So while watching pitchmen tonight, I had no idea that the funniest part of the show would be a commercial. This commercial is for JK Harris tax people. I couldn't stop laughing at all aspects of this commercal.
Okay so first, is this woman so in debt she can't afford to turn on her lights while she cleans her pot? But then this guy talks for what seems like forever, and then jimmy the giant strolls on from stage left and totally overtakes the poor soul seated to his right. But the best part in my mind is that they don't even cut, they just slowly pan away while this poor guy stares at the camera saying "Please help me get away from this linebacker that just ran in and stole my thunder."
I couldn't stop laughing, I watched it about 20 times.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Baby Roller Blades
Just heard I Get Around by the Beach Boys. To this day, whenever I hear that song, I think of the "baby roller blades" commercial. Drew had no idea what I was talking about, but a quick youtube search found the commercial, and not only did I remember the "BABY ROLLER BLADES" hook, but also about 90% of the rest of the song. I remember the weirdest shit.
Geocities Shuts Down
So Yahoo is pulling the plug on geocities. For those who don't know, geocities was the original social networking, they just didn't know it yet. There were neighborhoods (SunsetStrip for Music) street names (Palms, Alley) and then addresses (8871). Put it together (www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8871) and this was your website. It had the social networking aspect, because drop your address and check the site of someone next door to you, and they also had a music related site. People made web rings, where you would join a ring and add your address and then you would have an ad on your site that would display a random site from the web ring.
I was in 8th grade. Instead of going to the cafeteria and getting fatter, I would head to the school library every afternoon with a few friends (Jeff and Matt) and work on my geocities website. You were presented with a text block full and you filled it up with HTML and published your site for the world to see. I can still remember my first site. It was a website for guitar tabs. It's first iteration had a pale orange and green tiled background. I remember spending a week wondering why the background wasn't showing up (I spelled it backround). There was no spell check, there was no color coding. This was the original days of HTML.
I never understood it, but Jeff's site got a shit-ton of hits. All the time his site was geocities site of the day. There was absolutely nothing on his site of value. He had a few paint shop pro tutorials, some information about his Everquest guild, it was all over the place, pointless worthless information, and people went to his site (I think this was the beginning of the blog)
My first redesign to my site added frames. The top half held the content, the bottom half was split into three sections. The first section was a midi player that played all the hip midi jams like sublime santeria. the middle section was navigation, an image map created in paint shop pro, portraying the "Got Milk" monster with a t-shit that said "Got Tabs". Back then there wasn't a tool to help with image maps, I had to write down cordinates and plug them in manually. The third section contained a drop down list to choose different songs for the midi player. The tabs on the site were all written by me, and were all half songs. Elastica - the Connection, for instance, contained the main riff (DA-DANANADA-DANANADA-DANANA-DA-NANANA)... you know the riff... that was it. And thinking back it was probably wrong. Salt and Pepper - Push It, had the same thing for the tab. Main riff (DA-NANANANANANANANANANA DA-NANANANANANANANANANANA) and obviously that was the whole song.
I ended a friendship over a geocities site. true story. Another friend started making a tab site as well. He spent much more time working on it, and looking back, his was better. He focuses solely on Nirvana tabs, and even had a Kurt Cobain tribute page with animated gif torches burning on either side of a picture of him. I was pissed he stole my idea and then did it better. Looking back, I was kind of like Cartman in the whole situation. He later abandoned his tab site since there wasn't going to be many updates to a tab site where the bands front man blew his brains out, and he made a southpark animated gif site. He drew the south park characters scanned them and then animated them, but our friendship was never the same, I kicked him out of my band, and started a 3 piece and he joined another band with Herb, who turned out to be a furry.
If you go to the internet archive and look at my old site, you will see that I never set a "noframes" page, so it wasn't archived. It makes me sad because I would love to rehash all that all code and see what I was doing. Another fond memory I have from my geocities page is showing my uncle who worked for a computer company. He asked how I wrote it and didn't believe I wasn't using a tool to make it work. He went on and on about how his company bought a program called frontpage that made their website a million times better and I should get involved. Luckily I decided on Allaire Homesite instead of Frontpage, which then transferred me to dreamweaver, with a short stop at GoLive in between.
