Weekend Update
On time!
Gaming most of the day Friday.
The laptop did very well, with the exception of Titan Quest. Not that it bothers me much, wasn’t a huge fan of the game.
I could probably turn down the graphics a little and it would run swimmingly, but meh.
Saturday.
Wow.
Since everything on the laptop was running really well, I couldn’t just leave that alone.
I decided that I was going to delete/move/create the partitions so that I could squeeze Ubuntu on there.
Dell did some weird partition editing.
In order; 10 gigs ‘recovery’, 100 gigs ‘main’ and two gigs of..something.
In that order.
So…I popped in the Ubuntu boot disk, launched GPartEd and went to work.
Deleted the 10 gig, and tried to move the 100 gig. Well, turns out you can’t move NTFS partitions. Bummer.
OK, recreate the 10, and chop up some of that 100.
That worked.
Reboot.
No boot drive. Hmmmm
Try again, this time turning on the boot flag for the main.
No NTFS Loader. Hmmmm
In pops the XP CD and I try some of the recovery options.
Reboot.
Nope.
Crappo.
Oh well, there’s only one thing I want to burn off that drive.
So I deftly make my USB key a bootable Live Ubuntu CD(pretty cool really) and install some burning stuff, then burn the stuff that I want onto a DVD.
Then I drop kick the partition table and reinstall XP.
However, now there seems to be two boot options when I launch XP. I’ll look into that later.
I left this and picked up the dog from my folks place. Apparently there was an incident in the morning where she decided to eat about 12 hot cross buns. More on that later(oh the suspense!).
Spent the evening with Tara. We had dinner at this nice little Italian place that was totally empty, then laughs at Absolute Comedy.
That’s the second time we’ve been there. It’s a really good time!
Mind you, we saw one of the same comedians that we saw the last time, and he was telling the same jokes.
Oh, word to the wise; on a first date do not:
1. Go to a comedy club
2. Sit in the front row of said club
3. Admit to the comic that you’re on a first date
4. Keep your cell phone turned on and actually LEAVE to answer it.
Boy, bet they sure thought that it was a good idea at the time.
Sunday.
Woke up to let the dog out.
Noticed that there were some paw prints on the carpet. At first I thought they were blood(the dog nicked herself on Saturday, very small like).
I thought nothing of it.
I went into the kitchen to do something, let the dog in, and then noticed the really big pile of poo on the carpet.
How I had missed that the first time…
So the hot cross buns made a return.
Can’t really get angry at the dog as it obviously happened sometime in the night.
SO I cleaned it up and whipped out the SpotBot. My Mom gave this to me but this is the first time I used it.
It works rather well. It’s a smallish cleaning area, but two goes with he Bot and some extra cleaning, and the mess was gone.
Wicked!
Tara and I had lunch then went back to her place to let her pack.
Dropped her off at the airport and she didn’t want me to go in as it might have been tearful.
So I didn’t.
Went to the folks, had some dinner, came home, watched Dr. Who, and pretty much went to bed.
This morning, woke up to email saying that my monster was done.
Woot!
You can see a picture of it here and watch a video of it being made here.
It’s pretty wicked.
The art project is interesting too.
For $20 you get original art. All you do is suggest a word, and he draws it out.
And what’s cooler, is that all the money he makes is going to hospital bills for his new daughter. So it’s like charity, but I also get something cool from it.
Win Win if you ask me.
Now, back to work!
Filed under: Blog - @ April 9, 2007 8:43 am
Okay that art thing is really cool. Loved the video.
Hey! At least part of your weekend sounds familiar…
Linux on a Dell… I started with 64-bit Ubuntu (Nvidia drivers hosed X), moved to OpenSuse (likewise 64-bit) which couldn’t make my sound card go (it found it though…), back to 32-bit Ubuntu… All was going well, and I thought I’d licked the Nvidia driver thing until I rebooted…
Anyhow, Vista back to XP (I really don’t like Vista, despite trying…)
[That mystery partition might be a drive overlay… My SATA drive is something I can’t figure out, and don’t really care about, but it seems to take up about 55 MB, then there’s the 10 GB Recovery (AND diagnostic) partition.]
If you figure out how to get rid of that second boot option, let me know. I figured I’d just use msconfig > boot.ini to get to it, but I seem to be be missing that section right now…
[Also found out QEMU is quite nice, although a CD/DVD drive eject would be nice for trying to get an upgrade copy of Windows to actually see it’s qualifying product CD… Note: Install the original, boot to it, ensure you’re linked to XP via CD, run upgrade through existing Windows, run the install from the crazy partition/boot option it creates… or it fails all over again. Best part, save the HDD image prior to doing it and you’ve got your previous copy too! Not legal, but then again, I’m not in that boat anymore anyway, so…]
Well, other than that… Sounds like a sweet and sour weekend, but it also sounds like you’re doing great overall!
(Longer than anticipated… Hmmm… Ooops…)
Remind me not to sigh in a HTMLesque fashion again…
“Error: Irreparable invalid markup”
I take it you’re the Owner who “must fix manually”.
Sorry about that…