Saturday, August 22, 2009

Busy!

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. Of course, like everyone else, I've been busy. I've been busy getting my life back. In the past several weeks, I've been seeing a lot of my friends. We had a small high school reunion and there were 25 adults and 27 kids! More kids than adults. My classmates have been very busy. And a really good friend just gave birth to a bouncing baby boy: 9 pounds, 4 oz. I just found out that another friend had a boy on 8/8/8 and we celebrated his one year birthday with a BBQ!


I've met up with one high school teacher who is now retired and told me stories about his sabatical; he traveled around the world. And he has a map hanging on his wall with the path he took on it.


There's so much going on and I can't believe that I've missed most of it. But it also gives us many reasons to get together now!

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Reunion 2009

It's so awesome to see old friends!

There were more kids than adults!

Friday, July 3, 2009

True Friends

Do you know who your true friends are? I know mine. After what I went through, I can honestly say I know exactly who my true friends are. They are the ones that give support and friendship even when I've been absent. Wow! I can't tell you guys enough how much that touches me. I am ashamed that I've been away for so long. I know that I've lost a lot of time and missed a lot of stuff, but it doesn't feel like it. We can spend time together and not lose any of the connections.


That says a lot! These are my true friends. I love you all.

The Word is Out

It feels bad and good. I had to do it. I couldn't stand it anymore. After I realized that the decision had to be made, it felt good. I'm finally taking my life back. I sent the email today. Almost immediately, I got emails back from people and I'm glad to call these people my friends. They made me feel a tremendous amount of support and I realized I made the right decision. For that, I owe them all a huge thank you!


I know that I made mistakes. I'm at the point of trying to learn from it and move on. I cannot dwell on the past; I cannot change it. So why waste the energy. Instead, I need to take back my future and my life. Today is the beginning of the rest of my life.

Friday, May 22, 2009

Fog

I was driving down 101 and I saw this. I had to pull over. 

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Asus EEE Laptops

Asus 1000HE: who would have thought that for $400 you can get a light laptop that runs for 9.5 hours on a single battery charge? It is nice to see that technology is getting cheap enough to put into everyone's hands. Most people don't need a large, powerful laptop. They typically want to get to the web and run a few programs. For those that want or need more powerful machines, they're not likely to use a laptop for that purpose anyway. So this definitely makes a lot of sense. Remember when the $100 laptop for kids project seemed like such an impossibility? Now it isn't. I can't wait to see what kids can do when they're growing up with this technology.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Computer Geeking

Dual quad-core Xeon E5410 @ 2.33Ghz! 12GB RAM... 64-bit OS. 2TB RAID 5. 74 GB VelociRaptor. 256GB SSD (RAID 0) for virtual machines.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Death of a Fan

Not quite as ominous as the subject would make it appear. This morning, the workstation had a temperature of 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Not that high, but higher than normal. I opened up the side panel to find that the 120mm case fan was not spinning. Actually, I should have realized that earlier by looking at the FanSpeed tray icon (a great little utility, by the way). I then embarked on a journey to replace the fan. More on that later. But now the machine is running at 99 degrees again. Phew!!

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Blu-Ray

Now that the high-definition war is over, I've finally decided that it was time to explore Blu-ray. I've seen both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. I never thought that one was technically better than the other. Then again, technical excellence has never the deciding factor for which technology wins. It has always been about marketing. Remember VHS versus Beta? Of course, very few people remember about Betamax now. This time Sony wins big with its high definition format.


So I got a Blu-ray drive for my computer. My laptop had the HD-DVD, but I never got any movies in that format because I've never found a good movie player that worked well. So I gave up on it awhile ago. This time I figured there must have been tremendous progress made. I remember reading about this article (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001197.html). So I tried the AnyDVD program. Sure enough, I was able to rip a Blu-ray disk to my computer. I even got venturous and tried to rip a HD-DVD from my laptop. I then purchased a copy of WinDVD HD. I got a copy of PowerDVD along with the Blu-ray drive, but it doesn't support HD-DVD. The other problem I had was that I was using Daemon Tools to try to mount the blu-ray ISOs. Doesn't work with the latest version because it was reporting to Windows that the ISO is an HD-DVD. Weird. So I went to SlySoft and found that they also had a virtual driver. This one reports all ISOs as Blu-ray discs even HD-DVD ISOs...


The solution I ended up with is that I have to use both ISO emulators, one for Blu-ray and the other for HD-DVD. I don't mind switching and remembering which is which. The picture quality is absolutely amazing! I remember this feeling when we first got HD cable. That was 1080i. This is 1080p!


Oh, did I mention that the HD-DVD ISO were about 25Gigs in size? Or that the Blu-ray ones are 50GB?