The Cult of The Cool Mac

Stuff came up. Busy. Sorry.

I hear that analytics firms consider a blog to be abandoned if there hasn't been a post made for three months. Hah!

Anyway, I'm back. Major updates in the works. Already moved to the 2-column format. 'Got lots of stuff to post about, including some interesting pics from a state auction for some of my friends who were wondering what those auctions were like.

So far, about half the old stories are back up and accessible from the Archive link or using the Search tool.

Once that's done, the next step will be fixing some of the aesthetics on the site. The current layout is mostly for utility. I like the color-scheme. 'Probably going to keep that much.

'Sorry I had to change the Shout-Out to add user-verification. I was getting a lot of spam from spambots and attempts to merely obfuscate the text-fields weren't fruitful.  Anyone can still login and leave a message or even use the Shout-Out for a chat-session -- It live-updates! I'd like to see it pick up again. Some of the Shout-Outs were pretty cool.  :)

You know how you're supposed to use 2 different kinds of sugars to avoid recrystalization and lumpiness while melting and caramelizing sugar? Well, if you didn't know before then you know now.

Anyway, I made caramel for my popcorn this evening with honey as the second sugar and added a pinch of sea salt, using just a tiny bit of butter and milk to keep it liquid.

It totally ruled.

Somebody is going to read this and say, "Duh." :)

This week, I installed Windows XP Pro via Boot Camp on a MacBook Pro with a new 500GB hard drive. I encountered some interesting trouble, but successfully got Windows going on the laptop and I'm passing on some of what I've learned to you.

The goal was to create a drive with 3 partitions: a boot volume, a Time Machine and secondary boot volume and a Windows volume. In real-world terms, there's about 465GB to divvy up among the partitions and I figured it this way:

Boot vol: 313GB
Time Machine and Secondary Boot vol: 120GB
Boot Camp: 32GB

Initially, I erased the drive, installed the OS and did some basic setup stuff, then made a clone of the boot drive (you'll see why when I get to the end), ran the Boot Camp Assistant, which repartitioned the drive for me and restarted from the Windows XP installer CD. I went through a normal-seeming installation, but then hit a roadblock.

Lesson 1: You can start up from a Windows boot disc by holding down the "C" key during startup or by holding down the Option key and selecting the Windows CD as the boot volume.

Hey! Just like with a Mac disc! But unlike a Mac disc, the software just wouldn't seem to install properly. I got a little ways into the Windows boot process, but then it stopped with a hal.dll is corrupt or missing error. There's advice on Apple's forums that those errors require a reinstall. Two reinstalls later, I went looking for better advice. Most fixes that I found for this error involved running the Recovery Console from the Windows installer CD. Okay, where's the Recovery Console? 'Turns out that there was no Recovery Console on my installer disc. Ouch!

Lesson 2: Buy a full retail version of the Windows install CD... (continued)