Anxiously Awaiting

I was cruising my statcounter page and I found a couple of visitors to my site that got here via a keyword search on Google. So, I have made it a game to try and see how high I can get myself on the list by typing in searches related to topics on my blog. I registered with google, yahoo, and msn.

Other than that, the week has been pretty boring so far. I started eating salads for lunch (blech) in an effort to return to skinnydom, and I beat my best mile time of 7:15 by 25 seconds yesterday. Woo. Work has either been ridiculously busy or boring me to tears lately. During said boring times, I usually bother eric. Example:

me: Which is better: Double stuffed oreos and milk or chips ahoy soft batch?

Eric: FORMER

me: why?

Eric: if you have to ask

you don’t deserve to know

me: i prefer soft batch

Eric: because

you sux

splited

me: my blog doesnt have a cheezy theme changer

therefore

i dont sux

Eric: listen

me: rofl

Eric: 2 loyal readers

said they wouldn’t read no mo’

if old theme not available

and since I pander to my readers

viola

one plugin, 4 lines of code, theme switcher installed

me: the word pander confused me

i thought it was ponder at first

Eric: talking about bears

me: then panda

Eric: define: pander

me: from now on things are no longer pimp

they are ponce

Eric: (in England they call a pimp a ponce)

lolol

I agree

thats ponce

me: indeed

Hence the coinage of a new phrase: I ponce’d yer mum. Expect to see it alot.

Those of you who don’t know about Personalized Google Homepages (PGHP) are missing out on a load of cubicle based fun. So yesterday I was bored at work. That never happens, so I decided to find something to keep me busy whilst waiting for the phones to ring.

This weekend I found out that I kinda like watching soccer, and since the world cup is going on it’s a good time to be keeping up with it. With that in mind, I surfed through all the cool little PGHP widgets until I found a world cup soccer tracker. Neat.

That wasn’t enough, however. I craved more. After some more searching I found the holy grail of PGHP widgets: Sudoku! You know what I’m talking about. Every nerd’s favorite logic game sitting right there on my Personalized Google Home Page. Calling out for me to fill in the numbers in an effort to solve the puzzle. So now, I can productively waste time when I get bored. The only bummer is when the page reloads, I get a new puzzle and all my work on the old one is lost =(. Me in action:

I am clearly owning this sudoku. For serious.

Today I had my quiet time. Seeing as it’s been about 3 months since I last opened my Bible, this was a good first step to getting back on the right track. I read Psalms 146. This is one of my favorite Psalms because it is a song of hope; something I’m sort of short on right now. An excerpt:

5 How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, Whose hope is in the Lord his God; 6. Who made heaven and earth, The sea and all that is in them; Who keeps faith forever;

Emphasis is mine. Verse six particularly stands out to me because of the last part. The word shâmar–translated to keep in this verse, means to keep, guard, preserve, or protect. With that in mind, you can re-read that verse as: Who guards, protects, preserves, and keeps faith forever. The Author of our faith makes sure that it is preserved and protected. That is an exciting concept. What is faith? Why should it be protected? What happens when faith begins to break down and degrade?

Humans are creatures of faith. You can tell that by the many religions that exist in our world. Even the religion of science requires faith–although it is usually faith in oneself, or a bunch of numbers and equations; concrete or theoretical. If faith disappeared then humans couldn’t exist. It is so central to our being that we require it in order to function.

God protects faith, and in turn He protects us. Without faith we would be hopeless, and useless. The desire to have faith in something keeps us busy, and ultimately leads some to the perfect truth. Some are still looking, and others have found a counterfeit–faith coupled with pride often leads to misplacement. That’s why we need to be lighthouses that point in the right direction for faith to go: Jesus! There are too many traps and snares in the world that demand faith as payment. And part of the human condition is that once we have been snared, it’s rather hard to retarget ourselves. But thank God for his ability to rip us away from the things that preoccupy us, steal, or make us so numb that we forget about our faith. Thank God that recently I was ripped away from selfishness and reminded where my faith lies. Now I can start growing again =).

