Heads Up

Don’t email me at my .mac account.  I’ve decided not to renew my account.  A hundred bucks a year for the few features I use isn’t worth it IMHO.  Perhaps if I didn’t have this site and needed a place to host my junk it would be worth it, but I can’t see spending the money.  I really wish Apple would have updated it sooner, or perhaps lowered the price, but alas it wasn’t meant to be.

He’s not Heavy, he’s my Piano

I mentioned to my lovely wife that I’d like to get a piano for our new house. She jumps on the internets an finds a piano, for FREE. So we rent a truck and go and pickup the piano. It took 4 of us to get in in the house, the thing weights close to 500 lbs. Seriously. It’s a little out of tune but it’s in great condition. I’ve put the pictures up on my flickr page.  As cliché as it sounds, Craigslist is THE source for all things cool.

Picture-taking, Radio-playing, Call-making Phone

My previous cell phone comes from the era of New Radicals and the Y2K scare. It was definitely time to upgrade to something new. I was holding out on picking up something that would take decent photos and have a better battery life than my old phone.

I think I’ve found the best phone that does all the above at a reasonable price. The Sony Ericson w810i. It has a built-in 2.0 megapixel camera, an FM radio and MP3 player. It syncs beautifully with my Mac and takes the same memory format as my PSP. (Memory Stick Duo)

I wanted to have a small camera that I could take with me when I was out and about to capture the interesting things I see. I’ll be updating my flickr page with photos from my camera. Enjoy and Happy Holidays.

127.0.0.1

Our offer was accepted on our new home! We move in on the 7th of November. The house is 1 1/2 stories on about an acre of land. We’re really excited and can’t wait to invite our friends and family over to visit. We’ve got great plans for this home and it will be a great place to raise Kari.

Here’s some pictures:

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How to Zen a Parallels VM

This process was discovered researching how to Zen a Boot Camp partition. Those instructions can be found here.

One of the concerns when trying to deploy a Zen image is the HAL. Our base image has a standard single processor ACPI. However some of our new machines are dual-core, and as such need the ACPI updated. Corey Webb, our Zen guru, created an add-on image to swap out this ACPI to Multiprocessor. I stumbled across this when I was having an issue with an IBM T60 that wouldn’t wake from sleep. Thinking this might help our success with imaging the Intel Macs I applied the add-on and was met with great success.

Taking this one step further, I noticed that my Parallels VM of just a standard Windows XP install had a ‘Standard PC” HAL. I asked Corey to create an add-on image that would swap out the HAL with ‘Standard PC’. That’s it!

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Just boot your VM off the zen imaging CD, pull down your base image and an add-on to replace the HAL. You’re done. Once you’re up and running you can send ctrl+alt+del to login from the VM menu in Parallels. After installing the Parallels Tools (an MSI that could be deployed to the maching via Zenworks) you can press (in this order, holding each one until they are all depressed) alt then ctrl then fn then delete.