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There are still a few kinks to work out.

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This is so awesome and crazy at the same time. For IT geeks only.

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Bummer. Last season MLB.TV promised a sync feature that would allow users to listen to the radio feed while watching the TV feed. For example, I could listen to the AM620/Bob Uecker audio and it would sync up with the video. Pretty awesome, huh? Well, the feature never really got off the ground last year and this year it’s not even mentioned. I just hope they haven’t completely abandoned the idea. I’d rather listen to Uecker with no video so I guess I’ll just go with the MLB app on my iPhone.

Oh, Microsoft. Just when you had me won over with Windows 7 you had to go and do this. A much used feature in XP for an IT guy like me was the offline repair installation. It was great for fixing a corrupt OS or upgrading a system’s hardware. I recently got stuck in a bit of a quandary where my Windows 7 install wouldn’t boot and Startup Repair couldn’t fix it. Trying to start an install off the boot media just resulted in being told that an upgrade install could not be performed from boot and that I should restart and log into Windows. Well, that would have been fine, but my problem was that I couldn’t boot into Windows in the first place.
Microsoft: Please add this feature into Windows 7.

I’m sad to have learned of Paul Pohle’s passing this week. Our alumni chapter here definitely would not be one of the most vibrant in the country if it weren’t for him. I hope wherever he is there’s a TV that gets the Badger games.

I watched King Corn the other night. If you’ve watched Super Size Me or read Fast Food Nation or In Defense of Food you’ll get the idea. In short it’s about two college buddies from Boston who decide to raise an acre of corn in Iowa from seed to harvest to find out what happens to the corn. Some interesting takeaways:

- Many Americans are made out of corn! Seriously. They do an isotope analysis of the filmmakers’ hair.
- Most corn farmers today can’t eat what they grow. The corn is largely inedible and its ultimate purpose is to be turned into sugar.
- Beef cattle are not designed to eat corn, but that’s primarily what they’re fed. After six months on a corn diet a cow will die, which is why they’re shoved into packed feed lots where they can barely move and fed corn for five months before slaughter. Buy grass fed beef.
- 1 in 8 New Yorkers is diabetic. Sugar = Death. Think twice before reaching for that daily soda.
- Corn (usually as HFCS) is in nearly every processed food. Read the labels.

To better food.

It was the Monday after the holidays and like most of us I was dreading the return to work. My one salvation would be listening to the Steve Czaban Show on Fox Sports Radio as I headed to work. No such luck. Steven A Smith came blaring across the speakers in all his hair tearing glory. I immediately realized this was no fluke and that the Steve Czaban Show had either been moved to a different slot or cancelled. Well, we all know what the answer is now. Very disappointing….

Let Fox Sports Radio know about the giant mistake they’ve made here:

http://msn.foxsports.com/feedback

Oh, the joys of older hardware.

I’ve been running Windows 7 since the beta came out and installed it without issue on a number of my work machines, but when it came time to do the install on my primary home computer things got a little dicey. It had nothing to do with Windows 7, mind you, but rather my aging Pentium 4 system. My machine didn’t even have a DVD drive. I know, that’s kind of crazy for 2009, but I just honestly never had a bona fide need for one in that particular machine. Windows 7 (on DVD) became the reason. With my DVD burner I was all ready to install Windows 7! I threw in the DVD and nothing happened. I hopped into the BIOS only to be presented with more puzzlement: my hard drive was the only listed boot device. It turns out that my motherboard doesn’t know how to boot from a SATA optical device although it works fine once Windows is loaded. Undeterred I grabbed a spare hard drive and a spare PATA DVD drive I had sitting around. I figured out I had another issue since Partition Logic and Gparted were both unable to interface with the SIS chipset on my ASUS motherboard leaving me unable to create a partition on which to install Windows 7. Are you following me? Ok, good. With the spare PATA hard drive and DVD I got to work getting Windows 7 installed. Once it was installed on the spare drive I was able to view my primary drive, the one I wanted to resize and repartition all along. I created a new partition alongside Windows XP, disconnected the spare hard drive, and ran a second install of Windows 7 on the newly created partition. Voila, I now had Windows 7 and Windows XP both running on my 500GB SATA drive. My goal is to eventually get almost everything off of my Windows XP partition so that I can shrink it down to something small like 20GB. This is going to take some time, though, since I have to keep shrinking and extending each respective partition as I move things from XP to 7. Hopefully your installation of Windows 7 was a little less painful than mine.

For some reason I’m feeling particularly stifled tonight.  Drawing now seems like some long lost art, I don’t write enough, and I haven’t touched a guitar in far too long.  I look around and realize I’ve been placed inside an upper middle class suburbia where the walls are too steep to climb; I know there’s something on the other side, but how do I get there?  Oh well.  At least I have an excuse to stay up late since the Badgers are playing in Maui tonight and the game just started.

Packers aren’t on TV here this week so that means I’m watching the game down the street at my local Packer bar, Tiffany’s. Rob and I decided to try the Summit Slam, which is a one pound burger, fries, and a 24 oz beer. If you can finish it you get a tshirt. Mission accomplished!