KJ German does a show in Delray on the last Saturday of the month, so I work his regular Saturday night show in West Palm Beach.

This is the third time I’ve worked this show, and it’s always CRAZY busy!

But a good time is had by all–and I was delighted to see ubiquitous_a–an old Karaoke friend I barely ever get to see anymore–in attendance, who got to sing the first song! Which was a good thing–with over 25 singers, the rotations were an hour and a half long!

Neil Rogers was a radio talk-show host in Miami for almost 30 years… and was one of the funniest on-air personalities ever. I miss you, uncle Neil!

I’m trying to upgrade the SSD on my 2nd-line manager’s ThinkPad X300 to the recently-released Lenovo 128gb SSD.

SSDs are neat; In theory, they’re direct replacements for hard drives–except for the fact that they have no moving parts whatsoever; they’re essentially big honking memory cards. This means that they’re extremely rugged and just about impervious to being dropped because there are no spinning platters to disrupt. They’re also quite a bit faster in terms of disk access inasmuch as there’s no arm dragging physical heads back and forth across the aforementioned spinning platters. And because there are no electric motors or magnetic actuators that are spinning platters or moving arms, they are remarkably miserly when it comes to power consumption.

However, it seems that the standard rules of upgrading them don’t apply. On a typical laptop, a tech would use a piece of software like Norton Ghost to move, bit-by-bit, the stuff from the old drive to the new drive.

Well, that doesn’t seem to work with the X300.

The X300 takes a 1.8″ micro-hard drive (typical laptop drives are 2.5″), and have a different connector than typical hard drives, even though they speak the same language as typical hard drives. The new 128gb SSD came with a clever little adapter that allows it to be plugged into a conventional hard-drive cable, and so using this arrangement, I ghosted the data from the old SSD to the new one.

The new 128gb SSD, however, would not boot when inserted into the X300. Bummer.

After trying every trick in my rather extensive arsenal, I’m now using my method-of-last-resort:

1. I’m installing Windows XP from scratch on the 128gb SSD whilst it’s in the X300.
2. Then I’ll swap SSDs, put the old one back in, boot Windows, and use NTBACKUP (Windows’ built-in backup utility) to dump the files and system state to my network file server.
3. Lastly, I’ll put in the fresh 128gb SSD, boot it’s “virgin” Windows installation, and do a full restore from my server.

That is the least-attractive method because so many things can go wrong. There’s no guarantee that restoring the system state from the old SSD won’t screw up the boot mechanisms on the new one, and if it can’t be repaired, I’ve just blown several hours worth of work.

I’ll just have to take my chances.

UPDATE: Backing up the old SSD using NTBACKUP. It says it’s going to take almost four hours.

Ugh.

UPDATE 2: it worked like a champ!

…is taking forever to install. Two DVDs worth of stuff–and a CD add-on pack called “Accelerator” (The last time I tried my hand at simulated carrier landings was Jane’s U.S. Navy Fighters, and I got pretty good at it.)

Plus, I want to take my Saitek X-45 out of mothballs…

This has been an amazing morning. And I don’t mean ‘amazing’ in the good way. I mean ‘amazing in that I’m amazed that so much could go awry in a single morning–and it’s only just lunchtime.

