INTERNETS

My internet has been out like the past four days.  I just noticed it was on this morning, but I need to get to work.  I might update later on if it's still working.

This is stupid

I've been reading a bit lately about increasing pressure being driven to apply Title IX rules to colleges if they don't have more women in subjects such as IT, chemistry, physics, etc. Supposedly some people believe there is a "gross" inequity in the amount of male vs. female majors in these subjects. Title IX basically says, "if you don't have X percentage of women in this field, you lose your funding." But what if there REALLY ARE (GASP) specific differences in men and women, and many women by nature simply do not care to take up these subjects? What if women have the free choice to choose whatever field they want to be in, and choose something other than this? I was an IT major but I felt no such supposed animosity toward women in any of the classes I took.

There are some who very reasonably believe that the quality of training in these fields could degrade if they lose their funding because more women don't want to take those courses. Furthermore, this could very easily be translated into companies losing tax breaks because they don't have a specific percentage of some gender or race. Companies would be pulling potentially unqualified people into jobs simply to fill a quota, not to get a job done.

I wish people could just be left to do whatever they enjoy without any sort of coercion. People will excel at what they enjoy.

I watched a movie

I went and saw 10,000 BC with some people tonight.  It was pretty good.  Kind of unbelieveable in a few parts, but whatever.  It's probably not the sort of move that would end up in my DVD collection, but it was entertaining, so I'd recommend it.

I'm really craving Chinese...

...but all I can really eat is crackers.  I still have this stomach bug thing and it sucks.  I'm going to a clinic tomorrow to get myself checked out.  I'm getting pretty frustrated with the frequency of health issues I've had lately.  Once warmer weather comes around I'll be alright.

Practice went well tonight.  The Mix band is still a work in progress.  It's requiring a lot of time and sacrifice, and to be honest it's hard to adjust to working with people like this after doing it solo for so many years.  I'm not going to offer anything to God that has cost me nothing, though.  I only hope that He uses our efforts to really affect some lives.

I'm still enjoying the new laptop.  The battery life on it is insanely good.  I'm finding that it doesn't work so well out of the box with Ubuntu as my previous laptop did, but that just means I have more of a challenge posed to me to figure it out :)  The next version of Ubuntu will be out in April, so maybe it will work a bit better with the new revision.

I'm glad tomorrow is Friday.  It's been somewhat of a weird, rough week.  I've been on the pager this week, so I get a half-day off, which I will definitely be taking tomorrow.  I really need to get my apartment cleaned up.  Or I can just sit around and play video games.  Such a tough decision...

Ok, I'm going to play some Counter-Strike Source for a bit then I'm heading to bed.

Other events of the day.

Lots of snow on the ground this morning.  I didn't go to work until about 1:30.  I'm on call this week so I logged in from the laptop and worked from home.  That was kind of nice.  My cats were freaking out almost the entire time though - running around, meowing loud, knocking stuff over, etc.  They're weird.

I'm pretty certain I have a stomach virus. I believe my colon is the cleanest it's ever been, which is a good thing, I suppose.  The bad thing is that there's a possibility I could get dehydrated (yes, it's that bad), so I've been making sure I drink plenty of water.

I've been fighting off a sore throat for about the past two weeks and maybe this is just an additional symptom of whatever it is that's trying to break into my system.  So far I've been successful at fighting it off.  I guess that taking vitamins and drinking lots of orange juice has been helpful.

I'm kind of uncertain how practice times for the Mix band are going to work out this week.  We were planning on practicing Wednesday, but Jason has other plans that night, so he can't do it.  Ray and Monica have a life group on Wednesday too, so they can't make it.  Looks like Wednesdays generally won't work.  I might start trying to plan for practices on Mondays or Tuesdays, hopefully that will work out better.

Continuing with the whole computer thing

Got my old laptop good to go (for the most part).  After putting a few more things on there it will be ready to go.

Started installing Ubuntu on my new laptop.  That thing has a crazy partition setup.  The old laptop was reasonable - two partitions (one for the OS, one for user files) and one more for restoration.  It's rather simple to take the user files partition, split off a partition from it for the swap space, and start installing Ubuntu on it.  Not the new laptop, however.  It comes maxed out at four partitions - one for the OS, one for user files, one for the restoration partition, and the last one for I have no clue what.  I had to remove the user files partition, set it up as an extended partition, then split that extended partition between the Ubuntu OS partition and the swap space.  For some reason, hard drives are limited to four primary partitions.  I read somewhere that this has something to do with the way the MBR works.  Setting up Ubuntu without blasting the other partitions would require five primary partitions, which wouldn't exactly work with current limitations.  Thankfully we have extended partitions that let us work around that.

Anyway, that's going well.  Hopefully all the dinking around with the partitions doesn't blast any of the Windows/restoration stuff.  Files are copying right now.

While I'm at it, here's what my desktop looks like right now:



Yes, there are four computers in that picture.  Yes, it is ridiculous.

Adventures in MBR restoration

Backstory:
I'm trying to restore my old Acer to factory default settings before I ship it to the person that's buying it from me. Apparently putting Linux on my old Acer wiped out the MBR (master boot record) - which I'm cool with, I like the GRUB boot manager that comes with Ubuntu.

