Myrtle Beach 2008 - Day 1 Departure

When I was young Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was often our family's choice of vacationing for our 2 weeks in August. It was typical of our family and related family members to do the same.

It was typically a 2-day trek from Toronto, Ontario to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with a stop in between to close the first day of non-stop driving. It can be done in slightly less than 24 hours but we were always reservation-less and found vacant hotels when we arrived ... and this was easier when we arrived mid day as opposed to midnight.

My last trip was probably in 1988 so it was with a bit of excitement when I organized my family's trip almost 20 years later. With a sixteen-month old I was not about to make the trek by car so it was the choice of air for us. As most Canadians know the trip out of Canada is full of extra taxes ... often flights with less than 1hr travel times by flight can cost $20, the taxes the Canadian government can slap on are as high as $300 per person. Quite the deal killer.

Our choice was to fly out of Buffalo, more specifically the Niagara Falls International Airport (IAG). The trip to Buffalo was about 1.5 hours, but with the wait at the Queenston-Lewiston border it was probably close to 3 hours. The Niagara Falls airport is just around the corner from the former Prime Outlets - now called Fashion Outlets so that gives many Canadian travellers as to its proximity to the actual border.

The airport is quite shocking to look at after you've seen the monstrosity referred to as Pearson International Airport. A very simple building with free parking and friendly staff to serve you. This isn't your regular overpriced parking, overpriced shopping, and overpriced dining experience. Great for arrivals and departures, but not for stopovers. No big deal.

Our flight was with an airline called Myrtle Beach Direct Air ... one of the few airlines that flies directly into Myrtle Beach non stop (most other airlines require a change of planes in Charlotte, North Carolina and I believe Spirit Airlines flying out of Detroit, Michigan is the only other direct flight). I would have to say that the direct option accounted for 50% of my decision to fly ... the fact that the flight was $99 each way for an adult was the other driving factor. Factor in about $35 of extra fees ($5 seat pre-selection, $15 baggage fee, $10 convenience fee, the rest in misc. taxes each way) and And I'm sure many other Canadian travellers can agree as it seems to be a common occurrence for families of more than 2. The cost of a family of 5 is significantly reduced. I'm sure the Canadian government won't take any action in reducing their fees. And this doesn't rest solely in the hands of the GTAA - the operation that is responsible for Pearson being one of the most expensive airports to land at in North America.

Myrtle Beach Direct Air has been flying this route for about a year and a half and is probably best known to Canadian golfers flying out to the abundance of golf courses in and around Myrtle Beach. The airline is supposedly affiliated with JetBlue in some way ... probably sharing revenue or chartering their flights. We happened to fly a JetBlue Airbus A320 jet on the trip there. Free refreshments and snacks. leather seats, full satellite tv per seat (although I was disappointed our first row of seats 1D, 1E, and 1F were not working) ... all the amenities of a JetBlue flight. Super friendly steward staff and a very enjoyable flight overall.
If anybody has the opportunity to reserve their seats, the first row is a nice-to-have because you have extra legroom and nobody to deal with in front of you.

Windows 2000 and a hard drive limited to 137gb

I recently had the task of installing Windows 2000 Server on a Dell Poweredge SC420 as my RAID server. I have two identical Western Digital 250gb hard drives, one of which I had installed Windows 2000 on. The full capacity was recognized and the install went fine.

Now was the time to install the 2nd identical hard drive and initiate the RAID (software RAID within Windows 2000) sequence of converting the drives to dynamic disks, and setting up the raid. Then Windows was supposed to go about re-syncing the date from the populated drive 0 over to the newly added drive 1.

Here comes the problem. Upon adding drive 1 the capacity only registers as 137gb. But they both drive 0 and drive 1 are identical makes, models, and size? Simple fix :

1. Run regedit.exe
2. Search for My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters
3. Click "New" then "DWORD Value"
4. Call the new entry EnableBigLba
5. Give it a value of 1
6. Reboot the system

Strange that 1 of the drives was recognized for it's full capacity but not the second. Oh well, I guess Windows has its reason.

As for why I decided to create a Windows software RAID solution? I had a similar situation set up with a hardware controller card when one of the drives failed. I was out of luck accessing anything from it or even booting, so I decided to put it in an external USB enclosure to recover the data. No go. The Windows software RAID solution allowed me to do that without a question.

It's a file server, who cares about the extra 5% overhead involved? I'm more concerned with data redundancy.

