This little tip is totally and completely useful. I hate having to wait for the computer to boot, then login, then wait for it to bring up the desktop. This trick bypasses this Windows fault by setting up a registry startup item that automatically locks the computer after it automatically logs you in. Sweet.

How would you like your computer to load all of your startup items before you ever have to enter your login password? You could press the button to power up your system and go get a cup of coffee. Five minutes later, you come to your desk and type in your password. BAM! Instantly dropped to the desktop!

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While I’m sitting here bored at work, I’ve been dutifully working on my website. I recently noticed, after the addition of the new Gallery2 photo gallery, that the site design was rather narrow. To remedy this, I have horizontally expanded the site to fill a standard browser maximized at 800×600 screen resolution. While I know some might argue for the use of dynamic layouts as opposed to static ones, I find that I have enough content to fill a browser window when maximized on 1024×768, but the site just looks bare at 1280×1024.

I will also develop a few new header images, which will be larger, to offset the expanded width of the screen. While browsing around the internet, I notice blogs usually have oversized header images which fill a majority of the screen. I don’t want to feel out of place, so I’ll orchestrate a cocoughany of larger images to fill the newly voided space at the top of the site.

P.S. I just heard the awesomest ringtone ever!! Some lowly paper-jockey came in today to help file, and his phone rang… Super Mario Brothers theme. It was friggin’ sweet! That just made my day.

So I thought it wouild be cool if I installed Microsoft Windows Vista. You know… preview the newest OS from MS before it hits the market. After running through the first part of the installation procedure where it asked me for the product key, the installation volume and the installation type the computer prompted me to restart. “Ok” I said. Routine, right? Wrong.

After the computer booted, I what I saw flashed before my eyes in a haze of colors. First, the boot screen. Something about “Legacy version of Windows” and “Longhorn setup.” The delay must have been about 2 seconds because the screen went blank soon after. Next I see the Windows Longhorn boot screen. Sweet. What happened next kinda took me by suprise. The OS flashed a Blue Screen of Death, and immediately restarted. There was no time to see the error message, so I just let the computer boot again. Same thing; boot prompt, flash Longhorn screen, flash BSoD.

It was about then I said a few choice four-letter words. After the computer booted again, I waited until the boot prompt showed, and selected “Legacy (pre-Longhorn) Windows OS” (Long-winded way of saying “Windows XP Pro.”) The computer booted normally from there. I then thought, uh oh… the Vista install overwrote my boot.ini file. I’ve done other multi-boot systems, and whenever the other OS fails, I always went in and removed the entry from the boot.ini to correct the problem. I went to check my precious boot.ini file. I ran msconfig and sure enough there was a cute message in there saying,

;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems.
;Warning: Use BCDEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options.

Other than those wonderful comments, the rest of the file seemed fine. Damn. Hmmm… more investingation I needed. So I opened up my c:\ drive to see what it overwrote. I noticed two new files. Boot.BAK and BOOTSECT.BAK Well, that’s where my original boot.ini file went to. Great. And it also appears that the Vista install killed the boot-sector on my NTFS partition. Swell.

I then noticed a few new folders on the drive too. In partitcular, one called “Boot,” which of course was hidden. Well, doesn’t that look interesting. In this folder were a few nifty looking files. bootfix.bin, fixfat.exe, fixntfs.exe… Oh look at that. I like the sound of fixntfs. I opened up my command-prompt and plugged in c:\Boot\fixntfs.exe. Low-and-behold, I get some documentation on usage:

Usage: fixntfs -xp | -lh [-all]
Replaces NTFS bootcode on NTFS-formatted partitions.
-xp - Use XP-compatible bootcode.
-lh - Use Longhorn-compatible bootcode.
-all - Replace on all partitions (default is only system partition)

… “Use XP-compatible bootcode.” Couldn’t hurt. I run c:\Boot\fixntfs.exe -xp. Well, everything seems fine. Well, after a reboot, everything went back to normal and I got my XP booting computer back. I took what happened as a sign, and have since deleted all the Vista files on my drives. I think I’ll wait till the retail release… hopefully they’ll have fixed this and there will only be 999,999 bugs.

Yeah, I’ve been playing around with a few WordPress plug-ins lately. I found some interesting ones, especially the myMooMus mood plug-in. It adds a mood entry to my posts. It’s uber fun.

What I’ve really been looking for is a gallery plug-in. I found a few that add images to blog posts, but I want on that will manage images on blog pages. Hmmm…. Nothing specific yet, but I did find one to use with Gallery2

Incredibly high quality Quicktime stabilized version of the infamous Zapruder assassination footage. Hoax or no? Either way the video is absolutely unreal and a must see. Caution: Extremely graphic.

I’ve always had a fascination with the JFK assassination. I don’t know why. I just have. And when I saw this I thought “Hey, this proves that there was another shooter…” But then, I read some of the other links, and they provide some very interesting counterpoints.

An entire website claiming that the Zapruder film was a haox created by the government to appease the public. Amazingly interesting read. I was skeptical at first, but it has some good points.

Another website with a lot of information about the JFK assassination. I haven’t read a lot of the stuff on this site, but it has some pretty interesting reading from what I can tell.

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I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Don’t know why I did, it’s not like the old WordPress (1.5.1) was giving me problems… I just felt like making everything joyous for the new year.

Oh yeah. I also paid for ad removal from my host, so I’ll be taking down the ads pretty soon. I also get moved to a better server, where there (hopefully) won’t be any downtime. I’m thinking about buying a domain too… We’ll see.