meddlingBanter

While I have a free min before bed I thought I would update the blog a little bit.  I guess I should begin with December when I began and ended the month with Umphrey’s McGee.  Sometime around the 1st Abby, Chris, Ben, Gabe, BG and I all went to see Umphrey’s at the Boarders in Ann Arbor and again that night.  Seeing them up close at Boarders was pretty cool, except for the fact I lost my chair to Chris due to me trying to go sit closer to Abby..I ended up standing in the back for whole set but that was all right since I got to jam out back there.  I do remember this kid in front of me who was texting feriously to someone every song they played. He also said suck memorable things as "this is single handedly the coolest thing I’ve ever been apart of."  Now I think Umphrey’s is great, but that statement seems a little out there for me.  After Boarders we all tried to just go to a bar and drink before the show, but decided just to go to Kliens and drink and then return later. 

None of us really had seats together except Abby and I because we all bought them at different times.  For a while Abby and I left our seats and just jammed out in the iles just to get up close.  At one point I think I felt I could dance better if I had my shoes off so I spent the better half of the show with no shoes, seems a little dumb now, but what’s the worst that could happen?  Umphrey’s performed awesome as always.

Later in the month was Christmas.  For that Abby came to my house to celebrate with my Dad’s side of the family the weekend before Xmas.  I went to her house Christmas eve to spend it with her family in Haslett.  I met most of her family for the first time then.  I think it was a good first visit with her relatives (aunts, uncles etc).  Christmas day I went home sans Abby and we celebrated Christmas day apart.  I didn’t get a whole lot for Christmas, but I got everything I wanted.  I bought a bunch of clothes from the Timberland store and had my mom give me that.  I also had her get me to Umphrey’s at New Years in Chicago.  Well, my parents actually got one for me and one for Abby.  Then my parents surprised me with a paper shredder.  I had borrowed theirs for a long time and apparently this was there way of telling me they wanted it back.  I never would have thought I wanted one, but I love that thing.  It’s pretty nice if I can say so.  It cross cuts, shreds CDs and credit cards, and has a removable bin.  As a bonus its on wheels.  I usually hate surprises like that but they did good this year. 

I mentioned earlier I got a ticket to Umphrey’s New Years show.  Abby and I decided instead of getting each other presents for Christmas we would just go to Chicago for New Years to see Umphrey’s.  They were playing a three night show at the Aragon Ballroom so we had to be there.  We wanted to go all three nights, but financially we decided to just to two shows.  In retrospect that turned out to be the best idea because doing those shows two nights in a row drained me pretty bad.

We drove down on Sunday morning since I had made plans to meet up with my buddy Jeff who lives there. We met Jeff around 2 at a bar to watch the Lions game and catch up since I hadn’t seen him since GVSUs homecoming, and that was only for a night.  I think the lions ended up losing that game but still we had a good time.  After that Abby and I still had some time to kill before we could get in the hotel so we went with Jeff back to his apt to check it out.  I forget the city off the top of my head, but its southwest of the city….I think.   It was a pretty nice one bed room apt with a nice view of a golf course.  I’ll have to check it out this summer if at all possible. 

Fast forward to the hotel.  We stayed at this place called the Club Quarters at the corner of Michigan and Whacker downtown Chicago.  We got a decent deal on the room, I think something like $125 a night.  For New Years in downtown Chi that seemed pretty damn good to me, especially since the room Abby booked was $200.  The hotel was pretty nice, though the rooms are a little narrow compared to a normal room.  For us it was perfect since all we were doing was sleeping there before the shows each night and during the day we planned to go out.  We had a sweet view of the river and the new Trump tower being built across it.

I won’t go much into the shows but I will just say Umphrey’s took a lot out of me both nights.  So much the second night we didn’t end up meeting up with my other friend Jeff who was also in Chicago for New Years.  Dancing for 4 hours can do that to you and if I recall we were in a Blizzard on the way home. 

