So, I figured I’d at least get one post in every month in 2012. That being said… it’s January 31st. I think for a while there I was shunning technology a lot. Crawling into my little hole and trying to ignore electronics for a while seemed like a fitting thing to do with all the workload I was under for so long. It’s been really nice to have the last couple of months be somewhat “normal”, if there is such a thing. I rolled into 2012 with some cool tech toys… upgraded my failing HTC G2 with a nice Samsung Galaxy S2, scored myself a Transformer Prime and I’ve been on a rampage of updating things the last few days on the backend of my servers. Feels good to be back in the saddle again. I may even pick up some lightweight development projects for android along the way if I can keep this up.

So, 2012… a new year and lots of things to do. Fitness, major revamp of that project in order this year. I haven’t gained any weight back but I’ve been in this maintenance mode for all too long. It’s quite pathetic and I need to bust out of the plateau and just finish the job. I only have about 10-15 lbs to go out of my journey, why just settle now? 215 is right around the corner and is taunting me. Still, where I’m at is quite the departure from the 270 I started at. *shudder* Aside from the obvious non-resolution, I’ve decided this year to spend some time getting some things in order in my life… the typical gambit of things… doing more family stuff, finances, future goal setting/planning, etc… etc… I figure I’ll get it all figured out just in time for the 12/21/12 apocalypse… *laughs* whatever. Top on my list of things to do, be a little more focus on who I should be… This blog is probably going to turn into the most bi-polar representation of my psychological state that anyone has ever seen trying to meet that goal. Should be fun from an observers point of view though so stay tuned!

With that… I need to go to bed.

So walking to the bus today I saw a homeless man standing ther with a sign that read, “anything is a blessing” and it made me stop and think…

If someone who has nothing deems anything a blessing, how should someone who, by comparison, has everything view what they have?

Everything is in fact a blessing. No matter how much we feel we lack or what we feel has been taken from us, we should always appreciate those things which we do have. Hard to think like that sometimes through all of our human imperfections, but it’s a solid lesson that can definitely change one’s outlook on life in the bigger picture.

Man, I must be getting old. Lol

So walking in this morning from the bus station to my office, I see a couple workers on the 16th St mall area standing by a running truck, one on the phone, one smoking a cigarette… both keep looking under the truck and discussing. I walk by and glance over to see what they’re looking at and notice what appears to be gas dripping from the tank under the rear of the vehicle. Again, I notice one of them is smoking… I hurried myself along.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/06/ics-based-cyanogenmod-9-its-on-track-but-not-for-everybody/

*cradles my MSM7230 phone*

I love CM. That is all.

Well, if it was only that easy eh?

So, poor Andy brings me his laptop with this error. Seems he’d contracted a virus earlier in the day and in the process of cleaning the virus out, rebooted his machine and up pops the error ” STOP: C0000135 The program can’t start because %hs is missing. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.” Whoops!?

So we buggered around with the system quite a bit last night and tried to figure out the root cause of the issue. He had mentioned attempting to install AVG so we had started there with the though that it might be the cause, but he couldn’t be sure since he didn’t actually get the install to launch since his system was acting like a complete maniac anyway. Well, further investigations uncovered that AVG had, in fact, not made it to the hard drive. So what now?

Fortunately, the error is pretty straightforward if you read it. It basically states that the system is having a problem launching off some type of program at boot-up. Due to the nasty blue-screen nature of this thing, it’s safe to assume it wasn’t something that lived in the regular ole startup/runOnce/run section of the registry and it behaved a lot like an error I’d seen before due to a csrsss.exe/winlogin issue. Not a full-blown blue screen with a nice kernel dump, but pretty annoying none-the-less. So, with csrss on my mind and a couple of pointers over googling some ideas, the solution came out of the following:

The virus which he had contracted, modified the registry settings under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems

The value ‘Windows’ was changed from:

%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,20480,768 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ServerDll=sxssrv,4 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16

to this:

%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,20480,768 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=consrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ServerDll=sxssrv,4 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16

The called ‘consrv’ is part of the virus that was implanted into his machine and when he cleaned it up, the dll went missing, thus causing the system to EXPLODE on bootup. Upon loading up the ole trusty Hiren’s BootCD in MiniXP mode and launching a registry editor from it, I was able to modify the two keys from their viral consrv entries back to winsrv.

