An hour of my day.

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This sounds like basic functionality to me – the ability to export a VM from Hyper-V into a single file for mobility/delivery.

10:00 am – logged into SCVMM to perform the task.  Couldn’t find it.

10:10 am – typed “export” into the help console.  Nothin’ – I don’t care about exporting reports.  I want *vm* related help.

10:20 am – Google-fu hit paydirt – except this most only pertain to Hyper-V in plain 2008.

10:30 am – Technet Hyper-V forum, let the fun begin.

10:55 am – realize you need to actually log in to one of the Hyper-V servers directly and run the Hyper-V manager.  Evidently the central console doesn’t have this functionality.

10:56 am – queue some reading about GUIDS & such pertinent to Hyper-V exporting.

10:57 am – decided to just export a VM to see what happens.

10:59 am – realize there is no local space to drop the exported files.  Need to map a drive or something to make this work…

11:00 am – lunch.  Tasty.

–Nat

A *good* day…

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1) Kristin and I drove to work this morning, no drama.

2)I got some things done this morning at work.  It feels nice to have taken care of something.

3) Kristin and I walked out of the building and got lunch.

4) I heard back from the Forest Lake FFA Chapter, they might want some help with Ag Marketing.  Finally, a volunteer effort I feel excited about.

5)xkcd.com and meninhats.com

6)It was still light outside when I left.  Hello, Sun.

7) Your friends love you anyway.  Sometimes you just need to hear that – or read it on the wall at Jimmy Johns.  Either way, I feel relieved for no reason I can put a finger on.

8) Class tonight – but Friday tomorrow.

9) With any luck, I’ll get to talk to some distant friend on the drive home tonight.

10) Guilt free Mass Effect when I get home to wind down the day.

11) Going to bed 🙂

–Nat

PS:  Yes, I know that number eight is borked.  I am just not messing with an accidental smiley today…

Interesting article on attention spans…

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Over on my new fave tech/news site, Ars Technica, a interesting opinion piece has been published.  Basically the author chronicles a back and forth blog exchange between a more classic journalist and “futurist” on whether we are being consumed by the amount of information that is presented to us.  Is the constant information hampering our ability to make sense of any of it?

In an age of instant information like Twitter and the ever domineering presence of Facebook, it may be easy to write this off as nothing more than exaggerating the benefits of how things were in the “old days” versus our current frontier.  There is more to it than that simple superficial take though.

How many people spend hours on Facebook reading about friends rather than doing things with friends?  I am certainly guilty of this and I also don’t believe that this was ever so prevalent in the past.  On the flip side, it seems to me that fewer people just park in front of the TV, rather they are sitting there with a laptop or phone “multi-tasking” or maybe they are using the TV or computer to watch a movie or play a game.  Is there really that much value to most of this stuff?  Why do we spend so much time on this type of activity? Because it is easy, cheap and convenient?   What human need is this fulfilling?

Time is incredibly precious and it is mind boggling that we spend so much time on this stuff.  On the other hand, don’t we go to school and work so that we can do “what we want to do” in our free time?  Who is to judge that reading a novel or playing a video game or going to a park and taking some photographs of trees are activities or reading about someone elses adventures doing these things on Facebook are “better” or “worse” ways to spend this supposed free time?

I agree that we are faced with information overload.  I agree this could be a bad thing.  There are a lot of big important activities going on everyday that many don’t participate in (local government, education, etc.) that could benefit from extra input.

That doesn’t change the fact that I also want to go home and spend a few hours playing Mass Effect.

–Nat

Adblock Plus, you rock…

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There are some pretty annoying advertisements out there.  Facebook is annoying enough since the whole right pane of the page is ads.  Other sites like Dailytech are worse with their “Vibrant” advertising, where the popups come when you mistakenly move your cursor over highlighted text.  There is a simple remedy to get rid of this crud when using Firefox, and its name is Adblock Plus.

  1. Install the latest version of Firefox from www.mozilla.org
  2. Open Tools –> Add-ons
  3. Click “Get Add-ons”
  4. Type “adblock plus” into the search box
  5. Click “Add to Firefox”
  6. Click through the installation
  7. You’ll have to restart Firefox
  8. *Important* – now you actually have to enable Adblock Plus
  9. Open Tools –> Add-ons
  10. Under extensions, you’ll see Adblock Plus, click “options”
  11. Open Filters –> Add filter subscription
  12. I’ve been using the first one, Easylist USA, make sure you hit “apply”
  13. Under options, make sure Adblock Plus is enabled
  14. Viola, all done!
It just works...

All the usual garbage on the right is gone.

Do you have any awesome browser extensions you’d like to share?  Leave feed back below 🙂

–Nat

New Sections!

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I’ve added a couple new areas to the good ol’ TeamJuchems blog.

The first is the addition of the “NATLAN” section.  Updates to this annual/semi-annual LAN party will appear there, along with pics and videos as they are available.

