OK, this is a total cross-post, so if you’re not interested in reading about a fund-raising drive I’m doing for Bend Forums, don’t bother reading on. Normal posting coming when I get through the rest of my email.
Category: Jake
I’m Home
Made it home a few hours ago. The wedding was very nice (Emily, you and Stephen are going to make a wonderful husband and wife), and it was nice to see everybody there. I’m sitting here watching my 1200+ email messages download here, so I’ll get through those tomorrow.
One last thought before I get to bed: Taking a vacation with kids (especially when they’re 3 and 6 years of age) is not a vacation — it’s exhausting.
Leaving Town
I’m heading out of town for a few days to head up to a good friend’s wedding in Portland. I’ll be back on Sunday. For those of you thinking about breaking into my house, don’t bother: other family members will be staying at my house and we recently upgraded the locks and deadbolts in the house.
I’m going to see if I can pirate a wireless signal while I’m up there, mostly just so I can get onto Google maps to get directions.
Meanwhile, everybody play nice until I get back, enjoy some other blogs or start up some threads over at Bend Forums.
Getting Back DMA For Your CD/DVD Drive
I’m mostly bookmarking this for my reference, but maybe somebody else will run into this on a Google search and it might help.
After struggling all week with poor DVD drive performance (DVDs were skipping really bad, data transfers were really slow, burning took forever, etc…). Come to find out that, for some reason the drive had been switched to “PIO Mode” instead of the faster DMA transfer mode. How that happened, I have no idea. I figured it happened when I upgrade the firmware for the drive last week. So switched it to use DMA if available, rebooted, and it was still in PIO mode. Removed the drive to have it reinstall/redetect on reboot, still no dice.
After looking around on Microsoft’s site and reading all about the CRC errors that can cause this to happen (along with a partial fix), I came across this fix as well. Did both, and am now back up with DMA mode, and everything is hunky-dorey.
Need Portland Lodging Help
I’m looking for some good lodging in the Portland area for this upcoming weekend (nights of Friday the 11th until Sunday the 13th — possibly coming in on the 10th if the price is right). I’m going to a wedding in Oregon City, but I’d probably like to be on the other side of the freeway so I can take the kids to the zoo, etc… . The rub is that there will be 5 of us: Me, my wife, my 18 year old sister-in-law, and my two small children (6 and 3) so ideally we’d either need a suite or a small home or something.
The various vacation rental sites didn’t have much (I’m used to Central Oregon that has hundreds of vacation rental homes), and the chains that we’ve tried are all booked or too expensive for the room size we need.
Anybody got a good hookup? Email me at jake [at] utterlyboring [dot] com or comment here.
Update on 8/6: Thanks for the offers and the help, but we actually found some relatives that live really close to where we need to be, so we’ll be crashing with them. Thanks anyway!
Sick
If you’ve sent me an email in the last 24 or so hours, don’t expect a reply really soon. I was sick in bed all day yesterday and am still recovering today (my daughter’s 3rd birthday). Back to regularly scheduled blogging when I’m back up and going.
Bend Forums Beta Is Live
OK, so I’ve owned the domains bendforums.com and bendforum.com for a long while, and I’ve finally decided to do something with them. I’ve thrown up an installation of Vanilla over at Bend Forums. It’s still very much in beta form, but the only want to make it work the best it can is to have folks use it.
I’m still going to probably tweak/change the template, add/change categories (I like to keep it simple as I hate trying to figure out which category to post in when there are dozens listed), and add some more features. It could go up, it could go down, but my loyal readers here (and fellow Bend-ites) are welcome to register and start breaking it for me, making suggestions (I have a category for that), etc… .
So go ahead and register, create a topic, and have at it. I do have some basic ground rules that I reserve the right to edit at any time, so please try to stick to those.
U3 Uninstaller and Remover
I recently bought a new USB key as my job commandeered my old 256mb one (I am using it instead of a floppy for the configuration media for the ZoneCD for the hot spot I setup). So I bought a new 512mb SanDisk Micro, and was going to start following some of the suggestions on these various sites and fill the thing up. I plug it in and this stupid U3 service installed and popped up (which is a service far more annoying than useful). Despite deleting the U3 files off the key, they still came back. It was slowing down loading of the key, too, and it was really annoying.
After a Google search, I realized I wasn’t the only one with the problem, and found that U3 has an uninstall application. Apparently there’s a hidden partition that it clears out, which would explain my inability to remove it.
So if anybody ends up with a U3-enabled USB key, there is hope if you value your sanity.
Anybody Want An Old Mac?
I’ve inherited an old Macintosh Performa 6400/180 from a homeowner that I work with, and I have no idea what to do with it. It’s not even remotely new enough to give me an excuse to learn OS X (some folks have gotten it to run, but I doubt it would run well). I don’t know if it’s even worth installing Debian’s PowerPC Linux port to just tinker with it (I don’t have room in my house or time for it and I don’t need the frustration of trying to install it on this thing). I haven’t bothered to boot the thing up to see what’s even on it, software and OS-wise.
Generally, if I had an old PC, I know I could at least part it out and use some of it, but I don’t know Mac hardware at all (it’s been many years since I’ve opened one up). And I don’t know if there are local charities that would take it (I’d like to see the thing put to use instead of just dumping it). Heck, if it were even possible, I could make a PC with off-the-shelf parts, but I’m not really thinking I want to tinker with it that much.
Any Mac geeks locally want the thing? I have a monitor and keyboard and mouse to go along with it. It’s yours if you want it and can come get it (I live in Northeast Bend). Just email me at jake [at] this site’s domain or comment here if you have any suggestions as to what I should do with it (and taking it out to the desert and shooting it full of holes is not an option).
Be Safe Today
Like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really like this holiday. I don’t mind the fireworks, the problem lies in the fact that I live just a few blocks from Pilot Butte and have a great view of the fireworks show (for those folks who don’t live here, thats where the huge fireworks display is launched in Bend). What that means is that everybody in Bend has a tendency to flock to our neighborhood to not only watch the fireworks that burn the Butte every year, but to show off their stuff with their own fireworks show that’s equally as loud (if not louder) than what they shoot off the Butte. And they’re usually at it all night long, nearly setting my house on fire on multiple occasions, and despite phone calls to the police nearly every year, nothing ever changes.
I just know that one of these days somebody’s going to get themselves killed within about two or three blocks of my house. I am glad, however, that these idiots don’t live across the street from me anymore, otherwise the night would be a lot longer and somebody would get killed much sooner.
It’s going to be a long night, and I’ll be enjoying the show from the comfort of my living room as we have a good view from my couch. And if you don’t have a fireworks show where you’re at, here’s the virtual show that I link to every year.