Ryan Prins' Blog

After a weekend of golfing at Bandon Dunes it is back to the reality of work for me. But, the trip will be one this is not soon forgotten.

The drive down to Bandon Dunes is not for the weak. It took me 7.5 hours to get down there and that included only two stops along the way. One to eat, and one to use the restroom. But, really the drive went by really fast (relatively speaking). I was listening to the radio until south of Tacoma then I had come Nolo.com podcasts to listen to (like 25) and that took the rest of the journey down to my destination. So really, it wasn’t that bad of a drive. It’s really like 3 roads the entire way, so it’s kinda tough to let lost.

I could write about each day and hole, but that would be long and boring for most of you. But, I’ll just say this… the course are unreal. They are not terribly challenging, given the right conditions, but it is the conditions that make these courses what they are. The first two courses we played, Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes are pretty close to the Pacific Ocean and the wind was probably one of the biggest challenges on these courses. But, I’d also have to say that the fairways and greens are some of the fastest and bumpiest I’ve ever seen, let alone played on.

The greens were really fast and it was like trying to land a golf ball on a piece of plywood. It was just crazy firm. When you got to putting, it was like you didn’t need much force at all to completely putt your ball twenty yards off of the green. That became frustrating quickly, but you adjusted to it over time.

The last day we played Pacific Trails. This course was off of the ocean coast and was a little bit more wooded than the other links style courses we had played on the days before. It was also equally fun, but just as challenging as the other two we had previously played.

All in all, it was a great way to spend a weekend. If I had to do it over again, I’d wear sunscreen the first day (and every day) so that I didn’t get burned to crisp like I did this time. But, really, it was a good weekend of golf, now it’s time to heal my burn and to take a break from golf for a little bit and let my body heal from the punishment the sun put to it over the past weekend.

Flickr Photoset: Bandon Dunes Golf Weekend

The results are out from the Washington CEO Magazine’s survey for the best companies to work for in Washington and Avanade ranked #4 in the large companies category. The initial list of companies started out at 105 then was widdled down to the top 60. So, this is a pretty neat thing for the top companies on the list. If you’re curious about the rest of the list it can be seen in this PDF.

As a side note, aQuantive beat out Avanade for the 3rd place spot… only b/c of Jamie ;)

As a part of testing the internal apps for Microsoft, we have to test them against all of the upcoming versions of their OS and Office. So, this means that I need to create an environment that contains Vista and Office 12. The concept isn’t all that strange, it really makes great sense. The company will eventually be switching over to this platform, so testing on it is pretty much a requirement, and it is.

As such, I’ve been tasked with creating a Virtual Machine using Virtual PC 2004 SP1. Again, the idea is easy enough and the steps needed are pretty straightforward. I get my copy of Vista from an internal share and I make my Virtual Machine from it. Well, this is where the first kink came into play. I had all of the files, but Virtual PC requires either a CD/DVD in your optical drive, a mounted ISO, or an ISO mounted using a tool like Daemon Tools. So, after realizing that I didn’t have a DVD burner at my disposal, I was onto making an ISO image. This proved to be much more difficult than necessary.

I had two tools that I could use to make the tool and the first one errored out for a reason I don’t understand. I mean, with an error message like “Generic error message”, you really have no clue. So, it was off to using a Microsoft tool to create the ISO via the command line. Great! This worked! Now, let’s mount that on the virtual machine. Oooh, yea, sorry buddy, we don’t think that’s a well formed ISO. Why? Well, because it’s not in 2K blocks. Doh. I don’t even know how to go about fixing that. So, off to get Daemon Tools.

After what seemed to be 4 restarts, Daemon Tools was installed. Finally. The image mounted and I thought I was ready to go. So, off to booting from the DVD Image… or so I thought. Ends up it doesn’t like to be booted from. So, I need an alternative. So, I grab a premade Vista Beta 2 Virtual Machine. It would be great if I was to test on this, my work would be done, but we’re required to test on a newer build. So, I start it up to re-install over it. But, it is in sysprep. Basically, it would need to install then I could wipe it. So, opting against watching an install of an OS that I’ll never need, I stop it and grab a Virtual Machine I made months ago and use that to start the install process. Perfect. Now, we’re in business.

So, about five hours after I’ve started I am finally installing Vista. I just hope that my virtual hard drive has enough space to hold the install. If it doesn’t, I guess I’ll need another alternative. Let’s hope my Office 12 install goes much better.