Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Yeah, right.

Needed to install Microsoft Office 2007 on a machine today (upgrade from 2003). The installer would not execute. Just failed with a non-desript error like “error can not continue”.

From Google, figured out that the issue was likely an older version of Office and the installer could not uninstall the older version to make way for the new one. So I tried uninstalling it manually and even that failed!

Cleaned the registry. Did not help.

Googled all over for more info. Finally found a Microsoft Knowledge Base entry that took me over an hour of pain staking work to finally clear out the mess. Read it here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928218/en-us

What a load of bullshit. Anyone still using Windows should just shoot themselves. Mac OS X has absolutely nothing even close to an issue like this. And Apple would never publish something like this to “help” their users. Apple would never let a condition like that happen.

Apple is not perfect, but they are so many miles ahead of Microsoft.

Windows is the lamest piece of crud operating system ever cobbled together and forced on the public. Get smart, folks, get a Mac.

Yeesh!

Jake started viola lessons last week. He continues to enjoy playing and started making up his own songs tonight…and the melody of the one he invented just now was pretty cool. You can listen to it below.

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This weekend, the International Children’s Festival is taking place at Wolftrap. But before the main public performances, Fairfax County Public Schools were treated to a preview. I joined my son’s class for the field trip and was VERY impressed at the performances. We saw dancers and musicians from Ghana, Finland, China, and Joran. And the two clowns that MC’d the show were very good as well. Every kid loved the show.

Some pix below.

My family visited Rehoboth Beach again this year as we have for maybe 15 years straight and likely 35 of the 40 years I have been around. This year was similar to years past. Thrashers french fries, Candy Kitchen fudge and chocolate covered pretzels, Grotto pizza, and Funland rides.

We got washed out on Saturday thanks to Tropical Storm Hanna. The storm went almost over top of our location and it was pretty impressive to be on the beach during the height of the storm. 35-50 mph winds and rain driven into your face enough to hurt. And the sand got whipped up into your legs - not fun. And to think that this was a minor tropical storm. Imagine 130+ mph winds. Scary.

Sunday and Monday were beautiful beach days. We spent the time digging in the sand, swimming in the waves, and playing games. My mom and I played some Scrabble several times. She won a very close game (by 2 points on the very last play of the game using the word “Qi”!), but I won the rest (heh!). Jake out smarted me to win Settlers of Catan the moment before I was set to win, and the moment before Rylan was also about to win. Smart guy he is.

Some pix below.

Not that the Dems don’t do the same thing, but man, I have never seen such blatant hypocrisy and contradictions. Too funny.

Last week I was very fortunate to join my hiking buddies (David, Dave and Brad) for another amazing trip out west. This year we would do the Three Sisters Wilderness near Bend, Oregon. For those who do not know Oregon, the Sisters are three volcanos, each over 10,000 feet. In addition to the Sisters, there are numerous other peaks in the wilderness area named similarly…the Husband, Wife, Mt Bachelor (also a ski resort) and so forth. The Sisters are part of the long chain of volcanos stretching from CA to WA and beyond including Mt Hood, Rainier, St. Helens, Adams, and more.

As an added bonus, Rich Ayers, an old friend from High School first grade! contacted me just before the hike and let me know he lived in Portland (I went to a twelve year all boy private school…that likely explains a lot). So I made arrangements to fly into Portland (instead of SLC as I normally would) and hang out before the hike with Rich and his wife Gina.

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I have an Infrant ReadyNAS 1100 unit and I can’t say enough great things about it. But yesterday I had a very strange issue. After having it running for quite some time, I upgraded all the drives to 1TB drives. I first backed-up all the data and then went with 4 new 1TB drives. I went through the whole process of formatting the drives, setting up shares and permissions, and copying the data back to the system. All was great!

Then after a reboot yesterday (installed an add-on), I found that I could only mount some shares on the device via AFP. I could mount everything via SMB…but AFP mounting two of my 6 shares would hang my OS X machine for a long time….10’s of minutes. I thought the issue might have been the add-on I just installed. But Infrant does not allow you to uninstall add-ons (bad bad bad).

So I was sort of stuck. I tried a few things but nothing seemed to help. The console logs on the Mac were full of some strange messages but even that did not tell me the issue even after Google searching the errors.

I eventually stumbled on what I think was the issue. There seemed to be some sort of KeyChain password issue. I can’t say for sure that I even understand what it was that made me think of it, but I decided to clear out all KeyChain entries for my NAS unit…both IP address and DNS entries. Everything.

Once I did that, everything was happy again.

Why’d it happen after that reboot when I had many other reboots along the way? Who knows. I think this was an obscure Mac OS X bug myself. But if this helps someone out there solve this issue, great.

Well, OK. Maybe you didn’t wake up today and think, after this bowl of [insert expensive brand name cereal here], I was thinking of cooking up some corn. Likely true. But just think, a few hours from now, around 3:38pm your time you will be hungry and one of your co-workers will be microwaving some corn down the hall. And that smell….oh, how it will be wafting through the halls to your office.

But you could have your own delicious popcorn! Whether you like one of the many microwave varieties or a tin of classic Kettle Corn, Caramel Corn, or even Chocolate Covered Caramel Corn, it all can be yours while supporting a great cause. Cub Scouts.

My son, Jacob, is doing his part to raise $350 for his cub scout pack, Pack 340 of Reston, VA. He would love to have your help and you can order online very easily.

Just visit the Popcorn Order Website and enter Jacob’s code: TEYHWQM

One of my clients forgot their password a few days ago for their email address which is hosted on Google Apps. It just so happens that this account was also the admin account for the entire domain!

On top of this issue, for some reason the “I forgot my password” link was just telling us to “check with your domain admin” for assistance. While I was pretty sure I had checked the box allowing us to reset the admin password by sending an email to a secondary email address, this was not showing up.

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1. You can FTP files to/from your website almost as fast as you can copy them from one folder to another on your laptop’s hard drive.
2. Your upload bandwidth is faster than your good friend Phil’s download bandwidth.

   ….and the final way you know your Internet connection is too freakin’ fast…..

3. The CPU in your Linksys WRT54GL router is not able to fully utilize the entire pipe as it is CPU bound!

Verizon FIOS 20Mbps/20Mbps all on a piece of glass about the size of a thick human hair. Yeah, baby.