Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

No politics today, come back tomorrow

This weekend my wife and I went to the Scottish Highland Games and Clan Gathering in Enumclaw, WA. As far as I know, I don't have a drop of Scottish blood in me. My wife might have, but we're not sure. Her maiden name is in a list of Scottish names that the genealogists at the gathering had, and we know that some of her ancestors came from the British Isles, but that's about as much detail as I know.

Fortunately, you don't have to be Scottish to enjoy the games or the gathering. One of my wife's friends and coworkers is a member of the local Scottish dancing group, and they perform at the games every year, and march with the clans during the opening ceremonies. We go to the gathering to watch, but we've missed the dancing every time so far. We still have a great time, and this year we actually got to see Cindy and her brothers.

Speaking of the dancing, Cindy has invited us to join the group, to learn the dances, and to perform with them. We're actually considering it, but there's only one drawback. I'd have to wear a kilt at least once a month, and for performances. From the prices I saw at the gathering (ranging from $95.00 to $500.00), that could be fairly expensive for an item of clothing I'm only likely to wear occasionally. Still, it might be fun (the dancing), so we're going to at least look into it.

After watching the opening ceremonies, we wandered about and visited all of the little shops. We ate some meat pies. We bought some gifts. I bought a really nice shirt. The man that sold it to me told me to tell the cashier that I was an “extra large rogue”. He also told my wife that she'd need a stick to beat off all of the women if I wore it. We  also collected lots of business cards for the places that had things we wanted to buy but would have put us over budget for the month.

Afterward, we were going to go to a quilt show, but we postponed that until Sunday. Instead, we went home and mucked about on the computers, and started getting the materials together for the quilt that Betty and I started over a year ago but never finished. It had been quite a while since we had worked on it, mostly because we didn't have a place prepared in the house for it. Now that the combination sewing, computer, and entertainment room is finally arranged we could get back to it. While Betty struggled to figure out what we needed and whether we had everything that we had started with, I tried getting a virtual machine running on my computer to install Ubuntu Linux. I spent most of the rest of the weekend trying to get that working, without success.

I tried using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. Every time I booted the Ubuntu CD in the virtual machine, the virtual machine would restart. I tried using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. I was able to install Ubuntu, but only by first installing Windows XP and running the Ubuntu installation from within Windows. When I actually tried running it though, the virtual machine would reboot. Needless to say this was pretty frustrating. I eventually abandoned that effort. I'll try again with a Red Hat installation in a few weeks. At least Red Hat Linux will work in Virtual Server 2005 — or so Microsoft claims. They don't, of course, support that configuration.

I also ran into a few other irksome issues. I wanted to set up a virtual machine running Windows Server 2003. I searched all through my software CD collection and couldn't find my installation disks. I looked through the boxes and boxes of software I have collected over the years, and I can't find the product box either. Needless to say, I'm less than happy about that. Even if I'd found the software though, I ran into another problem with running virtual software, although I'm not sure that this has anything to do with the Virtual Server or Virtual PC products.

You see, I can't get the networking configuration working properly with the virtual machines. In fact, ever since I upgraded my machines at home to Windows XP SP3 not one of them has been able to communicate with the others on my network. I don't blame SP3 (yet), but I really need to get the networking issues figured out. Every machine in my house can access the Internet, but they can't access each other. So much for file sharing, and printer sharing. I suspect that this is the reason I can't get the networking configuration working on my virtual machines. It's really strange too, because the virtual machines were actually able to see my router, and they were able to obtain an IP address from its DHCP server. Not only that, they appeared in the network's list of servers once everything was set up. They just couldn't communicate with anything but the router.

Oh well… it's a puzzle for me to solve. …Next weekend.