meddlingBanter

I’ve been contemplating installing Vista on my laptop for the last couple months, ever since I downloaded my copy from GVSU’s MSDAA.  Finally this weekend I had the time to install Vista since I didn’t go to Grand Rapids like I normally do.  Normally installing Vista is pretty straight forward.  Pop the disc in, wait 20 min or so and you’re up and running Vista.  Everything is automated, I don’t think I had to enter in more than a serial number and pick my HD partition before I had Vista installed, XP took far more time and is much less automated.  Vista impressed me with that.

Prior to this install though I’ve been dual booting XP and Ubuntu with a shared 20 GB NTFS partition between the two OS’s.  I had the space to put Vista on my laptop, but having XP and Ubuntu on there already made things a little more difficult.  Prior to installing Vista I had two stipulations:

• Keep my XP and Ubuntu installs Untouched

• Use only GRUB as my boot manager 

Looking around online there were a lot of guides for triple booting XP, Ubuntu, and Vista.  Most them come from the stand point of installing fresh copies of each OS.  Since I already have some fairly tweaked XP and Ubuntu installs, I didn’t want to reinstall the OS’s and reinstall everything all over again.  In all my googling and searching Ubuntu forums I found a blog telling how to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu with Ubuntu already installed, basically just installing Vista on a separate partition or drive then replacing the new Vista boot loader with GRUB and then adding Vista to the GRUB menu.  Seemed simple enough and I thought this would work perfect for me.  I didn’t realize how Vista’s boot loader worked at the time.  I then proceeded with the install.  Once Vista was installed and I had GRUB setup again to boot Vista, XP, and Ubuntu, booting to the new Vista install didn’t work and booting the XP install just brought me to the Vista boot loader, giving me the option for Vista or XP.  At this point I had a triple boot system, but not exactly what I was looking for.  

I then found a GUIDE which explained things a little more clearly.  Vista’s boot loader was installed to my XP partition which messed everything up.  When I would try to boot Vista, the boot loader wasn’t on that partition so GRUB just crapped out.  At this point I needed to reinstall Vista, but when I install Vista, I had to hide my XP partition.  All of that is explained in the GUIDE.  This way Vista doesn’t think I want to dual boot my machine and installs Vista normally.  To fix what I had done in my previous attempt I first used my XP boot disc to run FIXMBR and FIXBOOT on my XP install.  Vista put its boot loader on that partition so I needed to remove that boat loader and just use XP’s boot loader.  Once that worked, I followed the GUIDE to install Vista.

After all that, I’m now triple booting and everything is working wonderfully.  I’m writing this post in Vista right now.  I like Vista so far, though my laptop seriously sucks in the graphics department so I can’t run Aero Glass, but honestly I really don’t need that feature, I just wish I could change the color of my Windows to black.  For some reason none of that functionality works unless you can support aero.  Everything else runs great so far.  I’m sure I’ll be posting issues in the future once I start using it more and more.  My boss at work curses Vista out almost hourly.  Sometimes I think he over exaggerates though. 

 Abby sent me some new HDR photos she did, I’m going to post them here for your enjoyment.    

So I’m at work late right now scanning about a thousand pictures.  See I’ve put off looking for a real job for a long time, several factors are involved there, but mostly I’m just lazy.  Last week the owner of the company I work at kinda gave me the hint that I need to get off my ass, make a resume and find a real job.  To compound that he has assigned me the job of scanning and organizing all of their company photos for the past 30 years of business, more on that later.  In an effort to get a real job and actually make money to live on, I’ve taken my boss’s advice and put together my resume and am starting to look for a real job, since they’ve out grown my usefulness around here.  I guess considering this was only supposed to be an internship for the summer, and I’m still working here I have been lucky.  Plus I’ve been able to build up my resume with the additional projects I’ve worked on.  Now that I’ve been reduced to office lacky I suppose its about that time to get going from here. 

The scanning though has actually been kinda fun.  We don’t have the best scanner here at work, well not the best scanner for scanning in thousands of photos.  The document reader blows for photos, either adding huge white bars on the sides, scanning in sideways, or adding flares to every photo it scans.  That leaves me with the flatbed.  I started scanning individually, but that took forever so I decided to read the scanner docs and find out if there was anything I could do to make things easier.  A couple hours later, configuring the shitty HP scanning software and I was able to scan multiple photos and then crop the photos individually with relative ease.  Today though this didn’t suit me so I started to look at photoshop, maybe that could lead me to an easier time.  I found out photoshop has a crop and straighten fucntion built in, perfect for what I was doing.  All you have to do is import a set of photos from your scanner, say three, the max I can fit on the scanner bed.  Photoshop imports those photos to one file, then just click on crop and straighten and you get three individual files.

This led to another problem though.  Photoshop was saving the files as PSDs, so I needed a way to convert those PSD files to JPGs.  Saving each file indivually would take forever, which again wasn’t what I was looking for.  I did a little googling at that point and figured out you could create things called actions in photoshop.  Wow, those are time savers.  So basically I recorded an action of me saving one file as a JPG with the setting I wanted.  I then used photoshops batch function to apply my Save to JPG action on all the files I had open. 

After all that and learning about actions I created a few more actions that when clicked would scan in the next set of photos, crop them, and close out the file I cropped the individual files from since I didn’t need them anymore.  Pretty slick and way useful when I do projects like this in the future of my own at home.

Unrelated to that Abby’s doing some HDR photos for one of her classes and sent me her first HDR photo (not finished) so I thought I’d post it here for all the world to see.

 I guess I spoke too early yesterday, it seems I wasn’t the only one who noticed IE7 wasn’t available via windows update.  Follow the link.