I think back and if it wasn't for these experiences I wouldn't be in the career field I'm in now. I wouldn't be doing this for a living that's for sure. I owe my entire career to Geocities and Jeff for dragging me to the library and trying to teach me HTML. So geocities you will be missed.
GEOCITIES.COM
I was in 8th grade. Instead of going to the cafeteria and getting fatter, I would head to the school library every afternoon with a few friends (Jeff and Matt) and work on my geocities website. You were presented with a text block full and you filled it up with HTML and published your site for the world to see. I can still remember my first site. It was a website for guitar tabs. It's first iteration had a pale orange and green tiled background. I remember spending a week wondering why the background wasn't showing up (I spelled it backround). There was no spell check, there was no color coding. This was the original days of HTML.
I never understood it, but Jeff's site got a shit-ton of hits. All the time his site was geocities site of the day. There was absolutely nothing on his site of value. He had a few paint shop pro tutorials, some information about his Everquest guild, it was all over the place, pointless worthless information, and people went to his site (I think this was the beginning of the blog)
My first redesign to my site added frames. The top half held the content, the bottom half was split into three sections. The first section was a midi player that played all the hip midi jams like sublime santeria. the middle section was navigation, an image map created in paint shop pro, portraying the "Got Milk" monster with a t-shit that said "Got Tabs". Back then there wasn't a tool to help with image maps, I had to write down cordinates and plug them in manually. The third section contained a drop down list to choose different songs for the midi player. The tabs on the site were all written by me, and were all half songs. Elastica - the Connection, for instance, contained the main riff (DA-DANANADA-DANANADA-DANANA-DA-NANANA)... you know the riff... that was it. And thinking back it was probably wrong. Salt and Pepper - Push It, had the same thing for the tab. Main riff (DA-NANANANANANANANANANA DA-NANANANANANANANANANANA) and obviously that was the whole song.
I ended a friendship over a geocities site. true story. Another friend started making a tab site as well. He spent much more time working on it, and looking back, his was better. He focuses solely on Nirvana tabs, and even had a Kurt Cobain tribute page with animated gif torches burning on either side of a picture of him. I was pissed he stole my idea and then did it better. Looking back, I was kind of like Cartman in the whole situation. He later abandoned his tab site since there wasn't going to be many updates to a tab site where the bands front man blew his brains out, and he made a southpark animated gif site. He drew the south park characters scanned them and then animated them, but our friendship was never the same, I kicked him out of my band, and started a 3 piece and he joined another band with Herb, who turned out to be a furry.
If you go to the internet archive and look at my old site, you will see that I never set a "noframes" page, so it wasn't archived. It makes me sad because I would love to rehash all that all code and see what I was doing. Another fond memory I have from my geocities page is showing my uncle who worked for a computer company. He asked how I wrote it and didn't believe I wasn't using a tool to make it work. He went on and on about how his company bought a program called frontpage that made their website a million times better and I should get involved. Luckily I decided on Allaire Homesite instead of Frontpage, which then transferred me to dreamweaver, with a short stop at GoLive in between.
I think back and if it wasn't for these experiences I wouldn't be in the career field I'm in now. I wouldn't be doing this for a living that's for sure. I owe my entire career to Geocities and Jeff for dragging me to the library and trying to teach me HTML. So geocities you will be missed.
GEOCITIES.COM
Friday, April 17, 2009
Susan Boyle Is Ugly and Sings Well. Who Cares?
So I've gotten emails, and seen countless articles on the web today about it, so I figured I would chime in. I'm sure you've seen the video, the ugly woman walks on stage, everyone laughs at her (why?) then she says she wants to be a singer, people keep laughing (no idea why?) she then sings, and everyone is blown away because she can sing. it's an inspiration.
Okay, so really, who cares? I mean, being attractive has absolutely nothing to do with how well you can sing. It's not like she came on stage and said she wanted to be a stripper or a model. There are plenty of ugly people that sing. Sure, she would never make it on American Idol, it's a different show. But this show is pretty low on the totem pole, different audience all together.
