Personal

As I was sitting on the couch last night, I figured I should be thankful.  Why?  Why not!

As I sit here today, at work I can list off the stuff that is going on with me, or has gone on with me in the last few years.

Throughout my life, my parents gave me everything.  Not literally.  They gave up their life so that my brother and sisters could have it all.  They didnt bitch about me not taking over the family farm, or anything, they were always there when I got in trouble to make sure I know why I did.  They were not the parents that covered up what I did wrong in school or such, but stood by whatever the teachers thought was punishment.  Thats parenting!  Pretending that your kid didnt do anything does not teach your kid anything!

When I was 18 years old, my parents stood by me when I openned our own business.  They did the parental thing and asked the questions, to make sure I had asked myself the same questions.  A month before my 19th birthday, me and 2 other very talented people openned our own company, and havnt stopped going to work or loving it since.

A few year after that, I met Jamie.  She was the girl I wanted to get ‘hooked up’ with for a while.  When a friend of mine was trying to hook me up with ‘anyone’ and I declined since I didnt want to ruin any future chances if/when she came available.
Finally, when she was single, I knew that this was the girl.  We got together, and I could be myself around her….and she didn’t mind it (that’s 1 in a million).  After 3 months being together, we bought a house, lived through that, and moved in together.  This was kind of the point of no return, and I was fine with it.  We moved in, got a dog and started living.
Within, what seemed to be a short time later, we got engaged, where married and lived through a fairly lengthy renovation while working in the house and living with her mom.   About 6 months after that, we found out that we were expecting a baby in May of 2009.

To recap, yes these are all things you have to work for, but if thats what it takes, its very worth it, just look at what I have right now.  A beutiful wife, baby on the way, in a house which we love, working at a job I enjoy.  Could be worse…

Whats next?  Who knows…with the baby, many things are going to change.  A friend of mine whom I corespond with over email says this:

Your life is going to change FOREVER….but in the most wonderful of ways!!!

I’m up for that!

So on Saturday Jason and I were working (very hard I might add) in the service shop close to closing.  For whatever reason I thought about upgrading the hard drive on the Xbox 360.  I had read somewhere that it is is a laptop hard drive in an enclosure.  A quick google found that sure enough, there is hack to use a normal hard drive in the Xbox.  I did a little research (which is fairly dull since websites really don’t want to get into trouble) and before I knew it I was thinking this is a heck of a good idea.  We had a hard drive in the service shop (160GB) that would do the job, but there were risks.  For example, in order for it to work, we needed to reprogram the firmware on the drive.  Firmware…the entire brain that runs the drive.  Could toast off the entire drive, might not.  Secondly, you needed to crack open the drive enclosure that is currently on the Xbox 360, and if that didn’t go right, might toast off the ability to put it back on.  Before I left on Saturday, I successfully reprogrammed the hard drive, it now only showed up as a 120GB (which is part of it…xbox wont see anything more than 120GB currently) with the proper info on sector 16 of the drive, which the xbox needs.

I went home, pulled off the drive, and needed to remove 4 torx screws from the bottom.  REALLY FREAKING SMALL ONES!!.  I didnt have the screwdriver for it, so it waited until today to get the right one.  Turns out no-one in Estevan has the right size, so I ended up using a smaller flat screwdriver to remove the screws.  Popped in the drive in, put it back on the Xbox, and formatted it.  Formatted successfully and then shows me this:

This is good news.  I then loaded up the console main screen and downloaded to the drive my Gears of War 2 just to make sure it works…..loaded no problem.  So there….it worked perfectly.  Now the weird thing is…I am not keeping this, I did it just to see if I could.  I had to recover my gamer-tag and the whole works and then have to fart around and get all the stuff the same way I did before.  I loaded my 20Gb drive back in, and away I go again.  I restored the firmware on the drive, so its like I didn’t even touch it.

So tonight I went wondering who would go through the trouble to do this.  I then looked at what future shop had their own 120GB drive on sale for.  This is from tonight:

So there ya are…buy just a drive for about half of the whole thing….granted you need to fart around to get it to work, but come on..whats the fun in that?

Chow!

A relatively new service from Apple that replaces the .mac from long time ago.  In June I signed up for a year since I really wanted it to sync everything from work to my home.  Since it didnt exactly launch with a good review I wanted to state how it works for me.

When it first came out, the upgrade took days, instead of a few hours like planned.  Things were busy with apple.  They were putting out a new Iphone, mobileme and a bunch of other things.  That said, yes it was ugly.  But I stayed away from it for a few days (still used Gmail at the time) and when things finally said they were up and running, I had no problems.

A month or 2 later, people are still complaining a bit about how slow it is.  I dont find that at all.  I found it works great.  That said, I dont have an Iphone.  This is how it works for me.  I have mobileme sync my outlook at my desk, which is important for me, since my blackberry syncs to outlook.  From there, it sync’s to my macs at home.  My calendar and contacts are now one.  Dont have to worry about that person in my phone, but not on my computer….works great.  Next..email.  since I have my own @hjl.ca account, I forward that to mobile me email address.  From there, my blackberry checks that address.  So if I sit down at a computer, I can see my email through the web interface, or through my Apple mail address, which is perfectly in sync with my address book (as stated earlier).  Can it get sweeter than that?  Oh yes.  With the blackberry, I can delete email, which also deletes it on the server, which is automatically pushed any changed to my mail program or the web interface…it literally is a one stop sync.  I am never looking for email on my phone that isnt on my mac, or the web interface.

All in all, very happy.  And hey..its Apple.  They noticed that things didnt exactly go smoothly with the upgrade…so they gave everyone a free month…then a month later they gave everyone another 2 months free.  They stated below:

We sent out an email today containing the news that we are giving every current MobileMe subscriber a free 60 day extension for their subscription. This is in addition to the 30 day extension most subscribers have already received. As stated in the email we’ve already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make, and we appreciate our subscribers’ patience while we turn things around. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. Link – Apple MobileMe News Page

Wooohoo.  Admitting a problem is good, taking the right action in the end…better.  I checked today when my account expires…September 19th of next year.  That means its like I havnt even started using it yet….

All in all…happy.  People seem to be complaining a lot, but I have to hand it to them….they have done a hell of a job to convince me…and therefore I would think there are a few more like me out there.

Chow – James

DSC_2352, originally uploaded by HackerJL.

Carlynn and Mitch’s pictures that were captured from my camera (thanks for Keith for helping with that) and can be viewed by just clicking on my picture above to get right into the set. I was talking about it with Jamie tonight, and i dunno why, but these were definatly not the greatest pictures I have taken. Dunno if it was the light or what…

Anyhow…enjoy!