Harry’s Blog

The Clean PC new logo for parallels

That’s a big starfish

Testing Windows LiveWriter so I thought posting a picture of my beautiful wife would work.

How many systems do we need? I mean i have a system for a blog, a system for documents, a system for thecleanpc content, i use pages on a mac, then save it as a doc to share it with windows users, at least my e-mails, contacts, and calendars are all synced on all my varying devises, thanks to exchange… at least Microsoft can do something right. How many systems can there be? I am sure I will have at least a dozen more this year.

I am currently an owner of my job, I do not own a business, I own my job… or maybe my job owns me? either way i do not own a business yet. To own a business you must be able to walk away and have it continue to work and make a profit without you there. By the end of 2008 I hope to own a business, so Mark and I can actually take time to enjoy our hobbies, not just try and fit them in when we can. It is fun to run away for a day during the week to enjoy some fresh snow, but I would really like to take a week to spend with my family and to recharge my self. In the past year The Clean PC has grown incredibly, but with that growth has come growing pains. Looking forward I am excited to take advantage of the systems we have put in place, like clearspace for a wiki and internal discussion board, our CRM, and our Managed service platform. We made serious investments into The Clean PC last year in order to provide the highest quality service for our customers.

Have you tried calling a Best Buy store recently? I have and I cannot get through, tried calling again and again. I refuse to go into the store because there service in person is among the worst i have ever experienced. A friend of my families recently asked for some help after he hired Circuit City and they botched the job, then he hired Magnolia home theater (part of Best Buy) and they botched the job, I guess he was told that he needs to have HDMI for the best picture (true, except the device s he has only support 1080i so HDMI wont really help) and they could not run one because the conduits were to small. Well i found a device from gefen that allows HDMI to run over Cat5e and they work great excpt the end devices still only support 1080i. I wish i could run a company with such horrid service and still be around.

Recently we have been finding more and more blue screens of death that are caused by rootkits disguised as sys files and seem rather legitimate.

I love the Mac but one of the things that has always frustrated me was automatically reconnecting network drives, or file servers, on startup. The solution is already built into Mac OSX, it is called automator. Although i believe finder should have a check box labeled “reconnect on startup” but that would be too windows like. Step 1 open automator, step 2 select finder, and then “Get Specified Servers”, click the plus icon and add your server (if you are connecting to a windows share like i am then enter “smb://[ip address or unc]/[directory name]”, step 3 add finder action “Connect to Servers” this will take the name from the previous action and then connect to it, ok almost done, step 4 save as, “connect to my drive” or any name you like, and place it in your applications folder, i personally like to make a folder for my automator items and put it there, and finally step five make an alias and place it into your root library startupitems. For good measure run it without the drive connected to make sure it works, do not forget to save the credentials in your keychain, and if that is successful viola you now have an automatically re-connecting network drive on your Mac. Feel the great sense and accomplishment that you have achieved in completing a task that is a check box is windows. Now back to playing with pages in iwork 08.

So I have been trying to figure out what to hook up to my living room TV (a Vizio 47″ Full HDTV) and while I was picking up some Mac Mini’s for a client I figured why not pick up an extra one. I had an old HP P4 1.6Ghz with 768MB RAM and though that would make a fine little internet PC, but after hooking it up to my TV I realized that I could not display widescreen, so I figured ill try the Mac. What an amazing little device first it looks gorgeous on the Vizio, second a little extra ram and it’s a PC too. I let my mind wander a little bit an decided to try to archive some DVD’s and found MacTheRipper and so far it has ripped every DVD I have put into it. I have a DVD collection of over 300 now and wanted a way to play whatever I want whenever I want. Front row is nice and DVD Assist makes it even better. You could use Handbrake to rip the movies to much smaller size (1-2 GB) but you lose the menus and bonus features, and with 1 TB drives becoming so cheap why not just leave them untouched. Well back to business planning…..

My beautiful baby girl. Isabela Ruby Slack born August 9, 2007 at 9:01am.