I don't understand the fascination with this story? Is it that everyone in the crowd was laughing at her for not being attractive? If so, yeah, that sucks... but then everyone stopped laughing she she sang well, and I think that's even worse. Don't feel bad for it... she's still as ugly as she was when she went on stage... if you thought it was okay to vocally express your displeasure of her appearance earlier, you should still think it's okay to laugh when she's done singing.
She's going to win the competition, based solely on the fact that if you watched the show and laughed at her, you will now vote for her, and in your warped twisted mind, think that now everything is okay and you can go back to making fun of ugly people, because you "voted for an ugly chick on tv that one time" (classic 'I have a black friend so I'm not racist' move)
The other group of people voting will be ugly people that are too ashamed to even leave the house that they are watching this show on Saturday nights while all the attractive people are out enjoying themselves. They see a little bit of themselves in Susan Boyle, but have absolutely no confidence so they will never be able to accomplish what she has, so they are content with voting for her to victory.
Good for her though. She exploited her ugliness, no makeup... shunned the stylists that would have ran a comb threw her hair. She knew what she was doing, it's not like she was shocked by the fact that people liked her singing, she knew she could sing, she knew that going out with a bit of makeup and a nice hairdo would have gotten the crowd to take her a bit more serious, but she didn't want this... she orchestrated an amazing scheme to not only make it on the show, but unquestionably win the show. Good for her.
Here is the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY&feature=related
(over 20million views already)
Okay, so really, who cares? I mean, being attractive has absolutely nothing to do with how well you can sing. It's not like she came on stage and said she wanted to be a stripper or a model. There are plenty of ugly people that sing. Sure, she would never make it on American Idol, it's a different show. But this show is pretty low on the totem pole, different audience all together.
I don't understand the fascination with this story? Is it that everyone in the crowd was laughing at her for not being attractive? If so, yeah, that sucks... but then everyone stopped laughing she she sang well, and I think that's even worse. Don't feel bad for it... she's still as ugly as she was when she went on stage... if you thought it was okay to vocally express your displeasure of her appearance earlier, you should still think it's okay to laugh when she's done singing.
She's going to win the competition, based solely on the fact that if you watched the show and laughed at her, you will now vote for her, and in your warped twisted mind, think that now everything is okay and you can go back to making fun of ugly people, because you "voted for an ugly chick on tv that one time" (classic 'I have a black friend so I'm not racist' move)
The other group of people voting will be ugly people that are too ashamed to even leave the house that they are watching this show on Saturday nights while all the attractive people are out enjoying themselves. They see a little bit of themselves in Susan Boyle, but have absolutely no confidence so they will never be able to accomplish what she has, so they are content with voting for her to victory.
Good for her though. She exploited her ugliness, no makeup... shunned the stylists that would have ran a comb threw her hair. She knew what she was doing, it's not like she was shocked by the fact that people liked her singing, she knew she could sing, she knew that going out with a bit of makeup and a nice hairdo would have gotten the crowd to take her a bit more serious, but she didn't want this... she orchestrated an amazing scheme to not only make it on the show, but unquestionably win the show. Good for her.
Here is the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY&feature=related
(over 20million views already)
Business Card
So I have been trying to layout a decent business card for my side business, and I've got what I thought was a pretty decent layout... until I came across this.
well, back to the drawing board. I need something that will shoot confetti out of it
well, back to the drawing board. I need something that will shoot confetti out of it
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Another Blog about John Mayer
This is more about writing music though, with a video of john mayer proving why I'm so bad at it.
I've been playing music since 7th, 8th grade somewhere around there, and whenever I start writing something, I always give up after I try the first thing. I think, 'nah, this isn't working' and I give up. And I'm watching this video of John Mayer working on a new song. And he's starting off, and he's like here's what I have so far, and I'm thinking to myself... this is kind of weak, I don't dig it. He then layers another vocal harmony and I'm like, okay this isn't as bad as I thought... after the 4th thing he does at the end of the video, and only 2 minutes worth of messing around, he's made it sound totally different.
I think this just boils down to me not having the patience to be good at this. I'm a "now" type person and when I don't see immediate results, I kind of give up. That's why playing with Matt was so beneficial, he did all this work, he sat and wrecked his brain to put together a shell for us to come into and noodle over to make catchy ass songs. After he left, even though I was surrounded by some pretty talented people (and dave), I tried really hard to accomplish this.
I think we actually did get there with one of the new songs, but because of my personality, Brad bails and I just think that I can't keep going on like this. I'm tired of playing in a band where all we do is try out new people. But I do miss it, I miss this part of it... even though I wasn't good at it, I miss it. Much more then I do playing shows. And that's weird to me, because I've always thought of myself as the show guy in the band. I wasn't one for studio work, I was all about sharing the music with people, and not so much arguing of the amount of measures before a bridge. Once I finish school and have a bit more time, I hope I can revist this stuff again and see if I can get passed this wall of mine and make some cool shit up... even without anyone around me that can sing worth a damn.
I've been playing music since 7th, 8th grade somewhere around there, and whenever I start writing something, I always give up after I try the first thing. I think, 'nah, this isn't working' and I give up. And I'm watching this video of John Mayer working on a new song. And he's starting off, and he's like here's what I have so far, and I'm thinking to myself... this is kind of weak, I don't dig it. He then layers another vocal harmony and I'm like, okay this isn't as bad as I thought... after the 4th thing he does at the end of the video, and only 2 minutes worth of messing around, he's made it sound totally different.
I think this just boils down to me not having the patience to be good at this. I'm a "now" type person and when I don't see immediate results, I kind of give up. That's why playing with Matt was so beneficial, he did all this work, he sat and wrecked his brain to put together a shell for us to come into and noodle over to make catchy ass songs. After he left, even though I was surrounded by some pretty talented people (and dave), I tried really hard to accomplish this.
I think we actually did get there with one of the new songs, but because of my personality, Brad bails and I just think that I can't keep going on like this. I'm tired of playing in a band where all we do is try out new people. But I do miss it, I miss this part of it... even though I wasn't good at it, I miss it. Much more then I do playing shows. And that's weird to me, because I've always thought of myself as the show guy in the band. I wasn't one for studio work, I was all about sharing the music with people, and not so much arguing of the amount of measures before a bridge. Once I finish school and have a bit more time, I hope I can revist this stuff again and see if I can get passed this wall of mine and make some cool shit up... even without anyone around me that can sing worth a damn.
Texican Whopper
So I've been seeing a lot of stuff about this ad that Burger King made for the Texican whopper.. I watched the ad, I'm not sure what's racist about it, but that's not the point of this post.
I want to know where I can get a texican whopper and what exactly the second patty is on there? It's a mystery, and for some reason people are more worried about the little Mexican guy, and not so much about how delicious everything from burger king is.
I am hoping that the second patty is made of 98% wheat and then 2% of something incredible so that I can go to Robs house and eat it every day and laugh cause he can't have one.
EDIT: Found an ad finally describing the second patty and yes I want it.
I want to know where I can get a texican whopper and what exactly the second patty is on there? It's a mystery, and for some reason people are more worried about the little Mexican guy, and not so much about how delicious everything from burger king is.
I am hoping that the second patty is made of 98% wheat and then 2% of something incredible so that I can go to Robs house and eat it every day and laugh cause he can't have one.
EDIT: Found an ad finally describing the second patty and yes I want it.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Dell Adamo - Should be featured in the next mac commercial
So I'm sure everyone has seen the new Windows commercials that send people to the store with $1000 or $1500 and tell them to buy a laptop, they of course look at mac and say they are too overpriced and the end up with a shiny new HP or Sony. Now I'm not one to ever say that mac's aren't more expensive then windows computers. I've always been under the impression you get what you pay for, so I don't mind spending a bit more for apple products. I also find it interesting that Microsoft would be doing this comparison since they don't build hardware at all, they should be doing commercials comparing OSX to Vista, or the upcoming Windows 7... that would make more sense, but I digress.
I think the next mac commercial could be golden. Set up the same voice over guy, have him say that apple gave a guy $1800 to go to the dell website and buy an ultra lightweight computer with a 13 inch screen. Then end the commercial with him getting the air because the air is cheaper and more powerful than the Dell.