• I thought it’d be a nice morning to ride Lorelei to work, so I stopped at the gas station a mile or so from my house to fuel up and fill my tires. I left the key in the ignition when I filled the tires (a sweaty, dirty job in itself), and killed the three-year-old battery.
  • A nice gentleman tried to give me a jump, but my puny little pathetic jumper cables were not up to the task.
  • I walked the mile or so home and got my truck and portable jump-starter, and Lorelei started right up. I pulled her into a large parking lot, where I’ll go collect her later this evening.
  • I ended up getting to the office around 11:00am. Wow, that’s late.
• Once at the office, I was informed that because of an inspection happening on Thursday, all the low-voltage wiring (e.g. network, alarm, and the like) has to be completely off the ceiling grid–y’know, the grid that all the ceiling tiles hang from.
  • Our offices are over ten years old, and still have shit in the ceiling from the old BlueBehemoth days (read: a metric assload of Token-Ring) . Even if it’s not connected to anything, it still has to be tie-wrapped off the ceiling grid, or cut out.
  • It is incredibly hot, sweaty, physical work, going up and down and up and down on the ladder.
• My second-line manager’s ThinkPad X300 is giving me screaming purple fits. I’m trying to double the size of the hard drive, but it simply will not cooperate.
  • The X300 is equipped with a 64gb solid-state hard drive. It’s really slick, as it has no moving parts. But, at 64gb, it’s pretty puny by today’s standards.
  • The 64gb drive has a micro-SATA interface, which means it’s different from all the equipment I would normally use to copy one hard drive to another. The replacement drive conveniently came with a standard SATA-to-micro SATA interface. However, it’s not recognized by my external SATA USB drive reader under Windows XP.
  • I used GHOST to make a copy of the machine’s data, and transferred it to the new drive–this time, directly plugged into my bench machine’s planar (motherboard, for those of you who are not BlueBehemoth initiates). When I inserted the new drive into the X300, it would not boot.
  • booted the X300 with the Windows XP cd, thinking I’d use the Recovery Console to write a new MBR (master boot record) and boot sector to the disk. Windows XP would not recognize the new disk in the X300.
  • I plugged the new disk into the bench machine’s planar again and booted it with the Windows XP cd. It recognized it this time, and using the recovery console, was able to write a new MBR and boot sector to the disk. But once again, on reinserting it back into the X300, it refused to boot.
    • I’m beginning to suspect that this drive isn’t compatible with this machine, and is only compatible with the X301. A call to Lenovo ought to tell me for sure.
    • If it is indeed incompatible, I’ll have to return the drive to PC Connections, from whence it came.

Whew. What a morning.

DrumDude and I had kind of a falling out a few months back… over something really stupid (as most fallings-out are over). And it stinks, too, because I really miss him. He had a really unique way of looking at the world, even though he did make goofy-ass comments in my Livejournal and admittedly tried to drive me insane by calling me every day, multiple times a day, for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

He used to opine that we were just about as diametrically opposed as we could possibly be. But we made really good friends anyway. I thought he was the most amazing drummer alive, andhe thought I was a talented singer and a good Karaoke host. In fact, few things fascinated him more than my Karaoke shows and my regular singers who attended them–he even had this crazy notion about filming a documentary about Karaoke and the characters who delight in getting drunk and singing to their fellow drunks.

I wish I wasn’t so damn stubborn. If I weren’t, I’d contact him again. But I am.

A few months ago, a friend f mine from my high school drama days passed away. A month or so later, a bartender at the venue where I do my Thursday night show also passed away (I will readily admit that I really only knew her by reputation only). And both events got me to thinking, however clichéd and hackneyed the concept, that life really is fleeting; in the words of Col. Sherman T. Potter, “life is a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t kind of affair.” It occurs to me that I should really try and overcome my stubbornness and contact DrumDude again–friends as good as DrumDude are very difficult to come by.

I don’t really believe that DrumDude called me multiple times a day because he was trying to drive me insane. He was doing it because he’s a good friend.

With the offices at my job under construction, my particular office is the hardest-hit. There’s air conditioning ductwork in the walls near my office, and every day I come in and find ceiling-droppings all over my desk and such.

But I come back from vacation to find that they’ve taken down all my pictures, posters, and such, and gouged huge marks into the walls with their ladders–not to mention that they’ve taken down half the ceiling tiles and left them. There’s ceiling debris everywhere.

This is a nuisance. I’m really looking forward to the office construction being completed–as I’m sure most of the folks here are.

Thanks again to Conman, who found this great plug-in for me called LJ-XP.

Butterfly and I just got back from Jacksonville. The train ride back was very uneventful, and very relaxing. I absolutely adore traveling by train.

Butterfly wasn’t quite the weepy, blubbering mess that she thought she was going to be at the train station, although she did shed a few tears as her son pulled away. I think that the reality of her eldest finally leaving the nest hasn’t quite sunk in yet.

When it does, I’ll be here.

Once upon a time, I had a crazy dream:  to go out into the desert, procure, convert, and live in a retired Boeing 747.

Yup. That’s right. a 747.

Think about it: 1,800+ square feet of living-space under air. The vast cargo hold becomes a huge basement. The upper deck becomes one sweet den. Up to six bedrooms. And since the thing was designed to ply the friendly skies at 40,000 feet at .85 Mach for hundreds of thousands of miles, virtually indestructible (not to mention termite-proof).

Complemnts of Greenacres comes a link that makes me want to cry:

Jumbo Hostel

This is a retired Boeing 747 hat some folks in Sweden have turned into a hotel. An honest-to-goodness hotel.

Wow.

Doesn’t seem like such a crazy dream now, does it?