EricBetts

I got back from a pretty exciting weekend earlier, and since I haven't done and update in a while, I figure one is in order.

I went to my mom's to setup a new computer I bought for her. Her old one was 900mhz, 128mb of ram and just wasn't cutting it for the 5+MB pictures she likes to take. The majority of what she does is pictures and email, and having seen how well my MacBook Air handles those tasks, I opted to get her a Mac Mini. I purchased Parallels and installed it, FireFox, Adium, and some other stuff ahead of time, then took it up on Friday and began using Parallels' Transporter utility to copy her old XP machine into a VM on the Mac Mini. It went pretty well until the thing booted and had a glitch where anytime you mounted a virtual CD (like the ones needed for Parallels' Tools), XP would crap itsself and become unresponsive. I did eventually realize I could just copy the contents off ISOs by mounting them in the copy of Parallels on my MacBook Air and coping them over to her computer. That problem solved, the harddrive in the MacMini(80GB) was still too small to hold both the VM(40GB) and copy all of her pictures (20GB) off of it and into iPhoto, thus began (and continues) a itterative process of copying some photos over, deleteing them from the VM, and "Compacting" the VM using Parallels Tools (which takes a long while with 40GB). I also realized that I forgot to buy a copy of MS Office for Mac, so I'll be picking one up at the OSU Bookstore tomorrow and USPS'ing it. Once these little glitches are taken care of, I think my mom is really gonna like her new machine.

I got the idea for buying my mom a new computer after being at her place for OSCON and seeing not only her computer, but my niece's mother's computer (my brother's ex-fiance, Melissa). I got a wild hair to get them both new computers and so when I came up this weekend, I brought a second Mac Mini for their house. As I said to some friends after my last weekend up there, "I don't want me niece and nephews growing up using Windows, especially not Windows ME, and if I can't get them using Linux, OS X is at least better than Windows". They seemed to like the new computer, and hopefully the little kids will learn to use it as well as they use my iPhone :).

The last major thing from this weekend was that my neice, Adeline, was a contestant on 105.1's The Buzz Nelson and Terry Summer Talent contest and won 3rd place. After hearing an advertisement for the talent contest on the radio, Melissa let her call the station and enter, she sang part of Miley Cyrus/Hanna Montana's Nobody's Perfect, then got a callback at daycare to ask if she would sing it again and would like to be in the talent show. Since she got the callback during the week I was in town for OSCON, I got to hear her on the radio live, and was really impressed with how she did and her answers to some of the DJs questions. On Saturday, at The Bite of Oregon she got on stage, and after a heap of stage friend and a small restart, she got up there and sang. The crowd was very supportive and cheered for her. At the end, she was called out as one of the four finalists and based on cheers from the crowed, given the 3rd place trophy and $250 (beating out another, slightly older, little girl who did a martial arts/nunchuck routine). Since there were at least a couple people who video taped it, and the plan is to YouTube some of them, I'll try to edit this later to include them.

Edit: Youtube video