www.NewVentures.ca

A bit of background here for you.

I’ve been a curler at heart since I first watched my dad slide down the ice at the age of 10 or so. I started curling when in High School, in the school boy league and quickly graduated in skill to the level of skip (team leader for those who aren’t aware of the nomenclature ) and have “skipped” games (on and off ) for well over 40 years. I may not be the best, but I’m no where near the worst.

Unfortunately, while I can still hang in there for a game or two of my favorite sport, my wife is not so lucky, having been struck with arthritis enough to hamper her playing ability and our mutual enjoyment.

The Setup

So we were both quite excited, when after acquiring a Wii (which we both really enjoy playing…. albeit me much more so than her ), we heard that Hudson Software was developing a new Wii game called Deca Sports. One of the games within the sports package was to be Curling . Wow!

We checked all the reviews and online pre-release video’s and everything looked really, really great. So when it became available this month, I rushed out and got a copy.

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Oh the joys of upgrades!

As I am sure most of you are aware by now, the software on most computers that you install gets, or should get upgraded every now and then, either by small pieces of software called patches , or by larger pieces called upgrades. WordPress ( software upon which this blog operates ) is now exception.

Unfortunately, as I am sure most of you are aware of by now, one companies upgrade or patch can quite often affect ( or even break ) another companies software, especially if they are related or dependent upon each other. Anyone who has upgraded their Microsoft Windows has probably experienced this from time to time. Well, WordPress is no different…

WordPress has actually been upgraded 2-3 times this last month, and while I noticed some oddities, nothing jumped out at me, that there was a problem… which is unfortunate… because there was one. (Continue reading…)

Well I finally solved the puzzle of installing Ubuntu 8.04 within a dual boot environment alongside an already installed Windows installation. Unfortunately, the website I found the information on is lost within the Internet somewhere.

It was during one of my many Google searches for the dual boot solution (recalling the problem as mentioned in my previous posting ) that I came across a very simple and well written explanation on how to make it work. Unfortunately I did not write it down, nor did I bookmark the page, and so I cannot give credit to the real savior of my sanity. But if I ever do come across it again, I will put his credit here ->

The solution was unbelievably simple, albeit not what I expected. (Continue reading…)

So I’ve spent quite a bit of time experimenting with my newly transferred drive (as mentioned in the last few dispatches ) and have to tell you that I am quite pleased all around.

I was quite certain (based on my last experiences ) that I would eventually have to roll back to the original drive, but the more I kicked the tires, the more programs I tried, the better the experience. Everything, without fail, Works!

Plus, remember how I mentioned that I would try to transfer whatever I could to my now much larger D drive (not being able to make the C drive/partition any bigger than it always was ) – well that worked too. I went from originally having less than 9% free disk space to over 55% free disk space. This was the equivalent of doubling the size of the drive – so I am quite happy on that front too!

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So if you recall my posting from yesterday, I was extremely close to just giving up on moving my windows installation to my new hard drive and just installing Ubuntu Linux instead… It was very, very, very close…

I also mentioned that I might give the net/Google one more chance to deliver what I need before I did that… It looks like I intimidated the Internet… yeah right…

So I did some more looking about for cloning tools, something that would work… Now for all of you out there who were probably thinking “Why didn’t he just buy something like Norton Ghost?” You obviously haven’t read my blog much as I am a big supporter of freeware and GNU products and seriously believe that one shouldn’t be a slave to all the commercial suppliers out there if one doesn’t have too – Besides which I have mentioned, I’m RETIRED….. (and you can read what you want into that one…)

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