Son of a b..  Now I realize why I had formatted my external as FAT32 (on a previous post I said it was NTFS, but I was wrong).  I usually transfer a bunch of tv episodes or movies from my Macbook Pro to my external hard drive just so I can watch it on the PS3 and big screen.  Well since I had to reformat that hard drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), the PS3 isn’t gonna be able to recognize it when I plug it into the USB port.  Ugh.  I guess I gotta seriously look into getting the uPNP on the NAS working so I can stream videos from there to the PS3.  I’ve gotten the pictures and music to work, but video isn’t showing up on the PS3 as a network drive for some reason.

If you’re really looking to feel refreshed, lightweight, and “cleansed” for lack of a better word, eating a lot of food with a lot of fiber content is the way to go.  I’m 26 and I don’t think fiber is for old people.

Here’s what my diet consisted of yesterday:

Breakfast

• 1 bowl of Kashi Go Lean Crunch Cereal
• 2 slices of whole wheat bread with peanut butter

Lunch

• 100% whole wheat spaghetti with turkey meat sauce

Snack

• a Fiber One bar (35% of your daily fiber in that one bar!)

Dinner

• a bowl of ground turkey chili with some random “chili” beans we had in our pantry.  I would’ve preferred black beans, but that’s okay.

So yeah… at the beginning of the week, I was around 186ish… now i’m at 180.  You may call it cheating cuz I weighed myself at 180 after dropping the kids off, but in any case, I feel motivated to keep going to the gym every day (even if it’s just for 30 minutes of medium to intense activity on the elliptical) and eating these foods which make me feel full and help clean my digestive system of all the literal crap inside of it!

Time Machine advertises itself as able to backup external hard drives, which is exactly what I need because I store all my raw pictures and video on an external hard drive. However, after plugging in my external, Time Machine never picked it up. Turns out that that external hard drive needs to be formatted as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”. I think I’d formatted it initially as NTFS.. i don’t remember. Sooo, luckily I have enough hard drive space to copy all the data from my external to my laptop, format the external, then copy everything back. It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass, but it’s all in the name of keeping these pictures and videos secure.

Just so you know, I will never refer to Kristine as “the fiancé” or “the wife” or “the Mrs.”.  I will refer to her by her name because she has a name.  

I think I’m going to start with a weekly featured video cuz there’s a lot of stuff I want to share.  And for the next few weeks, I really want to showcase some of the random music I used to listen to on the radio.  In particular: Power102, El Paso’s #1 station for hip hop and r&b.  But honestly, back in the 90′s it was a lot different.  Por ejemplo:

This is the kinda music kids in El Paso grew up to in the 1990′s.  We had a little Facebook wall conversation among a few El Paso friends about how this song just brought back memories.  You know, school dances and such, lol.  Kristine told me that they played country music at her school in Beaumont, and that sure as hell wouldn’t fly at a school dance in El Paso.

Anyway, there’s a few more hits in Español which I will highlight in later weeks.

Before I go into what I did today, I just wanted to say that I find a lot of value in the pictures I take, the videos I make, the music I buy and the rest of the important crap on my computer. Well, a few months ago, after I had a perfectly new Western Digital hard drive crash on me, I figured it was time to seriously look into backup solutions.

I finally took the dive and spent some money on some cheaper computer parts to make myself a NAS (Network Attached Storage) running FreeNAS. I figured it would’ve cost just a little less to buy a PCI SATA card to handle the SATA hard drives (the old motherboard still has IDE), but I wanted to spend a bit more on some parts that might last me a little longer. So I bought

• a cheap motherboard
• a cheap one-core AMD Sempron processor
• a gig of DDR2 memory
• two 2TB hard drives
• and a power supply

So yeah, I basically started from scratch, lol. It’s okay.

I don’t feel like going through all the details of installing it, but overall it wasn’t that bad. However, I learned not to change any settings that I’m not familiar with. One setting ended up changing something on the BIOS, so when I rebooted, the computer was just dead. So I learned how to reset the BIOS today, lol… It involves putting jumpers on particular pins just for a few seconds then putting the jumper back in the original position.

I learned about ZFS, how to create a ZFS Virtual Device, how to create a mirror out of my two hard drives (so my backup has a backup in case one fails). I’m afraid 2TB isn’t gonna be enough to last us for a while so I believe ZFS makes it easy to scale to more and more hard drives. I did find out that FreeNAS has some power-saving options to turn off the hard drives after a period of inactivity which you can set.

I’m definitely going to need a better case to keep these hard drives cool. Right now, I don’t have fans blowing directly on the hard drives, which could most likely reduce the life of the drives.

So currently, I’ve got Kristine’s computer running Apple’s Time Machine to back up all the stuff on her computer. I’m curious as to how much space Time Machine uses up after a period of time. I’m debating whether we should even be using Time Machine or if we should just use this NAS as a fileserver which we manually transfer files to ourselves. If anyone has any thoughts on how to use this NAS, especially if you’ve got Time Machine running, I’d love to know. Also if anyone’s successfully gotten UPnP to work successfully with their PS3, let me know. The PS3 isn’t finding the NAS so I’m not sure what’s going on.

Please tell me why my package didn’t go straight from Houston to Austin. Why the hell is it in Laredo?!

Where the hell is my package going?

The phrase above basically sums up my existence at my job. There’s all sorts of important information that people have been storing in an Excel Spreadsheet and now, they have no easy way of extracting that data and/or connecting that data to other data sources.

In my continuing quest to figure out a better way to display a spreadsheet-like interface on a webpage, I found this article which was published a couple months ago.

http://roberto.open-lab.com/2010/01/18/javascript-grid-editor-i-want-to-be-excel/

It’s pretty much a roundup of all these different grid/spreadsheet javascript libraries which all have their pros and cons… I’m hoping to find something I can seriously use now. Something that will drastically reduce the load-time due to the number of DOM elements on these gigantic grids which my application is asked to handle.

Anyway, I’ll let you know what I come up with.

Just wanna give a shoutout to Rico’s new blog lovehandled.com. He asked me to get the domain name and set up wordpress on it, and it honestly took like 5 minutes. Dreamhost makes it unbelievably easy to do so.

I’m sitting here at LAX waiting for a delayed flight home so I might as well blog from my phone.

After visiting New Zealand, I kinda feel a bit ignorant that I didn’t know how much of a big deal rugby is to the rest of the world. Pretty much the whole country of New Zealand is crazy about their All Blacks team the way we’re crazy about Texas Longhorn football. In fact, on the flight back here to the states, I watched the whole movie Invictus starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon which is about rugby and South Africa upsetting the badass New Zealand All Blacks. I was a little upset that I scheduled our return flight on the Saturday when New Zealand was playing Ireland just so I could give myself a day to recover before heading back to work.

I still don’t understand the scoring in rugby but I do know that it’s pretty damn hardcore since they don’t wear any pads. But I do think if the US started playing internationally, we could put some NFL guys in there and start kicking some international ass. I’m not sure why rugby hasn’t caught on here, but it should!