Big Dan’s Site

Long story short, I’ve mentioned several times about my move to Florida and I’ve been putting it off because I cannot afford the move. Well my move is coming a lot faster than I thought. For my birthday this Saturday, my mother is buying me the Amtrak ticket so I’ll be leaving the Monday or Tuesday after Mother’s Day. It’s only a 24 hour train trip, I’m taking the train rather than flying because I can check more luggage on the train.

I’m just 2 weeks, a bus ride and train ride away from Florida. I cannot wait. My best friend is a kitchen manager at an old age home and says he can get me in right away so I’ll be working a 9-5 again which will probably be better for me but allot me less time at the computer maybe that’s a good thing too.

Next week, I’m going to ship a big box with most of my clothes and some small electronic stuff then once I get there mom will ship the rest of the stuff I’ll pack before I leave.

I’m pumped and excited.

On my diet, I’m not doing that well it’s been too cold to walk here plus rainy and I’ve gone off a bit on the junk food but tomorrow is a new day hopefully the weather will be a little better so I can get out and walk. Hopefully I’ll also be able to quit smoking tomorrow too.

I cannot wait to get on that train!!

Just about everyone who has a computer, has a morning routine aka morning blitz; That is what sites they *must* check, what they do, etc. I run through a bunch of things just to check that my servers are still up and running and nothing major has happened or is going on the forums I own or have responsibility on.

My morning routine probably isn’t all that unique I wake up, turn on my computer, start the coffee, go brush my teeth & wash my face, go back to my computer and log in, turn on a music channel on the TV then I fire up Firefox.

My homepage is iGoogle which has a Gmail preview right in the middle, right away I look to make sure there aren’t any reported posts from the forums I run/moderate on then I look to make sure my cron scripts ran and sent me an email confirmation. I open my full Gmail in a new tab and browse over my inbox. From there I open my DJ forum and search for new posts, just look over the titles to see if anything looks suspicious. Then it’s off to new posts for Discuss NY, I browse stuff that looks interesting, maybe reply on a thread or two. From DNY, I go to Web Talk Forums which is my main hangout (that I don’t own), I also moderate there but it’s a fun place I try and post on at least 1 or 2 threads a day but sometimes I just ain’t got nuttin’ to say.

After I get done with DNY and WTF I go back to my new posts search for my board and open all posts in new tabs, I read over them, reply on some then mark the forums read.

From there it’s back to iGoogle where I open Google Reader in a new tab and look at my local headlines first, then what’s new on Woot and then browse over the rest of my feeds most of its fluff so I mark all of them read.

Then, I’m done for the morning. On a good morning with no issues to attend to, emails that need an immediate reply, or security patches to install, or posts on forums that need my attention I can be done in a half hour – forty five minutes. Other mornings it can take me a good hour or two to just trudge through it all some times more.

So what’s your morning routine? My reason for bringing this up is my new exercise routine, that I started last week but am going to stick to this week. My goal is to be up and out of the house for my morning walk as fast as possible however with my wake up blitz that can be a challenge some days. I think for tomorrow, I’m just going to wake up, browse my email then have breakfast and go for my walk, save the forum browsing for after I get back from my walk as long as there’s no reported posts/server crashes to attend to.

For those of you that have a morning exercise routine, how have you changed your morning blitz to accommodate it?

This week I started my new diet and exercise program. Now that spring is here and the drama is over with my leg and I can walk again fairly comfortably theres no better time.

I started out by setting my alarm clock for 7:30 on Monday. Now you all know I’m no morning person by far but I still got up and out of bed. My plan was to walk 1.5 miles in the morning and 1.5 miles in the afternoon. It didn’t work out too well with my computer issues on Monday & Tuesday, I couldn’t get out of the house. However Tuesday I did do two walks one at 2:30 in the afternoon and one after dinner about 6:30. It killed my body doing them so close together like that. I went back to one walk per day but pushed myself a little further on each walk for a total of about 2 miles per day.