I just got done reading a not too favorable review of the Adamo, calling it overpriced and underpowered, and for a moment, you would think you were reading a mac review. Points were made that you are paying strictly for the looks and build quality of the machine and the components suffer greatly from it. Just found it kind of interesting that Dell would try to compete in this market.
I think the next mac commercial could be golden. Set up the same voice over guy, have him say that apple gave a guy $1800 to go to the dell website and buy an ultra lightweight computer with a 13 inch screen. Then end the commercial with him getting the air because the air is cheaper and more powerful than the Dell.
I just got done reading a not too favorable review of the Adamo, calling it overpriced and underpowered, and for a moment, you would think you were reading a mac review. Points were made that you are paying strictly for the looks and build quality of the machine and the components suffer greatly from it. Just found it kind of interesting that Dell would try to compete in this market.
Hackintosh Weekend - Issues I've had
So the final parts of my hackintosh arrived Friday so I started putting this beast together. Here is a run down of the parts.
core i7 2.6Ghz processor. 4 cores and hyper threading means 8 addressable cores
12gigs of DDR3 ram.
620gig hard drive
the cheapest graphics card I could find that would do 2 monitors (Nvidia 9800GT)
an aftermarket heat sink for the processor
a gigantic antec case with 3 fans, and all sorts of bells and whistles
a 550watt power supply
so anyway, to start, I'm getting there, after spending all weekend with it, it still has issues, but I believe them to be hardware related. So I'll get there... here are the problems I had.
Friday -
assembled all the hardware went then went to the movies. (I love you man.. not that good) I then came home, got the htpc out of the closet and used that to install the operating system with drews Leopard disc. unfortunately his disc is an upgrade and not a retail disc so I had to go ahead and get a retail disc online. So that was pretty much friday, just needing to get the software ready so I can spend all saturday working on it.
Saturday -
woke up and leopard was done downloading so I installed it on the new harddrive. To do this, you need to put the harddrive in another computer because OSX doesn't know what to do with bios, so you need to do it from another leopard computer.
Issue #1: So once the software was installed and the script was ran, I put in the hard drive into the new computer, and nothing happens. The board won't even boot. Looking around at the lights on the board, I'm noticing the processor is overheating. So I take the cooler off, and I notice it's not even making contact with the processor. Figuring it's broke, I disassemble it from the board, and put the stock cooler on the processor. Now I can get it to post.
Issue #2: Keep getting an error that it can't find the boot drive. I have to plug it in to a bunch of different ports till finally the computer can find the hard drive and boot. So I finally get OSX to show up on one monitor.
I run the program that I got when I made the HTPC to get the graphics card recognized and now I have dual monitors. Pretty sweet everything seems to be great. I start downloading the stuff from the macheist bundle that I bought, start loading music into itunes, ect. I downloaded istat menus so I can keep tabs on everything going on in the system. istat is only reporting 4 cores, but I figure it's set up to only address physical cores so I don't think anything of it.
Issue #3: Kernal Panic (this is the first time I've ever seen one of these, it's pretty much a blue screen of death only on a mac.. you don't see them when running legit macs, but I've seen plenty of them this weekend) So while trying to recreate the KP I realize that it happened when the program finished downloading and the dmg mounted. I notice that I missed a crucial step in the process when re-reading the guide, and I forgot to run the EFI script. (Basically this takes all the tweaks that you make to the OS and places them in their own partition on the hard drive so that when you install updates to the OS or whatever, they aren't written over.) So I run this, and now I'm not getting a KP when I mount dmg files. I also have 8 cores showing in istat However...
Issue #4: Now I have no audio. I notice it because I'm trying to play some music over itunes and nothing is happening, I go into the audio preferences, and it doesn't even find any output or input devices. I also notice that I don't have access to the DVD burner I bought. I am still getting KPs and it's happening usually with stuff having to do with the ethernet port. I'm getting them constantly when trying to move the Adobe package over the network. I try it from computer to computer, and from shared hard drive to computer... I keep getting KP's. I'm also getting KP's when trying to move my music library to itunes all at once, so I split that process up into a few pulls and it works.
