It used to be that I was a faithful Adobe Reader user and anytime I opened a PDF...there was my old friend. Then I found Foxit Reader from Foxit Software and found that I am much happier. It has a smaller footprint at install, and just plays nicely. I especially like the tabs view (though I am sure Adobe does that now). So you're thinking...who cares, right?

Been stuck with some software and can only boot into safe mode. You think to yourself, "OK, let me just uninstall the offensive program"...only you realize that you can't because it is based on an MSI installer package. Safe Mode restricts the services that can start and this includes the Microsoft Installer Service. But...there is a workaround via a registry edit. Be careful as always, break the registry, and you might just break Windows for good. Step by step below...

We went out on a 3 day hiking adventure over the weekend and found out what sub-freezing temperatures can be like. Below are links to the weather histories.

While deploying storage for my clients, I frequently have to mount storage assigned to hosts and have to follow best practices for aligning the partitions. If you don't know what partition alignment is, it is the process of including an offset when creating a partition so that writes to disk do not cross a stripe unit boundary. All of this begs for some definitions.

There has been great debate about whether on not you should add one or two spaces after a period in a sentence before starting the next. According to MLA (http://www.mla.org/style_faq3 ) the answer is that it doesn't matter. On a typewriter, all characters are monospaced, and so the second space makes reading easier. In a word processing program, the fonts we use are proportionally spaced so the extra white space is no longer required to make reading easier.

I registered today for my first Triathalon! It's in May and is a sprint format...aka...easy. It's a 300m swim, 11 mile bike, and 2 mile run. Sounds easy, eh? Well, considering I am not much of the workout type, this is a big deal for me. You can get a lot more information from their website including the location, the course, and registration should you feel the urge to join me.

Wish me luck!

I was recently installing VMware Server 2 on my Windows 2003 host and came across an error 1718 during the installation. I also found in the release notes from VMware that this is a known issue with a known fix. Worked for me.

Microsoft KB reference and solution
VMware Server 2 release notes

Well, another year has passed and I have grown one year wiser. At this somewhat poignant age of 35 I have looked back over my should and can honestly say that I am please with my journey thus far. I would have never guessed in a million years that this is where I would have landed, but I can't complain. So raise your glasses and let's have a toast. To friends, family, and another joyous 35 years.

Happy Birthday to me...and everyone else lucky enough to be born today.

I have completed dozens of P2V migrations for various clients and have to walk down the same path each time. One of these days I will get around to scripting some of this stuff, but wanted to at least highlight the steps I take here. I do all of this work on the new VM, despite that it could be done on the physical server before doing the migration. If you do that though, you lose the ability to roll back to the physical server as a failback. I would rather do the work on the VM knowing I can always simply power up the physical box. Steps below:

Microsoft has a great KB article that lists a number of best practices to consider when virtualizing domain controllers. Most notable of these below:

1. Disable Write Cache on volumes hosting ESE based databases. This was also tossed around on the VMware forums a while back and there doesn't appear to be a conclusive answer how to deal with this suggestion.