WEEK 8 2013
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Saturday 23 February
2013
Saturday - Well, it was time to bite
the bullet and install Bootcamp and Win7, as the Sony laptop has be
unusable for the last few days. I'm not sure if it's hardware or just
some bitrot, but it's a pain.
Technically, yes, Bootcamp and Win7 installed in an hour or so.
Firstly, downloading the various support packages for Bootcamp took a
couple of hours - it kept hanging at 20%. Other than that it was pretty
painless to install - I was concerned that the installed had hung a
couple of times, but it always eventually finished. I chose a partition
size of 80GB, bigger than the suggested 32GB minimum, but smaller than
the old laptops 100GB.
Win7 itself took about an hour. Again the progress bars would just STOP
for five or ten minutes, which sort of defeats the purpose of having
them. After a couple of reboots it was installed in basic VGA mode, and
then the installation of the drivers from Apple took place. I had to
manually run the setup.exe, rather than Windows finding it on the
external USB drive, but everything installed OK. There was a bit of an
issue with the video drivers for external monitors that seems to mostly
have been cleared up.
Then, Windows Updates. I just selected everything, since it's a new
install. So far we are approaching, after twelve hours or so, nearly
200 updates and over a gigabyte of downloads. Sheesh.
Mostly it seems to be working. Tomorrow I'll install some userland software, Office, Firefox, Nvu, and all the rest.
Friday
- A friend inquired about that picture below, that showed my Dad's best
man, asking if he was a family member. Amazingly that simple question
made me remember his name: Paul Rolafson (Rolason?). Dad had only a
sister, so Paul as his best friend was also his best man. I
remember seeing him when I was about 10 years old, but not after that.
Not sure what happened, a move, a falling out? No real way to tell now.
I suppose my older sister might know.
Which brings up another family memory thing: during WWII my mother
worked in a bomb manufacturing plant, somewhere in the Midwest. By
chance I ran across a review of some sort of TV show with the name Bomb
Girls. It seemed so contrived & soapish that I have never bothered
to look to see if it's available around here.
Thursday 21 February 2013
Thursday
- Talking to my friend about starting on a new app, since we are kind
of on hiatus, waiting on the artist. This second app is actually a
great deal simpler than the first. It was going to be the first, then
we decided it was too simple, but now, after looking about at the App
Store and what people need, we think it might be a good thing after
all.
Wednesday 20 February
2013
Wednesday
- There is snow on the hills about the AV, and it's cold, but it's not
the same as a nice blanket of snow on the ground. Oh well.
The old Sony laptop is having more and more problems. I removed some of
the old anti-virus stuff, but it is still having problems booting and
in seeing the network. Not sure if it's a hardware issue, or just
bitrot on the old (original!) XP installation. I still have a few
programs on there that I need - the differential correction software
for GIS for one, and a couple of other things, but it's really time to
migrate to the MacBook and the Win7 partition for that stuff.
Reading up on the Parallels stuff, you can install Win7 on a root
partition, via Bootcamp, and it runs at full speed on the hardware. You
can still boot into OSX directly as well, so it also can make use of
all the system resources. And finally, one can also import the
Win7 Bootcamp partition as a Virtual Machine into OSX using Parallels,
so you essentially have the best of both worlds - all the hardware for
Win7 when needed, and all the hardware for OSX when needed, and sharing
the two when the workload isn't high (most of the time).
Tuesday
- No snow. Not that I noticed, looking out the windows a couple of
times during the night. February is a good month for it, we've had
snows several times in the last ten years during this period, but this
was just a little front, blowing through by morning without much
rainfall in the valley. There was a nice coating of snow on the hills
to the north and south, but it looks like the snow level was about
3000'.
Monday
- Did a few hours of work on some GIS stuff, and turned the manure into
the vegetable beds. This meant that I first had to take down all the
stakes, frames and watering stuff, then turn in the manure and a bunch
of bags of leaves that I'd been saving for this. It was cold and
blustery but I was warm and perspiring by the time it was done. My back
held out (it was a little sore yesterday), and hopefully the rain/snow
that's predicted will moisten the planters and start the decomposition
going!
By early evening it was sprinkling, but still rather warm, 42F or so.
They said snow after midnight, so if I wake up I'll have to remember to
check outside.
There were some interesting pictures floating around the internet last
week, of what Mars would look like with oceans and an atmosphere, and
even deserts and green areas.
I've seen things like this before. This is more of an artist's
impression rather than an actual physical model. The author, Kevin
Gill, did
use some sort of elevation model to get the oceans and seas in the
correct spots though the atmosphere and green/dry spots were by what
looks nice.
I've seen this sort of thing before. The act of adding water up to a certain level makes what is called a floodplain map (makes sense) and people have used, for example, ESRI products, to do similar things for Mars.
Sunday
- Warm and nice. So I took the opportunity to shovel a pile of sh*t.
No, really.
Valentines Day means it's time for composting, so I went with a friend
and collected a bunch of (free) horse manure. Rather that shovel it directly
into the back of my little trailer as we'd done the last couple of years, instead we brought along the rolling waste
bins from our respective houses and shoveled into those. Thus we
avoided having to shovel it out again into wheelbarrows to trundle into our
back yards. It worked pretty well - the bins couldn't be completely
loaded because of the weight, but we got enough.
I did a bit of work, a bit of reading, a few chores - trimming the
roses in the front, which is a lot easier with the rock landscaping!
It looks like the
weather will be stormy next week, even a chance of snow, so there
were some things to catch up on.
