Realizing that I being able to develop on my desktop would come in handy while my laptop was otherwise in use, yesterday I decided to turn it on and bring it up to speed.  Seeing as I had no Visual Studio installed, I decided I might as well upgrade to Windows 7 before I bothered to install anything.  While booting to an install thumb drive, I recalled the horrible pain in the ass I had to go through to get my RAID working to install Vista some years ago.  The mobo on my computer is an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (socket 939) so I first went and looked into exactly what I was running and what I could find on the internet.  The mobo supports RAID through nForce4 (NVidia) and a Silicon Image controller.  So first thing I did was downloaded a plethora (yes El Guapo, I know what a plethora is) of drivers that seemed like they’d fit the bill.  After trying this for several hours last night, I hit failure.  Deciding it wasn’t meant to be, I put up a disappointing status on the good book and went to bed.

Not to disappoint me like my driver search had, I awoke to a few different suggestion, most of them from Atomic.  After further talking with him at work, I decided to try a couple different things:

1. Unplugging the SATA cables from the onboard SI ports and plugging them into the Nvidia ports.
2. Updating my BIOS.
3. Turning off the SI controller and turning on the Nvidia “MediaShield” controller.
4. Trying to find newer drivers again.

So after getting home from work today, the first thing I did was update the bios.  This went over well until I rebooted and my RAID controller couldn’t find any devices (not even hard drives!).  At this point I was pretty sure I had completely EFFED my entire system.  After plugging the cables into the Nvidia ports and trying again, I still had nothing.  At this point I just said screw it, as long as I can get the damn thing to install.  So I scoured my bios and found how to turn off the SI Controller.  However, there was no way to turn on Mediasheild.  After a bit of research, it would seem that while I have the Deluxe mobo, Atmoic has the Premium.  Mine is without Mediashield.  Still screwed, I spent another hour trying to load different drivers.  I went through Asus and Nvidia’s sites as well as numerous forums and found nothing.  Finally I came upon Silicon Image’s PCI to 4 Port SATA150 drivers.  Finally I had pay dirt.  The drivers successfully loaded during the Windows 7 install and showed my now recreated (and blank) RAID array.  So while I failed to keep any of my data (not as bad as it could be thanks to primarily using a laptop) I am now running Win7 on both home computers.

Last night while driving home from some Halloween Bowling, I had the misfortune of getting a bit too close to one of Mother Nature’s wee animals, the Opossum.  While traveling down a 2 lane road with a car coming from the other direction, Flatly (the opossum), started wandering out into the road.  When I saw Flatly I did what you’re supposed to do: I held the wheel firmly with both hands, hit the brakes, and did NOT swerve.  Alas, Flatly was too slow and the Escape was too fast.  We could both feel and hear as Flatly was flattened.  It was not a pleasant experience for everyone (Erin) in the car.  She was not hysterical or anything like that though, and Atomic, who was also along for the flattening, insisted that there was nothing we could have safely done.  To my knowledge this was the first animal I have ever personally driven over.  I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t want to do it again.  Today we drove past the scene of the crime again just to make sure Flatly had truly gone on to Opossum heaven.  Rodents, opossums, rabbits, squirrels, and deer beware… the Escape continues to prowl the streets.

1. Two weekends ago was the Detroit Free Press Marathon in downtown Detroit (and Windsor).  Not feeling up to running a full marathon or a half marathon this time, I ran in the marathon relay.  For this relay, we had a team of myself and 4 other people I work with running varied distances.  It worked out like this:
2. 1.  First runner runs 6.2 miles and crosses the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor.
3. 2.  Second runner goes 6 miles and goes through the tunnel back to Detroit.
4. 3.  Third runner does 6.7 miles and goes through Campus Maritus.
5. 4.  3 miles around Belle Isle.
6. 5.  4.4 miles and crosses the finish line.

I ended up running the first leg which meant that I didn’t have to sit around and wait for anyone to get to me but also meant that I had to start at 7:20 am.  It was pretty damn cold that early in the morning.  Running up the bridge, while quite an experience, was a little rough.  It’s pretty damn steep.  All said and done, my team finished in 3 hours, 48 minutes, and 15 seconds.  We were 19th out of 97 “over 500 employee corporate teams”.  After finishing we headed over to check out the “post party” dubbed “Conquered”.  The advertised band for the event was “The Killer Flamingos.”  Now I’ve seen the flamingos before and rather enjoyed them but if they were the only band that played at the party, then wow.  The band that played while we were there just sucked something awful.  After suffering through that and paying for a thimble size cup of beer, we headed out on a little bar tour.  Before leaving the D, we hit up Cobo Joes, the Hard Rock Cafe, and best of all, the Town Pump.  All that drinking was reward enough for having to run into Canada early in the morning.