I go online, and find out that there was another folder in the install download that had some updated kexts that would fix the audio issue. I try installing them manually a few times and nothing seems to be taking, then I go to bed for the night.
Sunday -
Issue #5: I can't even get the computer to boot anymore. I must have screwed something up. So I bring the HTPC back upstairs, and put this hard drive into the HTPC and boot to the HTPC. I rerun the scripts and rewrite whatever I did wrong. Now I'm able to boot again but no audio, and I'm on one monitor again. I run the program to get dual monitors (when OSX doesn't know what graphics card you have, not only is it 1024x800 but everything runs slow because the OS is so graphics intensive.)
So now I start scouring the web for audio fixes... it seems weird that I'm not getting audio running the same scripts that other people ran and have audio. I find another set of audio kexts. I think that I moved the wrong ones in there, they are dated Aug 08 and I have Jan 09 kexts (obviously newer). So I take out the hard drive and put it back in the HTPC so I can get these installed instead and....
Issue #6: The HTPC won't boot. I guess when I was running all those scripts on it, I accidentally ran something that screwed it up. So now I have to backtrack..
Issue #7: I put the both hard drives back in the new pc, and boot, and it can't find the second hard drive. So I start guessing and putting in a bunch of different sata ports and rebooting until I finally find the drive. Now that it finds that drive, I go online and find the scripts I ran to get the HTPC to work, and I run those. I take it out put it in the HTPC computer and it's working.
So now I bring the new hard drive to the htpc computer and run the scripts again, being extra careful with them, and viola I have audio. I remember when OSX found the other harddrive so I plug the dvd burner in there and
Issue #8 KP. Apparently OSX has certain places it looks for hard drives and certain places it looks for dvd burners. So I just start rebooting and guessing where to plug the burner in until I have that showing up.
So now everything seems to be working. I have two monitors running gigantic resolution, I have audio, I have 8 cores showing up, the HTPC is working again. I'm able to mount dmg files and install stuff. So I start scouring the web for stuff that I need to install. Safari 4, Firefox, Dropbox ect. Everything is going well, but I'm still struggling to get adobe installed. I was able to finally get it across the network,
Issue #9: but I keep getting KPs during installation. I think it's a memory issue so I take out two sticks and try. By this time, I'd already installed a good portion of the programs, so it only had a few left to install and no more KP. This could have just been coincidence and not a memory issue.
I notice that I keep dropping connection while listening to music which is on a shared drive. When I go into the network preferences I notice that the entire network card isn't discovered anymore. The motherboard has 2 ethernet ports, which are labeled (en0) and (en1) by the mac. I've tried switching the cable to the different port when I lose signal, and I've even tried plugging a cable in both ports. I'm now noticing that when I switch cables to the other port, mac is picking it up as a different network card, not 0 or 1, but now I have 3 and 5....
Issue #10: it's at the point now, where I get KP just plugging a cable into the port. I'm thinking the motherboard is faulty and that's what is causing a majority of the KPs. When installing adobe, I was also listening to music over the network, so while I thought it was a memory issue it could also be a network thing.
I ran memtest for 10hours last night (recommended at least 8) with all 12 gigs installed, and it threw zero errors, so the memory is in good shape. I'm also thinking the mother board has faulty sata ports too which is why I'm having trouble with finding a place to plug in a hard drive. I am going to go to best buy and buy a cheap NIC card to plug in and see if I'm able to connect to the net that way.. if so, then I know it's the mother board and I'll ship it back. another option would be to install XP on another harddrive and see if it can find everything in different sata ports and if the network works with that. So I have two tests to make sure it's hardware related.
When the computer is running, it's ridiculously fast. the only time I've seen a spinning beach ball is when I'm connecting to the shared drive to start listening to music. Photoshop loads in like 2 seconds. it's nuts. I can't wait till it's stable.
core i7 2.6Ghz processor. 4 cores and hyper threading means 8 addressable cores
12gigs of DDR3 ram.