Second is the “For Sale” section.  Take a minute to read that page, I’ll put in a blog post when I add items to it.  For now, I expect it to be full computers that need to stretch their legs and be put to use by other folks.  With two people, there are only so many computers that can be used in one house.

–Nat

Mass Effect 2 + Chuck?

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Great news if you like Chuck and the actress that plays Sarah Walker, one Yvonne Strahovski.  She does the voice acting for the character “Miranda” in the game.  Evidently she served as the actual character model as well.  Pretty cool – and if we learned anything from Mass Effect, it’s that the lead character can get a little freaky with his crew mates.  Here’s to hoping 😉

Looks pretty close to me...

Looks pretty close to me...

Mass Effect 2 is sounding better all the time!

–Nat

Zune Update 4.2

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Running Windows update with the Zune software installed gets you a little point release upgrade.  Ars Technica is all excited about how this software added some mysterious phone support.  Myself, I am thrilled that xvid, avi, and divx are all recognized by the player!  Even though they have to be re-encoded to work on the Zune, they now show up in the library and the re-encode is handled natively by the Zune software which uses at least two cores and seems to give good audio/video quality.  Previously, I had to re-encode all the crap from the internet into .mp4 or .wmv manually and separately.  This additional codec support is going to be a huge time and effort saver for me.  Evidently the Zune HD will play these files back natively in the future, which would be perfect.  With anyluck, they’ll support .mkv files in the next few months too, totally eliminating all that messy manual re-encoding 🙂

Which, incidentally, brings me to the big new iPad.  Its codec support is pretty sucktastic and speaks to how tightly integrated it will have to be with iTunes to get crap onto that device.  It really is just a big iPod touch…  it gets less and less cool the more I think about it.

I would take a 7″ Zune HD for $300 though :p  (Please, Kristin?)

–Nat

Mass Effect 2 Launched, crap…

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I’ve been really enjoying Mass Effect, the only issue being the free time sink that the game is to play.  I’ve logged twenty two hours of play time so far, which is likely enough time to have blasted through the main campaign but I am the type of player who just cannot ignore the side missions.

The truth is that the game is truly epic and has a attention to detail that is second to none.  Realistically, the only issues I have had so far are around inventory management which is fairly awful even compared to Fallout 3 (no hotkey to open the inventory directly?  you have to open the inventory to switch weapons?) and just grotesque after having played a dungeon crawler like Torchlight where inventory management is a constant mini-game in of itself.

Evidently Mass Effect 2 fixed these issues, but I am pledging not to read about it until I finish the first one.  I am not going to buy the game until at least its first price cut anyway, but knowing that there is a better game out there I could be playing will crush my desire to finish this one.  After 22 hours, I need to have some closure.

If you play Mass Effect 2, please don’t tell me about it for a couple weeks 🙂

–Nat

Epic Choke Job by the Vikings

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What hurt the most about the loss last night to New Orleans Saints was that it was a game, barring one statistic, that the Vikings should have won.

Look at these stats!

The Vikings had twice as many first downs, twice as many yards and ten minutes more time of possession.  Perhaps the only truly glaring team mistake was the yardage allowed on kick returns; a long kick return to start off Over Time basically sealed the deal.  Even on penalties, the Saints did worse despite the crowd noise.  The fact remains that they shouldn’t have been in overtime at all except for one important stat.

Turn overs.  Six fumbles, three lost.  That must be some sort of record.  New Orleans put the ball on the ground three times and only lost it once.  That punt return fumble by Reggie Bush should have resulted in at least three points (no overtime!) but AP and Favre managed to bungle a hand off about three seconds later and give it back to the Saints.  Brett Favre had two interceptions whereas Brees had none.  Too bad Favre threw the interception at the end of the game that took Minnesota out of the drivers seat for what happened to be the rest of the game.

It was like the offense just didn’t want to win!  Two opponent red zone lost fumbles, one in our own red zone that set up a New Orleans TD.  The defense did their part I believe, it has to be almost impossible to keep the other team from scoring when they get the ball on your ten yard line.

Bottom line, the Vikings had a great team and a great shot at winning a super bowl this year.   They’ll still be a good team next year but it is hard to believe that they will do this well and have so many of the right pieces again.    It is really disappointing.  Dave Brahn welcomed me to Vikings fanhood after the loss last night.

Thanks, I guess.

–Nat

Fun with Update Manager

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After having a mornings worth of issues troubleshooting an error in vCenter Update Manager, I stumbled across a great blog entry that had the answer.  After we had a server (the server I am trying to patch, ironically) act up and give some VM’s fits, our first reaction was to bring it up to date with patches.  Update Manager wouldn’t do anything but scan hosts for baseline compliance, which makes patching pretty difficult.

First, I restarted the Update Manager service without any change.  Next, I followed the above blogs guidance and unregistered some orphaned VM’s.  Even though the server I was having issues with didn’t have any VM’s on it and was in maintenance mode, this seems to have turned the trick.

Now if I could only find the Update Manger logs in Server 2008…

–Nat