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And everyone thought that Computer Science majors were twiddly little geeks that couldn’t land a date…Take that French majors!

Short version – Purdue makes it to the sweet 16.  Longer version is that I got to go to the game.  Even made a few cameo appearances during swinging shots (I’m over on the far right side – midway down):

What an amazing and fun game – and we got 11th row tickets this go around.  Lots of amazing energy – and I lost a good chunk of my voice in the outing.  Purdue fans were definitely in the minority with plenty of Washington fans driving down from Seattle – so what we lacked in numbers – we made up in volume.  The whole stadium was sold out – and it certainly showed by the numbers of folks outside trying to pick up last minute tickets.

Overall it was a great moment of re-living the college days.  Purdue Pete, the cheers, the band, the game itself.  What a way to spend a Saturday.  I hope Portland gets another chance to host the NCAA playoffs again.  Now on to the sweet 16.

Portland got lucky and is hosting NCAA playoffs in the Rose Quarter.  And I got lucky in that of all the teams to start their playoffs – Purdue was playing here(!)  So after working with a buddy with insider connections – I got 10th row tickets to Purdue’s round 1 and 2 playoffs for $55.

I went to Thursday’s playoff game – and it was great.  The Purdue band was playing and we were sitting right in the middle of the Purdue section.  We beat Northern Iowa – but not by nearly enough to make me happy about it. It was very surreal to bridge seeing my old college team, the band and it’s usual shenanigans, and hordes of Purdue fans – but in the Rose Quarter.  After winning against Iowa, our tickets also entitled us to stay for the Washington/Mississippi game.  We stuck around for half of it until it was clear WA would win, then we left before the masses and rush-hour converged on the stadium.  My buddy took pics of us at the game – I’ll put some up when I get a copy.

We’re on to play Washington on Saturday – and I’ll be there at the game as well.  I’m optimistic, but not convinced, of a win. Hope the black and gold gets some fire in it’s belly for this next game.  Washington is definitely playing with the energy of the home crowd.

Disneyland for free on your birthday is worth the trip.   Had a great time – as it was my first go – and it was the first chance for a day-vacation I’ve taken all year so far.

I’m in LA at a friends house right now, and after an enjoyable evening with an old coworker, I’ll be heading to my free Disneyland ticket Saturday morning.  That’s right – this year, on your birthday – Disneyland is free.  I’ve never been – so this should be quite fun.

Forgot my camera though – hope my buddy has one…

Just another way in which Microsoft just keeps breaking my productivity by making me fight their systems instead of making it easy to get real work done.  In XP – there was a handy “Open command prompt here…” Powertoy that allowed you to right-click on a directory/folder and get a command prompt at that location (no directory switching).  But no such luck on Vista.  Now add the pain of UAC and you need TWO kinds – “open a command prompt here…” and “open a command prompt here (in administrator mode)…”

Well, here’s how to have BOTH:

“Open a command prompt here…” (courtesy here)

1. Open regedt32.exe/registry editor
2. Browse to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Classes/Folder/Shell
3. Change the default REG_SZ string to whatever text you want to appear in the right-click menu. (such as:“Open command prompt here…” without the quotes)
4. Create a new registry key type within your newly created command prompt shell named “command,” and set the default string to:
   cmd.exe /k pushd %1
   You may need to add %SystemRoot%system32 before the cmd.exe if the executable can’t be found.
5. The changes should take place immediately. Right click a folder and your new menu item should appear.
   

“Open Command Prompt here (admin mode)…”

1. Same as above – open Regedt32
2. navigate to/create [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellrunas]
3. Set the default REG_SZ string for this key to “Administrator Command Prompt here”
4. Add a new string value in the same same key called “NoWorkingDirectory” and make sure the string is set to “”
5. Navigate to /create [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellrunascommand]
6. Set the default string to “cmd.exe /k “pushd %L && title Command Prompt””
7. Navigate to/create [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDriveshellrunas]
8. Set the default REG_SZ string “Administrator Command Prompt here”
9. Create another new string value in the same key called “NoWorkingDirectory” and make sure the string is set to “”
10. Navigate to/creat [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDriveshellrunascommand]
11. Set the default REG_SZ string to “cmd.exe /k “pushd %L && title Command Prompt””

Or open notepad on AdminOpen.reg and copy/paste the following into it (courtesy of here):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellrunas] @="Administrator Command Prompt here" "NoWorkingDirectory"=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDirectoryshellrunascommand] @="cmd.exe /k "pushd %L && title Command Prompt""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDriveshellrunas] @="Administrator Command Prompt here" "NoWorkingDirectory"=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDriveshellrunascommand] @="cmd.exe /k "pushd %L && title Command Prompt""

Between lots of other activities this weekend, I fiddled around with my three new 1.5TB drives.  It’s been years since I’ve felt like I took some sort of Apocalypse Now trip up the technological congo – but adventures in installing these drives has made me feel close again.  What awful adventures getting some wild combination of things working in tech-land have you had?

