A Look Back on my 2007

A monumental year and a lot of fun. I’ll break down my last 365 days by starting out with a few firsts,

Firsts:

• First flight on commercial airline
• First international trip
• First time as a member of a board of trustees
• First time being away from Jane for an extended period (while she was in France for 6 months) -> SAD!
• First time campaigning for public office (and hopefully the last)
• First time living away from the piedmont of North Carolina
• First visit to a state not on the East Coast (Louisiana)

Highs:

• Visiting Jane in France
• Winning the Presidency at UNC Charlotte
• Moving into our house
• Internship at PARI
• Transit-tax debate at Harris Alumni Center
• Speaking at Convocation

Lows:

• Leaving parking brake off of car, while on top of mountain. Almost disasterous.
• Drowning camera in water
• Campaigning… it is brutal
• First week of school. Being away for the summer is rough being student body president, but possible. 12-13 hour days, catching up with meetings and life

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A Triple Boot Vista, OSX, Ubuntu Machine

Now that I’m on winter break from college I have the time to experiment with my computing equipment. My goal was first to upgrade to Vista SP1 RC1 because I already had Vista installed, just to test things out. My system config was Vista and Ubuntu loaded using GRUB.

After the install of Vista SP1 completed I quickly discovered that because some hackers had been fooling around with the Vista bootloader, MS decided to only allow the Vista bootloader when starting Windows. GRUB had been corrupted and I couldn’t access Ubuntu or Vista, even from the GRUB command line.

I tried reinstalling GRUB and still no luck. The SP1 install was nasty! I restored my hard drive using Windows Complete PC Restore and everything was as good as before. I then erased Ubuntu and set aside two extra partitions other than my main partition on my main hard disk. I installed UPHUCK v1.4r3 OSX on one partition and everything worked fine except for my CD Drive. I then installed Ubuntu Gutsy and everything worked fine. After that I loaded the Vista installer from the CD and ran Bootsec.exe /fixmbr then Bootsec.exe /fixboot to restore my Vista Bootloader.

The final step was to install Acronis OS Selector to provide a bootloader GUI for the operating systems. I booted into Vista and ran the install. Then after restarting AOSS loaded and I had a visual menu of operating systems to decide from! But now I’m done with OSX Tiger and waiting for iATKOS v1.0i OSX Leopard to download so that I can truly utilize the latest OS technology on my machine.

Thanks to my roomate Marcus for providing me with a Wireless Card that works in all 3 OS!

After I get Leopard to install, I’ll virtualize XP and Ubuntu inside OSX so I’ll be down to 2 operating systems.

Why so many OSs?

Vista for games, documents, and music
OSX for iLife, iWork and virtualization
Ubuntu for linux
XP for vista-incompatible software that updates ringtones on my phone and syncs with my pedometer

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UNC Charlotte Noted as Top Research University

UNC Charlotte was recently described by Business Week as one of the top up and coming research universities:

From the article:

Like Brigham Young, in recent years UNC Charlotte has launched two to
five startups annually. Relative to its budget, the school was No. 2
when ranked by patent applications.

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The Facts About the World Economy

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Do You Drink Coffee?

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Gmail Disrespects North Carolina Public Schools

Everytime I use Gmail with my @uncc.edu email address I always get these really annoying “Tarheel Gear” ads in my sidebar.

UNC Charlotte students hate being associated with Chapel Hill, and this is just another example of why we need to accelerate the process of referring to ourselves as Charlotte in every way!

No!!! I don’t go to Chapel Hill!!!

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Charlotte’s An’Juan Wilderness Gets #1 Play on ESPN Sportscenter

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