Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Getting anxious

My oldest is in the Navy, and he'll be moving with his boat to Hawaii soon. I wish I knew what to do for him. I know full well he's in a world of busy right now; everything is going to pile up at the last minute. It always does. Big Navy, local Navy. Gotta get going on some ideas for stuff to accompany him.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

BSG finale was disappointing

It seemed quite a lot like Ron Moore and the cast had a big party, wore body armour and fired heavy weapons, then said good bye to each other, turned out the lights and oh, by the bye here's a not at all disguised morality lesson on the dangers of technology for technology's sake.

Or something.

He certainly didn't work on any resolution of the major tensions of the series, the season or even the final episode arc.

I might feel differently given some time.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Missing 'Safely remove hardware' icon

I was playing with my USB portable hard drive and found to my horror that the icon in the Windows task bar that allows me to safely remove hardware was gone. I didn't want to unplug the cable before choosing that option because I wanted to make sure my data were intact.

I did a bunch of searching, but the proper keywords eluded me. A bunch of people suggested using File Explorer and choosing 'Eject' as though it were a CD/DVD but I didn't have an eject option.

Finally, I came across the answer here: http://blog.monkeyless.com/2006/03/12/safely-removing-hardware-when-the-icon-is-gone/ The secret keyword is hotplug, and so I can find it again, here is the DLL to invoke from Start->Run %windir%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll Alternately, make a shortcut by right clicking on the desktop.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

WDSC on a portable drive

Well I loaded WDSC 7.0.0.6 on my USB portable drive. I stupidly could not locate the Code/400 CDs, so I didn't get that loaded :-( I was able to get Eclipse Monkey installed, which made me very happy. WDSC is sort of Eclipse 3.2 (Ganymede) and Monkey is in the Europa distro (sort of 3.3) but it did go in via the normal Help->Software updates->Install new software.

Hurrah!