With all that cleaned up, I was able to run another viral scan against the system, remove any other traces of such things that I could detect and the system now boots correctly. Unfortunately, there aren’t many things that can change in these fields that won’t spin off other types of error messages so if this particular error rears it’s head and you’re not running AVG and this fix doesn’t resolve it… it’s probably reload time. Also, if you happen to jack-up the entries in the registry, you may encounter a STOP: C000021a error on bootup. That usually happens when you’ve mistyped something in the registry entry while resolving this issue.

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/31/justice-seeks-to-block-att-merger-with-t-mobile/?iid=A_F_News

For the record, I believe AT&T needs to go pound sand. The thought of them taking any part in T-Mobile disgusts me. I went to T-Mobile because of extremely poor service from other carriers and their value to cost ratio. AT&T would completely undermine the values of T-Mobile should they acquire the carrier. Not to mention we’d watch our rate plans and phone costs go through the roof. I hope they get burned for this and it costs them that 3 billion in reversal fees. It would serve them right for trying to covertly corner the market by strategically positioning themselves to own almost half of it.

If you have an aversion to colorful language, you may want to skip this one… however, this guy hits the nail on the head.

Left Brain, this one is for you.

Credit given where credit is due, this is from my mom, straight to you.

Wow…

And that’s all I have to say about that… It’s been a little over 24 hours since completion and I’m still feeling like I just got done. If there was ever a course on the planet that could make you feel every ounce of just how out of shape you could possibly be, this is it. Blistered, burned, bruised, scratched and cramped should about sum it up… Major thanks out to Randy and Nef for dragging me through that last bit… I never would have made it without them. All in all not too shabby… I do have to admit, I skipped a couple obstacles – I had to… Mostly due to pure exhaustion and a throbbing pain in my hand/arm from having it stepped on in the cargo net, but hey… that’s part of the game right? 20/25 obstacles is still OK in my book when you look at the scope of what that course is like. Next year I must best it though.

I do have to say though… I’ve never experienced anything like that before and the training I did to prepare for it was GROSSLY INADEQUATE. There will definitely be MAJOR changes to what I do to prepare for it, should I decide to submit myself to that kind of torture again. Two things on my list… hill running and cold water treatment. Those are the two things I need to focus on because traversing 4200+ vertical feet of Beaver Creek on foot is no joke nor is swimming through sub 40 degree water. I quite honestly thought I was going to collapse from the shock of that alone.

I still don’t think I’ll ever have the guts to do electricity though… That particular obstacle I had no physical reason to skip, that was all a solid wuss move. Electrical current is just something I can’t purposely subject myself to. lol

Props out to anyone who tried that event yesterday, bigger props to anyone who finished and ultimate respect to all those who completed all the obstacles and finished. Amazing.

Ok, so I love Epic Meal Time… They come up with some of the craziest stuff and it’s so overwhelmingly disgusting sometimes but you just can’t look away…

Here’s a good sample:

If you’re feelin it… go check em out at either:

http://epicmealtime.com/ 
or
http://www.youtube.com/epicmealtime

Soo… I ran my third Bolder Boulder today and successfully shaved off another 11 minutes from last year and came in at 1:03:32! So in total from the first time I ran the race I’ve shaved off 17 minutes and 25 seconds. Next year I think I’ll break that one hour barrier and see just how far under I can go. I probably would have come really close to that one hour mark but I drank too much water before the race and  had to stop at bout the 6k mark and hit a roadside port-o-pottie, lol.

Here’s the results from today… not too impressive overall but I’m well pleased!

Running Activity 6.51 mi | RunKeeper.

overall place: 18472/49208
division: M32
division place: 323 out of 497
gender place: 11221 out of 22348

mile 1: 00:09:44.80

mile 2: 00:09:47.22

mile 3: 00:10:39.53

mile 4: 00:10:18.56

mile 5: 00:10:08.29

mile 6: 00:10:54.11

net time: 01:03:31.48

pace: 10:13 (based on net time)

Next stop… Tough Mudder Colorado… Just 25 days and counting!