Thursday and today, I got out of bed after 12:00, I gave up on getting up in the morning. Next week is a new week and I’m really going to try to get up and out the door for my first walk of the day by 8:30.

Other than that I’ve been majorly cutting down on my eating which is a good thing but very hard because the walking works up a huge appetite for me.  My new rule was to actually eat 3 meals per day, I normally skip breakfast and lunch which in turns makes me feast at night right before bed. Also, I wouldn’t eat after 6 PM. That didn’t work out to well either.

Next week my goal is to accomplish and stick to my goals for this week, ie make them happen! : 2 – 1.5 mile walks per day; one in the morning after breakfast and one in the evening after dinner.  Eat 1 normal sized breakfast, a large lunch and small dinner. No snacking except for Saturday night and I’ll allow myself a big dinner on Sunday the only day I’ll break from walking.

Next week I also really want to quit smoking, I’ve been talking about it forever and my birthday is next Saturday so I want to quit before my 24th birthday. I’ll quit smoking on Monday, cold turkey. This ain’t gonna be fun.

I have a lot of other little things I wanted to write about, places I figured out to avoid calories and stuff but for now this is a decent synopsis.  I did buy a new domain for this, I’m thinking of setting up a new blog just for my diet stuff as I don’t want to flood this one with it. We’ll see if I get to it over the weekend 

Well, thanks for listening! Anyone else recently start a diet and been successful with it?

Lately, I haven’t been blogging much, I suppose it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time just “fixing” my computers. Fixing not in the sense that it’s broken but fixing in the sense of customizing. In February, I got my new HP Desktop which came with Vista. I ordered an OEM copy of XP the first day I got the computer. I’ve played with Vista a lot and it’s an okay OS however I really really don’t care for the fact that it was designed to annoy you and I, aka the end user. Microsoft shouldn’t put it’s users in the middle to try and force developers to develop properly. Plus Vista is a memory hog, I don’t like waiting 30+ seconds to log on to my machine when I have a pretty “beefy” system and nothing running at startup other than AV.

On Monday I got fed up with XP because I made some changes and boinked the kernel so I formatted and installed Vista along with Ubuntu.

On Tuesday I wrote that I was disappointed with Acer, I still am but found a work around and got a fresh install of Vista on my laptop. If I could get XP on the laptop, I’d fork over the dough for another OEM copy but XP doesn’t even see the hard drive, I’ve read a few guides XP needs a driver, I suppose I’ll see what I can do

On Wednesday vBulletin released yet another version in the 3.6 series, 3.6.10, which wasn’t support to be, it’s a security patch but required a full updgrade. I ripped my hair out trying to get the custom theme on my DJ forum to work properly with the new requirements for the quick search drop down. Since my search isn’t coded into the navbar template, vB couldn’t auto-update the template. I wound up just linking the word search to the full search page instead of mucking with the new access key schema. I’ll fix it once and for all when I update to the 3.7 which was supposed to be final this week but because of the security issue it won’t be. I was a very unhappy vBulletin customer, apparently the issue has been in the 3.6 code branch for a while, why an update right in the middle of a release cycle when 3.7 is just about to go Gold?

Today, Thursday I formatted my desktop again and this time installed XP. I got all the updates installed and my favorite programs. Roboform, one of my favorite applications gave me trouble with activating again so I had to email their support which gave me an extra activation. Windows doesn’t even complain about all these activations why is Roboform? I just spent $40 on two licenses that in addition to the 3 other licenses I’ve purchased in that past that I forgot my login information for and thus cannot use any more. None the less XP is installed my computer boots much faster and the time from entering my password to a useable desktop is less than 10 seconds, I’m happy with that. Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 went Gold today, so it’s a final release. I’ve been running it since the betas, I downloaded the final release today and installed it alongside XP on my Desktop. For now, XP remains my default operating system. Once Ubuntu’s servers get a break and I can actually download some software, I’ll probably make Ubuntu my default yet again.

