Downtown Memphis Blog

From WMC TV Five:

Evacuees fleeing the Gulf Coast arrived at the Amtrak station in Memphis around 10:45 Saturday night. The Tennessee Air National Guard is helping to place them in local shelters.
Several thousand evacuees are expected to flee to Tennessee in the wake of Hurricane Gustav.
Evacuee Bernell Vultz says he’s happy to be out of harm’s way, safe and sound at Cummings Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis.
“The church is always going to get blessed by the lord, as they open their days and let everybody come in,” he said.
But Vultz is worried about his property back home in Louisiana. “I just hope my house is still there when I get there.”
Nearly 60 volunteers from the Cummings Church congregation spent Saturday preparing to welcome evacuees like Vultz.
Kevin Faulkner says the church expects to provide shelter for at least 120 evacuees, and that means making sure all the necessary supplies are in place.
“Blankets, bedding and sheets and stuff,” said Faulkner. “We had them donated by our congregation. Food is supplied.”
Memphis City Schools will provide food to the shelters.
Faulkner says his church did the same thing three years ago during Hurricane Katrina, but this time they’re better prepared, ready to do everything they can to make sure their guests have a comfortable place to stay.

According to the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau, almost all local hotels are full. And Tunica County hotels, motels and RV parks were already full as of Saturday afternoon.
The Red Cross is managing the shelters.
The following area shelters are now open:
Byrne High School, 1475 East Shelby Drive in Memphis
Catholic High School, 61 North McLean in Memphis
Cummings Street Baptist Church, 794 E. Raines Road in Memphis.
G.W. Henderson Receation Center, 1155 Abbey Drive, just off U.S. 61 in Tunica, Mississippi.
The Red Cross is seeking volunteers to help welcome Gulf Coast evacuees to the Mid-South. Volunteer sign-up and orientation will take place Sunday and Monday from 10:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. Volunteers can sign up in person at 1400 Central Avenue in Memphis, or call 901-726-1690.

Great, another incoming crime wave.

I’ve gone through a bunch of crap with my HDD install, due to poor planning.

The actual replacement is very straight-forward, but I was in such a hurry to get it in, I didn’t properly prepare. Hopefully this will help you avoid making the same mistakes.

First: I made the mistake of hooking it up to my EeePC and copying the files over. DON’T DO THIS. It resulted in the added headache of the drive being assigned a volume letter. When I installed it in the EeePC, it kept the drive letter assignment and made shit hard. I had to go edit the registry to change it, or else my desktop wouldn’t appear at all.

The easiest way to go about this is to have an external enclosure. They’re dirt cheap. You want a 2.5" sata enclosure, preferably one that doesn’t require AC power, and one that comes with a dual USB cable. You can find some on My Amazon Store.

You can do it without one, but it makes it a lot easier, and then you get the added bonus of having an 80GB external when you’re done. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. First things first.

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to assume that you came off the $15 for an external enclosure.

Remove your factory HDD, as covered in a previous post, and stick it in the external enclosure. Leave it the hell alone for now.

Next you’re gonna need to format and partition your HDD, but you don’t have an Operating System yet. Get gparted from gparted.sourceforge.net, the live thumbdrive version. Download the compressed file to your desktop. Use 7zip or whatever floats your boat to extract it to your thumbdrive. Navigate to your thumbdrive and find the makeboot.bat file. Double click to execute, and you’ll get a command line window. Follow the instructions to make your thumbdrive bootable. Remember that anything on the thumbdrive will be erased in this process (other than the gparted program, obviously).

Now you’re ready to format/partition.

Stick your thumbdrive in your EeePC. Boot it up, but start hitting esc as soon as soon as you power it on. You should get a window that will let you select which drive you want to boot from. You want to boot from USB. Select it and press enter.

It should start booting gparted. You want to install it to ram, so you can remove the thumbdrive and still have it running. Follow the setup instructions for language and such.

You’ll see a bunch of command line stuff on your screen, then eventually the gparted gui. At this point you can partition your drive. I would suggest a 20gb partition for XP and a 40gb partition for Vista Ultimate SP1 full. If you’ve stripped either down either vlite or nlite, you can make your own call. I went with 30gb for vlited vista ultimate. Set up your drive however you like, just make sure the first partition has the label C and is bootable. If you want to run linux or any other OS, make a second partition of appropriate size. The other partition should be the remainder of the drive.

Format all of these drives NTFS. Hit "apply". Go get a beer, this will probably take a minute. While you’re getting drunk, gparted will be partitioning and formatting your drive. When it’s done, it will tell you that all operations are complete. Exit gparted. You’re almost done. You should now delete everything on your thumbdrive, ignore any "System File" warnings.

Now all we have to do is move all your files over, but we don’t have an operating system. Go to www.slax.org and download the thumbdrive version of Slax Linux.

This is going to sound familiar. You’ll download a compressed file, extract it to the root of your thumbdrive. Navigate to your thumbdrive. Find the "boot" folder and click on it. Find "bootinst.bat" and double click it to execute. Follow the directions to make your thumbdrive bootable, again.

Now it’s down to business. Stick the thumbdrive in your EeePC and boot it up. Again hit ESC and choose USB as your boot option. Once you get to the slax boot screen, plug in your external HDD. Let slax pick the default option (GUI) and boot up. Again you’ll see lots of command line stuff, then finally a Linux desktop. Now you can just go to system and copy your drive from your external to your C drive. After the copy is done, you should be able to shut down, remove thumbdrive, and boot up. It should load your OS normally, and you should have a lot more drive space. Congrats!

I didn’t bother to write a real How To, as it’s insanely simple.

Here’s how it looks when you take the bottom cover off:

Take the screws out and pull down on it to unplug it.

Swap the cage over to the new HDD by removing the 4 phillips screws on the sides.

Drop it in, slide it upwards to seat it on the connector, bolt it back down and put the cover back on.

Now you have a lot more space.

The offtopic forums, and thus a lot of the viewers moved to www.memphisofftopic.com

Pretty cool site, worth checking out for sure.

Fox 13, appropriately.

http://www.myfoxmemphis.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=7302128&version=2&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.2.1

http://www.foxyjacky.org/

Click on “Take the Tour” to see the pics of this slut from the bartlett park.

Edit - This is a free sample from the website, and does include nudity.

http://www.foxyjacky.com/jackypark.html

Apparently someone shot a porn in a bartlett park. I must find said porn, as odds are someone knows the girl in it, and it will make me laugh. You have your orders, go!

www.mesh.com

Free service from Microsoft that allows you to remote desktop to any of your computers from anywhere and use it as if you were sitting in front of it.

Useful for playing loud music while I’m at work to annoying my girlfriend who’s sleeping at my apartment.

Also useful as you can copy and paste files from the remote computer to your 5GB of online storage, or to the computer you’re on now. In other words, you can never forget a file again, as long as it’s on a PC with Mesh and an internet connection.

Here’s a screenshot of “My computer” on my home computer, as seen from the Mesh interface on my EeePC. That’s my home desktop. I even used the snipping tool on my home PC to take the screenshot, then saved it to my home desktop, clicked “copy” and pasted it to the desktop. Pretty cool stuff, especially for free.

Holy shit, closest thing to home cooking I’ve found. The menu is fairly limited, but my god, it’s great.

They do breakfast from 7 to 11. I will let the picture do the talking.

They also do plate lunches, including meat loaf, BBQ, burgers, etc with veggies and assorted other sides. I’ve yet to check that out, but I definitely will, based on the breakfast.

Front Street Deli
77 S Front St
Memphis, TN 38103