A Little Blind Spider Took The Wheel

So...Yeah.

There WERE a crap-ton (Okay, well. Two.) giant spiders (Yes, they were pretty darn big!) living on the steps right outside my back door.

"Were" being the operative word here.  They were living outside my door.  As in "They were living. They were outside my door."

They are no longer living on the steps outside my back door.  They are also, more likely than not, no longer living.

The half bottle of ammonia saw to that.

On the plus side, I do not expect to see any living creatures on my back steps for a while.

I'm Going To Mars, I Got A Message For The Poodle In Your Pocket

Started "The Martian" by Andy Weir yesterday.  Finished it today.

It was a nice break from the Clive Cussler junk I have been reading lately.

Very engaging. Being as it is basically the log of an astronaut who was unintentionally abandoned on Mars.

You should read it!

Inviting And Enticing Me To Rise

I do love how every now and again you get to see hot air balloons floating about.

Don't Get A Nosebleed, Don't Get Upset

Dear 'Merca,

Has it really come to this? I realize the notion of dumping a can of condensed soup and a can of water in a pan on the stove it too much.  But I thought we were still in the prime of the "dump a can of soup and a can of water in a big bowl and microwave it" age. 

Clearly the time of the microwave has been and gone and forgot to take my head out of the sand.

So, I guess I tip my hat to you, Campbell's for getting in on the ground floor of the K-Cup rage. 

Kudos to you.

-Me

And Call To You Across The Sky....

Out of context quote of the day:

"LET'S SOLVE WATER!

I'm On Top Of The World Looking Down On creation

And here, I thought Starbucks had expensive coffee. But no! Chili's beats them quite handily.

We Hope That You've Enjoyed The Show

I did, however, just get Windows NT 4.0 to start up, so I guess I will have something going on here with that sometime soon.

Gonna Bring It On Home To You

So I decided to give Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 a go on a Virtual PC today just to see how it would work out in a modern virtualized environment.

My first two attempts went badly.  We shall see what we shall see in the future.

To begin fired up a copy of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, mounted the .iso file I made from the CD I bought ages ago, snagged the Windows NT 3.51 boot floppy images from the NT page at allbootdisks.com and got started.

To start with, everything went fine...

Installed some drivers.

 Kicked out an error message about the hard drive.

 Let me go on anyway.

 Examined the disk.

 Told me that it didn't like what it saw and could we pretty please get rid of everything and start fresh.  I told it yes.

 Brought up the good old Setup Menu we all know and love from the Windows 3.x days.

 Then it decided that it hates the world and wants nothing to do with functioning ever again.  Ah well.  On to plan B....

Plan B involved snagging a Windows 95 bootable floppy image from...You guessed it! Allbootdisks.com!

 Let it start up.

 Let it find the cd-rom drivers.

 Goodness me, how I have missed fdisk!

 Set the disk up using fdisk.exe, format it and keep on keeping on.

 Let it do it's thing.

 Give it a name.

 Whoo!  We are done and ready to start it up from the cd.

 Track down the installation stuff, in this case it is "R:\i386\winnt.exe"

 But before we do this, we need to lock the disk.  Otherwise it doesn't even bother.

 

The purpose of this is to find out which commands we need to run with it.  The /b sets it up so as to not make bootable floppy disks, and the /w sets up for converting the disk to the NTFS format later on. 

 So now we go and run our setup commands.

 Tell it where the files are living.

 Let it do it's thing.  On a side note.  The setup choked when it got to the file "banana.ani" which turns the mouse pointer into a banana.  The reason this happened was because the cd-rom driver was named banana for some unknown reason.  You can just ignore the error and it will keep copying files without any problems.

 Now here we go.  The MS-DOS based portion is completed.  Let us restart and see what we shall see!

 Setup is doing it's thing...Good so far.

 Still doing it's thing...Still good so far.

And there we go...Still hates the world and still wants nothing to do with anything.  Ah well, I guess I shall try again another time.