House of Jorob

NaNoWriMo: The Forums are Open!

I'm so excited.

The forums have been stripped and reopened on the NaNo web site.

This means the start of National Novel Writing Month is less than one month away.

The Forums are the bulletin boards supporting the NaNo authors, and once a year they are purged.

Wiped.

The good stuff--plot leads, character development, that sort of thing--is archived and reposted a couple weeks from now, but the Forums themselves are dumped because they're job is to support the current crop of novelist nutcases.

All 100,000 of em.

That is a lot of nutcases.

Nano makes ends meet--web servers cost money, and so do staff people supporting administrative activity--with voluntary contributions from their participants. And some grants, which in this climate are not exactly falling out of the trees.

If you decide to participate in this year's fun, maybe find a couple bucks to send their way.

50 and Grooving

50.

Half a freakin century.

And dammit, I made it.

Took every single shot life threw, and still standing.

Got knocked back a couple of steps, sure.

Some of those shots hurt.

Coupla goals for the next half century:

1) Finish five books in the next six years.

Writing them.

Reading them is different--see the reading list I've got running on the side of the blog.

I'll worry about actually publishing one or two of them after I write the damn thing.

NaNoWriMo is a part of this.

So are all the sidenotes and pieces I've been working on lately.

2) Get my voice-over work going.

Wandering through a large forest on this one.

Every pro I've talked to tells me I need a demo disk.

Engineering time.

That's like, $4,000.

If I had a spare $4,000, I wouldn't be looking to develop my voice-over work.

But still.

It's a goal.

The mic loves my voice. Does things to it that other people like--without engineering.

Because when I broadcast at the Show every year, complete strangers find me to tell me how much they like listening.

And all I'm doing is announcing the next round of lectures or demonstrations.

Can't sing worth a damn.

But give me a script and a mic, and I can influence people.

Bonus Goal: Write up the other goals I have.

Next post.

NaNoWriMo warmups

National Novel Writing Month kicks off in just three months.

Write a novel.

From scratch.

In one month.

50,000 words in 30 days.

1,6667 words per day.

The mind boggles.

Well, no.

Not really.

More like an extended cramp.

This November will be my fourth shot at the magic number.

Haven't made it to the finish yet.

I mean, with the 50,000 words.

I'm usually gamely plugging along, filling page after page.

Just not enough of them.

Last year I tapped out at just over 19,000 words.

That I'm thinking about this year's Nano project three months in advance is a good sign.

That I'm actually drafting an outline is even better.

Although, I've never worked from an outline for Nano.

Been letting the characters develop themselves, and work out the story between us.

We'll see what the outline does.

It's legal, as far as the NaNo writing rules go.

You can't use prewritten chapters, that kind of thing.

Outlines and character sketches, sure enough.

As long as it's planning material.

I don't have a clean ending on this post.

Kind of like my NaNo novels, to date.

Quick Test results

Well, both the missing posts turned up on my FB profile.

Flagged as being posted about 6 hours ago.

One was written June 18.

The other, June 20.

OK, so maybe that's when they were released from FB Purgatory.

Either way, its working again.

Back to randomness.

Quick test of the facebook posting process

This'll be supplanted real quick, but right now I'm testing the FB posing process. Went out and got a username on FB (instead of the numeric thingy that I've had for so long) and all of a sudden the next blog post didn't make it to the FB account.

Grilling II: The First Weekend

I didn't think the chicken would catch fire.

Grilling I: Bringin Home the Char-Broil

I bought my grille at Lowes.

It's a Char-Broil.

Two burner thing, didn't cost me a hundred bucks.

I figure if I still suck at this after a year, I'm not out that much money.

The adventure started when I tried to take the thing home.

Lowes offered to put the thing together for me.

If I wanted to wait three days.

I didn't.

It just so happened that my model was also out on the flat, chained up with a bunch of other grilles on display.

I opted to take one of them with me.

Until I opened my trunk.

I drive a Saturn sedan.

Oops.

Unbolt the grille from the cart.

Put the grille on the back seat.

Oops.

Detach the wheels from the cart.

Unbolt the base legs from the upper legs.

Oops.

I hadn't counted on the wings.

The side trays were permanently attached.

Unbolt the brackets supporting the wi--

Duh.

I'm buying an assembled grille because I don't want to put one together.

Right now my car looks like a parts-pile.

The sales guy knew where I was going before I started pulling the pieces of the pre-assembled grille out of my car.

"The box is a lot smaller," he said. "I'll have one brought out for you."

The box fit on the back seat, with room for Little Boy.

For a couple of hours, my front porch looked like a construction zone.

But the grille went together really easy.

The fasteners--and there were a bunch of them-- were all together on one card, with clear identification on the back of each blister.

And the identification on the card matched the naming in the assembly instructions.

I tested the thing today, attaching Little Boy and then firing up the grille after a leak test.

Blue flame all around the burners.

Elation.

Bring on the hot dogs.

What, I'm going to risk steak at this stage of my grilling career?

That Glow on the Horizon? That's my Dinner!

Put that fire extinguisher away.

I haven't started yet.

But I will.

I have to.

Grilling For Dummies showed up back around the December holidays.

I unwrapped it thinking it was something else.

Like a toy.

Or a game.

I didn't own a grille at the time.

There's a reason for that.

I suck at cooking over an open fire.

There's no burner knobs on a hibachi.

My idea of temperature control is not raising and lowering the food so its closer to the coals.

I burn marshmallows, for god's sake.

Put them on a stick.

Put the stick over the fire.

Torch.

Now I own a grille.

But I'm not playing around with charcoal.

No sir.

Got me a gas tank looks like Little Boy.

Only smaller.

And white.

With a valve.

I start burning things next weekend.

Meteor 4: The World of Warcraft Expansion

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 ftw!