Software RAID in Windows Server 2000, 2003

A strange thing has been happening to me over the last couple of days. I was reformatting my Dell Poweredge SC420 from a being a workstation back to being a server. Wiping out Windows XP and installing Windows Server 2008. I wanted to have a reliable file and print server - yes, I know a 3.4ghz P4 enterprise edition is overkill ... but my only PC with enough hard drive slots and space for cooling.

Well, Windows Server 2008 is useless to me since there are no drivers yet for the SC420. That was a pointless install.

Then came Windows Server 2003. It was my basic server setup - 2 identical drives to be configured with Windows and then setup as a RAID mirror set. Windows software RAID. All was dandy and working fine but i felt using a Server 2003 license for a simple file server was overkill. So I began to dismantle the setup. First thing was to remove one of the RAID drives and put it aside - my hope was to reattach it to my new Windows setup, add it as a 2nd drive and copy all the files over to the main drive. Then reformat this drive and set it up as the RAID mirror.

So Windows Server 2000 installed with adequate success - network drivers for the Broadcom gigabit NIC were not present, nor were capable video drivers for the E7221 integrated video card. After some fiddling with another system and a USB drive I managed to get the Broadcom drivers loaded. Then with some chance of fluke, my previous post on Windows XP video card drivers and the SC420 worked without a problem under Windows 2000 too!

Upon adding the second drive in the previous RAID array, everything started to look normal. I began copying files from the drive to the Windows 2000 C:\ drive. Mid-way through the operation some funky things happened. BSOD. Trying to reboot was pointless - could not find OS.

Second try this time with the old RAID mirror drive as an external USB drive. Mid-way though the C:\ drive became corrupt. What the?

Then it dawned upon me. What if Windows thinks that a RAID rebuild is necessary and that the new C:\ drive is trying to be sync'ed with the old RAID mirror? It sure seemed plausible.

Although I could find no documentation of this (how would you go about searching for it?), I managed to copy the files through an interim Windows XP installation.

Stranger things have happened to me before.

For those under a similar situation, chances are you've found this post after it has happened.

Live and learn.

Must have Windows applications

Here is my ever-growing list of must-have software applications for Windows (XP, 2000, 2003). It will continuously be updated over time :

1. 7zip - the free equivalent to Winzip.
2. Videolan - small footprint media player for all your movies, music and sound files.
3. Foxit Reader - a free, quicker loading equivalent to Adobe Acrobat Reader. Acrobat reader has grown to a overgrown pot-belly fat application. It makes me nauseous to wait for it to load all those libraries when all I need is to quick view a PDF file.
4. Cute PDF Writer - a free printer driver to create PDF files. No need for a printer, and no need for Adobe Acrobat. If you pay bills online always create a PDF printout for record keeping.
5. Mozilla Firefox - Do NOT install any new versions of Internet Explorer if you don't have to. Firefox is quicker and less of a headache down the road.

Unknown device error in Device Manager

I have a Dell Poweredge SC420 server and was installing a copy of Windows Server 2000 on it. Dell had labelled the machine a server and as such did not provide any drivers for Windows XP. Now I don't quite remember fully, but I think they provided Windows Server 2000 drivers at one point. Unfortunately they are no longer on the support site.

Like a similar post of mine with regards to installing Windows XP on this machine and getting the onboard Intel E7221 graphics to work, there are always ways around getting things to work. If you experience some "Unknown device" entries in device manager, they are almost always the lack of drivers with the Intel chipset. Specifically, I was getting some PCI and USB entries in the device manager. Grab this file from Intel and let it do it's thing :

INF Update Utility - Primarily for Intel 4, 3, 900 Series Chipsets

I have a similar suggestion for a similar problem involving USB drivers in the device manager for my Dell Dimension 2400.

Are hybrid cars really the answer?

With all the commotion currently going on about the high price of gasoline many consumers and advocates are pushing the move to hybrid cars. Sure it may be cleaner, but with the North American economy heading in the same direction as it is now, how can such an economy support such a massive surge on the nation's electrical grid?
click here
Many major metropolitan centres have experienced blackouts on several occasions. Even more are on the brink of being pushed beyond their production capabilities. Many of the nation's electricity distributors are pushing incentives to cut back on electrical demand. Rates during peak consumption hours are rising, and discounts are given to those who use the grid's power during off-peak hours. There are even programs that allow the electricity companies to cycle down your air conditioner remotely to conserve energy.

Electric cars are not the answer. They are simply a segment of the auto industry just as 4-cylinders, 6-cylinders, and 8-cylinders are. Just as a small percentage of North Americans choose to drive diesel powered cars, so will be the one for electric vehicles.

