As some of you know, we recently moved to a new home here in Austin and now I need to prepare the old homestead for sale and move-out.   (pics and video are forthcoming, I promise).

Good thing I have the promise of knowing that hardworking, honest people who care are out there.  And it’s nice to know they are painfully honest.

I have an appointment with a handyman to come out next week and give me a bid on doing some work here and there – power wash the outside, rebuild a couple sections of flooring that got wet, fix some walls, lay down some vinyl tile - you know… stuff.  

Stuff I’d do myself if I had time.  Don’t even get me started on the cleaning that has to happen.

You see, the work itself is something I find fun and rewarding, but I just don’t have the time.  I’m the type of guy who likes to learn how to do something – just about anything - once.  I’ve changed my own oil – once.  I’ve rebuilt a carburetor – once.  I’ve laid tile, installed carpet, put up a dividing wall, poured concrete, dug a fire pit, changed my tires, installed a garbage disposal, painted a house, replaced heating elements in a water heater, built a computer from as scratch as you can get, installed a level brickstone walkway, resurfaced furniture and raised a couple of kids (well, halfway so far).  These are things I’m glad I know how to do, but I don’t want to do them every time, or very often.

Once is enough for most of it.

Now that I think about it, it’s not just about the fact that I don’t have the time.  It’s about efficiency, too.  Sure, it’s good to know how to do a lot of things… it helps you learn, you become smarter, more self-reliant, and if nothing else, you know how to spot a bad job when you see it.  But people who do things for a living are usually better, faster and more efficient than someone who just does it the first couple of times.  So while I know how to change my own oil, when *I* do it, it’s a mess and it takes me about 5 times as long as someone who does it every day.

About the only thing left is to figure out how to set up little mini-services for people who A) absolutely have the time to do a specific chore and B) have the money to pay for the chore to be done but C) want no part whatsoever in doing the chore (or) might do a horrible job at it. 

The example I’m thinking of right now is puppy dog poop stains.  I just want to call someone out to clean it up and clean it up right.  Sure, I have the time.  Sure, I have some of the right equipment.  But I know that there are people who are much better at doing that kind of stuff and won’t leave such a stain.  They can go door-to-door with a backpack-steam-vac and make the carpets look like new instead of like mushed up plastic swirlies.

Sigh. I guess it’s the price I pay until we can get a doggy door installed at the new house.

He sure is cute, though.

Ren and I are going to Vegas for our birthdays this December. 

If I had the time and inclination, I’d photoshop our faces into this apropos movie poster.  I’m still trying to figure out which of us would be which actor. 

Both of us have birthdays in December, and we were chatting it up during pool league how we need to do another road trip. You know, like our TequilaCon 2009 road trip where we took video but I never made a DITL, er I mean RITL (Roadtrip In The Life) for it?  *THAT* kind of road trip.

Then it hit us that we should go to Vegas. 

Turns out there’s already a big blogger birthday bash going on during my actual birthday (Saturday the 12th), and there are a million or so bloggers going.  So after comparing flights, holiday vacation travel for the Halls (what I like to call Hall-iday travel), vacation time from work and hotel options, we made our plans.

Friday the 11th to Monday the 14th.   Join us!

What makes the accommodations especially cool is my RCI membership – we snagged an entire week at a resort for pretty cheap.  We’re not staying the whole week, but it ended up being cheaper than a hotel would have cost per night during the days we’ll be there, AND we get a full kitchen.

The blogger bash is going on at Planet Hollywood and place we chose to stay at is just a couple blocks from there.  Ren’s not on Facebook, but so far out of the 40+ people confirmed attending, I only recognize two faces, and one of them is mine.

So I will finally be able to meet Adam. 

I wonder.  Is the blogosphere ready for us to meet?

Here’s the official (is it official? it LOOKS official) link and picture that includes the obligatory Elvis, coming from the folks I’ve never heard of at Room 704.  All I know about them is that they are women and drinking is somehow involved.  What more can you ask for?

But sometimes they don’t. 

Although, there may be one lurking, if we extend “ondas” to be “Hondas”.  I can just imagine tiny little Hondas on shore leave.  Little horno de microondas.  bwahahaha.

In other news, I believe I found out what was causing the extreme delay in my Windows 7 Easy Transfer problem from my last post.  I watched and watched and thinked and thunked.  I pondered.  I perused.  I fell asleep, then woke up and thought some more.

Then I decided to look at the external hard drive where my user profile was stored.  Since Windows didn’t give me any specific details during the transfer, I went ahead and canceled it and saw that it had copied some of the profile but not all of it.  The external hard drive supports USB2 and firewire, and because firewire is faster, I initially chose it for the supposed speed increase.

