By Travis Whidden on 1/27/2008 8:35 PM

Lol, well, we went and saw Rambo tonight. I knew it was going to be corny, but guys like lots of blood and gore.  April said it was going to suck, but she went with me on this one. I have totally forgot what the other Rambo movies were about.  After watching this one, I actually want to go and rent them just to see if I was missing anything. The story starts out kind of slow. Just building the plot for the movie.  SS is just getting old! SS is obviously going to be the hero of this movie. This movie was FULL of guts and gore.  Actually, that made the movie even better!  I love when they pull out the 50 cal and I love the use of the sniper rifle by one of the other characters of this movie.  April went in giving this a D, and she bumped it up to a C.  I give this movie a C+ / B- but its worth seeing, especially with a bunch of guy friends.  Read More »

By Travis Whidden on 1/26/2008 1:43 AM

Its not often you go to a movie and hear real computer terms. I am so pleased when someone that knows nothing about computers actually uses real terms instead of making stuff up (like in Firewall with Harrison Ford).   I was glued to the screen at the start of this movie as they talked about DNS servers, TTL, Bots, etc.  It really did build some credibility to the story. The movie itself was actually quite good.  I loved how there are some clues in it that tell you information later in the movie. I also like how they didnt hold back on some things. There were some gore scenes.   I did hear something about "net neutrality" in it, but I couldn't figure out if they were saying that its needed or not.  All I know is that it should stay like it is now. I would give this movie a good B+/A-.  I really enjoyed it, and so did April, and she isn't even a computer person. Worth a night movie ticket and a DVD rental when it comes out ;) Read More »

By Travis Whidden on 1/26/2008 1:38 AM

Well, I have been quite pleased with ModernBill lately.  There are still some quirks.. but overall I am very pleased.  It has handled our business the way we have expected.  Now, the hardest part is to get all of our customers moved.  Our old billing system is so screwed up, that its hard not to have Garbage in, Garbage out.  I am waiting on a new release of their software which will include some long needed fixes.  They still have problems with Plesk and creating 2 or more accounts for one user.  I have done a lot of complaining about it, but we are not very pleased with Plesk anyways, so we may dump it. We noticed that hostgator is running an older version of the software (4.x) and we are running 5.x.  That made us happy to see that a major competitor to us is using software that has been "questionable" at times.   I am hoping that this will continue to become a solid product over the years, as we are making a considerable commitment to use it and move all of our customers into it. Read More »

By Travis Whidden on 1/26/2008 12:17 AM

I am seriously happy that I could move my vista partition to another hard disk.  I recently just bought a 750 gig Western Digital that has nearly double the read and write speed.  I didn't want to go and re-install Windows Vista for the 3rd time this month.  My new computer is just smoking fast, but hey, disk IO is very important also.

So, I did a quick Google search, and I found some people saying it could not be done, reinstall.. blah blah.  Then I saw in a thread.. it was the very last post.. "use Gparted".  I was like "what is gparted" so my Google search changed to looking for this new tool.

I downloaded it. It was an ISO. I burned it to my CD, and away I went.

Now, at this point, I was prepared to re-install windows if it came down to it.  I would recommend you do a backup, although I think you will be ok without.

The program includes a screen shot option, but I didn't use it.  I am going to give you the instructions from memory if you are trying to do this yourself.

Some more links before we get started:
GParted home page:  http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php
GParted screen shots: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php

 

1. Download "GParted" from sourceforge.net: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828
2. Burn the ISO (using something like Nero)
3. Shut down your computer
4. Install your new hard drive
5. Make sure your computer is set to boot of CD-ROM - keep the freshly burned disk in your cd drive.
6. Let the program boot up. I selected the first option, and things went perfectly.
7. A nice GUI will boot.. and you are now using the GParted tools.  This is very powerful and you can toy around with some cool stuff including a nice shell
8. Go to the disk that contains your Windows Vista Partition (/dev/sda1 usually)
9. Right click on the disk, and click "Copy"
10. Go to the destination disk that you want Vista to be on (or any OS really) and right paste.
11. Apply the changes.  This will take a while, depending on the size and data content of your disks.  It took my 30 gigs of storage about 10 - 20 minutes to transfer
12. Right click on the new disk and select "flags" and click on the "boot" check mark which will make that partition bootable.
13. Double click on the exit button at the top left.  Shut down
14. Open up your computer, and put your primary disk on SATAII0 or what ever port you can to make it be the first drive in your system
15. Attempt to boot your machine.  If your windows vista starts up and throws a huge error that it cant find the boot files.. dont sweat it.  If it boots right up.. you dont need the rest of this tutorial.