And neither are cars powered by water. With the municipalities surrounding the Great Lakes (Manitoba, Michigan, New York, Ontario and Pennsylvania) fighting over the world's largest source of fresh water for drinking, let alone for an alternative auto fuel.

Alternative fuels are not the consumer's answer to today's problems. The answer to the domestic problem of energy use is simply efficiency. Yes, that's right. Today's automobile engine is roughly 35% efficient.

The electricity industry has taken a step in the right direction by actively supporting the fluorescent light bulb. Regular incandescent light bulbs gave 10% of their energy in the form of visible light ... the rest in heat. That's practically reversed with the compact fluorescent bulbs.

Why Canada is the best haven from climate change

The Independent has an article about why Canada is the best haven for a climate change. An interesting read and opens your eyes to how easy it is to take a good thing for granted.

Google and YouTube - smart choice after all

Google is one of the key players of the Internet and for very good reason. They are one of the few companies actually making money off the Internet ... not with it, but because of it.

They saw an opportunity to excel in a field that was virtually untapped. Advertising has always been big business, although television and print were pretty much cornered by a huge list of advertising companies across the globe. They saw the huge potential to make money by completely dominating the Internet market for advertising. And that's why their stock is hovering the $500 mark.

Most analysts saw a plateau on Internet advertising that Google could not overcome. They've already cornered the market, how much more money could they make? Taking a pretty huge chunk out of the market for print-advertising where else could they go? Video.

Many of you are thinking that they tried that with their purchase of YouTube for the cool 1.6 million dollars. Many of you probably thought that the whole idea of YouTube being worth that much money was downright ridiculous. How could ads in YouTube videos pay off for Google especially to recoup the amount it paid for it?

Think outside the box. YouTube was an experiment. Acutally, Google Videos was an experiment that went wrong. So they purchased YouTube to understand it's inner workings and closely track its usage. What for you ask? The key is television. Yes, television. Television is the one advertising market that Google has yet to dominate. With newspaper and television advertising you pretty much have to have a newspaper or television. Too much effort to acquire every newspaper and television station around the world.

Google is using YouTube to envision a global network of television channels. Yes, television channels. Google is set to explode with their technology and expertise with content delivery over the Internet. We all know how well iTunes has succeeded with music, and their soon to be fame with videos and television.

Now picture Google serving ads in television shows. Not the same commercial everybody within a geographic region would see with an NBC or CBS station affiliate. Commercials garnered to your Internet and viewing habits.

Google has long been known for tracking searching and surfing habits of users. Just imagine Google's ability to target commercials directly related to your tastes during a tv show or even a live sporting event.

In the future Google will become a vast television agency serving up live and pre-programmed television channels with advertising that caters to every single user. Every television show served will be indexed and cross-referenced with your surfing habits and geographical location.

Viewing a station while at home in Denver in the winter? You'll get ads for the local ski resorts.
Viewing a station while in a hotel on the east coast? You'll get ads for local establishments within walking distance from the hotel. The degree of marketing accuracy is astonishing.

Throw into the mix Google's new Android phone and how they will target individuals with phone commercials. Commercials will come on your phone while driving past a gas station, or shopping mall.

Google has the technology to track what you like, where you are, and whenever they like.

That to me is an impressive stock buy. Especially at today's share price of $537 USD.

Flickr feature - sets & collections within your groups

I've been a frequent user to Flickr but only recently splurged for the Pro account to increase my photostream. It's great to be able to use Flickr as an offsite backup for my digital photos but now I am starting to get into the more advanced features of the service.

I've got plenty of photos of family and family events and I would like to share them with specific family members - hence the Flickr "group" feature. Create a Flickr group, specify who can join, and voila! Family members can now view and upload their own photos.

But I've quickly come to the realization that a group is not useful unless it has the same collection and set functionality as your regular photostream. I'd like to create a family group for all my relatives to view - and within it create sets of different family events. I'd also like to organize all my family events by year in a collection.

Anyone at Flickr listening?

Use Flickr as a backup for your digital photos

I've come across several friends and family who have come to me in dire need of some backup help. For whatever reason their hard drives had conked out - some either giving errors during use, or not being able to load Windows at all. In most cases the hard drives were somewhat recoverable . In a day and age where digital picture taking is the norm and 50+ pictures per event is not uncommon, one has to realize that digital files are more susceptible to becoming nothing than are film negatives. I quickly came to that conclusion when the drive where I store my photos on ... along with 200gb of other data went on the blitz. Fortunately that hard drive was part of a mirrored hard drive RAID array and the other drive was holding an exact copy of that data for me.

