RTFM - In The Kitchen

There are times when you should truly take the advice as provided in the title. "Read The Fine Manual". Well, in this case, it was a recipe. I had to have read this thing 3 or 4 times before I started cooking. Each and every time I read the instructions, I came to the same conclusion. It wasn't until it was WAY too late did I realize my mistake. Thankfully, I didn't ruin dinner into the trash can. I got lucky this time.

For this episode in the kitchen, I was attempting to make Island Pork Tenderloin. I thought I had everything covered, until the first set of instructions were improperly completed. After getting the dry rub mixed up and applied to the tenderloin, the instructions said to "brown, 4 minutes".

Well, I managed to mistake the meaning of this entry. I dropped the tenderloin into the skillet and set it down for 4 minutes on EACH side. It was only until later that I realized it was to brown each side and this should only take 4 minutes. Anyway, part of the confusion that I ran into was that this tenderloin was roughly in the shape of a square or cylinder. I only later realized that there were 2 pieces of tenderloin that were frozen together. The defrost cycle didn't do as well of a job this time around and they were pretty convincingly tied together. Therefore, after the 16 minute "browning" time I had put forth did I realize that 4 minutes was total, not per side.

Well, after this is all said & done, I come to pray that the remaining step of baking a marinade into the tenderloin would render it as edible. This time I was lucky and it was moist and delicious.

One of these days I'm going to ruin an entire meal. I dread that day.

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8 bit Video Game Revival

I happened to stumble upon this website today. I don't even remember how I found it, but I had to share it with you.

Someone has decided to take a few of our favorite 8 bit video games and recreate them into a human stop motion video. Have a look over at Project GAME OVER.

If you would like to have a look at the specific projects they've completed thus far, I have them listed individually for you.
Tetris
Pole Position
Space Invaders
Pong

Now that you may have reviewed their projects to date, I would like to share my take on the project. I think it is hilarious. To think about the effort that they put into getting these accomplished inspires quite an interesting mental image. Think about it, on a couple of these, they have quite a few complex constructions to make. People, left and right move from one chair to the next and sit there for a photo to be taken. And they do this for a few hours. I think the max time was 6 hours. That's craziness, but cool.

It sounds to me to be a labor of love for the guys producing it and the extras, known as "pixels" have just got to be good friends or really enthusiastic about the completion of this video.

Once they get the video/photographic process complete, they take it one step further to voice record the audio. That's amazing. It's fun & a perfect fit for the apparent goal of the project.

Well, enough of that for now, I hope you find this as fun and interesting as I have.

Peace.

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How NOT To Install A New Hard Drive

Late last year Angel presented to me a problem. She was out of hard drive space. She was working on school projects, transporting them to and fro and since her projects are audio related (some of them video too) they take up some serious space.

When I built her computer, I had taken this possibility into consideration. I got her a 75G SATA hard drive for nothing but project work. Well, it just so happened that when she moved to GA before me, I was having difficulty with my rigs at that time. I took the liberty of using some of her project drive as a backup location. Even after I moved down to join her, there wasn't much motivation to get that data off of her machine. Well, at this time it was needed. I took my files back to my computer and uninstalled some games from her computer. Between these two activities, I managed to free up somewhere in the neighborhood of 15G of space. Well, it wasn't but moments later that she consumed a good portion that space.

This all took place right before the wedding. We really didn't have the money to be spending on either of our machines and time was a premium too. Even while we were on our honeymoon, we had discussed buying her a new hard drive shortly after we got home. Ironically, this didn't happen. It became a low priority and all but forgotten.

It is pretty well known that as a couple, I'm the big spender of the two of us. That's saying something significant. I'm pretty conservative with what I'll spend money on and she's even more so. Amazing, how did I find a woman that doesn't like to shop? Anyway, since I am the spender and I know how to curb my spending (by not going to stores or temping myself), it took quite a while for me to be in a place to peruse the prices of hard drives.

