Cleaning House

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I went to Bed Bath & Beyond with Jayson and Gretchen last night before dinner. I was planning on getting some towels for my bathroom and maybe check out the bedroom sets. I left the store 30 minutes later with new towel’s, and a nice comforter set to replace my aging Ralph Lauren Denim set I currently have. In return BB&B decided to keep a whole bunch of my money. I wasn’t planning on spending as much as I did, but I saw something I liked and decided to just buy it. It wasn’t what I set out to get. I was looking for another set of denim sheets and comforter. Funny how things don’t end up how you planned them, but you end up being happy anyway?

It is now the 2nd of the month and I will be watching my budget the rest of the month. But I will be sleeping nice and comfy in my new blanket.

On a side note, Ralph Lauren why did you stop making plan denim comforters? They rocked.

After shopping we went to eat at a decent Italian restaurant. Then we watched Dead Like Me on showtime. I like that show and it would be the only reason I get showtime. But I won’t spend the money showtime for just 1 show. So every so often I get to see it at Jay and Gretchen’s. Then I went home. With my traveling and the spending, it was a long day.

Finally A Hair Cut Guy Replacement

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I have been looking for a halfway decent person to cut my hair since I moved. I can’t even travel back to my old neighborhood and use my old guy, I tried. he is not working there for a while. I have tried 2 different places. One by work that has like 30 people working there, and a smaller place by my apartment. I went to the local place by my apartment again today. I am lazy, the last guy who cut my hair there wasn’t very good, but I figured I would try someone new. Thankfully I went. I got an older “old school” hair cutter. He actually did exactly what I wanted and used the nice straight razor to clean up the back of my head. I am very happy. The little things make me happy. I nice haircut feels good, and looks good for a few weeks.

I need to live up the good haircuts while I can. Sooner or later (hopefully later) the hair will fall out, and then I will be really upset:)

EMT Class Day 1

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The class was long. I really am not used to class. My but hurts from those dam hard college desks. Once we got into some lecture stuff the second half of the class went by quick. I hope that is how it is most nights.

I didn’t get home till after 10PM. I am hanging in there. I just plugged my schedule into Outlook. Man the next 3-4 months will be busy. More when I am not tired. Off to bed.

Class Starts Tomorrow

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My EMT class starts tomorrow. I am looking forward to getting the certification again, but I am not looking forward to the class. It is allot of time commitment. I hope I don’t have issues with work regarding it. I also haven’t taken a class since I got right out of college. I am not a fan of sit down education so I hope I can sit through 3 days of class.

I also hope I can handle the medical stuff. I used to be able to do it no problem. That was why I wanted to goto medical school. Now it is years later and I am getting back into EMS, I hope I can handle it. it has been a while. I am probably just worried because the class is a big change for a few months, but I haven’t ridden on a call in years. It will be an interesting transition.

Of course if my last EMT class is any gauge on my knowledge (even if it is book knowledge) I will be ok. I got like an 86 or 88 on the last written exam I took, and a perfect score on my practical exam. High marks to live up to. I know I wont ever get a perfect mark on the practical. I don’t know how I did it the last time. I just want to live through the class and get my certification card again.

Tomorrow will be an extra difficult day at work also. Jayson is down in Baton Rouge cleaning up his house so he can sell it. He wont be back until Wednesday. Then I am off to Kingston for Thursday and Friday. That means we will be short handed at work all week. Him being gone means I will have to do some helpdesk work. I hate that, but I gotta do what needs to be done. Danny will hang out with me in my office while Jayson is gone. He likes our office since he can hide (if only a bit) from some of the developers. With him working out of my office, I am not all by myself. It gets lonely sometimes back there. other times I actually get allot done when no one is around. So after that all being said, I was looking forward to the quiet to get some extra work done with Jay gone, but Danny is cool, and it does get really quiet in my office when I am alone.

My typing hands are getting tired. It is also getting late. I was hoping to get some more writing into this blogging session, but I will call it a night. Hope to get some more writing in later this week, class permitting.

Classic VMWare

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I have babbled on about VMWare for the past 2 days. I know, I have. Well I will probibly continue to do so for the forseable future. Why? Because that software is so cool. But in the short term I will stop my raving. I have finished installing Windows 3.11 for workgroups, Windows 95, 98, & ME in virtual machines. All I really need to create is a Windows 98SE vmware. Probibly no real reason to do it, but I will probibly do it anyway.

All the virtual machines work great. The only one with an issue is Win 3.11. I am not sure if the network card is properly configured. Since it didn’t come with an option to install a TCP/IP stack I will need to find that somewhere and give the network on that VM a try. it came with Netbeu, and IPX, but no TCP/IP.

Now that all that work is done I need to offload the virtual machines off my laptop since I only have 2 gigs of space left on it now.