Other than that, I started my diet and exercise program this week, I really wanted to post a full post about that earlier this week but by the time I get down mucking around with my computers, fixing technical issues on my forums and the forums I manage, then get out for my walk I’m popped and go stright to bed when I get home. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have sometime to write about my new diet and exercise plan, which has been working out pretty good for me except for tonight, I cut my walk a little short as my back was killing me.

So that’s what’s up! I hope to be blogging more in the near future.

Lately, I haven’t been blogging much, I suppose it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time just “fixing” my computers. Fixing not in the sense that it’s broken but fixing in the sense of customizing. In February, I got my new HP Desktop which came with Vista. I ordered an OEM copy of XP the first day I got the computer. I’ve played with Vista a lot and it’s an okay OS however I really really don’t care for the fact that it was designed to annoy you and I, aka the end user. Microsoft shouldn’t put it’s users in the middle to try and force developers to develop properly. Plus Vista is a memory hog, I don’t like waiting 30+ seconds to log on to my machine when I have a pretty “beefy” system and nothing running at startup other than AV.

On Monday I got fed up with XP because I made some changes and boinked the kernel so I formatted and installed Vista along with Ubuntu.

On Tuesday I wrote that I was disappointed with Acer, I still am but found a work around and got a fresh install of Vista on my laptop. If I could get XP on the laptop, I’d fork over the dough for another OEM copy but XP doesn’t even see the hard drive, I’ve read a few guides XP needs a driver, I suppose I’ll see what I can do

On Wednesday vBulletin released yet another version in the 3.6 series, 3.6.10, which wasn’t support to be, it’s a security patch but required a full updgrade. I ripped my hair out trying to get the custom theme on my DJ forum to work properly with the new requirements for the quick search drop down. Since my search isn’t coded into the navbar template, vB couldn’t auto-update the template. I wound up just linking the word search to the full search page instead of mucking with the new access key schema. I’ll fix it once and for all when I update to the 3.7 which was supposed to be final this week but because of the security issue it won’t be. I was a very unhappy vBulletin customer, apparently the issue has been in the 3.6 code branch for a while, why an update right in the middle of a release cycle when 3.7 is just about to go Gold?

Today, Thursday I formatted my desktop again and this time installed XP. I got all the updates installed and my favorite programs. Roboform, one of my favorite applications gave me trouble with activating again so I had to email their support which gave me an extra activation. Windows doesn’t even complain about all these activations why is Roboform? I just spent $40 on two licenses that in addition to the 3 other licenses I’ve purchased in that past that I forgot my login information for and thus cannot use any more. None the less XP is installed my computer boots much faster and the time from entering my password to a useable desktop is less than 10 seconds, I’m happy with that. Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 went Gold today, so it’s a final release. I’ve been running it since the betas, I downloaded the final release today and installed it alongside XP on my Desktop. For now, XP remains my default operating system. Once Ubuntu’s servers get a break and I can actually download some software, I’ll probably make Ubuntu my default yet again.

Other than that, I started my diet and exercise program this week, I really wanted to post a full post about that earlier this week but by the time I get down mucking around with my computers, fixing technical issues on my forums and the forums I manage, then get out for my walk I’m popped and go stright to bed when I get home. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have sometime to write about my new diet and exercise plan, which has been working out pretty good for me except for tonight, I cut my walk a little short as my back was killing me.

So that’s what’s up! I hope to be blogging more in the near future.

I bought a new laptop in March, I decided on the Acer 5920-6864. Price vs features it’s the best I could get for my money: 1.66 Ghz Intel dual core processor, 3 GB RAM, 160 GB HD and a bunch of other features like built in blue tooth and web cam. Now, I really like it it’s a great little laptop in fact Vista scores it better over all than my new desktop but it doesn’t feel quite as fast.

Long story short yesterday I decided to do a fresh install of Vista on it because things just seem to be slowing down. I’ve already made the restore DVD’s via Acer’s recovery manager. I should be able to pop in the discs and restore to factory roll out right?

