Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, advanced plank. Stretches. Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Checked in with WeID, talked to Tyler who says they're short on staff and will get to my requests as soon as possible. Thought I had a meeting at 9:30 AM but it had been canceled and somehow I never got the original Exchange invitation so no one was there and I left. Web edits: orientation agenda. Very slow behavior in multiple apps in Win XP—feels like bad network settings. Logged out then logged in as admin, reset network settings to DHCP but that didn't fix it. Reinstalled VMware Tools, restarted XP, still same problem. Ran Disk Cleanup (nearly already clean). Defrag said not needed. Ran chkdsk. While waiting, I archived files to DVD using our spare office and computer. I've just about entirely given up on optical media—such a waste of time—and put in a purchase request for 2 portable hard drives. Win XP still not behaving, so I am prepared to abandon it. I will try working with Vista, but if that doesn't work I'll reinstall Win XP into a non-Boot-Camp VM and if that's successful I'll just get rid of the Boot Camp partition. Installed OLPPS in Vista. Vista was extraordinarily slow running in a VM in Fusion 1.1.3—I was simply browsing the filesystem and experiencing pauses of several seconds, so I disabled the sidebar and all performance options except for smooth screen fonts. Quit Vista. Adjusted settings on the VM to give Vista more RAM and use 2 processors. Restarted Vista. Much better now. Installed Firefox 3.0.1. "not enough storage is available" error when attempting to install mmc 3.0. addons.mozilla.org is really slow today. Realized that 20 GB—the default Fusion gave me when installing Vista—is not enough, and Fusion really won't grow the virtual hard disk like I was led to believe during the installation. Must trash the existing Vista install and start over. No obvious way to stop using Boot Camp, so I ran Disk Utility and simply formatted the 2nd hard drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which seemed to do the trick. Installed Vista into a new VM created on the newly erased 2nd hard drive. Operating system not found message during install. (This happened to me the last time but I didn't mention it.) Selected Virtual Machine > Restart Guest. Same problem: no bootable device was detected. I have 2 dvdrw drives, so the way I fixed this was to change the VM settings to manually specify one dvdrw drive—try it—let it fail—then manuall specify the other dvd-rw drive which worked. Successfully activated Windows Vista after some trouble—I must have mistyped a character. Installed Win XP into a new VM. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: Try something new and different - you will like the results. Chatted with Cesar: Vista and XP setup. JH on the bus. Home. Snack: crackers and green tea. iMac setup. Dinner at home with Patrick: roasted lemon chicken, corn on the cob, dinner roll, Smart Balance Light. Watched House of Flying Daggers on owned DVD with Patrick.