bamed.org

Right after Christmas I purchased myself an Asus Eee PC.  It’s what we call an Ultra Mobile PC(UMPC).  It has a 7″ screen and weighs in at about 2 lbs.  Let me just say, I love this thing.  It comes installed with a customized version of Xandros that’s perfect for new users.  Very SIMPLE.  But simple doesn’t cut it for me, so I quickly started hacking away at the default OS.  There’s a great community built around the Eee at http://www.eeeuser.com, where I found lot’s of useful advice.  But when it came down to it the default Xandros OS was just too hacked to really be usable for me.  The final breaking point for me was the fact that you couldn’t require a password to login to the OS if you were in “Advanced Mode”, that is if you were using a regular KDE interface instead of the “Basic Mode” dumbed down interface.   So I loaded Ubuntu on to a flash drive and installed it on the default OS.  There’s a few things you need to watch for and tweak when using an Eee.  It uses a solid state hard disk, which is basically an SDHC card soldered unto the motherboard, and SDHC’s have a limited number of writes.  So you need to disable any swap partitions, or swap files, and DO NOT use a journaling file system.  Again, you can find all the useful you need to properly setup your OS of choice at the Eeeuser site.

So I got Ubuntu working on it, I got Compiz working pretty well on it, I even got Diablo II, and Wow working, though Wow is kinda laggy.  I take this thing with me everywhere, it is SO handy.  So I ordered a USB DVD-burner, and a USB enclosure for 2.5″ HDD’s.  I had a 120GB 2.5″ HDD lying around, so I plugged it in and managed to get Windows installed on it.  That wasn’t an easy task I might add.  It turns out Windows doesn’t support booting from an USB device.  So I had to install Windows into a VM, then I ran a script I found at USBoot.org which setup the necessary drivers in the VM, then copied the Windows install to the USB HDD, and all is well.

I think my next project is to try install OSX on my Eee.

In case anybody out there is still shopping for a Christmas present for me, here’s a list: http://www.thinkgeek.com/brain/gimme.cgi?wid=81d6c846c

I don’t normally talk about this, but I have Fibromyalgia.  Last night was one of those nights when the touch of the blanket covering me in bed was painful, and today is one of those days when the touch of the clothes on my back are painful.  It hurts to move; it hurts to not move.  Such is life.  The good news is that I don’t have these days very often, and diet and exercise are supposed to help, which I’ve started doing.  And of course the best news is that God is in heaven, and one day I’ll join Him there.  So all is well.

It’s official!  Peter Jackson will be producing two new movies based on ‘The Hobbit’.  Catch the details at http://www.thehobbitblog.com/.

2010 is too far away.

It’s on the desk of most of my co-workers. Every time I go to someone’s desk to help them with something it sits there and taunts me. Yesterday it was in my mailbox here at work. Someone gave it as a Christmas present. I saved it and brought it home for the kids, unopened, but it taunted me all day long. Right before Christmas is a BAD time to start a diet, but so far so good. The temptation is there, but I’m resisting.

Oh… what does, “Nuq daq yuj da’pol,” mean? It’s Klingon, and it means, “Where’s the chocolate?”

Reading through the Lord of the Rings again I have trouble picturing Elijah Wood as Frodo. He’s much too thin for a hobbit, don’t you think. And while we’re on the subject, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd are way to thin to be Merry and Pippin. Sean Astin as Sam was the only one to even closely resemble a hobbit, and even so he looks more like I picture Sam after all the adventuring and lack of food. I imagine hobbits to be short and round, more like Tolkien describes them. The movie just made them out to be short and left out the roundness. Of course the movie also left out the move to Brandybuck, the Old Forest, Tom Bombadil (still a bit miffed about that one), and the Barrow-Downes, about 150 pages of great stuff.

Anyway, speaking of roundness… I’ve joined a Biggest Loser Contest. You can read the details about it, and follow my progress at http://citpodcast.wiki.zoho.com/Biggest-Loser-Contest.html. At the moment there are 15 people competing. Each person has put $25 into the pot, and whoever wins the most weight (percentage, not actual pounds) gets the pot. The competition is amongst the group of Church IT RoundTable people. My wife has really gotten on board and come up with a healthy menu and is still keeping me well fed, I’m just eating food with less fat and fewer calories. I’m also cutting out the Mountain Dew. I normally consume large quantities of the stuff on a daily basis. I’ve switched to water. I may be grouchy for a bit, but the pounds should fall off just from that switch. The competition started last Monday, while I was stuck in Tulsa, so I got started a little late. If you notice I didn’t lose much this week it’s because I didn’t get started until Friday.

I suppose at some point I should start exercising as well…

I just finished reading the first two books in the “HALO” series, but before I read the third one I’m really in to mood for the Lord of the Rings, so I started reading it this week.  It’s been awhile since I’ve read it.  My sisters gave me the series for Christmas 2000, and I think the following January was the last time I’ve read the whole thing through, so it’s definitely time.

I have a brother-in-law in the army who spent the last 15 months in Iraq, and just came back. His wife, my wife’s sister, has been staying in Joplin while he’s been in Iraq. So when he came back, I volunteered to drive her down to Ft. Hood in Texas to meet him. His mother was supposed to do it, but canceled at the last moment because she needed some kind of surgery, so it was all kind of last minute. The plan was for me to drive their car with my sis-n-law down to TX, then they were to pay for my way back home to Joplin, MO. They chose to send me back via a bus.

So anyway, I left Killeen, TX at 7:10AM Sunday morning on my way to Joplin. I made it all the way to Tulsa, OK by about 7:30PM, less than two hours from Joplin. If you haven’t been following along, an ice storm hit the MidWest this weekend. So when I got to Tulsa I was told all bus routes out of Tulsa were cancelled for the night, and the next possible bus would be 12:45PM the next day. For a little while I thought I’d be spending the night on the floor of the bus station, but I called around and found that the son of an elder at College Heights lives in Tulsa and is the youth minister of a church there. So some calls were made and I spent the night at his house. The next day there’s more ice, and when I call the bus station they tell me all buses out of Tulsa are canceled for the day and to try back tomorrow. Meanwhile, my family is back in Joplin, trees down everywhere as my last post illustrated, and without power. So I spent Monday morning making calls trying to get my family taken care of and trying to get myself back to Joplin. PTL the Church took good care of my family. Someone came and got them from our house, then brought them to the Church which was being used as a shelter. Then when the power at the church went out, they went home with one of our elders and were very well taken care of.

Then Monday night, my boss, the Minister of Administration at College Heights drove the 2 hours to Tulsa and brought me home.

It was quite a crazy weekend, that could have turned out with my spending 2+days on the floor of a bus station and my family freezing in the dark, but the Church took good care of us, and we all had a warm place to stay and were well taken care of.

Tonight I’m hosting a LAN party in my garage.  We’ve talked about playing OSS-only games, but haven’t planned well for such a thing, so it may not work out.  Instead we’re going to play the usual CountStrik, WarCraft III, and probably Worms.  I’ve downloaded a Linux Live CD designed specifically for gaming and we may give it a try.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

So we’re starting a series going through Judges at church. The following video was shown Sunday morning to encourage people to read through Judges on their own.