Nope, the restore disc is looking for a recovery partition that I wiped to install Ubuntu on, which by the way works great on this laptop.  I wiped it before I created the recovery discs and the partition was empty. Acer’s included backup software wants to use that partition to back up you files. Now the interesting thing is the partition is half the HD, 80 GB. Leaving only 80 GB for actual user data. I think it’s assine, let’s set aside the fact that a good portion of the time files are lost because of hard drive failure which makes that partition “backup” partition all together useless in a hard drive failure. 80 GB for all the music and photo’s that today’s computer users store is ludicrous, my old desktop came with an 80 GB HD in 2002!

Does it make any sense to advertise plenty hard drive space then require half of it to be used for backups, which creates a false sense of security? When I popped in the restore CD I got an “mismatch error” very cryptic error message, I searched on line and see there are some work arounds. I’ll try out some of them sometime in the future. For now, I wiped the whole HD and installed Ubuntu Hardy.

I just don’t get it.. First of all maufactuers partition schemes suck, even my new HP desktop had a crappy partitioning scheme from the factory, I cleared that up and the master restore discs work fine even without the original partitioning scheme. With Acer, I’m disappointed it’s not good enough that all manufacturers are being cheap and not including restore discs, they’re leaving it to the consumer to create them. I’m guessing most do not bother which will lead to problems down the road but now even when consumers are responsible and waste DVD-R’s on creating restore discs, Acer poorly designs the restore image to require the original partitioning structure.

What the hell Acer??

Update: I found a fix and posted on the thread here on the Notebook Review Forums: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=3266605#post3266605

Half way through April we finally get some decent spring like weather. Sometimes I doubt the whole global warning deal, especially when the cold seasons seem to be last longer. Although last winter, (2006-2007) we had considerably warmer temperatures later into the winter, 60 degress in January! This winter was a real doozy and I spent more than half of it in Florida!

I’ve got all three windows open in my bedroom and put the screens down for the living room windows. The kitchen and bathroom windows have had their screens down for a couple of days now. Mom’s talking about putting in the air conditioners already. Jeez, Ma at least wait until the first 80 degree day.

Today, I did a little spring cleaning in my bedroom, sorted through the stack of unopened bills that collected over the winter most of them went into the circular file. Also on my attack list was a bunch of newspapers that I only read parts over through the winter, I threw them all out, it’s old news anyhow. Next on my attack list is my closet, it’s small but it’s got so much crap packed into it who knows what I’ll find. I’m sort of a pack rat, I have an entire huge plastic bin of various keep sakes that I hold on to for God knows what reason. I’ll probably attack the closet over the weekend.

Oh some great news!! I went to the doc on Monday he put on a new boot to keep things in order until I could get my support stockings. I got those today so tonight I’ll cut the boot off before I go to sleep and then put the stocking on as soon as I get out of bed in the morning. $50 for elastic stockings is ridiculous but if they help me to not get any more ulcers I’m all for the ugly things.

Other than that, I plan on getting back into walking some, I did start some last week but stopped as it was hurting my leg to much. I think I’ll take advantage of the beautiful weather tonight, with a nice evening walk.

Things went unbeliveably smoothly. No complaints here, some of the issues I complained about previously such as mounting other partitions have been taking care of. With only 1 full day before the release canidate, I don’t suspect much will be changing.

As soon as RC 1 hits the mirrors, I’m going to run a fresh install on my Desktop and see how that pans out, I’ll write a full report, right here on BigDan.us!

Hmm.. I haven’t written in over a week. Been pretty busy, thinks got hectic over on the DJ Forum, most of my online time was being spent running damage control along with a couple of other staff members. Some staff members stepped down, then we had a man forum that caused a big stir so we axed that. But some positive stuff happened too. We have a brand fully custom theme that’s all ours, from Kalina Web Designs, she does awesome work and has been great throughout the whole process even making changes even after the whole thing was done. We also got a great new logo done by one of our forum members, Request Line Productions. I think it looks awesome but you be the judge.

Other than that spring is almost here we had a few days in the high 60’s, yesterday it was even 70! Today is colder (in the 40s) and raining. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be better weather wise.