Then, before we knew it, it was Christmas shopping season again. In our shopping, we visited Fry's a couple of times. I even managed to go alone. Well, on my solo trip to Fry's I took an opportunity to check out their hard drive selection. I was amazed. I was able to find a .5 Terabyte (Western Digital 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 16MB buffer) hard drive for a mere $100. That was a deal I was not willing to walk away from.

I initially had intentions of giving it to Angel as a Christmas gift. However, once she caught wind that I "might" have bought her a piece of computer hardware as a gift she wasn't happy. After some additional consideration, since we'd already discussed the purchase, it wouldn't have been much of a gift. We both knew she needed more space and the purchase was already consented, so, as a gift, it would not have been fair. Anyway, it wasn't like it was going to be her only gift. So I broke down and told her what I had found.

Well, part of the low cost of the drive was that it was an OEM model. It didn't come with the data or power cables included. I wasn't concerned about this because I knew that the motherboard for Angel's computer came with two sets. Well, after a few weeks of the drive sitting on the desk, Angel began to question when it was going to be completed. Well, once I found the motivation to search for the cables amongst my collection of parts, I came up dry. To get this guy installed, I would have to return to Fry's again.

Saturday, when we got out of bed, we went shopping. Of course, one of the places on the list was Fry's. The rest of the shopping was unexciting unless you want to hear about the snow and lack of eggs at the grocery store, but that's a completely different story.

Once we get home, Angel throws the bag with the cables in it and says to get to work. She didn't want me to help with the groceries, she wanted me to get it installed. I see her resolve to get it done was much bigger than mine. One of the additional tasks I had to do was swap our video cards because apparently Pro Tools does not like the g-force line or needed a driver update or something. Since I was tearing into the computer, swapping the video cards was easier since I knew that the ATI card that was in my PC worked like a charm.

Back to the hard drive.

Well, the SATA controller in the computer is configured to be a hardware RAID. With all of my experience with RAID on SCSI, I made an assumption regarding how this was supposed to proceed. When I booted the computer, I immediately jumped into the controller BIOS application. Since I didn't want the two SATA drives to be in a single RAID array, I thought I would have to create a new RAID 0 specification for the new hard drive. As I immediately found out, this was not the case. When I selected the RAID 0 option and said, "Yes, I am sure", the controller placed the two drives into a single RAID 0 array. This is so not what I wanted. I removed the RAID 0 definition from the two drives, but the damage was already done. Assigning them into a single container blew away the MBR on the existing drive.

I booted the computer and initially discovered that the drive letter definition for the old drive was gone. When I opened the Disk Manager, it immediately prompted me to initialize both drives. I knew I had trouble at this point. I don't know what the initialize command would do to the existing drive so I didn't do it. At this point I also wasn't about to play with the new drive so I canceled out of the process completely.

Now that I have definitive knowledge that I trashed the drive, my options have become quite limited. The phone was my only line of attack left. They typical sources (Exile & Darkace) were scouted first to no avail (no answer). Then I gave FloydMonk a call. He was available, but after I explained the situation, he didn't have any direct answers to provide. HOWEVER, he did make the recommendation to talk to his dad.

That idea was a sunbeam that shattered my black cloud. Ever since we were in high school, I have had tons of respect for his dad. Thankfully, I was able to reach his dad. Once I was able to accurately portray what had gone down, he was immediately able to point me in the right direction. He sent me to download GetDataBack. This is not a free product, but was the one that carried his highest recommendation. There was a free alternative, but in this situation, better was better than free.

Once I got the application downloaded, installed and fired up, it was the time of reckoning. Will the application find my data (well, Angel's data)? This was very important. Three plus years of data to include all of her AI school work was on this drive. If I lost the data, she would have strung me up in the backyard from a tree by my balls, naked and lord only knows what else.

