Jarred Fehr Blog

Wow… double geek find today.  This one is courtesy of Don.  There’s even a website!

http://www.challengeofthesuperduperfriends.com/

Oh yes.  I have died and gone to heaven.

George Carlin died.  What can I say?  I liked him.  A lot.  Here’s some of his death material.  It goes without saying it is NSFW.

www.wherethehellismatt.com

I sometimes reflect on how my life could have turned out differently that what it is now.  I found this video which accurately describes one version that I can say I’m happy didn’t (and won’t) happen.

A couple weekends ago I went up to Blue Ridge, Ga. with the guys (Ben, Robert, Courtney, Jayson and Brian).  We had rented a great log cabin in the mountains.  This is my second log cabin stay this year and I’m thinking it is going to turn into a regular thing.  It is so quiet up there and there are plenty of relaxing activities. 

The food during the trip was most excellent.  On the first night, Brian baked a lasagna that he brought.  To go with it, I made my Onii-chan salad.  We hung out in the hot tub the entire time the lasagna was baking.  By the time it was done, we were famished and gobbled it down.  Yumminess.  The next night we went to some restaurant located off the side of the road all by its lonesome.  We tried our best to ignore the huge flag of the Confederate States of America.  The waitress was kind and informed us that they had an awesome salad bar.  Wait, let me quote her directly.  “Have you seen our salad bar?  It is AWESOME.”  I did not take this comment lightly.  I felt that if you are at server and are going to indicate that a salad bar is “awesome”, it had darn well better be.  Well, it was pretty good.  But not Fogo de Chao good.  I judged that in the future, she should say, “Our salad bar is ADEQUATE.”  I ordered the crab stuffed mushrooms and crab stuffed trout.  Mushrooms were great, trout was ok.  Robert’s pecan encrusted trout was much better, IMO.  The last night, Robert grilled steak.  I can’t remember how much red meat I ate that night, but I loved every bite.

We had a few activities planned besides hanging out at the cabin.  The main event was Whitewater rafting.  All the other guys had all done it last year, but on much calmer waters.  This year we went down the Ocoee River which is rated at level 3 and 4 rapids (aka. exciting).  I was pretty nervous up until we got in the water.  I never felt in danger.  We had what had to be the best guide on the river.  It was apparent that there were a lot of trainee guides based on how many people we saw stuck at various points on the river.  Our guide also helped us perform a lot of cool maneuvers.  If you ever get to go, try to get a good guide.  It really helps to make for a better experience.  We even did this one maneuver where we had the whole boat full of water and somehow got it resurfaced.  I took a few shots with a waterproof disposable camera I bought, but most of the shots were grainy.  We were also lucky enough to catch a lady that fell out of her raft.  Her boat was performing a maneuver and she got flushed out.  We chased her down and got her back in.  After seeing her adventure, I was party sad it wasn’t meet.  Seemed a better (albeit more dangerous) way to experience the river.  Maybe next year?

On Saturday night we went to the local drive in theater to watch a double feature.  I’m pretty sure the whole town was there.  I didn’t know people really did the drive in thing anymore.  Courtney’s van was pretty useful for this.  I was laying in the back with Robert and Jayson.  I think I had had a few too many coconut rums and pineapple so I didn’t remember much about the movies.  The first one was Kung Fu panda.  The parts I remember were pretty cool.  Especially this one fight scene between five different animals and a tiger.  The other movie was Indiana Jones 4 which I had already scene.  The best part I remember is listening to Jayson.  Maybe it was the alcohol, but he kills me with his comments.  I remember laughing more than the first time I watched it. 