How about:

• Getting more than 640k recognized in DOS on an IBM XT via a memory expander card (I had a 512k ram drive!)
• Getting an 8-bit IBM XT to boot from a very specific Seagate ST351A/X IDE drive (the only IDE drive ever that could run on an XT)
• Getting over 4gb of memory recognized (not hard -unless your motherboard has a bios bug that freezes the system up with four 1gb DDR2 sticks install -a bug I found and reported to Intel’s support guys…)
• Getting windows media player to stop f*** waking my system randomly in the night to update the program guide.

But anyway, TerabyteLand wasn’t quite as bad as those – but installing these drives helped me relive those days a bit.  Long story short – don’t expect to boot from a volume over 2TB.  Now, I have hardware RAID on my motherboard with ample SATA ports (six hot-swappable) and hardware support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 0+1.   My hope was to put all three drives in a RAID 5 setup for redundancy and read performance.  I could successfully create the 3.0TB RAID 5 set, but it was reported as not bootable by an ICH9 and ICH10 RAID controller.  After trying 2 other motherboards and digging around on forums, turns out due to current bios limitations.

MBR BIOS limitation to 2TB
Current BIOS uses MBR (master boot record) for drive support – and MBR only supports drives or partitions up to 2TB.  However, the new EFI (extensable firmware interface) specification is a BIOS replacement that removes this limitation by allowing the new GPT (GUID Partitioning Table) format that supports up to 18 exobyte drives/partitions.  So, in order to boot from a drive larger than 2TB, you need to have a motherboard that runs EFI (currently: Apple, Itanium, and HP-UX boards), and drives formatted with GPT.  So at the moment, that means not much love for Windows world.  You can create GPT partitions in Vista SP1 – but just not boot from them.

So, that leaves only two options: run my OS from one of my existing 750GB drives and then have the remaining 3.0TB in a second set as RAID 5, or put two drives in RAID 1 for the OS (mirroring for fault tolerance and read speed) and leave the second drive alone for DVR storage.  I went option #2 – but I hate the fact I can’t just have one big bucket of bits.  I HATE secondary drives that exist simply because of these stupid limitation.  At least I’m not alone.

Still, even doing this was painful.  Vista had trouble recognizing the drives when I first plugged them in.  You had to format them with AHCI first, then switch the bios over to RAID and set up the volume – then vista could install to them.  Weird.

Any of you set up a large bootable volume like this in Linux?

The deal for 1.5terabyte drives I mentioned earlier for $83 was quickly replaced by one from Dell with the drives at the still steal rate of $105 (using the same discount code strangely enough).  I picked up 2 more of the drives for a total of three with plans of putting them into a raid 5 setup (so I can lose one without losing my machine). However, when the two new drives arrived – they arrived just like this:

(except the anti-static bag was fully closed).  But I kid you not, the drive was just flopping around at the bottom of the box with no real protection.  Sure enough, I plug them in, one works – the other delivers a never-ending string of grinding, heads clicking back and forth, and ultimately isn’t seen by the bios.  Dead, dead, dead.  My first drive came with nice foam brackets protecting it all around – this came with a single wad of brown paper thrown uselessly on top the drive. Not only that, but the box says Western Digital all over it – when this is a Seagate drive…. curiouser and curiouser.

So, when I call to replace it – it takes no less than 45 minutes and 5 different transfers before I can get the drive replaced.  That and they tried to get me to send it to Seagate instead (at least a 2 week turnaround and you get a refurbed drive – not a new one like I paid for).  In the end, after a bit of haggling I did get a new drive over-nighted to me and it should arrive today. But I must say it does leave me with a slightly worried feel about the next potential order.

The surviving drive has been running through massive copies, defrags, and surface scans to give it a good workout to see if it’s up to snuff.  So far so good.

Ah, FedEx reports that my drive is now on the truck for delivery – should be home when I get there.   Fingers crossed.

Dell Home has the Seagate 1.5TB SATA Hard Drive for $143 – $60 off coupon code HNP1LLLS?ZKS48 [Exp 2/18] = $83 with free shipping.

Are they dumping them?  I just joined the masses that bought one of these drives at a staggering 5.5 cents per megabyte for 1.5 terabytes before the deal quickly died.  This price is about 1/2 the price this drive sells at normally.  There was some question whether this was a misprint – but it appears the drives did ship and mine is on its way.  Wow.

I only bought one since the price was too ridiculously low I had to try.  However, caveat empetor! This is the drive that’s was first plagued with random freezing (especially in RAID setups), then the bad firmware update meant to fix the problem was actually bricking drives, and reports of high failure and DOA rates.  Still, it should make a nice drive to store saved TV programs from my DVR – and if the rumors of it’s early death are true – I won’t be crying too big a river.

As for that, I’ll re-iterate one more time – WHERE ARE YOUR BACKUPS PEOPLE?  You should never have a single drive with the only copy of your information on it.  I have an external eSATA drive that I keep at work for ‘offsite’ monthly backups, a secondary drive that my primaries (in RAID 0) backup to automatically and regularly, AND for my most precious data (photos) I burn 2 DVD copies each time I get a DVD’s worth of data.   Storage is so cheap, you shouldn’t ever need lose data again -even if a drive dies.  And with automated tools, I almost never even think about or do anything myself anymore.  No excuses, get you data backed up.