Long Way From Home 2009-02-15

Interesting few days. I watched Avatar again. I read The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability by Lierre Keith. I read Coming Home To The Pleistocene by Paul Shepard. I worked on getting my paperwork in order for adding a type rating to my FAA Commercial Pilot Certificate. My MacBookPro died!

The MacBookPro disaster is the easiest thing to fix: I bought another one. Two days later I have my old user account copied over from Time Machine, Windows XP running in a Bootcamp partition, Windows XP running in VMware Fusion. I used the excellent winclone again to restore the last clone of my Windows XP partiton.

I hate having to run windows at all but aviation software that I use will only run in Windows. The new MacBookPro looks and runs great but I would have been happy to continue to use the old one for quite a while yet. The old Pro will get passed on after repair.

I recommend reading The Vegetarian Myth:Food, Justice and Sustainability. I do not have a vegetarian bashing agenda but the book contains so much helpful information about many aspects of eating correctly, agriculture, and civilization. A central theme is that for a human to live something else needs to die, and that when a human dies their body feeds the earth. This is a repeating flow of life from birth to death. The book is just excellent. I didn't have a problem with the Feminist views of the author myself but others might. I won't bore you or myself by trying to reinvent the wheel: read a review by Dr Mike Eades or Mark Sisson.

Coming Home To The Pleistocene is not as easy a read as The Vegetarian Myth but it is worthwhile. Paul Shepard writes about how humans do not live now as humans are meant to live. He offers pointers to what we can do to reclaim our humanness. I will read more Paul Shepard material before retuning to both of the books I've mentioned to gain a better understand of the subject: who we are, and how we should live.

I contemplate that caged factory chickens are like art reflecting our own lives: avian versions of ourselves. Too many humans in too small a space, diseased, and dysfunctional. We read of diseases of civilization: but the civilization is the disease. How do we not just step back in time but rediscover our essence and place in nature? Is there time for a rediscovery before we have destroyed our planet and ourselves? These questions are just the beginning.

The end apparently, really is nigh!

Wheels of Confusion - 2009-09-27

I can boot and run my windows partition again. I have windows booting and running in VMware Fusion. I lost a whole day getting there and I could not have done it without Winclone. I take back up images of my Boot Camp partition from time to time. I had one from just before I tried to upgrade Parallels from 3 to 4. I thought that version 4 was now stable but I was so wrong.

Parallels gives wrong advice about fixing the missing or corrupt hal.dll. This does not work in all cases and never in my case. Parallels gives wrong advice about how to manually remove Parallels Tools from windows XP after a safe boot for my MacBook Pro. After a safe boot into XP the neither the mouse or keyboard work: dah! In my opinion reinstalling XP is not an acceptable solution.

A Neil and his money go separate ways. Parallels made money off me for a buggy product that lost me a day of work.

I switched to VMware Fusion.

VMware Fusion would not boot at first because the Boot Camp partition changed between using the trial version and upgrading to the full version.

Unfortunately neither Parallels or Fusion really uninstall themselves when using their respective uninstall programs. Both leave files in the Libraries and User directories. I went through at least two loops of uninstalling and then reinstalling Fusion. I eventually found all the files from previous installs and deleted them allowing a clean install.

The Fusion help entry for installing Fusion Tools is not good. I ended up with windows activation problems as a result of not installing tools but thinking that I had installed Tools.

Fusion help says:

With the virtual machine powered on, choose Install VMware Tools from the Virtual Machine menu, and follow the on-screen instructions in the Installation Wizard.

Fusion help should say something like:

1. With the virtual machine powered on, choose Install VMware Tools from the Virtual Machine menu.
2. Click on Start Menu.
3. Click on My Computer.
4. Double click on the CD/DVD (usually drive D:).
5. Double click on Setup.exe.
6. Follow the on-screen instructions in the Installation Wizard.

Parallels installs Parallels Tools automatically, we must install Fusion Tools manually.

I will not be buying Parallels again and I advise you not to buy it either. I will see how Fusion works out.

I consider these to be essential tools when using any virtualization software on OS X:

• Winclone
• NTFS-3G

I used NTFS-3G (it includes MacFUSE as well) to take copies of my windows XP activation files. I might need them one day to reset the activation in the event of a Fusion crash.