Yes, you are reading that correctly. 18119 spam messages.
Keep in mind, that Gmail delete ‘em every 30 day.
Yep, in 1 month I get more spam than most of you get emails…combined
Scary eh?
Been getting the lad ready for school. Starts back on Monday and he is very excited to get back to it. I am also excited to get him out of the house during the day.
There might be some of you out there that are without children, or have children much younger than the Lad’s almost 16 years. Here are some things you can look forward to.
Registration High Schools now get you for:
- ASB Card
- Yearbook
- PE clothes
- Locker lock
- Photos
- Parking pass (if needed)
All before school starts. Grand total for me this year $177US.
Personal Items Needs for the new school year:
- Backpack - I don’t care what anyone tells me about those damned backpacks from the store that isn’t anywhere near my home or office, I’ll just buy a new one a year. Now leave me alone about it!
- Shoes - Size 13. Oh, that’s gross. Did you really think that? Man, he is my son. Knock that crap off you f’ing pervs. No cookies for you
- Shorts, shirts and socks (could throw skivvies in the list to make it the quad-fecta of S’s, but he’s good on those)
- Hair Cut
Grand total here approx. $250US
Moving on we have School Supplies, but it’s barely worth noting. At less than $30US, it barely makes a dent in things.
Transportation
Y’all know what a joy I find it to pay for a bus pass for the lad. This year, he stepped up and said he’d rather ride his bike. Good for me, until his bike was stolen.
- Bike that costs the same as a bus pass
Cost: $250US
Finally, one more good grocery shopping trip to ensure there are plenty of choices for breakfast so as to entice the lad to continue to eat before school and some good snacks for after school/before dinner. We’ll call this about $100.
Grand Total: kids cost to much.
Wait until later in the year when I gasp in horror at the price to put him on my auto insurance policy! Shriek with me in delight as he gets his first minimum wage job to pay for the car insurance!
So, yea. Start saving. Now would be a really good time to start.
Done and done. The hard drive upgrade went very well. Once I got all my mac apps installed, then I moved on to installing VMWare Fusion. I’ve been reading some great things about this, and they have been doing VM pretty longer than anyone, so I thought I’d try it. Bonus is that it is $30 cheaper than Parallels.
So far so good. Since I only need a few apps installed on this machine, it didn’t take long. VNC, firefox, pcanywhere and possibly Word and Excel. That’s really about it. I could install more if need be, but I don’t want to spend more time here than I really have to. I mostly need it for work, so I’ll keep work stuff on it.
It was really too easy. A bit spendy to get it all done, but for a grand total of less than $1500 (Macbook w/2GB of RAM, 120GB Hard drive, WinXP Pro, VMWare), I know have a machine that runs anything I want. heck, I might even set up an Ubuntu machine too, since I can.
Figure I’d take another stab at it this morning.
Loaded up everything before heading into the office, including the new drive and my new copy of XP Pro, just in case. Got a break in my work in the office, removed the old drive and slid in the new.
Disc 1 into the drive. Re-boot. Slowly but surely things started to happen. It went through the DVD check in about 15 minutes than continued on installing OS X and all of the other crap (since I missed the custom button) that comes with.
Looks like all is well. Downloads have commenced for OS X Updates as well as the most crucial apps I need (Quicksilver, Adium, Smultron, Firefox and MAMP). The others will come later.
Including VMWare…
Picked up a new Fujistsu hard drive from Micro Center earlier this week. 120GB, 5400 RPM. Not the fastest, but the price was right (less than $100).
Tonight, I set aside an hour or so to replace the 80GB drive in the MacBook with the new 120GB drive, in preparation to install Windows via Parallels on it.
Before I go any further, just so it is known, I am a professional computer technitian. I get paid to replace parts in desktop, laptop and servers. I have built, as my job, desktops and servers. I can completely disassemble any computer to the main boards. The only thing I don’t do is any work at the circuit level, and I don’t design my own parts. Not only can I do all of this, but I have been for at least 15 years.
So, I go to do the upgrade on the MB. Remove the RAM door as I have done before, no sweat*. Find the tab on the hard drive and it slides right out. So far so good.
Go to remove the remove the OEM drive from it’s enclosure and it requires, what looks like, the smallest TORX driver I have ever seen. I don’t have any that small, so I used pliers. Screws out, drive out, new drive in it’s place and reinstalled. Put the RAM door back and reinstall the battery. Done and done.
Flip it over, put the OSX installer disc in the drive and it boots to the first install screen. I partition the drive like I’m supposed to (thanks again Josh!) and then everything pretty much went pear shaped.
I tried to exit the disk utility and I was beach ball’d. Let it run for about 15 minutes, thinking it was doing something important. Nothing. So I powered down and tried again. Disc in, MB boots and about 45 seconds later, it ejects the disc. I’m just going to say that it was another hour of this. Finally, I put in an Ubuntu live CD I had laying around and it booted right up. Great. I have bad installation media. Lovely. No worries, I’ll reinstall the old drive.
New drive out, old drive into the enclosure and I’m sliding it back in but it won’t go. It’s like there is something in the way. Get a flash light and sure enough, the rubber track that goes down one side of the drive bay has come detached from the side. Great. I try to put it back, but no dice. So, I figure I’ll just take the bottom off the unit and get in there.
The term over-engineered comes readily to mind. There are no less than 15 screws that appear to hold this together. Actually, I think it’s closer to 20, but didn’t really count. As soon as I removed about 10 of them and nothing was really coming loose, I discovered an addition 10 (in the battery bay) that I knew were small and I would loose half of them.
So I put all of the screws back in, thought I had the rubber strip back in place, reinstalled the drive and RAM door and turned the MB back on. Nothing. Obviously the drive wasn’t all the way connected. Great. So I again take everything apart, remove the drive again and look down into the enclosure, only to see the rubber track in the way. So I removed it. Once done, the drive went right back in and I booted right up.
Now, here’s the thing. If there were a Dell, the whole hard drive swap would have taken me 20 minutes, tops. I just spent the better part of 3 hours doing what I just described above. Say what you want about windows and the machines they run on, but conducting routine repairs and upgrades and infintely easier than on this device. Rubber tracks? Double you tee eff? I’m sure it helps to cushion the drive and all that, but why not glue them in place, instead of making it a piece that essentially has to snap in?
So anyway, I’m back to the 80gb drive for the time being. At least until I can get a replacement Install disc. I’m sure that will be easy [insert ginormous eye roll here].
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