620gig hard drive
the cheapest graphics card I could find that would do 2 monitors (Nvidia 9800GT)
an aftermarket heat sink for the processor
a gigantic antec case with 3 fans, and all sorts of bells and whistles
a 550watt power supply
so anyway, to start, I'm getting there, after spending all weekend with it, it still has issues, but I believe them to be hardware related. So I'll get there... here are the problems I had.
Friday -
assembled all the hardware went then went to the movies. (I love you man.. not that good) I then came home, got the htpc out of the closet and used that to install the operating system with drews Leopard disc. unfortunately his disc is an upgrade and not a retail disc so I had to go ahead and get a retail disc online. So that was pretty much friday, just needing to get the software ready so I can spend all saturday working on it.
Saturday -
woke up and leopard was done downloading so I installed it on the new harddrive. To do this, you need to put the harddrive in another computer because OSX doesn't know what to do with bios, so you need to do it from another leopard computer.
Issue #1: So once the software was installed and the script was ran, I put in the hard drive into the new computer, and nothing happens. The board won't even boot. Looking around at the lights on the board, I'm noticing the processor is overheating. So I take the cooler off, and I notice it's not even making contact with the processor. Figuring it's broke, I disassemble it from the board, and put the stock cooler on the processor. Now I can get it to post.
Issue #2: Keep getting an error that it can't find the boot drive. I have to plug it in to a bunch of different ports till finally the computer can find the hard drive and boot. So I finally get OSX to show up on one monitor.
I run the program that I got when I made the HTPC to get the graphics card recognized and now I have dual monitors. Pretty sweet everything seems to be great. I start downloading the stuff from the macheist bundle that I bought, start loading music into itunes, ect. I downloaded istat menus so I can keep tabs on everything going on in the system. istat is only reporting 4 cores, but I figure it's set up to only address physical cores so I don't think anything of it.
Issue #3: Kernal Panic (this is the first time I've ever seen one of these, it's pretty much a blue screen of death only on a mac.. you don't see them when running legit macs, but I've seen plenty of them this weekend) So while trying to recreate the KP I realize that it happened when the program finished downloading and the dmg mounted. I notice that I missed a crucial step in the process when re-reading the guide, and I forgot to run the EFI script. (Basically this takes all the tweaks that you make to the OS and places them in their own partition on the hard drive so that when you install updates to the OS or whatever, they aren't written over.) So I run this, and now I'm not getting a KP when I mount dmg files. I also have 8 cores showing in istat However...
Issue #4: Now I have no audio. I notice it because I'm trying to play some music over itunes and nothing is happening, I go into the audio preferences, and it doesn't even find any output or input devices. I also notice that I don't have access to the DVD burner I bought. I am still getting KPs and it's happening usually with stuff having to do with the ethernet port. I'm getting them constantly when trying to move the Adobe package over the network. I try it from computer to computer, and from shared hard drive to computer... I keep getting KP's. I'm also getting KP's when trying to move my music library to itunes all at once, so I split that process up into a few pulls and it works.
I go online, and find out that there was another folder in the install download that had some updated kexts that would fix the audio issue. I try installing them manually a few times and nothing seems to be taking, then I go to bed for the night.
Sunday -
Issue #5: I can't even get the computer to boot anymore. I must have screwed something up. So I bring the HTPC back upstairs, and put this hard drive into the HTPC and boot to the HTPC. I rerun the scripts and rewrite whatever I did wrong. Now I'm able to boot again but no audio, and I'm on one monitor again. I run the program to get dual monitors (when OSX doesn't know what graphics card you have, not only is it 1024x800 but everything runs slow because the OS is so graphics intensive.)
So now I start scouring the web for audio fixes... it seems weird that I'm not getting audio running the same scripts that other people ran and have audio. I find another set of audio kexts. I think that I moved the wrong ones in there, they are dated Aug 08 and I have Jan 09 kexts (obviously newer). So I take out the hard drive and put it back in the HTPC so I can get these installed instead and....
Issue #6: The HTPC won't boot. I guess when I was running all those scripts on it, I accidentally ran something that screwed it up. So now I have to backtrack..