Even more backstory:
The MBR tells your computer how to boot. Most computers boot to one operating system. GRUB is a boot manager that lets you select what you want to boot then starts up the respective OS. The problem is, GRUB has to be installed to the MBR, so whatever was residing there previously (i.e., instructions to boot Windows) got wiped out.

Irrelevant backstory:
Ctrl+Shift in the blog input window switches between Preview and Edit mode, and it drives me nuts.  I use Ctrl+Shift to select blocks of text with the keyboard.  It's cramping my style, yo.  Word.

Back to the original backstory:
After dinking around for the past hour or two, I finally got the original Acer MBR back in action. The reason I needed to do this is because the ability to restore the entire computer to factory defaults relies on the Acer MBR being in place; if it's not in place, then the Alt+F10 key combination which is supposed to bring up the system restoration software, won't bring up JAAAACK SQUAAAT!  (Clever Chris Farley/Matt Foley reference, no?)

All that being said, I got the MBR back, and I'm hitting Alt+F10 to get my entire laptop reset, and a Windows XP screen comes up as the startup splash screen.  Mind you, this is a Windows Vista computer.  Apparently it has two versions of Windows running on it.  Spiffy!  It's like Acer hacked up a copy of Windows XP and set it up to only perform the restoration process.

I'm going to write down everything I did so if I have to do this in the future I won't struggle trying to re-figure everything out.  Unless you're just curious, you might want to go ahead and stop reading this (unless you already have anyway).
Prerequisites:
a.  Windows partition is intact
b.  PQSERVICE (Acer restoration partition) is intact
c.  We have a Ubuntu Live CD
d.  We have internets
If all that is good, then it's time to start cooking.
1.  Boot into Ubuntu with a Live CD.
2.  Go to System > Administration > Software Sources
3.  Enable the "Universe" repository.  Let it refresh the repositories so it will know ms-sys is available.
4.  Install ms-sys:  "sudo apt-get install ms-sys"
5.  If the hard drive you're booting from is /dev/sda, then run "sudo ms-sys -m /dev/sda".  As far as I know, you can't run it for a particular partition (i.e. sda1).
6.  While you're in Ubuntu, copy the "RYTOOLS" directory from the "PQSERVICE" restoration partition to the root directory of your "ACER" partition.  By default, the partition Acers boot from is called "ACER".
At this point, we have fixed the MBR so that Windows can boot, and have grabbed all of the utilities necessary to restore Acer's custom MBR.  Now we just need to run it.
7.  Restart the computer.  While it is booting, hit F8 repeatedly to bring up Windows' boot menu.
8.  Select the "Repair Windows" option (that's not word for word, but it does have something about repair in it).
9.  Select the command prompt option.  This will bring up a Windows terminal window.
10.  Run "cd \RYTOOLS".  This will put you in the restoration utility directory you copied over while in Ubuntu.
11.  Run "mbrwrwin.exe install rtmbr2.bin".  This command does the actual custom Acer MBR installation.
12.  Reboot your computer.  You should be able to hit Alt+F10 to restore it to default factory settings.
WARNING:  I read how someone used a method somewhat similar to this and they accidentally jacked up their Windows partition.  I think they did some other things to mess up their computer aside from running mbrwrwin.exe.  Since we're just modifying the MBR and not touching the actual data, the only thing we can really do is make Windows unbootable.  So, if you're just wanting Windows to boot and don't care about getting the restoration functionality in place, just run the ms-sys commands in Ubuntu above and that should be good.

And now my old laptop has finished restoring and is getting everything set up for it's second first-time run.  Thank you internets!

Returning to the blogosphere (and catchy buzzwords)

Well, I've tried this whole blogging thing two times before - once on LiveJournal (back when you had to have an invite to join, else pay), and once on MySpace.  The MySpace blog is still technically there, but meh.  I don't particularly feel like updating it.  It seems I go through phases where I feel like sharing what's going on, and some where I feel like being reclusive.  I think that in the past I've had a tendency to think that I had to write huge posts explaining some massive idea or detailing some intricate story so that it would be a worthwhile read.  Creating such writings takes time, and that is something that is in rather short supply in my life now. So, hopefully after this initial post I'll be able to cut down a bit on my long-windedness..

Anyway, I decided to try this again because I have a few friends that have prodded me occasionally to blog.  Maybe by blogging I'll be a better friend, and perhaps I might even read other peoples' blogs more frequently!

So, my big recent news is I'm selling my old laptop (an Acer 5610Z) and have in its place gotten a new laptop (an Acer 5920-6864). I wanted to upgrade the memory in my old laptop (it had 1 GB of RAM), but I also liked the design of the new Acers. The 5920 had the new body style and 3 GB of RAM (as well as some other cool things), so I went ahead and purchased it for nearly the same price I paid for my old laptop. I'm going to be spending the next few days getting it configured how I like it (i.e., Linux, desktop effects, a good desktop theme, etc.), so the following posts will probably detail how that effort is going, along with pictures and everything. Fun times.

I have some music stuff to go take care of, so I'm out of here.