To help figure out if I had a performance issue, I set up a standard file copy from the laptop to the external drive.  When I actually checked the file transfer speeds of this external firewire drive (which you CAN see when you expand “Details”), I saw that it was getting less than 1MB/sec transfer rate.

I had mentioned that the profile itself was more than 140 GB.  GIH. GUH. BITES.  A gigabyte is a thousand megabytes, btw.  In my world, anyway.

Let’s do the math on that, shall we?

Actually, let’s not.  Math is hard.  Let’s just say it would take a LOOOOONG time at that speed.  So I connected up the USB cable, did the same copy and was able to get between 11-25MB/sec transfer rates.  Ahhh.  The sounds of packets flowing across the wires.

A bit of googling showed that other people on Vista and Windows 7 64-bit had similar firewire problems due to drivers and what-not.  So I’m sure it’ll get resolved eventually with an updated driver, but for now I can stick with USB2 and get’r done.  The laptop also has an eSATA port (which is even faster), but the data isn’t on an eSATA-capable drive at the moment. 

There was one other problem I found on the computer, but I fixed it fairly quickly:

I was worried when I switched jobs that I might lose some of my Windows 7 accessibility.  I was IT Director of a large ISP, in charge of technical things like Operating Systems and our Microsoft Enterprise Agreement and bypassing the Internet logging… so not only was I in the know, but I had access to everything.  In my new job, however, I’m not IT anymore – I’m a dreaded and lowly “user”.  Now *I* have to create helpdesk requests and wait for things to happen instead of laughing at users waiting for things to happen.

Fortunately, the IT crew at the new job is cool and let me use Windows 7 even though they hadn’t prepared on rolling it out yet.  In fact, I’ve been testing some of the various apps like virus protection and the new game and I’m glad I can help.   I especially like testing out games.  WOO to the HOO.

I have Windows 7 on my work desktop and I just recently loaded it on my work laptop.  I already have Windows 7 on my home desktop and loaded it last night on my home laptop.  Is that enough computers for you yet?!?!?!

While there are many cool things about Windows 7 I could expand on here, I’m going to specifically mention Windows Easy Transfer.  I will mention it, and then I will trash it publicly.

Normally, this tool is incredible. It’s awesome.  It’s so much more than “Files & Settings Transfer” was in XP.  It’s better than USMT (User Settings Migration Tool) if you’ve used that on the Enterprise side.   It’s so much better than ‘Cats’.

What it does is take your files and settings (and in some cases, applications, but only in certain situations) from one computer and transfer it to another computer.   This is a fantastic boon for people who customize their computer a lot and have more than just a couple directories of files to transfer.  I, for example, and one of those people.  In fact, I customize my laptop so much I’m more like three of those people.

For the first four or five times I used it, it worked flawlessly and quickly.  However, in my most recent quest, transferring from a Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 laptop to a Windows 7 Enterprise released version laptop, I’ve been having issues.  HEadsup – I might need a hug.

Here’s some eye candy fer ya to help ’splain my issue.

(click to embiggify)

Note the transfer time.  btw, “Transfer time” indicates how much time is LEFT.  btw also, I started this transfer Monday morning and here it is Wednesday and it’s still chugging along.  Also, that “transfer time” sometimes says “1 day” and sometimes says “8 days” and everywhere between.  The disk lights on the laptop and the external firewire drive are still blinking, and the green bar is advancing some every few hours, or so it seems.  Just in the time it took to write this blog post, it’s changted from 2 days, 10 hours to 1 day, 9 hours, to 6 days, to 2 days 14 hours.

I should point out that there are a few quirks in my particular set up.

1. Different versions of Windows
   I am using a migration file taken from a Release Candidate version of Windows 7 and importing to a Released version of Windows 7.  I don’t know if that is supported – who knows, it might not be, or it might be buggy.  I can’t blame Microsoft for that part if it’s true.  In fact, they go out of their way to put in disclaimers on their beta software.
2. The migration file is huge:
   My migration file is 127.5GB and the user profile itself is > 140GB.  Maybe it’s supposed to take this long?  I don’t have any hard data to compare to on this front.  Perhaps I can blame Microsoft for that? Nahh.
3. I’m changing domains. 
   The profile was taken from a domain that doesn’t exist any more, and I’m importing to a new domain.  The docs show that this is supported (yay Microsoft for adding this!) but who knows, maybe it has a problem too.  If so, that’s Microsoft’s fault.  But we don’t know yet.
4. Power interruption on the first try
   The first time I tried the import (last Friday), there was a power interruption to the USB drive and the migration failed.  So I blew away the profile on the new laptop, rebooted again, removed from the domain and re-added, and then tried again.  While that shouldn’t be a problem, maybe there’s something wrong.  I did notice that when I logged into the account after the failed import and before blowing it away, there was about 90GB of files in the profile, so at least it did something.  There could be a problem on the external drive, or there might be some setting on my account somewhere from that failed first try.  Anyone feel like helping me blame Microsoft for the power interruption?
5. Domain account locked interruption
   There were some domain account issues on the new domain, where the account got locked for other reasons.  Since the process has to authenticate as that user during the migration, maybe it’s stuck somewhere and can’t do anything.  This was on the current try. (more specifically, I started migration the 2nd time on Monday morning, and the domain got locked twice Tuesday afternoon).  Stupid locked domain accounts! ALL MICROSOFT’S FAULT AND BUSH’s TOO!