The following is if you rebooted and your windows system did not start.  Just whip out your Vista Install disk.  You will love this new feature of their installer.

1. Pop in your Vista CD
2. Boot into the Vista Installer
3. Click on "Repair Windows" -- This is cool. It detected my problem, and fixed my system to point at the right device.  My old windows was Dynamic, so I assume it pointed the boot to the new basic disk.
4. Click on "update and restart"
5. Pull your Vista CD out of your CD drive.

If all worked out.. you will now be on the way to booting your Windows Vista on your new hard drive.

I used this tool GParted to also resize my 60 gig partition to 120 gigs.   I don't usually install anything on the OS partition, but stuff that has to be re-installed on a Windows re-install usually gets placed on that drive.

My admin at my hosting company (www.amhosting.com) will be very pleased that I used Linux to fix a Windows Issue. He is hardcore, and is always getting me to use new linux tool sets.  He has saved my windows windows machines a couple of times using other cool Linux tools. I am actually becoming very fond of Linux.  If I was not obsessed with the new UI and performance of Vista, I may be doing an Ubuntu desktop.

Good luck.  This really was a cool tool to use. 

By Travis Whidden on 1/25/2008 10:48 PM

I am nerding out here.  I recently just bought a Core 2 Quad Core 2.4.  The price for these processors has dropped amazingly low.  I am a huge newegg.com fan also.  I bought everything I have from them.   Even pickup up a nice Gigabyte P35 board.. with 8 SATAII ports on it. Well, this post isn't about my computer, but more about my new hard drive I just picked up.  I was reading online that this hard drive is out performing some of the top line hard drives.   I almost bought the Raid Ready drive for my personal machine (well, I did, but I canceled it).  The only real difference is the firmware on the Raid Raid drive designed for hardware raids (plays nicely with it), the nice 5 year warrantee instead of 3, and the fact that they only do 8 hours of testing instead of 24 on this drive.  Well.. that's fine with me. I did a full Q/A check on it using badblocks in linux. So, here is the cool stuff. My Computer Spec: Quad Core 2.4 4 GB 1066 DDR2 Memory 1.75 TB storage (Would have been 2, but a 250 died on Read More »

By Travis Whidden on 1/12/2008 11:42 PM

Well, its time to start blogging again about the movies we see.  Tonight, we went and saw "The Bucket List" and we loved it.   It was not the best movie in the world, but I swear, Nicholson and Freeman are just some of the finest actors out there.   Watching it makes you wonder what you would do if you were terminally ill and you still wanted to do some things with your life.   This movie is good for all all ages.  Anyone who has gone through cancer will enjoy this movie.  I laughed many times out loud (LOL).  haha. My rating: B+ Read More »

By Travis Whidden on 1/12/2008 11:18 PM

When I go to open an existing blog, I still get an error Message: Here is the error message I get:     I do love how I can embed images into this thing however. That is just amazing! Travis   Testing the Open -> Edit -> Save :) Read More »

By Travis Whidden on 1/12/2008 5:08 PM

Its a little buggy.  I cant edit any existing posts, but I can post new.  I also manage several blogs that exist on this DNN site, and I can use live writer to select between each one of them.  60 bucks is a little expensive for a slice of software that does not work perfectly. Anyhow, We will continue to report bugs.. Hopefully they find a fix for this. Read More »

By Travis Whidden on 10/20/2007 10:33 AM

Thank you everyone for being so excited with us. We are so excited and cant wait to see this beautiful baby come out of her beautiful mother!

I am so in love with April and love this baby so much, and I have not had a time to hold her yet. 

We just did the ultrasound photos yesterday and its amazing to see how much this baby has developed in just 20 weeks.   Its amazing to think that April is going to nearly double in size for this baby.  She is 20 weeks along, and we have 4 more months.

Here are a couple of photos:

Click Here for more pictures and higher res photos

Baby Feet:

By Travis Whidden on 10/11/2007 9:26 PM