MADD v. Grand Theft Auto IV

GTA 4 barely launched and the politics have already started. The problem is when good intentions clash with misinformation. I support MADD 100%, they are one of those precious few special interest groups (yeah, MADD is an interest group) that are no brainers: drunk driving kills.

The problem this time? Somebody at MADD did not bother to play the game before they put out their official stand against the game. Had anyone bothered to play the game first, they would had noticed that "drunk" mode in GTA 4 is a complete pain in the ass. I tried it last night and for the first few minutes I could not even play, the screen shook so much that I was a hair away from motion sickness. And even after the character felt like he had sobered up, within seconds of getting into the car it was already surrounded by cops. I don't know how the hell one can hit drunk mode and actually drive more than a street or three.

The 22-hour long Parallels Desktop Adventure

Sometime on Sunday night or early Monday morning, my Windows XP (Parallels Desktop, 10.5.2) started to run like ass. I usually brag that in my Mac Book Pro (Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz) I can have Parallels running with a bunch of crap open, through a VPN, while having another bunch of crap open on the OS X side, with no real hit on performance.

Not this time. XP was choking just trying to debug a project in VS 2005. Just horrible.

I blew a couple of hours installing every optional patch that I had missed in Windows, like the ASP.net 2.0 framework service pack and some other crap. Then I noticed that I had about 1GB of space left in XP, from the 32GB assigned.

First step was to use the Parallels image tool to expand to 64GB. No cigar, it still said 1GB left. Why? Because I was using an expanding virtual HDD.

Switching it to a non-expanding drive didn't work. After this I hit a vicious circle with the compress tool, which would waste 2-3 hours of my time at a time, only to find myself still at the same spot.

I spent my night waking up every hour or so, checking the progress of the damn compress tool.

At around hour 18, I found this post. It took me one hour to duplicate my 32GB virtual HDD, then a few minutes to get the drive extended properly and reassigned. The rest of the time was burned trying to figure out why I couldn't use the mouse (it had ditched the parallels tools), so I had to remember how to navigate in windows without a mouse.

Good times.

End result: XP now flies, I have two VS 2005 projects open, with VSS sources through a VPN, and everything runs beautiful. I also made a second virtual disk to use it exclusively for the swap file, so that probably has something to do with the performance boost.

Yes, he is

The long awaited reply to Sarah Silverman's video: