Dale Miller

UALR is running a fitness program called “Step Into Spring” which encourages participants to work their way up to walking 10,000 steps per day over a six week period. It’s currently in week 3 and I’m not quite where I should be. So, yesterday I decided to go climb Pinnacle Mountain to up my step count. I’ve never been a big fan of just walking, but climbing up a mountain is fun — go figure. I went up the east trail (1700 steps) down the west (1800 steps) up the west (1850 steps) and back down the east (1850 steps). So, twice over the mountain is only 7200 steps! If I just want to get my count up, there are certainly easier ways. But it was good for me to get out, and I did need the exercise.

Oh, did I mention that I took yesterday off? Since I have today off as the employees version of spring break, that gave me a four-day weekend. I don’t really have anything special planned, but it just seemed the thing to do since the weather was nice.

So far this has been a rather laid-back and yet productive workweek. I now have two more parking lots set up to use the CampusCard, a bit more work done on identity management, and my office cleaned up a little bit — although you may not believe that if you saw it. The weather has been lovely, and I’m looking forward to the weekend. I have decided that I’m going to get out and do something even if I haven’t yet figured out what. I have spent a bit more time taking pictures, mostly along Asher Avenue. I’m trying to get into the mode of shooting something just because I think it’s interesting, regardless of whether it makes a “good” picture.

It’s Monday. I’m already ready for the work-week to be over. It’s spring break at UALR, which means the week is likely to be rather light in terms of phone calls, but there’s also no scenery on campus. It’s currently raining and a bit cool, but the week is supposed to improve.

I have determined the PQBoot could almost be a UNIX utility. It’s cryptic, can do massive damage, and doesn’t really tell you what’s going on. Unlike most UNIX utilities, though, it reboots the system on exit, which doesn’t even give you the chance to fix your mistake.

Once I had Windows started again (and feeling much better about the whole situation), I started up PQBoot and set the bootable partition back to MACOS. A reboot started the usual bootloader (there was an improvement), but trying to start windows resulted in a message that autochk was not found followed by a solid black screen. Furthermore, now booting from the USB key presented the same thing. Great, my partition table is screwed up (I wasn’t going to believe that I had actually trashed the disk). What to do next? Okay, start up MACOS. The GUI disk utility was, of course, useless, so on to the command line and attempt to figure out how to use this particular version of fdisk.

Huh, why do you think my partition is OS/2 hidden? That’s not right. So, change the Windows partition from 17 to 87 (NTFS), and try one more time.

Hallelujah! I’m now back to the same point I started 3 hours ago. I think I’ll call it a night.

I’ve been having laptop fun. A couple of weeks ago I re-partitioned my laptop hard drive (using Partition Magic) to be able to install MAC OS-X and dual-boot the machine. The problem is that the bootloader wanted to default to the MAC partition rather than the Windows one. For some folks that may seem like an advantage, but not so much for me. So tonight I started trying to figure out how to change the default boot. There is documentation in Darwin for the “bless” command, which seemed to do exactly what I wanted. This command, however, didn’t seem to exist. The nice control panel for disk management doesn’t seem to work correctly on my system (What do I expect? It’s not supported, and isn’t even supposed to run.) So, I tried to find the relevant file on the disk, with little success. I found one configuration file which let me change the delay from 10 seconds to 60, so that was a bit better. Then I remembered that I had a couple of utilities with partition magic, one of which was called PQBoot. I thought I would see what id did for me.

What it did was render my system unbootable. Okay, it just messed up the partition table and/or the MBR. No big deal, I have utilities to fix those — or do I? It occurred to me that my laptop has no floppy or CD reader. I have USB versions of both, but not here at home. Okay, next step — I used a very nice utility from HP to format a USB key with an MBR, added files from bootdisk.com to start up XP and got it attempting to start. A bit of messing about with the boot.ini and my XP system actually booted again. Now I just need to fix whatever I broke the last time.

I need something better to do on a Saturday night.

Wet, cold, dreary.

That pretty much sums up today. Work was not bad, and I was even productive. That’s always a good thing.

I am messing about with OpenVPN on my Linksys router. I think that all I need to have it working in client mode is the CA certificate that the VPN server is using. I don’t have that handy, though, and don’t much feel like messing with it much more tonight. There is a book (Lieutenant Hornblower) waiting for me beside my bed, and I think I shall spend some time on it before I turn in tonight. I don’t know why I’ve never read the Hornblower stories before now. What was I thinking?

I am now ready for the Hooters® to open in North Little Rock.

Oh, if you want your own, visit http://www.hooterscard.com.

And now for something that could almost be true:
New Crispy Snack Cracker To Ease Crushing Pain Of Modern Life

Questions that OnStar probably wouldn’t answer, but I have fielded today:

• I’m lost. If I give you my latitude and longitude, can you give me directions to the Branch Davidian complex?
• I found out from the museum by the grassy knoll that Oswald is buried in Ft. Worth. Can you find out what cemetery and tell me how to get there?
• I’m headed back towards Dallas. Where can I find a Hooters to have supper?

DaleStar™ — We’ll do the same thing to you occasionally.