Archived News starting from 01-01-2008 and earlier
BlogThis year
Duane threw an
80s/Tiki themed new years party consisting of various 80s movies/commercials playing on TVs throughout the house, girly drinks, and
appropriately themed costumes.
It turned out to be an excellent way to welcome in the new year. A notepad "prize" in my popper gave me the opportunity to write how I really felt about everyone at the party, which I then folded and passed to each individual. An enjoyable visit to the "Brighton We Are Awesome Club" also means getting lost on unlit backroads during your departure, which I did at 3am during heavy snowfall and a high probability of drunken man-rape. I managed to make it to the highway unharmed, only to be "that jerk" passing everyone in the unplowed lane all the way home.
The laziness of a southerner famous for never answering Xbox 360 chat requests prompted a
comment about
Gravatars. Intrigued, I took a look at the
implementation page and discovered the easy way to solve my "create your own evader" problem and prevent a pellet gun attack from said southerner. Just choose "GRAVATAR" for your Evader and make sure you enter the same email you used to create your Gravatar and you'll once again be hip with the internet. I also took some time to build some
statistics on the results page which quickly and accurately indicates exactly how much I'm loved by 10 people.
My recent
adventure with Vista Backup yielded a
modest gain in data transfer performance thanks to the fourth drive in my RAID. My disk performance boost came just in time to help keep me well above
Senator Kelley's new configuration. His recent upgrade to 64-bit Vista bested my video performance. The data transfer crown for Michigan is all that keeps me going, and I can't let him have it. Perhaps the California champion could run
HD Tune for me and pass along the screenshot?
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.
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.
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