My inlaws were in town to help Liz through her surgery. They brought their machines to me for repair One of the machines had a full disk so I upgraded the 20GB to a 250GB drive.

1. made the 20GB drive a slave
2. installed the 250GB drive as the master
3. booted Fedora Live CD
4. create a partition of the same size on the new disk
5. copy the master boot record (MBR) using dd
6. copy the partition using dd
7. shutdown
8. remove power from the slave (old 20GB) drive
9. reboot to Windows, verify things look ok.

For detailed instructions visit:
http://www.nilbus.com/linux/disk-copy.php

I stopped at the “Resizing the Partition”.

The best part of all this was I never knew the power of dd, ntfsresize, and fdisk. I was originally looking for a copy of PartitionMagic or Norton Ghost. Linux is far better than any of that.

Once I finished the dd, I shutdown, and removed power from the slave drive. I rebooted and Windows came up on the new 250GB but still appeared as a 20GB drive. Now I had to resize it.

The oddest part was resizing the partition, because I couldn’t wrap my head around the “delete the partition” then recreate. The delete part threw me off as I was afraid to lose the data. But it was an in memory operation so it didn’t affect it. WHEW! Then I ran ntfsresize -n -s 250G /dev/sda1, then rebooted back to Windows. After a chkdsk, I was all done!

So Linux is a better Windows partition tool than Windows
http://darkstar.ucd.ie/timosh/links/ntfsresize.html#cli

Yesterday, I took Adan to t-ball practice. He’s doing much better with paying attention. He did a great job playing third base and running the bases. It was particularly fun yesterday because I helped out by being third base coach, it was surprisingly fun.

At the beginning of practice, I help Adan warm up, then Marco & I played catch for a bit. Marco has quite an arm for a 4 year old, and pretty good with the grounders. Though while I was third base coach, Marco decided to roll down the hill

Another cool thing, Adan tells me last night “Daddy, we’re doing times [multiplication] in math class. 10 times 10 is 100!” Apparently, they’re starting third grade math now. Adan is only in first grade though

During the 2004 election, I signed up for a few conservative mailing lists to see the utter bulls**t they like to send out. My favorite conservative argument is against abortion, but yet they are more likely to go to war (which kills people), support the death penalty (which also kills people), and yet they call themselves the moral majority. Yeah right.

Another issue conservatives are always ranting about are guns and taxes. Well, they’re planning on doing their idiotic^H^H^H^H^H^H^H patriotic duty by urging folks to use their tax rebates to buy guns:

The checks are in the mail. Those would be the so-called economic stimulus, or tax rebate, checks, rushed out to about 75 percent of Americans by Congress. The checks represent a pittance of your very own money (or, in the case of those who pay little or no taxes, someone else’s money) being returned to you (or, in the case of those who pay little or no taxes, falling like manna from government, as it is supposed to, according to some of them).

Buy guns. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will drive liberal Members of Congress crazier than tax rebates being spent on guns. Little will make you feel better and safer than some additional firepower. You want stimulus? You got stimulus.

You can read more of this nonsense here.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BARACK

This is hilarious.

Turns out the Trans Am which I thought needed a new Optispark distributor simply had a bad spark plug wire. Oh well, live and learn. I could’ve had this fixed months ago, but the plugs on the LT1 are a royal pain in the butt. Oh well.

This morning, Grandpop, Grandma, the kids & I went strawberry picking at Vollmer Farm in Bunn, NC. We came home with 3 buckets full. The berries are plump, red and sweet!

This afternoon, Grandpop Frank & I took the boys to see Iron Man. Usually I don’t see movies the weekend they have been released, but I promised the boys I’d take them today.  The movie was AWESOME! Adan & Marco loved it, as did I.

Then finally this evening, I drove the Trans Am to it’s new owner at RDU.

I had to relist the Trans Am after the non-paying bidder fiasco, but this time it sold! The money has been collected.

The surgery went well, they straightened her septum and cleared up her sinuses. We got home around 2:45pm today, but the ride home was less than fun for her. We drover my car to the hospital, and the suspension being to taut made every bump, ditch, or even minor road imperfections noticable. She was NOT a happy camper. We could’ve taken our Grand Caravan but my father-in-law needed it to pick up Adan from school.

It was a rough right, but we finally made it home. We had some Chinese food tonight for dinner, Liz had some soup and crackers. She’s relaxing on the loveseat, actually looks like she SLEEPING! YAY! It’s been a long day.

I’ve joined the twitter crowd. Here’s my RSS feed.

Liz went into surgery about 30 minutes ago, it will probably be at least 3 hours.