I’m thinking that if it doesn’t get somewhere today, I’ll have to interrupt it again, blow away the profile, do a disk check on the firewire drive (due to the power interruption) and try it again.

Hey.  Now it says only 1 day, 10 hours left.  Maybe it’s worth waiting for?

While I wait, I think I’ll compose a lolcat for the situation.  Wait.  Dang Office Assistant got in the way.

The new job? AWESOME.  I love the new challenges, the new company, the new product, and the future that comes with it.

The new house? AWESOME.  All four of us (ok, six including the dogs) have something we absolutely LOVE about the new house.  For me, it’s the 3car garage with a workbench + 2 attics.

I’m also attending a Transformation Boot Camp twice a week that should land me a new body in a few months.  I’ll let you know how that works out. (get it? work out?  HAHAHAH)

My old commute was right about 12.5 miles.  There were other ways I could travel to possibly avoid some traffic, but it usually ended up right about the same length of time – 25-30 minutes.

The new commute is… actually, right about 12.5 miles also. 

Today’s rain turned the commute that’s normally 20-25 minutes into a 50-60 minute one.  In fact, I never got higher than 3rd gear on the way in.  You know it’s going to be a long 12.5 miles if you never hit 4th gear.

Which brings me to the clutch.  Every time I change into 5th gear, it grinds.  The mechanic told me I’d probably have to consider replacing the clutch soon, so I guess I’m not too surprised.

So, I guess that’s my point for today.  I have a car that grinds when it gets into 5th gear, and the Universe threw me a nice rainy day that made sure I never got close to using it.

Thank you, Universe.

I was thinking today how… if I wanted to, if I *really* wanted to, I could be unhappy. 

I thought – if I concentrated hard enough, I could find a ton of things to be upset about.  Things to complain about.  Things to ruin my day or my week.  Things that could ruin my life if I let them.

Have you heard of gratitude journals?  I believe Oprah is a fan of them.  You’re supposed to write down the things every day that you’re thankful for.  I’ve never tried it myself, but have heard the wonders it does for people who are depressed or unhappy.

Since I’m so happy all the time, I wonder what would happen if I decided to start a complaint journal.  You know, for balance.

I could dwell on the fact that I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life.  Two hundred and seventy-five pounds of blogging muscle.

I could lament that I’m not at #avitaween this weekend like all the cool bloggers.

There are personal issues that could seriously weigh on me if I let them.  I don’t disclose them on the blog.

I owe a lot. In many ways to many people, and not just financial.

My feet itch.

There’s more politics to rile me up than ever before in my life, and it feels like the entire news media, the government, the blogging world, and most of my friends are against me and my principles.

I went without internet at our new house for a full week. Also, AT&T’s 3G coverage at our new house is horrible compared to our old house.

I forgot to set FastForward to record for my wife.  Now we’re weeks behind.

We still don’t have jet packs.

There are at least 3 jobs in my past that had I taken them when offered, I’d be a millionaire now.  I have 2 jobs in my past that I took a year too late and missed out on a million dollars.

My car’s muffler / tail pipe scrapes the bottom of our new driveway because of the incline.

I have health concerns. 

I’ve had to spend > $1000 on our two cars for maintenance, and I have at least another $1500 that needs to be spent, but we can’t right now.  $320 of it was for a leaking gas tank, and they just had to replace one little rubber grommet, but it costs that much anyway.

I still don’t have the game room TV cable hooked up, and we’ve been in our new house a week.

A road I drive every day will be moving from 2 lanes to 1 lane for 19 months while the government spends unneeded TARP stimulus money to pay workers to rebuild a bridge that doesn’t need rebuilding.

Speaking of driving every day, I used to work from home.  A LOT.  Now I have to go into work with 0% teleworking.  That means an additional $100-200/mo on gas expense.

