MER

About a month ago Jan and I went to a Marriage Enrichment Seminar at the Navigator's facility called Glen Eyrie. It is a beautiful place, in an area near Colorado Springs next door to a place called Garden of the Gods. There were 8 couples altogether, and we had a very intensive meetings and discussions. Today we met again as a follow up and the topic was on personality/behavior. We filled in a form that classify our personality type. Here are a couple of pictures of that facility:


The result of my self analysis says that I score highest in D, then C (next highest), then S, and lowest in I (Dominant, Conscientiousness, Steadiness, and Influenceness.) Does that surprise you?

Jan will add hers later (maybe).

St. Mary's Glacier, Idaho Springs, CO

Two weeks ago Jan, another couple from our Sunday School and I went hiking to the St. Mary's Glacier, near Idaho Springs, CO. I've never thought that there would be a glacier here in Colorado, especially at the end of Summer. But, as you can see from the pictures here, its real and it is not that far from Denver. The drive to Idaho Springs took about an hour, then we had to hike uphill for about a mile to the glacier. When we left Aurora, the temperature was in the mid 50s, and by the time we started our hike, it was snowing and the temperature dropped to below freezing. The glacier itself is located at 11325 feet above see level, according to my iPhone's Motion-X GPS. Enjoy.

"She's With Me!"

My mother passed away in January and she was not a believer. So I spent the last 3 weeks of her life praying by her bedside that the Lord would give me the courage and words to share the gospel with her. In her last week of life, I got some guidance from my pastor and he gave me the courage and the words to say. So I shared with my mother some of the wonderful things Jesus had done in my life. But I had to tell her in English - she didn't speak English! I wasn't sure if she got it.

After she passed away, I continued to pray that God would intercede and have mercy on my mother and take her to heaven. For 4 months I continued to pray for His intercession and mercy and wonder if my mother was in heaven. Then one Sunday morning just before Mother's Day, I was sitting in church listening to a lady sing a solo about how God intercedes for us. While she was singing, I felt this glow and warmth around me and I could see God looking down on me and He said, "She's with me."

Hugs for Heroes

Jan and few ladies from our church have been busy preparing an event called Hugs for Heroes (HFH), to take place this coming weekend. The event is to honor our American heroes serving in the military anywhere in the world, and the families of these men women that are members of our church. Since we do not have any family member serving the military branch, we've adopted Mike and Joe Hughes (Maria's brothers) as our honorees. They are US Marines currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jan and I have been busy getting songs (from iTunes) and making a patriotic playlist to be played during the HFH dinner, and ordering and re-ordering the songs. For some reason just a few minutes ago, Jan accidentally deleted the playlist, so she is now starting over. Luckily, its just the playlist, not the songs theselves. During the morning service that Sunday, the pastor will be blessing the care packages that will be sent to our servicemen/servicewomen associated with the church members, wherever they are located.

THANK YOU to all American servicemen and women and their families for your sacrifice and your life to preserve our freedom. May God bless you and the USA.

BootCamp - not ready for primetime

When I first got the macBook last year, I attempted to install Win XP but never got it to boot at all. Last month, I upgraded my HD to 500GB, so I thought I'd give it another try. First I partitioned the HD into two part, giving the Mac 400GB, and Windows 100GB with BootCamp. However, right of the bat I already knew something was wrong. Windows XP wants the HD to be formatted as NTFS, but BootCamp only supports FAT32. Thus it was a no starter from the beginning. I went ahead and installed WinXP following the BC instruction, but at the end, Windows will not boot correctly. I think part of the issue is that MacOS still have not been able to write to NTFS partition.

So I took the HD out from the Mac, and using a USB carrier, I hooked that up to my Dell and format the 100GB partition to NTFS. Then I put the HD back into the Mac. Relaunch BC, and proceeded to install WinXP. It went to completion, including the reboot afterwards. Then I was supposed to insert Mac OSX Disk One for the Apple drivers. No Go. Unfortunately, the XP installer I had was of ServicePack1 vintage, and BC does not like that version. It complained about not finding 'UPDATE', or something to that effect. So, copied the Apple driver folder from the Apple disk to the Windows HD. I then individually installed the drivers for the video, trackpad, audio, wireless card, etc. That step got most of the functionality to work from Windows in my Mac. But, keyboard volume control, complete shutdown, and a couple other function did not work. I then downloaded SP2 (and for good measure SP3 service packs).

Invoking the Sp2 did not work, it says I don't have enough disk space, and need a mere 4 MB more. My gosh, I know I had at least 80GB disk space available. So something is wrong here. So the next thing I did was to download Apple's BC 2.1 upgrade. This too failed to launch and install, saying that it could not find ordinal 264 in msi.dll something.

So after wasting almost 8 hours of work doing all that, I thought about "slipstreaming" SP2 into my Windows XP SP1 install disk. I spent the better part of last Friday and Saturday trying to do this, and made several CD and DVD coasters (in other word: un-usable trash disks). So far I have NOT been able to make these new disks bootable.

On hindsight, the fact that I have to reboot the Mac to switch OS is not the way to go. I've contemplated of trying Parallels, but I am not sure if this is even worth the effort. So for now, I just have to switch laptops if I need to run some utilities that only exist in the Windows world. I also installed CrossOver in the Mac, but I don't like the way it intercepts Win applications by creating "bottles". It semed too slow and confusing. That's it for today, November Two.

First entry for NABLOPOMO 2009

Another attempt at BootCamp ...

Since going back to my roots (original Mac Classic, to PC then now to MacBook), I've been trying to get BootCamp with Windows XP to work. I can now boot to XP and most of the functionality worked, e.g., audio, wifi browsing, video resolution, etc., but some other function such as complete shutdown or volume control from keyboard are still not working. I'll do a write up soon to finish today's late blog. Stay tuned.

Four laptops with four different OS

1. My Dell Inspiron 710m running Windows XP sp3

2. My MacBook running Mac OS X 10.5.6

3. My IBM Thinkpad X40 running Ubuntu 8.10 (Linux)

4. Jan's Dell 1410 running Windows Vista Home