Category Archives: Gallery

Photo sets, albums, and visual stories.

How It Was Fixed

Gallery, Review

Well, now that I’ve gotten the Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed and running successfully. I think the main problem with my original installation was that I had Lilo loading the operating system rather than a Windows bootloader. When I tried to reboot after the SP1 installatiion I would just get an endless string of “40” on my screen, which is really hard to explain so I put up screenshots (taken with a camera) and a video here. I tried repairing the installation using my Windows XP installation disk, but that didn’t touch the bootloader. What I ended up doing was installing a fresh version of Windows on my second partition, which did recreate bootloader and redetect my installation on the C partition. I thought that would be all I need, but when I tried to boot to the installation on the C partition, it would go into an infinite reboot sequence, which, needless to say, was quite frustrating.

It became obvious that the installation on C was beyond repair, literally, and so I made the always tough decision to scrap it and start fresh. This was a very big deal for me, because I abhor having to reinstall programs and losing settings and such. On my last desktop it was actually upgraded incrementally from DR-DOS through early versions of Windows, all the way to ’98 when I was forced by a hard drive failure to start from scratch again. I used Windows before they messed it up with a graphical interface :). I’m hoping that like a phoenix this new installation will rise from the ashes of the last and turn my laptop into an ultra-efficency machine that is easy, intuative, and functional.

So I backed up everything important from the drive and did a “clean” install of XP over the current one, deleting all the past files in the process. Then I downloaded the 134 MB network install of SP1 just to be safe, and installed it on a almost perfectly fresh Windows. It worked fine, and I’m appreciating some of the new features already such as the Bluetooth, and the “anti-trust” addons.

Now all I need to do is delete the installation of Windows from the D partition, because it’s just taking up valuable space that could be better used for some movies or music. Also in hindsight I probably should have just formatted the C partition because now I have a Program Files directory chock-full of stuff that isn’t actually ‘installed,’ though maybe when I reinstall programs they may pick up their old prefs. Cross your fingers.

Color Me This

Gallery, Meta

I’m playing around with some new colors on the site. I think I’m partial to the blue/green that’s up here now; it just feels cleaner. I’m open to comments, suggestions, complaints, rants, and observations.

Put up some new pictures up, as well as some older videos that I hadn’t put online yet. Now that things aren’t as hectic I’m going to start the daily photos again.

Random Picture Back

Gallery

Fans of the random picture on the menu should be happy to see it has returned in its former glory, and even faster. Barring any gallery disasters, it’ll stay there too. I’m playing around with the colors of the site, so if you see anything strange let me know. I take requests too :).

Photos Back

Gallery

It seems from a fit of stupidity I turned off FollowSymLinks in my gallery .htaccess file so that’s why the photos haven’t worked for a few hours. Things should be back to normal now, so now is a good chance to check out the new albums I’ve added. I’ve added some new days, which aren’t necessarily at top because things are in chronological order, and I’ve also added some new photos I missed to some of the recent days.

Canon 1Ds Field Report

Gallery

I just read a very interesting Canon 1Ds Field Report written by Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape with assistance from Thomas Knoll, who some of you might know as the original author of Photoshop. To sum things up, they basically came to the conclusion that the 1Ds surpasses every digital camera they’ve ever seen, and is preferably to film cameras in almost every situation. That’s quite a compliment coming from a reviewer with so much experience. I would recommend checking it out if just to see some of the beautiful test shots they took; the detail on some of them is really amazing. This camera is obviously out of my price range for the foreseeable future, but hopefully this will knock the price of the D60, which I’ve had my eye on for a while, down a bit.