I took a new job where I’m not the man in charge any more.  No clout, no history, no old-timer’s advantage.

That’s a lot of stuff, and I’m just disclosing or hinting at things that I’m comfortable saying on my blog.  If you know me and my blogging style, then you know there’s a lot more reality behind the scenes.

These were complaints off the top of my head.  Yet, I can easily come up with ten times as many things to be thankful for.  And it’s easy for me. 

In fact, it’s usually all I think about.  I keep being amazed at how lucky I am in life.  Everywhere I turn, I’m impressed with something.  There’s always something to make me smile.

Why don’t others have an easy time with it? Is it just perspective?

Despite all those things I listed above, I’m having one of the best days of my life today.

Here’s one of the reasons.  I found this on Iron Fist’s blog and I love it.

I’m so easy.

No.

I mean Demitri Martin.

I’ve really come to love more and more things on my iPhone and one of the most recent ones is the AOL Radio app.  AOL Radio is like XM or Sirius or a radio station but goes over this magical thing I like to call “the Internet.”  It streams in different stations, like Rock, Pop, All Beatles, Sports, Talk, Politics, Country, or whatever has a station.  There are millions of stations (sort of). 

There are a couple of stations in my AOL Radio “favorites” list that are Comedy specific – AOL Comedy Classics and AOL Comedy Attack!

Now, Faiqa, Avitable and you other liberals, please don’t get all freaked out about the AOL Progressive channel. It’s *not* what you think it is.

Here are some videos for your enjoy to see if Demitri is up your alley or not.  I’m giving you two options because you might be busy and want a shorter one.

(and yes, the 2nd one has a couple bad words in it, and has a couple repeat jokes from the first one.  I consider this the extent of my responsibility in warning you since my blog is PG-13 rated.)

You haven’t lived until you actually realize a car is driving up to you and you didn’t even hear it until the gravel crunches under its tires.  Man, that’s freaky. 

…but cool at the same time. I think it’s high-time we had electric vehicles (I had always imagined a car that ran on water, but electricity is still cool).  I still long for the Back to The Future-style floating skateboards (and cars of course), because I can totally see me tricking Biff into a truckload of manure.

You can’t see me in this picture, but I photoshopped myself onto the skateboard right behind the camera.  I look awesome in my life preserver jacket.  I also photoshopped Malorie in there with me because, well, she’s hot.

Anyway, Back To The Story, when I experienced the sensation of a huge car rolling up to me without any kind of engine sound, I instantly thought “I bet someone ends up faking the sound of an engine.”

And sure enough, this morning I hear on the radio something about safety concerns about hybrids and electric vehicles, and the fact that children might not hear them and end up getting squished.  I’m not sure of the details, but it sounded like someone was lobbying the car makers to make some artificial engine noise, and even have the sound increase along with the accelerator pedal.  You know.  For the Children.

I’m all for no-squish kids.  But fake engine noises?  Really?  Won’t we just be replacing real pollution with noise pollution?  Why can’t we just learn to live with silent cars and, oh I don’t know…. BE RESPONSIBLE FOR OURSELVES A LITTLE?!?!?!  Look, I can see having sensors that can notify the driver or even honk the horn or something, but constant noise doesn’t seem like a good answer to me.  You know what it seems like to me?  It seems like an answer someone came up with that is responsible for making the fake engine sound modules to sell to the auto manufacturers, and they happen to have a friend in the Legislature, and then they play the “it’s for the children” card and then we all pay for something that really wasn’t needed.

Anyway, Back To The Story II, I thought about ring tones.  Yeah!  RING TONES!  I figured – if we end up being forced by the government to pimp out our rides with noise makers, I might as well make a few bucks on it.  If we can put custom ring-tones on our cell phones, why not custom drive-tones on our cars?  I could make a website that sold custom driving ring tones for people’s cars and *SMACK* kiss the working day good-bye!

I’m sure NO-ONE HAS THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE.

So I go look. 

cartones.com: taken.  drivetones.com: taken.  electrictones.com: taken. drivertones.com: taken.  carrings.com: taken. carringtones.com: taken.  mobiletones.com: taken.  mobileringtones.com: taken.

Distraught, I take a break from the domain searches and try to compose myself.  I look out the window at the cars zooming by. I can hear them outside on Mo-Pac because, well, most of them are non-electric earth-killing death cars.  I close my eyes and imagine – what would I want to hear instead of pistons pumping and exhaust being spewed out into the sky?  What would *I* as a hybrid owner, want my car to sound like?  If I could choose any sound in the world…  what tone would I want to identify myself as when I drive up to someone. 

