
Biggest difference… when I’m running VMware my MAC does not instantly kick into overdrive with the fans.
The gym continues… and I seem to be making incremental progress. Treadmill time at 15 minutes is officially “No Problem” at what for me is almost a full run. That is the biggest difference I have noticed, other little things like increasing weight and reps on machines and free weights so that provides a increased amount of motivation to keep with it. That and I bought a new toy that really makes life nice. I picked up a Moto S9 Stereo Bluetooth headset. Which in combination with the Budda Phone makes for a good combination of running, lifting, and biking. And the S9 works on any phone that has A2DP capabilities so pretty much anything that has any sort media capabilities that has come out in the last two years that isn’t named “iPhone” toss in Pandora and damn this is better then a iPod. Hell it’s better the the mythical iShit!
Pandora however is a whole other ball of wax. It seems that my favorite Pandora station seems to really like David Gilmour which is ok by me since it meets all of my requirements for “good music” but every 5th song is a bit much.
You know I must be getting old when I’ve been meaning to write about this Springs sojourn out to NASCAR for 4 days and keep putting it off because….
I haven’t recovered yet!
Well not exactly anymore, I’m recovered (finally) it just took 6 days more then I expected it to I don’t think it has anything to do with the 2 thirty packs of Coors light…. though I’ve been wrong about this kind of thing before.
Anyway it was the ususal debauchery…. Cars turning left, mullets in full bloom, rednecks were out in full force.  Oh and top it all off I lost my cell phone…
I know I know…
Let me start at the beginning… so there we were watching the grocery cart races which had devolved into putting people into 55 gallon drums and rolling them down the hill (You won if you made it 10 seconds inside and didn’t puke). The sheriff’s office finally rolled in and put a end to the barrel rolling the grocery carts mysteriously disappeared…. Anyway Greg, Dan, Allan and I say “Hey it’s only 11 lets grab a couple of beers and see whats going on out there” So we all grab a couple of beers and go on “Safari”.
So we wander the wilderness of campers that is Nascar in the spring and alot of people have turned in for the night but in every row you find a group that is still going at it. One of these groups has two travel trailers parked together with a white sheet up on the side of the trailer displaying Karaoke! So of course we pull in there and are welcomed with open arms and cold beer (good thing since we were all about out). We sing… actually Dan and Allan sing… I hang back drink beer and enjoy the crowd.
So now at this point I’ve had more then “my fair share” of beer and we all know what happens when I have to much to drink… nothing good. And up walks so redneck chic in her Dale Jr. shirt talking about how great her driver was. Now I’m standing there listening to this in my Tony Stewart hat (who incidentally came in 2nd that day and not 31st like Mr. Jr.) and I’m listening to all of this and I star to analyze it and say “bullshit” not in my head but out loud.  I now have the drunk redneck chic’s attention and not in a way that I wanted… I don’t remember how I got out of it but I’m told that it was a very intense 3 minute conversation with this woman and I was also told “If she had started to kick your ass you would have been on your own brother”. I can’t fault anyone there.
So we hang for another bit and start to wander back to camp it’s at this point that I realize that I’ve lost my phone… so we wander back to camp karaoke and no one’s seen it but we look around no luck. So I call into Verizon and flag the phone as lost. We get back to camp a little after 3.  Later that morning at 7 I wake up and head back to camp karaoke to look in the day light, yep still no phone. We break Nascar camp and head home.
Next day I walk into my friendly Verizon store and purchase a new Blackberry Storm.  it’s not the one I was after but I will give it a try.  And as I’m setting up the email on the thing I have a new message… it’s a email asking if I’m missing a phone…. Is it a blackberry pearl with a big scratch on the side of the screen?…. sure is.
Damn…
It’s Saturday before the guy who found it and I hook up, but I get the phone back a little bit more cosmetic damage on it then before. But seems to be functional, well except for the SD card that is missing but that is a small price to pay (and there were no pictures on that card that I didn’t have backed up to Flickr or Facebook if I wanted them that bad).
So the moral of this story?
Don’t go on Safari with a phone in a holster have it your pocket!
Also the Storm with the 4.7.132 OS rocks.
So through the power of my TiVo I magically found myself watching “Scrubs” tonight (you know that show about doctors that fawns over other shows about doctors).
Anyway they had introduced Courtney Cox as some sort of new muckity muck (and I could tell you more if I was actually paying attention instead of fiddling with facebook on my phone) who was really really really really nice to everyone. Of course this leads to the final reveal that she isn’t any better then the last guy by saying a line that goes something like this…
“Of course we are running a million tests on him, this guy has great insurance! MOMMAS GONNA GET A NEW X-RAY!!”
For some reason I keyed onto this and the first thing that came to mind was
“It’s not going to be a digital unit”
And then after thinking about it for a few more seconds…
“Probably going to be used too”
About 2.5 hours later I realized that maybe I’ve been doing my current line of work for a little to long.
At least I don’t glow in the dark… yet