So it appears that my blog has periodic problems in IE. I was making some changes to the CSS styles to make it look more like what I wanted and it appears to have completely broken things that are below a block quote. For now ignore it. I’m going to find another more IE friendly theme to use for all -1 of you IE people. Redesign shall occur next week, along with the main site.

In parallel with Erics cool post about open source software and Linux, I think my readers should be aware of a certain little freeware utility that I found yesterday. Now it could be that I am just behind, or it could be that I had never found the need for this type of software before. In any account, it’s new to me, and it ridiculously useful.

First off, we all know that installing huge software or games on our PC usually requires a CD or a DVD. Most of the little stuff like Firefox you can download off the net at less than 6.0 MB ( < 10 seconds on a good cable connection). But larger games and software usually end up being multiple CD's, or one huge DVD. For instance Oblivion, my current favorite game, lives on a really huge DVD weighing in at about 3.5 GB.

Now the problem with these huge DVD's or multiple CD's is that it takes alot of time and CD switching if you want to install the software. In addition, some games like Oblivion require the CD/DVD to be in your optical drive while you play. That's all fine and good until you realize the speed of a CD/DVD Rom drive. It's horribly slow compared to other hardware on your PC like, say, your Hard Drive.

So what’s the point of all this learning crap? Introducing SlySoft’s Virtual Clone Drive. This sweet little free utility is a CD/DVD drive emulator. It tricks your computer into believing that it has an imaginary CD drive, and that it can play CD image files called ISO’s from that drive. Couple this with the Windows XP CD ISO ripping powertoy or DVDDecrypter–if you happened to get a copy before it was banned, and we have a winning combination. So before your head pops off and hot lava spews from your neck, let me explain how these two utilities work together.

Preliminary Setup

Install Virtual Clone Drive, then install the ISO ripping powertoy. Do it in that order so that the file associations don’t get confused. In other words, just trust me ;). You can get the installers for both from links at the end of this post.

Usage

Pick a CD or DVD from your collection and use the ripping powertoy to copy it to an ISO. Save it to your computer by right clicking the CD drive holding your disc, and select create image from CD. Follow the steps in the Wizard to save the ISO to your computer.

After you install Virtual Clone Drive, double click on my computer. You should now have an extra DVD Rom drive that looks like a really angry sheep.

You can use this virtual drive to mount the CD Image that we saved earlier using the ISO ripping powertoy. Simply find the ISO and double click on it, or right click -> Open With -> Mount Files with Virtual Clone Drive. You can now run your software directly from the virtual drive! If you need additional virtual drives, thats easy too! Simply double click on the VCD icon that was installed on your desktop and configure.

Why is this useful? As I stated earlier, DVD and CD roms are really slow compared to your computer’s hard drive. With a virtual drive, all the disc reads will ask the ISO located on your hard drive for information instead of the optical drive. You should notice at least a 50% speedup when playing games that require CD reads, and you will also get rid of that annoying chapter jerk when watching DVD’s–which is caused by the system waiting for the DVD drive to spin up and give it the next chapter.

So there are other virtual drive utilities out there–notably Daemon Tools, but none are as easy to use as CloneDrive. I tried Daemon Tools first, but when I tried to play Oblivion via ISO I kept getting errors. VCD fired it up the first time I tried it!

With these two nifty little utilities you can copy all your software from their discs to your computer. I would suggest getting a really big hard drive for all your ISO’s; a single 250GB should suffice. This is super useful for power geeks like myself who don’t want to be CD switching for 6 hours after a format. Using this method I can simply mount all the images of a particular software set (like all 4 CD’s of Diablo II) and run the installer. Presto, no CD switching. Below are links to download the installers for both of these awesome programs.

ISO PowerToy
Virtual Clone Drive

Disclaimer: Iso PowerToy and Virtual Clone drive are Trademarks of their respective authors. Neither the authors or I are responsible for damage or harm that may come to any data, media, or hardware as a result of the use of these products. Also note that the author of this post does not support illegal software or DVD pirating. Only use these utilities on DVD’s or CD’s for software or movies that you own! Remember, good software should be paid for.