A picture from my trip to California this pas weekend. My family went for a drive Friday afternoon and ended up at the Huntington Dog Beach. 

This is not a joke!! The book on the bottom I was reading before I went out of town(more on that later) and the one on the right I started when I got back and had forgotten about the first. The third book on top I started while I was out of town, but had forgotten about until I started unpacking.

Today started out like any other Monday, badly. I was running late, hadn’t gotten as much done this last weekend as I wanted and I was unable to get to sleep until past midnight despite having attempted to go to bed at 8pm. After walking into my meeting five minutes late my personal phone rings and I almost ignored it until I saw that it was from my mom. She never calls me on Monday mornings, because she knows it is the worst day for anything, unless it is an emergency. When I answered she told me that my grandpa in California had died last night.

Now I have mixed feelings on how to feel at the moment. On one hand I am sad, but not enough to cry and on the other hand I am happy since his health had been declining for the last few years. About 5ish years ago he had a stroke and was no longer able to speak or to eat normally. Add onto it that in all that time I have not taken the time to go down and visit him except for one time. My mom and even my sister has managed to get down there at least twice a year, but somehow I was always too busy.

All of this leads me to the bag of bricks I mentioned in the title of this post. When my grandpa on my mom’s side died I was fine(translation: composed) at the funeral/memorial as he had been in pain for years and years. Then my grandma on my mom’s side died shortly thereafter and I completely broke down and had to leave the viewing since she was her health failed suddenly and immediately after my grandpa had died. Now I am faced with a situation where for the last few years my grandpa on my dad’s side whose health has been deteriorating only for the last few years, but I only ever saw it once. Will I be able to hold some semblance of composure or is it going to hit me like a ton of bricks where I will completely break down? Unfortunately I have no idea and that scares me. For some reason I don’t like to not be in control of my emotions especially in a public setting and I am crying uncontrollably. 

I guess I’ll see in a few days when I head off to Cali for a few days over the weekend.

1.  Goto the Dynagen page and then to the Downloads
2. Select the OS X Intel Package and download the most recent DMG. As of this entry the most recent was Dyngen-0.10.1 and Dynamips-0.2.8-RC1. (Dynagen-0.10.1_Dynamips-0.2.8-RC1.DMG - Local Mirror)
3. Mount the image(this is usually done automatically upon downloading a DMG image, but browsers/settings may vary) and you will find a Dynagen Folder and an Readme file.
4. Drag the Dynagen Folder to your /Applications/ folder and open it up.
   1. Double-clicking on Dynamips Server now(after authenticating for sudo) will produce the following error “sudo: unable to execute /Applications/Dynagen/dynamips: Bad executable (or shared library)”
5. So now we need to fix Dynamips so that it will run properly. To do this we need to download a different version of the binary that has been updated to work on Leopard. It is available on 7200emu.hacki.at about the 3rd post in… (Dynamips-0.2.8-RC1-Intel-Fixed.bin for Leopard - Local Mirror)
6. In your current Dynagen folder you will find a file named dynamips with an icon like . I would suggest renaming this file to dynamips.old just in case you need it at some point. Take the second file you downloaded and move it into the /Applications/Dynagen/ folder.
7. Rename the file to dynamips and the icon should change to the , if it doesn’t use Finder’s Get Info command to unhide the extension and remove the extension.
8. Now double-click Dynamips Server and you should get a new Terminal window with:
   • Cisco Router Simulation Platform (version 0.2.8-RC1-x86)
   • Copyright (c) 2005-2007 Christophe Fillot.
   • Build date: Oct  6 2007 19:49:12
   • Hypervisor TCP control server started (port 7200).
9.  You’re done! Dynagen itself should already be working, but it is up to you to provide your own IOS images and network configuration files.

On a side-note: In the Readme file that was in the Dynagen dmg file there are additional instructions on how to associate your .net files to dynagen. I personally don’t use it and instead have a bash alias to run it from terminal directly. Also I have included a local mirror of the files not because I particularly feel like being a mirror, but rather I always find it annoying to follow instructions for files that don’t exist anymore. I highly encourage you to download the files from the individual sites themselves and leave a thank you for the developers. 

  So about a week and change ago I decided to completely reinstall my computer. Of course between work and everything else it has taken me a while to get everything reinstalled back to the way it was. One of the only things I hadn’t gotten at this point was installing World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade. After installing all 8 discs(4 for the original World of Warcraft and 4 for Burning Crusade) and wasting an hour and a half while it installed then I found out it was going to be another 2+ hours and just under a gig of downloading. I can only imagine that it will also take a while to run the full patch as well, so chalk up another 30 minutes to an hour for that. 

Blizz I can respect that you want to fix bugs, tweak the environment and add content. But I gotta draw the line at having to download a gig’s worth of fixes if for some reason I have to reinstall. For instance the 3 times that have had patches go bad and been told the only way to fix the error is to delete my installation and reinstall from scratch. Or if for some reason I need to reinstall one of my computers that has WoW installed on it.