First you could just go here.  This seems to give a pretty good explanation on how to set up your web slice.  However, if that site is down (as it was for maintenance at the time of writing this), you can also do this.  Around the content you want to put in your slice (i.e. your most recent blog entry), you’ll put the following:

   1:  <div class='hslice entry-content' id='blogInfo' 

   2:      style='width: 100%; background-color: #ffffff;'>

   3:      <span class='entry-title' style='display: none;'>Title</span>

   4:      <!-- Content -->

   5:  </div>          

So what’s important here?  Well the first div specifies that this is your slice.  The style on that div is used for actually displaying your content when the user clicks on the slice in their favorites bar.  The span line is used to specify what the default title of the web slice.  So in the image above, my slice is “Chris Risner . Com” so that’s what I would have where “Title” is shown in the example.  Finally the content area is where you put whatever you want to show.  The page linked above shows how to link to a different page for your slice content which I won’t show but you can mess around with yourself.

One final comment on web slices has to do with the Favicon that shows up with your slice.  When I first added mine, it was showing up with the default IE icon.  After seeing this I realized that IE wasn’t actually showing up with my favicon at all.  However, my favicon, which I had just placed in the root directory of my site was showing up with both Chrome and Firefox.  After looking around for a while, I realized that while those two browsers were content with just looking for my favicon in the default location, IE needed more instruction.  If this happens to you, add an explicit shortcut icon link in your header html like so:

   1:  <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://mysite/favicon.ico" />

Some of you are probably thinking, “What the hell is a morlock doing planting trees?”  Don’t worry, I have two things to say to you.  First is that these trees will aid in blocking the sun (that great big spherical thing in the sky that keeps me from leaving my cave like home) and secondly I’ll burn anything that falls off the trees, thereby destroying our environment and making it safe for morlocks everywhere to wander outside.

Now that the weekend of lush like living is over, I’m getting back to the P90x program.  I’m officially 7 days behind though.  Tonight was another night of Shoulders and Arms.  One thing I will say of the (minimal) workouts I’ve done from P90x is that each and every one has left me pretty sore which I take to mean they’re actually doing a decent job.  I would like to get more cardio in to my routine though (perhaps do more doubles) as the 3 cardio X routines just don’t seem to do enough (though I’m use to running).  In an effort to keep with the program, I’ll hopefully update more about working out.

That being said, the P90X train continues.  Yesterday I woke up early in the day and did the Pylometrics before work.  I then went running and lifting at lunch time.  That proved to kick my ass as I am now sore as hell.  Sore to the point that doing the Shoulders and Arms workout today was pretty rough.  I can definitely tell it’s doing something though as I’m sore in places I’ve never been before (if you snickered, you live in a gutter).  Tomorrow is Yoga which should be interesting as I’ve never done it before. 

In other news, there was a close encounter with Atomic yesterday.  So close it almost resulted in an Atomic shaped dent in the front hood of my 2nd car.  Despite his insistence that we join him and his neighbor / lover for a game of frisbee (I’m convinced they would have somehow roofied the disc which would have gotten to us) we successfully avoided it and returned home to watch more of the first season of Lost.

After months of encouragement from my friend Kevin, I finally got off my ass and ordered ripcords last Thursday so I could start P90X.  Kevin began doing it several months ago and has extolled the benefits of the program to me on a pretty regular basis (and writes pretty regularly about working out, nutrition, etc…so all of the things you probably don’t care about if you’re reading this).  After the bands got in on Saturday, I decided I had spent too much money and time to continue to ignoring it.  So today after work, I came home and decided to attack the fitness test and day one of the program, “Chest, Back, and Ab-Ripper X”.  The program doesn’t, and I wouldn’t, suggest doing both of those on the same day, especially without taking a break in between like I did, but I felt i was in good enough shape to give it a go. 
     The fitness test is primarily a way of making sure you’re in good enough shape to actually do P90X (I’d recommend figuring this out before you GET P90X) as opposed to a real work out.  The woman got a huge laugh out of my first attempt to do pull ups with the bands.  The way that works is that you jam one end of a small piece of fabric through a door jam and close it.  You then run your band through the exposed end of the fabric.  This works under the idea that the end you put through the jam has a small item in it which prevents it from coming through the jam.  Unfortunately, the first time I did this, that item (I’m not exactly sure what it is) was not fully through the jam.  This resulted in the band flying back to hit me in the chest in a very painful manner.  After Erin cleared the tears from laughing so hard she cried, we continued on.  After finishing the test, I decided to jump right into day one.  Erin felt like getting a bit more exercise (she ran earlier in the day) so she joined me for the workout.
   Day one, “Chest, Back, and Ab-Ripper X” has left me already sore.  The workout (“Chest and back”) is for the most part alternating between pushups and pull ups with 2 or 3 different band moves thrown in.  The pull ups weren’t very difficult at all (I think I’m going to be investing in a pull up bar very soon to make this a bit more difficult) but the pushups wrecked both Erin and I.  I’ve attempted (but gotten too lazy to finish) the 100 pushup challenge before and gotten a good distance into it but the amount and different style pushups in the first day was unbelievable.  I feel no shame in admitting that I was doing less than the woman on the video.  Following that, we did the Ab-Ripper X workout as well.  Ab-Ripper X was short and sweet and only involved ab related moves (as you might imagine).  So far I’m not disappointed with getting this going (finally) and look forward to tomorrows cardio.