Tuesday I went to the doc for a boot change. The hole looks just like a surface wound now, the one doc things my boot can come off but I have to see the head guy there Monday for him to double check. I hope it comes off as this boot is mega annoying. I’ll have to wear support stockings into the forseeable future but at least they come off at night for showers and the like.

On my desktop, I’ve decided to just dual boot XP + Ubuntu. Vista has it’s place, but it’s obviously pretty bloated when compared to XP on the same machine. Another interesting thing is my sound card sounds 100% better under XP than VIsta on a computer designed for Vista. Kinda makes you wonder about all that DRM lockout crap. I still have Vista on the laptop as I cannot get XP on here, I gotta do some research but XP cannot see my HD, I must need drivers for it.. Should be interesting trying to slip stream them in.

I went through a few cycles of installing the Hardy Betas and back to Gutsy. From the last install of Hardy it’s not ready for the prime time. I couldn’t even access other partitions on my drive, that’s pretty crappy. I think it had to do with the new security parameters they’re implementing and HAL. It’s a beta so I’m sure it’ll be fine by the time it’s released in couple of weeks. I may upgrade when RC 1 comes out tomorrow, I’m not sure though. I’ve run all the other releases from the alpha stages with out issues, this one has me a little shaky.

That being said, I’m running the betas (Ubuntu & Kubuntu) with the latest upgrades in virtual machines. They look nice but I don’t do much inside of the VM so I don’t know how it will work on full scale roll out.

Anyhow today is a family day for me. Last night went shopping for a big dinner, eggplant parmazean. Boy have prices went up $50 for a meal that used to cost about $20 to make. We’re heading for trouble economy wise, but what do I know… I gotta get to work on the gravy, catch yas later.

Hmm.. I haven’t written in over a week. Been pretty busy, thinks got hectic over on the DJ Forum, most of my online time was being spent running damage control along with a couple of other staff members. Some staff members stepped down, then we had a man forum that caused a big stir so we axed that. But some positive stuff happened too. We have a brand fully custom theme that’s all ours, from Kalina Web Designs, she does awesome work and has been great throughout the whole process even making changes even after the whole thing was done. We also got a great new logo done by one of our forum members, Request Line Productions. I think it looks awesome but you be the judge.

Other than that spring is almost here we had a few days in the high 60’s, yesterday it was even 70! Today is colder (in the 40s) and raining. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be better weather wise.

Tuesday I went to the doc for a boot change. The hole looks just like a surface wound now, the one doc things my boot can come off but I have to see the head guy there Monday for him to double check. I hope it comes off as this boot is mega annoying. I’ll have to wear support stockings into the forseeable future but at least they come off at night for showers and the like.

On my desktop, I’ve decided to just dual boot XP + Ubuntu. Vista has it’s place, but it’s obviously pretty bloated when compared to XP on the same machine. Another interesting thing is my sound card sounds 100% better under XP than VIsta on a computer designed for Vista. Kinda makes you wonder about all that DRM lockout crap. I still have Vista on the laptop as I cannot get XP on here, I gotta do some research but XP cannot see my HD, I must need drivers for it.. Should be interesting trying to slip stream them in.

I went through a few cycles of installing the Hardy Betas and back to Gutsy. From the last install of Hardy it’s not ready for the prime time. I couldn’t even access other partitions on my drive, that’s pretty crappy. I think it had to do with the new security parameters they’re implementing and HAL. It’s a beta so I’m sure it’ll be fine by the time it’s released in couple of weeks. I may upgrade when RC 1 comes out tomorrow, I’m not sure though. I’ve run all the other releases from the alpha stages with out issues, this one has me a little shaky.

That being said, I’m running the betas (Ubuntu & Kubuntu) with the latest upgrades in virtual machines. They look nice but I don’t do much inside of the VM so I don’t know how it will work on full scale roll out.

Anyhow today is a family day for me. Last night went shopping for a big dinner, eggplant parmazean. Boy have prices went up $50 for a meal that used to cost about $20 to make. We’re heading for trouble economy wise, but what do I know… I gotta get to work on the gravy, catch yas later.