Category: Not doing things the easy way

Drown in the now…

I seem to have picked up a new hobby in the last couple of months and I didn’t even realize it until I got done talking to my dad. Apperntly I’ve stumbled into gun collecting or at the very least the old man is giving me first dibs on guns that he either already has or doesn’t want. Now the part about the old man offering me guns is nothing new. The new part is the quantity and the quality of the guns…

2009 and before… it tended to be new rifles and more of a informative “Hey if you want a new hunting rifle this is one you should look at”. In 2010 I’ve talked to my dad three times this year… twice he called about guns the first one was a heavy barrel .308. I already shoot a 30-06 elk and deer hunting so the .308 isn’t of that much interest to me… though if you knew the kind of country we hunted elk in (an area that we lovingly refer to as the “nuclear wasteland of elk”) a .308 starts to make alot more sense. Of course setting up what amounts to a sniper position for elk hunting doesn’t really appeal to me all that much… but then again that’s basically what I’m already doing.

The other gun my dad called me about was a Colt AR-15 .223 (post ban no flash suppressor) that one piqued my interest and I have no idea why. It’s a .223 round which at distance is a little light for elk hunting (figure 200 to 300 yd shot) but it would be good for just about everything else. So this gun truly comes into the category of “toys” or if your Curtis “zombie weapon”.

My issues are all my own and I’m torn, yes I would really like to get this “toy” but at the same time the responsible side of me says there are alot of other things you can do with that money (I get that alot from responsible side it’s all responsible and stuff, it’s really annoying) why am I posting this? because it’s truly the biggest drama in life.. and if my biggest problem is whether or not to buy a gun I know that I truly have no problems.

It’s out of my hands…

No it really is… mainly since it’s ethereal in digital realm and all no physicality…

OK let me start again, so there was this “fire” over the weekend, and if you haven’t already you can go read about it. However it did get me thinking if I was presented with a similar set of circumstances what would I do? Probably nothing since I would never pay enough attention to connect all of the dots. No really I probably wouldn’t notice until my couch was fully engulfed and even then I would have to be sitting in it.

No honestly what would I do? I look at my “house” and I don’t have any real attachment to it… I mean it’s a nice a house, the back yard is killer, and if I was just a tad more social I would probably invite people over more often then the divisional round of football playoffs. I think the best way to describe my relationship to my house is probably quite similar to that of “Tyler Durden” or rather the man the that spawned Tyler Durden to paraphrase

no matter what I had the couch situation taken care of, now it’s gone. I need a new couch…

I know it’s no where close (and I can’t find the exact quote just deal). The cruxt of the scene is it’s all just stuff. That you don’t need or more then you need. And that’s how I look at my place it’s just the Kingdom of stuff. Nothing that can’t be replaced. I don’t have any pets, I don’t have wedding pictures what pictures I do have are of friends or their kids and while the pictures of the kids are cute I’m pretty sure I will get more at some point, and lets not get me started on furniture or clothes. As for the electronics, I was due for a upgrade anyway! I have a bookcase of DVD’s that I’ve watched once or twice each that can almost all be replaced. And those that can’t will be out on Blu-Ray or whatever the format of the digital future will be.

The “stuff” that I have that matters to me is all digital in nature. My pictures from various hunting trips, races, trips to the East Coast, and as silly as this sounds I have a couple of cell phone pics from outings to where ever that I keep for the memories. Music, so much music from so many things that I listen to constantly (and all three regular reads know that I generally pull the title of each post from what ever song is playing in iTunes when I’m writing). Files… all of my files from school personal projects and writing that I’ve done (not everything I write ends up here). Finally records… tax, finical, and other various tracking mechanisms. All totally digital.

Now granted I have multiple backups of all of these files and if I lost ONE computer I could pretty easily recreate 99% of the content. In a total loss situation though I would screwed since I don’t take my laptop (which for everything but gaming I consider my main computer) everywhere. Heck I take it on trips and that is probably the single dumbest thing I could do.

Hey nice MacBook Pro, I’m going to take that now!

To top it all off I’m a IT guy for my day job, well I like to think of myself as a IT guy most days. And what do we preach in IT when it comes to backups? One copy onste and one copy off-site (more then 50 miles away, and on different media if possible) I mean it’s not rocket science though some days it seems like it. I guess it’s time to break down and look at something a bit more comprehensive then just “Time Machine” for my backup needs.

I need secure, automagic, high storage limits, and accessible anywhere. I would like neat, easy, and multi-platform. I don’t need to backup all my computers just one. Anything that doesn’t live on my laptop can be copied over easy enough.

Who would have thought a little fire could cause so much thought?

The only downside to this plan? When the zombies come I’m scewed for my data not so much for guns.

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.

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…

Proof….

The Universe Hates Me…

1. My Football team loses on the last play of the game on 4th down by 3 points.

1a. The 49ers won today…

2. After running my dishwasher, I found a leak in the wall behind sink… how do I know this? The flooded utility room was my first clue.

Or the universe is just screwing with me….

1. My football team actually did really well using the backup quarter back.

1a. The 49ers may still have a winning season.

2. The leak is temporarily resolved by shutting down hot water to the house. Thus preventing further damage…

Or that the universe really does care…

1. My football team will probably have another winning season…

1a. The 49ers may still have a losing season.

2. A certain person that I’m happy is in my life.

NCC-17OHYES

Star Trek movies have a rule that they are pretty good on following… the odd movies are bad(ish) the even movies are good(ish)… The 4 Next Generation movies were able to pretty much kill that streak (they were 3 bad to 1 really good one).

In the past I have measured my like/dislike of a Star Trek film based on my reaction the first time I watch it at home with no one around. I knew that “First Contact” benefited way to much from the big screen when I watched it at home and wasn’t nearly as interested as I had been in the theaters 6 months earlier.

JJ Abrahams must have done multiple things right… not only did I purchase Star Trek the day it came out, but when I watched it at home I have the same feeling at the end of movie as I did when I saw it in the theater. I once again state…. “Star Trek has no business being this good”

Extra Geek cred for the following…
Where is Paul McGillion (aka if you don’t know where he is from you can’t play)
Where is Wil Wheaton? (aka you have to look very hard)

The Fat Lady Never Sings….

So last night it was pointed out to me that it was 10 years since a particular event… I don’t remember the event, but I do remember thinking “Christ where did the last decade go”?

And then I think about everything that has happened in just my personal life and it boggles my mind…. Not the amount of stuff going on but the minutia of detail that has been lost to the fog of time and probably one or two too many beers. And it’s the minutia of detail that I take the most pleasure in. So as I was thinking about this I also realized that this pile of drivel is going to be 9 years old in just about a month.

I will admit I have questioned whether it was time to mothball this long running hobby more then once in the last year or so. It seems redundant with Facebook, Flickr, Instant Messaging, Cell Phones, and this little thing called getting in a car and going to someone’s house. In the end though this serves two purposes that most of the previous technologies fail miserably at.

1. Long form composition of thoughts and ideas (even if those have been severely lacking for a while now) (and to those who would say cell phones and being social full fill this requirement I say come hang out with me and certain friends who won’t let you get a word in edgewise after alcohol has passed their lips)
2. It’s a vanity project that it’s limited to 140 characters.

So where does this all lead? I don’t know but I’m thinking that their may be a return to some roots and maybe trying out a few different things.

Who knows but the fat lady just got bitten by a zombie so I guess I’m committed now.