Just as a ringtone defines who I am when my phone rings, I would want to customize the sounds my car makes – not only when I’m driving and I revv up the engine, but also when I start the car.  When I’m idling.  When I stop the car.  When I’m walking up to it (it would sense my bluetooth-enabled iPhone).  When I want to honk at a cutie pie at the light.  When I want to honk at a jerk trying to fiddle with his car ring tones at the next light.

I GOT IT!

tonemycar.com: available?

Not any more! SUCKAS!

Now to make the website…. heh heh heh.  I’m already counting the money.

[time passes]

Anyway, Back to The Story III, anyone know how to make a website?

Note: I’ve not seen this youtube video until this morning as I was searching for something to embed.  It’s pretty cool, but the emphasis for this post is the music itself.  I recommend putting on headphones, starting it and closing your eyes.

This song appears on a CD I’ve had for a looooong time called Pure Moods. 

The version on the CD is only a shade over three minutes long and this youtube version is more than five minutes long.  The CD also features Enya, Enigma, Jan Hammer, and even the X-Files theme.  Relaxation is a lot easier when this CD is playing.

This morning’s routine was different because Jaden actually woke up tired.  He’s usually chipper, early and ready to do stuff in the morning before school but today it was a challenge to get him going.  One thing that got him up eventually was the thought of getting out to the bus stop early, waiting in the car, and being able to sleep again.  I said I’d play “our song” and he immediately brightened up.

We got through it twice before that infernal bus showed up.

But it was a good time.  Man I love that song.

And that kid.

The definition of compassion

Since when does compassion mean “removal of consequences”? 

Let me take a moment to say…. Nature is awesome.

(stick with me for a minute).

Nature, whether created or come about by chance, has survival down pat.  It knows how to make winners.  Nature doesn’t tolerate the weak nor the stupid.  The compassionless ice adheres to all the tree branches in the winter and the heartless wind breaks off the ones that can’t withstand the weight of life.  If the grasshopper doesn’t store up enough food, it dies.  There are no Extinction Committees among the animals.

In Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, he writes:

“Don’t feel sad, Little Tree. It is The Way. Tal-con [the hawk] caught the slow [quail] and so the slow will raise no children who are also slow. Tal-con eats a thousand ground rats who eat the eggs of the quail — both the quick and the slow eggs — and so Tal-con lives by the Way. He helps the quail. … Take only what ye need. When ye take the deer, do not take the best. Take the smaller and the slower and then the deer will grow stronger and always give you meat. … Only Ti-bi, the bee, stores more than he can use… and so he is robbed by the bear, and the ‘coon… and the Cherokee. It is so with people who store and fat themselves with more than their share. They will say a flag stands for their right to do this… and men will die because of the words and the flag… but they will not change the rules of The Way.”

Sadly, our society has interrupted Nature’s wisdom.  We have replaced the concept of compassion, which should be limited to “a deep awareness” and/or “sympathy for” with some sort of edict that we prevent failure at all costs.  Without consequences from failure, we do not improve.  We have no incentive.

We see it in our children, with the eradication of First Place Trophies.  Instead, we give “Participation” awards to everyone, and people who try harder or who accomplish more don’t get the recognition they deserve.  We rejoice in our collective mediocrity.

We see it in our government, with the inhuman and prolific handing out of free resources.  One of the worst things you can do to a human is remove his need to provide for himself.  Atrophy is the great killer of minds and souls.  When a person receives good will from another person directly, there is joy and compassion, and a required stigma for the recipient to improve themselves.  When a person receives a check from a cold hard brick building, there is entitlement and laziness.

We see it in our taxes, with automatic withholding.  If citizens had to pay a check at the end of the month to the Government, along with rent, food, clothing, transportation and entertainment, they may pay better attention as to what “the government” pays for and instead realize it’s what “we” pay for.

We see it in our jobs, with Affirmative Action.  If someone doesn’t hire someone because of the color of their skin, they need to be disciplined and fired.  Other than that, may the best person for the job be hired; quotas be damned.

We see it in the bailouts, with TARP and Auto companies, and AIG and banks and airlines and mortgage companies and paper companies. What’s next?  Newspapers?  Radio Stations?  There is no “too big to fail.”

When my child spills some milk on accident, I don’t clean it up for him just because he didn’t mean to spill the milk.  He still has to clean up the milk.  Otherwise, he won’t think it’s important to avoid spilling next time.

We need to wake up.  We need to let failure have it’s turn again.  Don’t get in Nature’s way.  She will do her job whether you go along with it or not.

Nature has some culling to do.