I also went on my first geocaching adventure.  Courtney got a new GPS device which we used to get to the cabin.  But he also looked up a geocache site for us to find.  I had heard about these be never done one before.  Essentially, someone hides a box with some stuff in it out in the middle of nowhere but lists the coordinates on a website.  You then use your handy dandy GPS device to find it.  We got close to where it was but it wasn't directly on the trail.  I ventured off into the woods a bit and found this big dead tree that had fallen over and it trunk.  Sure enough in the trunk was an army box full of little trinkets and a log of all the people that had been there and what they left.  I left my unused Marta card with two rides on it.  Eh... it's something.  Afterwards, we drove into town to get some fudge and candies.  However, Courtney and Jayson ended up buying this kickass wine decanter.  It has this glass ball filled with water and a spout and... well, it is hard to explain.  But it did a good job on the wine we tried with it.  (There are pics of the action along with everything else posted in the photo gallery.)

I had a lot of bonding time with the guys and learned a lot more about my friends.  I feel lucky to have fallen into such a great group.  I can only hope to get invited on any future trips. ;-)

For my Windows Vista deployment at work, I’ve been using Windows Deployment Services on Server 2003.  Overall it has been going pretty well.  The server allows for entire disk images to be uploaded and then sent back down to the clients.  Once the initial setup is done, it makes the work go pretty fast.  I did however run into an issue last week.  I had created an image of one of our developer’s machines that I wanted to use in the future.  They have so many programs it takes a few hours to setup.  The problem I ran into is that they use Adaptec SCSI controllers which is not supported by the default Win PE environment.

I found a method of injecting a driver into the image so that Win PE could see the drives (this could also be done for NIC, video, or pretty much anything else).  First I had to install the Windows Automated Installion Kit (WAIK) in order to get access to the imagex.exe program.  This allows you to mount the .wim image file and manipulate the files inside.  The command is

imagex /mountrw c:\path_to_image\imagename.wim X c:\temp\mount\

where X = the image number you want to manipulate in your .wim (you can store more than one image in a .wim).  The “c:\temp\mount” is the directory will the files will be mounted, so make sure that is already created.  I also recommend copying the image locally as well.

Next I need to inject the driver.  The command is

peimg.exe /inf:c:\drivers\*.inf /image=c:\temp\mount\

where c:\drivers\ is where your (hopefully Vista compliant) drivers are located.  You can point directly to a specific .inf or if you use the *.inf wildcard it will inject all of what you have in that folder. You will get a successful/unsuccessful message.  So if it doesn’t work check for what you did wrong.   So now I need to unmount the image using

imagex /unmount /commit c:\temp\mount

The /commit one is pretty important otherwise any changes made will not be saved to the .wim.  I then copied my updated .wim to the WDS server and proceeded to PXE boot the image… only to find that it still didn’t detect the SCSI controller.  I found out that simply overwriting the image doesn’t update WDS. I still needed to go into the WDS console, right click the image and choose “Replace Image” and then choose my new image.  Voila!  Worked like a charm. Now I need to figure out any other drivers I need to add. 

Next step: Get the Windows SIM answer file to work.

So I’ve noticed that the newest drivers from Nvidia now install a shortcut to some Valve/Steam games on your desktop when installed.  I’m sure this is some other way for them to make some money, but it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  I had icons on my desktop.  I like ones that I didn’t specifically put there myself even less.  I don’t even see an option during driver install to not add the shortcut.  So for now on, it appears that I will have to manually delete this stupid thing every time I update my drivers (or until I get a card from a different manufacturer). 

Bad move Nvidia.  This won’t be forgotten.

The other night I went out with JenFly to watch the new Sex and the City movie.  Overall I really enjoyed it.  It had the girls, clothes, shoes, sex, relationships, etc.  The one thing I was disappointed in was the ending.  I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, but I thought they had an opportunity to deliver an excellent message, but they went with the safe and predictable ending.  Oh wells.

I did find it humorous that the movie was completely sold out and I was one of three guys in the theater.  The other two were with their wives.  I was hoping that more of the girls would bring a token gay, but alas I was the only one.  Many of the women were dressed in their best Sex and the City garb.  I saw one good lookalike for Charlette (but I think that JenFly disagreed). 

If you were a fan of series, I recommend seeing it.  It'll be more of what you loved.

Just... damn.