Link to Neowin.net - IE7 for Windows XP Moves to Optional Updates

I get about as many comments to my blog as neutered cat gets layed, but if you can provide any incite as to whether my question above is true or not let me know.  This morning I was updating a new laptop and several desktops at work and noticed IE7 wasn’t being pushed out with Automatic Updates.  I know that it used to be pushed out because of all the media coverage, and that’s how I installed IE7 on most of the desktops around the office.  I searched around various news sources and googled my heart out but I couldn’t find any information to prove or disprove my question.  The IE blog had this to say back in November:

Don’t be surprised if you see AU distribute new updates for Windows in November, but don’t see IE7. The rate of delivery and when IE7 reaches you will be based on several factors including the release of other higher priority updates and support call volume. You may have IE7 delivered by AU at any time over the next few months. Of course you can go to the Windows Update website and get it whenever you wish.

The only thing I can conclude from this statement is that the lack of IE7 in Windows Update today could be from the high number of windows updates this month (13 at least on the desktop) and they chose to remove IE7 so their servers don’t get hammered.  In reality this is no big deal since I can just go and download it anyway, but this seems like a significant change in policy. 

Last night I downloaded the new (relatively) Ani Difranco cd for Abby, but it was only available in FLAC, a lossless audio format.  Usually I prefer downloading in this format, so I can have more control of what I do with the audio at a later time, be it burning it to a cd, making MP3s, ect.  It’s obviously better to start with something like FLAC to burn Audio CDs, instead of what most people do, downloading MP3s and burning Audio CDs from those, but that’s another blog post.  My burning software of choice is Nero.  By default though Nero doesn’t burn FLAC files directly to cd, and converting FLAC to WAV is just one extra step I’d rather not do.  In the past I would download the Nero plugin’s to burn FLAC and then install them manually.  Today I found a nice little program, Nero Plugin Pack, that will install the FLAC plugin, and many more, exactly where they need to go, nice.  So whether you work with MP3s, AAC, FLAC, OGG, SHN, ect, you should be able to burn things directly in Nero, no questions asked.  Now this is good for quick burning, but for simply the very best/accurate burning software around, you should probably check out EAC.  

On a side note I last posted about my troubles deleting audio off my Razr and the fix I had for that.  Well it turns out you can delete audio files off your Verizon Razr, they just put the option in the most retarded (for my lack of a better term) place.  Instead of putting it in the sound settings, some genius put it in the download music section….WTF?  Since then though I’ve been able to connect directly into my Razr and even uploaded a couple of new ring tones.  In fact there’s a pretty good tutorial on how to do this over at Lifehacker.  The easiest way I’ve found to make them actually comes from the comment’s of that same tutorial. I’ll post it here so I can find it easily at a later time.

From poster Debijit:

Here’s an easier way to make a ringtone:

(iTunes does a good job — which all Macs (and most Windows machines) have — so you already have all the software you need)
Pick a music file, and here’s what we need to do in a summary:

(1) Find out which part of the song you want — typically the first 20-30 seconds or so

(2) Downsample it. (Gina, I think you could mention this)

This converts your song into a lower bit-rate.

Why? Well, typically, mobile phone speakers are a little tinny, so a 128-kbps sound sample of an MP3 and a 96-kbps sound sample will sound almost the same on your phone. Also, you’ll end up with far smaller files on your mobile, saving a lot of memory.

Here’s what we do:

(1) Play the song in iTunes, and note the start and end times for the part you want for your ringtone.

(2) Right click on the song and select Get Info. In the Options page, enter the Start Time and Stop Time accordingly. Click OK.

(3) Open iTunes Preferences (Command + , on a Mac, Edit -> Preferences on Windows I think). In Advanced -> Importing, change “Import Using” to the encoder you want (MP3 encoder or AAC encoder, or if you’re phone can’t play these formats WAV is fine but will result in significantly large files. I use AAC, my Nokia supports it). Now, change the bit-rate in Setting to whatever you want — I use 96kbps — the higher the bitrate, the better your ringtone will sound and the more memory it will take (I’ve heard friends’ ringtone’s that were 48kbps MP3 and sounded fine). Click OK.

(4) Right click on your song in iTunes, and click “Convert Selection to XYZ” where XYZ will be whatever encoder you selected in step (3). Your ringtone will now appear on the iTunes library.

(5) (Generally your song will have the same name as the original song — to know which is which, right click on columns and select “Bit Rate”. Now we know that the downsampled song is the one we need)

(6) Drag the audio clip we just made from iTunes onto the Desktop or any folder you want.

(7) Now from the Desktop or folder, send your ringtone to your mobile.

(If you use Bluetooth and a Mac, the easiest way to do this is to select the file in Finder, and hit Command+Shift+B to send to a Bluetooth device)

(8) Now, on your mobile, you’ll simply need to set your new clip as your ringtone.

Simple

In other news, the Super Bowl is coming up.  I heard on NPR this morning Go Daddy’s stirring things up……AGAIN, with a racy commercial.  They do this every year though, probably on purpose for all the free publicity they get for it.  You can view the two rejected videos here and here.  Read more about it at Bobparsons.com.  I’m heading out to Grand Rapids for the weekend, and obviously for the game as well. 

Next week should be fun as I start Physical Therapy for my shoulder surgery I had a month ago.  Then next Thursday after work I’m heading up north with my brothers and friends for the Tip-Up Classic.  Should be lots of drinking, and some ice fishing thrown in for good measure.  Should be a good time.  Ok, this is getting to be too long of a post so I’ll end it now.  So long.