This entry was written while listening to 100 Years from the album The Battle For Everything by Five for Fighting

Really Old School Virtual Machines

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After getting Win 98, and 95 installed I gave a crack at Windows 3.11. First off OS’s built when the 386 or 486 were common install on a P-4 with 750megs of ram (even if it is in a virtual machine) rather fast. I got DOS 6.22 installed in the Virtual Machine in 5 minutes. It took longer to get the virtual disk to be formated with FAT16 and the install files onto the disk than it did to run the install. Windows 3.11, actually Windows for Workgroups 3.11 took like 15 minutes total to install. Probably less. I didn’t test the network settings, but I was glad that the thing installed. I have saved all the configurations. I have no real use for them, except for having them and making sure they actually work. You never know when you will need and old OS.

It turns out the problems I had installing all of the above mentioned OS’s was not me, but my AMD Atholon 1500+ desktop. Some piece of hardware is crashing windows, and vmware. it was doing similar things a few months ago when I was trying to install win95. Now I think it is the machine. When it happened before I thought it was what I was trying to do. I got everything to work just fine on my Thinkpad T40.

Old School Virtual Machines

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I am in the process of installing into VMWare Workstation 4.0. Win 98 went ok, so I am working my way backward now. I am building up to trying Windows 3.1. I got the install files for 3.1 off MSDN a few years ago but haven’t been able to get it to install. I am on a role so far with older OS’s, so maybe I will get 3.1 to install ok. I need to track down an old version of DOS 6.x or 5.x also.

I wanted to get an original Windows 95 install, but the only legal disk I have of original windows 95 is an upgrade. So I am sticking to the Windows 95b flavor since I have a ton of licenses for it that I have not used in nearly 8 years.

I can safely say that Windows 95 takes less than 30 minutes to install on a new computer. I was surprised how quick the install took.

What does suck is having an OS (Windows 95) that doesn’t support network devices out of the box. It was easier today to install a newtwork driver on 95 than I remember it. But it was still a pain in the ass. From what I have dealt with on 95, I am not 100% sure I will want to get Win 3.1 up and running.

Break Fast

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I didn’t really break my fasting since I didn’t fast, but it was still nice to see all the friends and family. We went to Amy, Jared, and Riley’s house. Got to see Morgan for the second time in two days so I was happy. The usual suspects were there. My parents, carrie, mike, Chery, David, their kids, nieces and nephews, and their kids, etc. It was nice to see them since I missed them last week on the second night of the new year. I spent that on a plane.

I got a ride back to the city with Carrie & Morgan. Carrie is going upstate with her sister in law loren and her husband andrew tomorrow, so she is staying over in the city. Andrew took Carrie’s truck and drove me home. Saved me from catching a cab. Ms Morgan was not wanting to sleep so they probably are having a grand old time getting her to lie down now.

It is a small world. Turns out that Andrews friend is high up in a volunteer EMS squad in the city. I am just taking the EMT class, but he said to get in touch with him so I can get an application in and become a member before I pass my test.

Windows 98 Basic

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Did you know you can’t even access windows update with the out of the box install of Windows 98? I am downloading the latest IE that you can get. Hopefully I can patch this thing up to make it almost usable.

Not sure what I am going to do when I install Windows 95 and it doesn’t even have IE 4 on it. I think it comes with IE 2.0, but that browser sucked even then. Who knows if I will even be able to get something newer installed. All this classic OS installing brings me back. Not getting that many good memories about dealing with this OS. I am so glad I am writing this from my Mac running OS 10.3 you can’t imagine. To think I was actually excited when Windows 98 first came out. I guess it was “good” back then, but look at what we have now, it was a joke. To be honest by the time 98 came out I was using Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. The only problem was almost no hardware peripherals worked with it, so I would always duel boot with the latest 9x flavor until Windows 2000 came out.

Windows 98 As a VMWare Virtual Machine

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I solved my boot disk issue that stopped me from installing Windows 98 into VMWare. A few months back I tried to put Win 95, and Win 98 into Virtual Machines using EMC’s VMWare. I had to play around with the boot options but I finally got one of my old Windows 98 CD’s to work. I took me a while to find what key code worked with the CD I had decided to use, but everything looks ok now.

Once this is build I plan on taking on Windows 95, and Windows 98 Second Edition. I want a basic Virtual Machine image of all the windows OS’s. You never know they will come in handy. I already used a Windows NT 4 Workstation image I made at work for troubleshooting a problem we were having.

On another Virtual Machine note I convinced Gus to evaluate the cost benefit of having a VMWare server (probably GSX Server) instead of buying hardware for some of the more obscure QA tests we run. It fits into our plan to emulate our production environment as much as possible, but why would we buy hardware for an ftp server in QA if we only use it once every few weeks. If we just built a virtual machine and used it when necessary we could save a bunch on hardware.