AtomicInternet Archived News

Archived News starting from 12-26-2007 and earlier

Since there is no 64-bit connector for Windows Home Server, I enjoy the irony of having to manually back up my most-likely-to-fail 64-bit Vista RAID 0 workstation. The 3 drive RAID has served me well until recently when I started running short on space. A spare drive I had on hand in case one failed was the perfect solution, and after reading a very happy tutorial on the Complete Backup/Restore tool in Vista, I was full of rainbows and bunnies about the whole process. The backup was surprisingly fast and wiping out my RAID was almost as satisfying as recreating it with the fourth drive, bumping my failure potential up to 4 times as likely vs. a single drive. The happy sunshine restore procedure worked great until an ugly "wrong size/number of drives" error refused to let me restore anything. A 2 hour odyssey of trying various disk/size/volume/partition/drive letter combinations to satisfy this error yielded no results. Fortunately a google search located this rant of people who also found the restore procedure less exciting than advertised. Apparently the folks in charge of this feature for Vista decided allowing you to restore to something other than the exact same drive configuration as you backed up from would frighten and confuse the average user. Since the point of a backup is to allow you to recover from a drive failure, you would think mapping your old volumes to new ones would be a common sense feature to include. Instead, after researching the recovery console command line, I pieced together the magic command to restore to whatever drive configuration you please: wbadmin start recovery -version:12/23/2007-05:59 itemtype:volume -items:c: -backuptarget:h: -recoverytarget:c:, replacing the version/drive values as needed. Obviously this is much easier to remember than providing a simple dropdown to select which drive you want to restore to.

This morning I woke up to a 42°F day which makes for great packing snow. What's the best thing to do with packing snow? Fire snowballs at unsuspecting passers by of course, but building a gigantic retarded snowman is a close second (I'm the retard on the left). My goal was to make one larger than my inflatable one, but lifting 50lb snowballs without them disintegrating was beyond me, so I fell a few feet short. Lisa provided needed approval, and the Morlock promised equal opportunity violation for both snowmen. Enjoy the abomination I've created until it melts.

Evidently, Engadget read my recent blog post and decided to create Evaders for their comment system as well. They're calling them avatars but it's obvious they stole the idea from me. Nobody else comes up with this stuff. Stavos, co-creator of the evaders, is already pursuing legal action against them.

With a constant barrage of 8800 hype from EternalOne, Duane, and Stavos, I finally found a good enough deal to justify a video card upgrade. I immediately put my 7600 GT on eBay to offset the cost, which promptly sold well before my 8800 GT arrived. While borrowing an old 7800 from EternalOne, a followup email indicating it would not ship till Jan 15, 2008 made me take the plunge and purchase another one at full price. While well below the three 8800 fanboys performance, I'm quite happy with the immense improvement, and await the day my second card brings me in line with the mega nerds.

3DMark Score (3DMarks)	3368 8935
SM 2.0 Score (Marks)	1343 4028
SM 3.0 Score (Marks)	1222 4630

Today I finally completed Portal, a full 8 days after Stavos and probably long after the rest of the world. Naturally, I'm obsessed with all things portal now, including desktop backgrounds and the end song, which I loop at work. I even started building the papercraft companion cube from the game, but fortunately it's complicated enough to possibly free me from my obsession.

My obsession with Windows Home Server is well documented, so naturally I check the team blog regularly. After a long gap I finally checked it again today to find a post about the Stay at Home Server ad campaign. While the acting in the clips is horribly cheesy, I'll write it off as their attempt to reach the average consumer, which went horribly wrong. Fortunately the most amusing part doesn't have any actors to make you cringe; enjoy Mommy, Why Is There a Server In The House?

A half-foot of snow today answered my question about global warming potentially ending big snowstorms. Drifts up to two feet were also a pleasant surprise. My hatred of winter is temporarily lifted when snow falls thanks to the light-reflective anti-SAD effect, and exponentially more exciting winter 4x4 driving. It also brings potential for more Yee Haw Sleddin which was missed last year.

After the Morlocks holiday party, followed by a visit from Chase and the flatlanders last night, I decided to assemble the inflatable snowman to help keep the good times rolling. Lisa has often told me how much she enjoys my obnoxious decoration, and the Morlock even stopped by promising to violate it frequently while I was setting it up. Repeated violations make me wonder if I'll get a 6th year out of this $50 investment, but even a 5 year eyesore was well worth the money, especially with so many great memories.

The Morlock messaged me today with the news that Google Maps Street View had added our street to their image library. You can even move the camera angle to the ground and see the car that drove by taking the 360° images. I wasn't able to find anything displaying a date in the imagery, but since my truck is in the back and my Cougar is in the driveway I would place it somewhere around the time I was shoveling rock in July. Now that I'm officially famous I'll be signing autographs for $1 each.

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4361 Total Comments
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