It’s official. Apple is killing lala. I used lala for a while, primarily for trading CDs. They stopped doing that a while ago, but continued to exist as a music streaming thing or something like that. I really never used it for anything other than CD trading.
Author: Andrew Huey
a case study in poor time management
I had a few things I wanted to take care of today. I’m starting a new job on Wednesday, so I just have today and tomorrow left before I’m back at a full-time job, and not easily able to run errands during business hours. Mostly, I needed to work on stuff related to my parents’ estates. To make a long story short, I ended up making three separate trips to the post office, two trips to the bank, two trips to the mail box down the street, one trip to Staples, and one trip to a local UPS drop box. If I’d really thought things out in advance, I could have cut out half of these trips and probably gotten all this stuff done before lunch. Oh well. At least I got a few important things done, even if it wasn’t in the most efficient way possible!
more Virtual PC grief
I booted up my main Windows XP VPC this morning, and it appears that some corruption occured on the virtual disk at some point in the process of moving from VPC 2007 to Windows 7 VPC. There was a problem at one point yesterday, where Windows XP did a CHKDSK and (I thought) fixed a bunch of errors. But now, when I try and go into User Accounts in Control Panel, I’m getting weird errors, so I think some XP files got hosed. I’m now doing a repair install of Win XP to try and fix this. I’m really starting to think that VPC is more trouble than it’s worth, but I’ve invested enough time in it now that I should at least try to follow through for a while longer.
getting there
I’m vaguely proud of myself. I’ve got the new machine almost completely set up now. (When did we get to the point where it takes 3 or 4 days to get a new computer set up?) I’ve got Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on there, both patched to current levels. I’ve got my TomTom One GPS working, and my BlackBerry Storm working (after some grief with the USB mass storage mode). My iTunes library is in place and synced to my Apple TV again. Outlook is all hooked up, and can send and receive e-mail, no problem. I’ve made recovery DVDs, so I can reinstall Windows, if I ever need to. I’ve got most of the HP crapware either uninstalled or at least out of the way so it doesn’t launch on startup. Ditto for all the weird stuff that got installed with the new Canon printer. (Speaking of which, I have the drivers installed on my Dell Inspiron and my MacBook too now, so I can print from either of those.) Even with all that, I’ve still got a few things left to do. And, after all this work, I really need to image this hard drive, just in case.
new printer
I’m almost done setting up my new Windows 7 desktop machine. (I’m in the middle of installing Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 right now.)
I had two printers (b&w and color) and one scanner hooked up to my old machine. None of the three was compatible with Windows 7 x64. So, I went out to Best Buy and picked up a Canon PIXMA MX870, which should do a reasonable job of acting as a b&w printer, a color printer, and a scanner. So far, I like it.
It took quite a while to unbox and set up though. Lots of tape to remove, five different ink cartridges to install, etc, etc. I’m using it as a network printer (rather than USB) so I’ll (hopefully) be able to print to it from my laptops, in addition to my desktop.
Oh, and I’m very happy to finally own a printer that duplexes. It’s kind of slow at duplexing though; it needs to wait a couple of seconds for the ink to dry on one side before pulling the paper back through to print the reverse side.
Windows 7 – Virtual PC annoyances
I’m setting up my new HP desktop (bought from Woot a few days back). Things are going well, for the most part, but I’m not sure I like the new Virtual PC. My main complaint right now is the convoluted method required to merge an undo disk into a main VHD file. See here for details. This worked fine in VPC 2007. Now, it’s a real pain.
I also hit a snag with the integration features. I have an XP VM that doesn’t have any passwords set on any of the accounts. If you turn on integration, then you get a separate login box that won’t allow you to log in to an account without a password. Also annoying.
I posted about some trouble I had with VPC a few weeks ago here, when I was trying to see if I could do P2V on my Dad’s old machine. Overall, I’d say I just haven’t had a good experience with Virtual PC lately.
new desktop computer
Yesterday, I bought myself a new desktop computer from Woot. It’s an HP Pavilion p6320y with 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and an AMD quad-core processor. The power supply is a little iffy, as is the on-board video, but I think I can live with that for now.
My current desktop machine is in a Falcon Northwest case, but now contains a hodge-podge of parts purchased from Newegg over the years. (I think the only thing left of the original machine is the case and the floppy drive.) Most of what’s in there was purchased in January 2006, so I’m more than overdue for a new machine. I was originally going to keep this case and just swap in a new motherboard & processor again, but the deal on Woot was good, and it’ll be easier to migrate to the new machine this way (since I can theoretically switch back and forth between the two until I’ve got everything moved over).
I may need to finally retire my HP DeskJet 520 printer now. The new machine won’t have a parallel port. Even though the 520 is about 15 years old, it’s still working (mostly), so I’m not that excited about tossing it, really. Even if I had the parallel port, though, I’m not sure Windows 7 still has a driver for it. (My current machine is running 32-bit Vista, and the new one will have 64-bit Windows 7.)
ASP.NET and other .NET stuff
I spent some time today watching a couple of dnrTV episodes on Entity Framework. (Episodes 117 and 118.) I may be using Entity Framework in the near future.
Meanwhile, my progress through the book for 70-562 has stalled at chapter 6. I got through chapters 1-5 in about a week, but then last week, I got distracted from this due to a sudden burst of job interviews (three in a row). I also just wanted to take my time getting through the ASP.NET AJAX material, since I found it to be very interesting, and I wasn’t that familiar with it.
I bought a cheap used copy of Dino Esposito’s “Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX” book from Amazon, to supplement the overview in the 70-562 book. It looks like this will be a good place to start. I’m not sure now when I’ll be getting back to studying for 70-562, though, due to these side trips. I’d still like to take the test next month, but we’ll see if I have the time to do that or not.
Merlin at Rutgers
Video: Merlin's Time & Attention Talk (Improvised Rutgers Edition) | 43 Folders
Cool. Merlin Mann did a talk at Rutgers earlier this month. If I’d known, I might have tried to go see him. I can’t imagine that he visits NJ often.
ScanCafe
I’ve sent off two big orders to ScanCafe recently. The first was a box of my Dad’s old slides (about 600) and the second was a bunch of my Dad’s old negatives (including both 35mm and medium format). I sent the second box in while they were having a 25% sale, which saved me a substantial amount of money, given how many negatives I had.
I’ve got one more box of negatives to scan. I was going to wait until ScanCafe had another sale, but I just got an e-mail from them saying that they’re going to raise their prices in May. Of course, they don’t say which prices or by how much. Hmm, now I’m not sure if I should wait or not. I also just figured out that they post their sales to Twitter at http://twitter.com/scancafedeals so I think maybe I’ll just keep an eye on that and wait for the next 25% off sale. As long as they’re not raising their prices by more than 25%, that would still be a good deal.