FLYingG0D

Well, for the love of work, I have been working nicely, and enjoying it! I have to say, my new job is not a burden, but a pleasure! More of a, "I get to do some physical work, but this is good for me, and it is an opportunity to get healthier!" than a, "Damn, I have to work? What is this, a salt mine?" ... you know what I mean. We get to do different things all the time. Not the same old "Swap this hard drive. Two today, two tomorrow, and two every day for the rest of your employment!" - but more of a, "Hey, this weekend, I made a list of things I would really like you guys to do! Tear out all these ethernets, and put new ones in, and clean up that junk pile we have been accumulating." It was meant to be a whole weekend job. They don;t want to push us too hard, and the like. They realize, we get quite busy sometimes, and if that happened, we can not be getting other things done. Priorities. However, Mr. BoB and I decided the night was slow, and we were going to see what we could do. We did the whole weekend task list in one night. That is productivity!

Other things happening ... well, I was driving my car, and to make a long story much too short, I need to buy a replacement rim for one that I broke. So, I took my car to my favorite place to have it serviced (Bell Tire & Auto Service) and let them know what was going on. So, they immediately began searching for a replacement rim, and I began the search too. Well, it was a hard find, seeing as the stock wheels were 16" rims, and the guy who had it before me did not like how wimpy those looked so he got 17" rims. 17x9.5" to be exact. Well, the dealership kept saying, "Oh, yeah, we can get those." - but the good people at Bell Tire & Auto knew better, and had them fax over some pictures of what they were looking at in their book. So, after many wrong pictures, we sent them a picture of the wheel (finally got something we could send) and they said, "Oh, yeah, that one. It is actually really expensive, and has to be shipped in from California." ... so, I was like, "Well, it is only a grand, go for it." One rim. Next day shipping. They sent us an expensive rim alright, but not the right one.

I have to say, after all this, those guys at Bell Tire & Auto were still determined to get me the right rim, and asked if I could let them borrow a wheel. They took it down there, and showed it to them, all closely like. I am sure one of the people at the dealership accidentally fell down some stairs, after all the troubles they caused us, but then again, nobody said anything about anyone having mishaps. I would just like to think there must have been. So, according to them, my wheel does not exist in the system, and the best we can go with is if mine are actually labelled as 17x9" - when they are really 17x9.5" - so we are hoping for that. They are the same ones, and I found them on the web, and they are much cheaper in price than the ones they keep popping up with, but they are not the same width. Meaning, I would have to buy a pair, if they are indeed only 9" wide, and not 9.5" wide. So, they shipped those out, or ordered them rather, on Wednesday. Word is that having them shipped in from Michigan could only be done in 2-day or slower. No next-day available. So, sent, and still not here. We were hoping maybe they arrive on Friday, but if not, then Monday is our best bet. So, on Monday, I get to see if I have a good rim, or if we get to hunt and find some temporary rims in the meantime.

Alas, a good friend said, "That is becoming a saga. Greek men are going to write epic poems about your rims." - ghz

... I forgot how to trim the entry, and make it short, and am lazy to look it up again, so sorry that this took like three thousand pages on your screen.

Please, VMWare, upgrade your "Server" edition to use the newer versions of the virtual machine formats (6.x as opposed to the 5.x version it supports now) ... AND, would it be so hard for you to let me install VMWare Player on a machine that has VMWare Server installed on it? Optimally, I would live to have Workstation, Server, and Player all installed on the same machine/OS (when I can get the Workstation program on a machine) at the SAME TIME ...

At work, we have Server. I would like to use some of the newer formats, which would require Player (apparently, it plays anything) - but no, it complains, and says, "You already have Server on this machine, you must uninstall that first" ... maybe there is a hack to get them all on there? Probably has to do with the services in the background. Oh, how sad. (yes, this is on a Windows machine ... XP something or other, I would guess Professional, cause who uses Home other than people who's computer came with it?)


ALSO ...
Please people, let's help popularize some awesome software out there! I know many of you are all about Virtualization ... well, there is a cool thing out there called "Thinstall" - which is too damn expensive. However, from what I read, it sounds like a godsend! Also, you can get FREE Thinstalled applications from Thindownload - a site that packages free programs with Thinstall, so you can port them anywhere! Word of note: It DOES create a C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Thinstall\[app_name] folder with some files that contain any file/registry modifications the program attempted to create on the system. Say, the program makes a .ini file, or modifies the registry with your custom settings ... well, it gets encapsulated in the virtual system, and put in one of like 2 or 3 files generated there for such a purpos. However, the way this works, you can run these on a limited user account (non-Admin) and it is supposed to let you run these things in Linux via Wine, they have a little video on the Thinstall site showing like MS Excel and Word running in linux! Talk about true portability! This is some awesome stuff!

Another little program we should get our hands on, and support, as it is beautiful is "WinUHA" - Much like WinRAR, or WinZIP, or WinACE, but rather a FREE program! It also claims to have better compression. How does it compare to 7z files? Who knows. If you are on Windows, may as well go for it. (however, look at the sad stats, only 2 donations ... )

Speaking of sad donations stats, anyone seen the NetBSD donation meter? They were hoping for $50K by the end of this year, and are at a lowly $17K ... that is about 1/3 of the way, and with the X-Mas crunch, it is unlikely they will make any more.

So, OpenBSD 4.2 came out for download on the official FTP sites on November 1st, 2007. I naturally want to install it and make new install disks while I wait for my beautifully stampped copy to arrive. I was able to fit the complete installer ISO for the i386 architecture on one 200 mb miniCD, however, the amd64 architecture was not having this. I naturally stripped out the bsd.mp and the games from the image, because I do not use them. This was about 2 MB short of fitting, and I wanted to be thorough, because I might not be the only one to install off this disk. So, if I can not get it on a miniCD, I can maybe make use of the full sized CDs and place all 3 architectures I use on one disc. This posed difficulty. However, I built it, and due to some extra space, threw in Hiren's BootCD, which is a compilation of a collection of DOS based tools for partitioning, password resetting, and other goodness. Then I realized there was a newer version of Hiren's CD, so I updated it.

Now, CD boots, gives menu, and you select what version of OpenBSD 4.2 you want to install, or choose to load up Hiren's tools, or boot the hard drive, and can also reboot if it was an accident. I feel I have mastered the basics for bootable CDs, however, there is the one piece, the bootable code that one basically gets from elsewhere. Grab it off an old boot floppy, or another CD. How do I make it and edit it? Maybe another day/time. For now, I am gonna put my cell phone away, and go get some sleep.

'night y'all!