I quickly realized that those photos from as far back as 1999 were irreplaceable - even if they were taken with a digital brick of a camera called a Kodak DC210 with it's whopping 1megapixel capacity. It was then I started to find an acceptable solution for backing up my precious data.

Websites that offer offsite storage solutions were either too-expensive or at the risk of disappearing tomorrow. External USB hard drives are good but those drives too are prone to errors (as with any hard drive) especially if you get one based on a laptop (2.5 inch) hard drive (I find laptop hard drives do not last as long as 3.5 inch desktop drives).

My final solution? The $24.95 a year Flickr Pro account at www.flickr.com. Those personal photos don't have to be made public to the world ... they can be marked as private if you choose to. Plus, you can give access to view those photos to other family members. Quite handy indeed.

Norton Ghost in a backup device

I've always been a fan about external USB hard drive enclosures. Originally I used my ADS full-height enclosure for a DVD writer. USB was great for my Windows pc and Firewire was used for my Mac. I was able to move it among all my Windows-based PCs and the occasional use on my Mac. It was so simple and easy that I was able to swap out the original DVD writer for a dual layer DVD writer in no time. Instant usefulness.

Then enclosures became popular with desktop hard drives. It was great to use it as a central repository for files - important backups or just temporary storage. No need to map network hard drives to backup important files and try to remember where you put them a couple of weeks later.

Then I started using them to backup my important files while I wiped out my machines in order to reinstall Windows. This was a frequent practice for me because I often found a fresh install of Windows XP always performed faster and smoother especially with all the spyware, viruses, and trojans that went around. So beneficial, it was commonly becoming a 3-month cycle for me.

With the frequent re-installs of Windows I then found a benefit for Symantec's Norton Ghost. It was software that allowed me to create a complete image backup of my system and store it on a hard drive in a single file (not always). I would create my clean Windows XP install with all service packs and create the backup image. Then, I could initiate the clean process 3 months later. So convenient that it took my 5+ hr reinstall period for Windows XP (with service packs) to less then 30 minutes.

Then I came across an article on PC Magazine that mentioned a product called Maxtor OneTouch. The article immediately had me believe that this whole Norton Ghost process of imaging a system was captured in an external hardware product - complete with hard drive and automatic software! To me it sounded like the hardware would allow me to immediately create a ghost image of my system - and with the size of hard drives nowadays (a 1 terabyte drive can be had for about $200 CDN) - you could probably keep several different stages of backups on the hard drive.

I have yet to see this product in the familiar retail channels (ie. Future Shop, Best Buy, Costco, Sams Club) to try it out. So until then, your guess is as good as mine to whether it works the way i think it might.

Todays desktop - Curacao from above

Available from Interfacelift.com

Something about the colourful buildings and peaceful sea gives you a nice mental break.

Car makers listen up! Heated windshields

Listen up North American car makers, I've got a simple and practical idea!

Build a defrost system that sits in the front windshield under the windshield wipers. Take the technology that goes into rear-window defrost systems, and apply it to the front. A simple metal contact that sits underneath the wiper blade ... no more ice buildup! How many times have you stopped on the side of the road because the wipers froze up?

My HVAC system in my 2004 Jeep Liberty just doesn't seem to be very effective when defrosting the front windshield.

Functional winter mudguards

Here's an idea for an automotive company, or perhaps even a parts supplier like Magna :

Build mudguards that are smooth on both sides - including the side that faces the tire! This way, during the snow-filled winter months here in Canada, snow has a hard time sticking to it.

If you've ever driven in snow, you'll notice that occasionally during heavy sticky snowfalls you might notice some degradation in turning, or braking ability, or even strange noises.

When your tires travel across the snow some of it is picked up in the rotation of the tire. Most cars have a slippery smooth surface on the underbody of the wheel well. The snow will travel along this path until it hits the mudguard.

Being the rough-edged, bumpy, and cavernous moulded plastic it is, the snow will undoubtedly stay there gradually building up like a rolling snowball.

My idea? Round it out to continue the flow of the smooth-surfaced wheel well ... that way the snow has nowhere to stick and continues on back to the road.

Granted in an industry where every penny is pinched (which reminds me of a story an automotive engineer told me when I asked why all car underbody parts weren't painted ... to save a few extra dollars) I can see how this "might" be a valid excuse, but if today's generic household product can be packaged in virtually indestructible plastic packaging, I don't see why it would cost THAT much more.