Issue #7: I put the both hard drives back in the new pc, and boot, and it can't find the second hard drive. So I start guessing and putting in a bunch of different sata ports and rebooting until I finally find the drive. Now that it finds that drive, I go online and find the scripts I ran to get the HTPC to work, and I run those. I take it out put it in the HTPC computer and it's working.
So now I bring the new hard drive to the htpc computer and run the scripts again, being extra careful with them, and viola I have audio. I remember when OSX found the other harddrive so I plug the dvd burner in there and
Issue #8 KP. Apparently OSX has certain places it looks for hard drives and certain places it looks for dvd burners. So I just start rebooting and guessing where to plug the burner in until I have that showing up.
So now everything seems to be working. I have two monitors running gigantic resolution, I have audio, I have 8 cores showing up, the HTPC is working again. I'm able to mount dmg files and install stuff. So I start scouring the web for stuff that I need to install. Safari 4, Firefox, Dropbox ect. Everything is going well, but I'm still struggling to get adobe installed. I was able to finally get it across the network,
Issue #9: but I keep getting KPs during installation. I think it's a memory issue so I take out two sticks and try. By this time, I'd already installed a good portion of the programs, so it only had a few left to install and no more KP. This could have just been coincidence and not a memory issue.
I notice that I keep dropping connection while listening to music which is on a shared drive. When I go into the network preferences I notice that the entire network card isn't discovered anymore. The motherboard has 2 ethernet ports, which are labeled (en0) and (en1) by the mac. I've tried switching the cable to the different port when I lose signal, and I've even tried plugging a cable in both ports. I'm now noticing that when I switch cables to the other port, mac is picking it up as a different network card, not 0 or 1, but now I have 3 and 5....
Issue #10: it's at the point now, where I get KP just plugging a cable into the port. I'm thinking the motherboard is faulty and that's what is causing a majority of the KPs. When installing adobe, I was also listening to music over the network, so while I thought it was a memory issue it could also be a network thing.
I ran memtest for 10hours last night (recommended at least 8) with all 12 gigs installed, and it threw zero errors, so the memory is in good shape. I'm also thinking the mother board has faulty sata ports too which is why I'm having trouble with finding a place to plug in a hard drive. I am going to go to best buy and buy a cheap NIC card to plug in and see if I'm able to connect to the net that way.. if so, then I know it's the mother board and I'll ship it back. another option would be to install XP on another harddrive and see if it can find everything in different sata ports and if the network works with that. So I have two tests to make sure it's hardware related.
When the computer is running, it's ridiculously fast. the only time I've seen a spinning beach ball is when I'm connecting to the shared drive to start listening to music. Photoshop loads in like 2 seconds. it's nuts. I can't wait till it's stable.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
mysql-xampp on a mac
I was having a hard time accessing mysql on my mac. I downloaded the GUI tools from mysql.com:
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html
but I kept getting can't connect errors. I had to find the my.cnf file to find out where the connection socket was located.
that file is placed in: Applications/xamppfiles/etc/my.cnf
and in there is the socket. I didn't change anything with the installation, so this should be the default location. In the gui tools you downloaded from the link I provided put:
/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/var/mysql/mysql.sock in as the connection socket,
localhost as the host,
leave the port alone,
root as the username
and leave the password blank.
That should get you in
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html
but I kept getting can't connect errors. I had to find the my.cnf file to find out where the connection socket was located.
that file is placed in: Applications/xamppfiles/etc/my.cnf
and in there is the socket. I didn't change anything with the installation, so this should be the default location. In the gui tools you downloaded from the link I provided put:
/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/var/mysql/mysql.sock in as the connection socket,
localhost as the host,
leave the port alone,
root as the username
and leave the password blank.
That should get you in
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Favorite April Fools Day Online Thing
I think this is my favorite April Fools Day internet joke of the year.
http://www.expedia.com/daily/mars/flights-to-mars/?mcicid=Mars_us&affcid=cj249294
This year was pretty lame, I guess the economy means no one can afford being funny, but this was still pretty good.
http://www.expedia.com/daily/mars/flights-to-mars/?mcicid=Mars_us&affcid=cj249294
This year was pretty lame, I guess the economy means no one can afford being funny, but this was still pretty good.
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