On New Years Abby and I opted to get a late check out and order room service and bum around till it was time to leave.  We probably should have left sooner since it took us 5 hours to drive home in the snow, but I didn’t have to drive so I didn’t mind:)

In other news my 4 or 5 year old laptop died a few weeks ago.  It’s had a problem with the power supply for a long time, I would have to hold the power cord in a special way just for it to charge up.  Years of doing this probably led to the tiny fire that erupted sometime in December.  After that little ordeal it worked fine for about another month until it finally stopped holding a charge.  I noticed more sparks again when it finally died. That really pissed me off since I had just finished putting full disk encryption on an Ubuntu install that week.  When I ended up taking it apart to take out the hard drive and any other parts I could, the mobo had a hole in it near the power supply.  I guess this is what did it in.  Now I’m in the market for a new one.  Once I get my tax returns I’ll probably purchase a Dell or maybe a Thinkpad.  I think I’ll then get rid of my CRTs and turn my desktop here into a server since it is ancient and really just a burden.  These things get so hot and suck a lot of power so it’s time they go.  Then whenever I have some extra cash I’ll purchase a new desktop, or just collect parts as I find deals and put one together. 

In future news I’m going to NY city in a month to visit my friend Andrew.  I’m thinking I may try to set up a job interview or two while I’m out there since I haven’t had much luck here at home with a more permanent position.  I looked on craigslist today and found some pretty interesting jobs. I should now be up to speed and hopefully I’ll update soon.  If only I were motivated.  Ha, ok good night.  

I wanted to take a few minutes and post about Tomato Firmware which I’ve installed on my Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router. Since my router much like some of the linksys routers uses open source technology these baby’s are able to be hacked with better software, all which is totally legal. Of course this voids any warranty one might have but when you pay $40 for a router I don’t think you’re worrying too much about a warranty. With the Tomato Firmware installed my $40 wireless router turns into a $600 wireless router. It provides things like VPN capability, DDNS, bandwidth monitoring/Usage Graphs, QoS, various wireless and general lan tools, and enterprise grade wireless security. I’ve also found it to be much more stable than the DD-WRT firmware most people, myself included, have been putting on their routers.

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Link to How to Hack Gmail Notifier to Use SSL - wikiHow

Two of my biggest annoyance’s I have with Vista are both a result of the new security features on Vista. Those of us using Vista (I know I just put it on my laptop today, but I’ve used it a handful of times on my desktop) know that the UAC(User Accounts Control) is pretty annoying when you’re installing a bunch of apps, like when you’re reinstalling everything. Truth be told I think it’s a good idea and I’m glad the feature is in Vista. Trouble is with a new system it’s way more clicking than I want to be doing. It’s simple enough to remove though; check out the link from lifehacker. Now like the article suggests (at least I think it does) it’s probably a good idea to reenable the feature on your system. I know I plan to.

My other annoyance stemming from UAC is flashing my screen every time a UAC box pops up. I think I can handle the box, just not the seizures I get everytime. I think a box popping up and a windows sound are plenty, good thing there is a way to remove it.

Update: From reading the comments on the link above, it appears removing the screen blanking is a baaaaaaad idea.  When the screen goes blank Vista enters a secure desktop mode, meaning that nothing can interfer with the UAC dialog box.  If you disable the feature any malware can simply send a continue signal to the dialog box and thus UAC is no longer secure.  Ok Microsoft, can you please make a way for me to run secure desktop mode without giving me a seizure?

While I’m doing a bit of ranting, I noticed on my copy of Vista Business edition that when I searched for games using the new searching feature (which I love, or at least like that it provides pretty much the same functionality as my beloved launchy does on XP) no games popped up. It seems as though for the Business edition games are not installed by default. Fair enough, thats probably a wise thing for Microsoft to do, I’m sure many a business owner requested they do that. There is an easy way to enable the games though, so get back to Solitaire!!

Speaking of games, yesterday I was talking to Chris and he was asking me what was so great about Vista Ultimate over say Business or Home, or at least what I thought regarding all three of them. Now of course I haven’t used Ultimate that much, but about the only think I could come up with at the time was the cool Texas Holdem game on UE, and of course there is the media center stuff. For me though I don’t particularly need any media center funtions since I don’t have an XBOX 360, nor do I have any particular want for the thing. I’d rather purchase a couple of old XBOXs for when my current one fails. Since I’ve modded my XBOX I can stream all my video to it from my computer without the need for a $400 operating system and a $400 gaming system. Eventually I’ll build myself a MythTV box, but that project won’t be for a while yet. I really don’t need a MythTV box yet anyway as my XBOX is still chugging along. The only thing thats wrong with it is the DVD player rarely reads a disc, like when I tried to watch Borat last night. Of course I can always stream the disc from my computer to the XBOX, so that’s not such a big deal for me. Owell, time for some Solitaire and finishing up Season 3 of 24.

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.