fuzzyraygun

Starting January 26th 2009 through February 14th 2010 is the year of the Ox.

“The Ox is thought to be the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work. The Ox is a power sign, like the Rat, Snake, Dragon, Tiger, and Monkey. They’re quite dependable and possess an innate ability to achieve great things. As one might guess, such people are dependable, calm, and modest. Like their animal namesake, the Ox is unswervingly patient, tireless in their work, and capable of enduring any amount of hardship without complaint.”

Barack Obama was born in the year of the Ox in 1961.

A special note to the San Jose Mercury News. PLEASE STOP CALLING ME! I have repeatedly asked to be taken off your call list and then two days later I get another call from someone in your call center asking if I want to get a free subscription to your paper. I have never gotten your paper nor do I have any idea how I appeared on your telemarketing death list.

I am an expert at this. It’s easy, just pile all the papers that you should be going through and working on into one very neat pile and presto you desk is clean. This gives you at least a couple more weeks of putting off that pile until it again becomes messy and you have to straighten you desk but not really get rid of the paper monster that is slowly growing.

Am i a geek for wanting this for my house? Perceptive Automation makes a MAC APP that controls appliances and lights around your house from a web browser or iPhone. Control lights, sprinklers, appliances etc. with timers or remotely to cut down on energy usage.

“I put my pants on the same way as everyone else. One leg at a time. But, when my pants are on I make gold records. Now give me some more cowbell.”

I am in the middle of switching from a PC to a MAC at work right now and the one thing that would make my life much easier is to be able to just “roll up” my existing PC machine install (XP SP3) into a Virtual Machine and keep it going on my MAC. I realize this may be like saying I want to go to the moon in my cardboard box but it sure would make my life much easier.

I love Parallels. I have it on both my machine at home and at work, but what I don’t really want to do, is have to re-install an OS and all the functions and programs I am working on, in order to keep one program running or just to save an an existing install for backup reasons.

Parallels makes it relatively easy to make a new virtual machine with an install of Linux or Windows but how about creating an image of one that is already up and working?

Pretty please?

BB pointed out that Parallels has a service like this its called Parallels Transporter and it comes with the install of Parallels. You can create the image of the machine on the machine itself or over the network from your MAC. Super cool. (Need to make sure your version of the Parallels Transporter Agent is the same on both machines and that you have enough Disc space to hold the new OS image file though.)

I have to many hard drives. So why did I order another? Good question.

Right now I have 3 computers and an iPhone to keep track of. I have a MAC and a PC that I currently run at work. (I’m in the process of switching) I also have a massive MAC Pro at home. My MAC Pro at home, has the combined emails, files, bookmarks etc. of 5-6 years worth of stuff. If it weren’t for Spotlight I would be toast.

I have photos on all machines, I have duplicate files all over the place. If my iPhone didn’t sych with my computer at home it would be one more headache. Surprisingly, when I look around at other peoples computers and setups, my sloppy digital life is actually not that sloppy. I have lots of applications and data on my home machine but they are, for the most part, kept on my main hard drive. I have an entire other drive that holds my music collection (iTunes) as well as all my music related files (samples, Logic Pro tracks, etc.). I also have a backup drive that is kept up to date with handy scripts in Automator to backup my Documents folder as well as my iTunes music collection.

My work machines are a little more cluttered with files. I have been on the same PC machine for a couple of years so I have lots of random files from doing video compression or downloading huge ZIP files worth of shite so that I can get one file. I am bad at digitally cleaning up afterward myself. I guess its the digital equivalent to stuffing all your toys in your closet when you want to clean up your room. (I have lots of folders on my desktop labeled “Temp” or “Misc”)
Since we have lots of good storage for all our projects at work and we mostly work off our network, my local machine just accumulates weird digital detritus.

So why do I need another hard drive for my machine at home that already has 2 internal hard drives and an external firewire backup?

The answer is simple BFD 2.0

BFD is a super cool, super realistic drum sampling program that I use with my Logic Pro setup. The crazy part is that it comes with 55 GB of samples that will stream from the hard drive. Since I already run my regular audio tracks from a dedicated hard drive and the APP is running from the main hard drive and well storage is cheap i decided that BFD should have its own hard drive as well. Storage is cheap and lord knows I’ll probable fill it up anyway. It may take a me a few more years though.