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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Looks like breakfast to me

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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Ok, so I'm a little slow with this update. Having a big trip right after a long weekend makes it a little harder to keep up with the blog updates ;-) So here's my update from the weekend of celebrating Murica! (and, of course, the eminent binding of MC and me ;-)) So, as many know, Bristol is typically a pretty kickin' place to celebrate the 4th of July. As me and my friends have aged, it HAS become more and more difficult to get people together, but I am still usually able to gather a decent group. This year was notably special because it also included an engagement party for me and my favorite person, Ms. Maricruz Rahaman. A few folks decided to join us (Fishel, Frost, and Bopper) along with Julie (Maricruz's sister) and Maria (Maricruz's mom). It was the first time for my family to meet any of hers, so that made it extra special as well. :-) Most folks rolled in on Friday, so it served to be a "get settled in and relax" kind of day. Nothing too fancy. We got up Saturday and got in a morning boarding session, then kinda took it easy until it was time for the party. As I am late in the mix when it comes to getting married in the Bristol crowd, my parents had already been involved in many engagement parties. Thus, we had a pretty large host list welcoming us into the realm of soon-to-be-married! It was an awesome party at Machiavelli's, a local pizza place owned by an old school mate of mine. If you are ever in Bristol, I definitely recommend it!

Who can go wrong with a Spongebob cake?! Definitely in my top 2 Spongebob cakes of all time ;-)! The party was a great time. I saw many people that I hadn't seen in ages, and it was kinda cool for everyone to meet MC and her fam. And weren't we the cute couple to celebrate?

While we, of course, look amazing, it was made extra special by both our beautiful mothers being there.

Lots of pictures were taken at the party (thanks to Lauren Fincher), but one of my favorites was the one below. Now, one of my favorite genres of pics is candid and this one was great. My sis asked for a pic of me and my buds, but somehow Fishel missed the memo. He thought we spontaneously just decided to crowd in and be close to him, hence the confused look on his face. HILARIOUS.

After the super awesome shindig, we moseyed back to the Fincher household for the official gift opening. As you can see, Maricruz was pretty excited about this.;-)

We had much fun viewing the generosity of our friends and making sure we knew how all this knew gear was supposed to work.

And while we were super excited about all our gifts, I think the pinnacle for Maricruz was catching that first glimpse of the yellow KitchenAid Mixer. :-)

I also learned (and Dad helped MC showcase) that there is a special place for the ribbons that are attached to engagement gifts.

Luckily, all the snazziness is not limited only to the bride-to-be ;-)

Heck, you can even share they snazziness with other brides-to-be, right Bopper?

Then it was back to the lake to crash, then time for some wakeboarding pics!

Doug carving it up (with a sprained ankle I might add)

Shredding the gnar

Catching a grab

I hear, that in some states, fashion air is illegal. Way to stand against the man Aunt Douggie!

Frost had a good run (even if he still holds the rope like a skier) ;-)

Of course Bopper had to throw in her "glamour" shot

We got Fishel up and riding.

And refreshed Bopper's memory.

Luckily, she still remember to hold her nose every time it looked like she was gonna wipe out ;-)

I threw some uuuuuuuugly tricks,

and Dad got a good set in as well. In addition to just having a blast hanging out with MC's mom and sis at the lake, Julie got to go play with some horses

and my sis joined to celebrate America's birthday.

I am so grateful that Maricruz's mom and sister made it up to meet all the Bristol folks at once and I'm glad that the Finchers and Rahamans seemed to get along splendidly (future family in the HOUSE!). It was a kinda busy, but definitely fun weekend and I must say that I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out. It was great to have good friends and family celebrate our upcoming union and I think it all went extremely well. We were extremely grateful for all the generosity and good times. Now a few more months and we'll all be family! :-)

View original posts at http://www.justinandrewfincher.com/

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Hmm...

I understand lock, unlock, alarm and trunk, but I am scared to push the one that seems to indicate "flip the car over."

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My first hackintosh!

So I posted a pic after I got it working, but figured I would go ahead and do a little writeup of my first experience with a hackintosh. I had done some reading on the subject because I've been interested in having a netbook for a while, but Apple is too busy making niche-y iPads and iPhone that lose reception if held "wrong" and aren't that great at taking fall. Since it doesn't look like an Apple netbook will be a reality any time soon, I figured it was about time to just do it myself! From my reading, the Dell mini 10v was a pretty good choice, and, since it is popular for this application, I figured there would be plenty of support out there. I found a refurbished one on the Dell site for ~$230 and a few days later it arrived and I was ready to begin! I started out with the How-to guide for making a hackintosh Dell mini 10v on Gizmodo, then also used the guide provided in a response in this forum post. Both were pretty helpful, but neither fully got me where I needed to be. The first big issue I had stemmed from a response to a comment on the Gizmodo how-to. Someone asked if you needed a retail copy of OSX or could use a disc that comes with a new computer. The author said the latter is fine, but after many fails, I made a post in a forum and found that not to be the case. So I went out at got a retail copy of OSX Snow Leopard (only $29!!) and that covered the first hurdle. After that came the interesting part. Now I'm pretty familiar with computer (you know, getting a Ph.D. in computer science and all), but I still don't understand how things work sometimes. Anyhoo, I will get to that in a second. So first I took a usb external (they recommend >8 gig) drive and used disk utility to "restore" the single partition I made on it using the "image" of the OSX install disc. Then I ran netbook bootmaker to make the drive bootable by my netbook and the result was an external hard drive that would act like the install disc. I had to do this because the little 10v doesn't have an optical drive. So then it was just booting with the drive, installing OSX, then the part where I'm not really sure how it worked, but it eventually did. In addition to the netbook bootmaker I mentioned earlier, they also make a netbook installer. This serves to basically clean up the OSX installation to make it more tailored to the netbook (some drivers that are needed, a fix to keep from kernel panic since Intel Atom processors aren't supported by OSX, etc.) So after the installation, I ran netbook installer, restarted, downloaded Apple updates, restarted, ran netbook installer, restarted, downloaded Apple updates (though I ignored iLife update since I didn't install that), restarted, then it worked fine... if I boot from the usb drive and chose the internal hard drive. It would also boot if I held shift (bringing up a boot menu) and typed "recovery=y" but anytime I tried a regular boot I got a kernel panic. After this it was essentially running netbook installer, restart, and repeat until everything worked. Now this is the point that I mentioned before. Computer programs are supposed to be deterministic. If I run a program, then run it again, it should do the same things to the same data, and thus have the same outcome. Why I could run netbook installer, have it not work, run it again, have it not work, then run it again and everything is perfect makes no sense to me. I can't really complain too much though as it DID eventually work. :-) So now I have a fancy little "Apple" netbook, and I love it so far! I'm sure I will do a followup after the novelty wears off, but here's hoping it stays awesome. Thanks to the folks at MyDellMini for help in this process too. From questions I asked to reading the answers to others, it really helped me through the process. Yay for hackintoshing!

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