Jill got Wow's Wrath of the Lich King for Hanukkah.

Time to install it.

But first, relocate the entire WoW installation to the 1 TB Barracuda SATA drive I installed in there during the late October hard drive disaster.

Oops.

When I set up the big drive, it was as a destination for backup and recovery services during the reconstruction of the existing--but crashed--hard drive.

I never reconfigured the drive to behave as a normal storage device.

Hell, at the time I was just happy to have a recovered PC installation with all applications running correctly.

Okaaaaay.

Pulled out Acronis.

Brought up the partitioning tools.

Advanced, Manual Mode.

Located about 700 free Gigs and created a new partition out of it.

Moved and deleted a couple extra backups from the Time of Troubles.

Closed Acronis and restarted the PC.

All drives checked in.

With the correct drive letters.

Total time to repartition and clean up the files: 8 minutes.

I am never going to use Partition Magic again.

Evar.

Next: moved and upgraded Wow:

• Located the installed files under Program Files.
• Copied to their new drive space.
• Renamed the old folder.
• Repointed the desktop icon for WoW's launcher to the new folder space.
• Booted up Wow and tested the new location.
• Testing: mailed stuff between characters, deleted a character, created a new character, doublechecked maps and character locations on the maps, etc.
• Rebooted.
• Fired up the upgrade DVD
• Grinned as the autoloader found the new location for the files and installed Lich King to the right place.
• Updated the account with Blizzard during the installation.
• Fired up Wrath of the Lich King.
• Tested by playing the damn thing long enough to level a 1st level Blood Elf priest to sixth.

Total time for the entire migration and upgrade, including updating the account with Blizzard and the subsequent patching (which kicked off automatically upon the installation completion) to the Lich King files:

45 minutes.

As in, less than an hour.

Man.

I hope this is an omen for the rest of 2009.

Meteor 3: Return of the hard drive

I didn't want to lose the data.
It was all still there, according to my forensics.
I couldn't get at it, but it was there.

And so I've been working on recovering this stupid hard drive one byte at at time, it feels like. Since October 23, no less.
I'm almost done.

Logged on the DDO last night and left a joyous "halloo!" to my gaming buds.
Implicit in that sentence: Windows was back, the firewalls were up, network connection was restored, and the gaming applications were no longer corrupt.

Immediately afterward, I ran another backup of the rebuilt system. Overnight, because it takes a good 7 hours to back the whole thing up, full. (too many repairs to run incrementals during all of this.)

And tonight, I transferred 10 GB of free space from one partition over to the C: so that the WOW patch 3.01 would install.

Which was what started me off on this journey of recovery in the first place.........

It was a long way back--after the breakdowns I wrote of a couple posts back, I invested in a Barracuda SATA drive. 1 TB. No fooling around.

Installed it nice and simple. Bought a copy of Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 to manage my partioning. Immediately copied the old partition wreckage over to the new drive, and set that drive up as having active system partions. That failed, but it did tell me it couldn't find ntloader.

Ntloader?

WTF.

This meant that the original screwup was more than a simple drive letter switch. Portions of the OS got whacked.

OK. Copied the missing files over to the system partition. For kicks, copied them over the the cloned set on the new disk, too. Then hid the new disk's partitions, to force the old one to boot.

Nope.

OK, Un-hid the 2nd system partition, then booted again, using the bios selector to tell it which disk to boot from.

"Windows is corrupt. Bad or missing boot.ini file. Windows will boot from C:\windows."

Wow.

That brought up a badly broken Windows installation, but the drives were all there.

Hallelujah.

Rebooted to the Windows OS disk.

This time it detected the older Windows installation. Would I like to repair it?

Hell yes.

After an hour, rebooted yet again.

Up it came. Got to my system login.

Once in, Windows was kind of there. A crapload of rundll errors all over the screen. Not to mention the video was shot (easily fixed. The video controls were there, just reset to 16 bit)

All the drive letters were messed up again.

What's this? Symantec's Partition Magic is trying to finish the original botched job, according to yet another error message, buried beneath layers of rundll errors.

All the run-time errors made sense now--they were calling from the wrong drive letters. Again. But the Partition Magic thing was annoying.

Ok. Reboot to Acronis. All the partitions are lettered correctly at that level, its WINDOWS that's got it wrong. While I'm here, another backup.

Back to Windows, the next evening. User regedit and regedt32 to reorder the letters in Windows. Reboot.

Hooray--all the rundll errors go away as missing things start loading themselves again.

No. Wait. There's no network connectivity.

Damn.

Control panel--there's no network setup icon. There's the icon shell, but that's all. Looks like a little copy of the unidentified application icon. Trying to use it is fruitless--it just lays there.

Sigh.

Insert the Windows OS disk. It spins up and wants to install.

Well, okay.

Fortunately, running the OS disk while already in Windows is not a death sentence any more. This time, the disk installer located Windows, and decided it could upgrade what I had. Which to me meant repair. Good enough.

Reboot.

Yay! Panda upgrades it's signatures for the first time in three weeks.

We're back where we were three weeks ago. Another backup kicked off, then to bed......

As I said, that was last night.

Tonight, moved 10 G over to the system partition, using Acronis.

Reboot.

WTF.

Where's the network?

The network config icon is there, and it reports IP is up, and receiving. Just no sending.

Everything else in the house is online and talking to the Internet--it ain't the router.

Couple more reboots and some system inspection and I'm guessing the repartition fubarred something in Windows again.

Damn.

Reinstall Windows again, see if it helps.

It does.

And the WOW upgrade starts up.

And that's when I learn there've been two modifications to the patch that was already a Gig in size.

My god.

Lesson learned: Don't screw with the system partition. Take stuff over to other partitions instead of trying to enlarge the thing.