Well, immediately the application was able to find the MFR (Master File Record) and started to spew out filenames and sector locations. We're in business. So, I let the application run for an hour or so. When it was complete, it said that it had found 64G of data on the drive. According to Angel, this was right on the money. Speaking of money, it was also time to spend some. Granted, this was ultimately my fault, but I was both relieved and frustrated that I had to spend $80 to restore the data.

Much of that data was literally irreplaceable, eighty dollars is nothing in comparison to the value that Angel placed on her work. And rightly so. I would be crushed if I were to loose a hard drive, but life would go on. Conversely, Angel still needs all of that data to complete her degree and to have a portfolio to assist her with getting a job. The damage would have been immense.

To shorten the remainder of the story, I setup the new hard drive wrong the first time. Avid software is very particular about the setup of the equipment it is to use. Pro Tools will NOT use a dynamic drive in windows. So, even after I finished the data restoration, I had to format the drive again and re-restore it to a basic drive configuration. As it turned out, I didn't want a dynamic drive anyway, but I didn't clearly understand what a dynamic drive was. Dynamic drives are a software RAID. Clearly not what I wanted. I was glad the software stopped me from moving forward.

So, in summary, boot your OS after installing a drive before thinking you know what to do. Wait to see if the OS acknowledges the new hardware before trying to take lower level configuration steps. I honestly don't think I would be here today if I had irreparably lost that data. The good news is, the new drive is configured correctly, Pro Tools is working beautify (even better now that it has its video card back) and the data that was on the damaged drive was restored without issue. All is good in the world again.

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Disposable Computer

The days of the disposable PC are finally here. You can buy a machine that intentionally prevents you from storing data on it and costs little enough that the entire system becomes plug & chuck. I have just discovered a brand new laptop (technically a sub-notebook) from Asus will cost you between $250 and $500. Really, even a $500 machine and is fully functioning out of the box machine is almost unheard of today.

I was poking around in my book marks today and found a link that I hadn't looked at in a very long time. I was about to delete it because I remember why I marked it in the first place. I was impressed that some online company would custom paint your computer for you. Anyway, since I have no use for this, I was about to circular file it. Well instead, I checked out what was on the page. I happened to come across a sticker for a website that I wasn't familiar, Virtual-Hideout. So, I was intrigued. I hit up the website and found this mod that they referred to as " One Eee to Rule Them All".

After reading this post, I was curious what in the hell a Eee was and why did it have so much modding interest. I Googled Eee but I wasn't finding anything that would answer my question. I resorted to the next best research tool for technological acronyms, Wikipedia. A simple search for Eee delivered me promptly to ASUS Eee PC documentation page.

I was quite amazed that an Eee mod was a modification made to this specific model of machine. I won't bore you with the specs and details of this machine, you can read that for yourself on the Wiki site. But the most interesting aspect to this machine is its cost, intentional lack of storage space, and it runs Linux with KDE.

From what I can tell, this machine is a small form factor. There are people complaining out there that the keyboard is too small and it only has a 7" diagonal monitor that runs 600 X 480. The boot time is pretty impressive also. Anyway, if someone is looking for a dumb internet terminal, here it is. I don't think that you'll be doing too much gaming on this system and the small form factor might cause eye strain if used for long periods of time. However, if you are only using your full size desktop computer to browse the internet or are willing to store all of your personal information on thumb drives or carry a portable USB harddrive with your machine, this is an easy sell.

I was recently thinking about getting my hands on such a machine. My work has me scheduled to do some traveling in the near future and being machineless is less than desirable, yet manageable. For personal reasons, an internet machine for my drill weekends and trips to Pittsburgh, to have my own machine handy would prove useful. However, my search has ended, even before this came along, as my employer has decided to upgrade my work PC and I was subsequently able to talk them into a laptop. I won't be getting it any time in the near future, but the fact it is in the works is promising. I think I'll put a personal i-net machine on hold until I have the extra money to invest in it, right now debt management is key. Though, it is nice to know options such as this are available when I'm ready.

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