(e:terry) needs some windows programs for work so we put a windows 7 virtual machine on his mac. It worked for a few weeks, then all of a sudden it stopped having internet connection.

I know its not the mac because I have other virtual machines on there which are all working fine. The windows networking control panel is a disaster. It never can find anything wrong and at the end of it all, it suggest - "Ask a friend for help using remote assistance."

This is a fucking ridiculous suggestion considering the problem is that I don't have an internet connection.


I tried searching for all kinds of combinations of issues with OS X host virtualbox and windows 7 client to no avail. The one thing I noticed was that the windows machine had a default route of 0.0.0.0 and it could reach the router but not the internet. When I would ping something it could get the correct address from the router, but then no response. So I started searching for how to change the route on windows which lead me to the solution. Turns out that Adobe Creative Suite 3 installs some bunk bonjour discovery service that wrecks windows 7 networking. It had nothing to do with Virtualbox itself and would have happened on a real windows 7 machine.

The real problem is that the solution actually turned out to be so obscure, non-intuitive and definitely complicated. I would like to point out that things do not just work in windows and that at least on a non-windows system I could much more easily debug the issue. I have no idea how someone would have debugged this without an internet connection and I clearly had a hard time even though I am an advanced computer user, meaning that I at least knew which terms to look up. Seriously, a regular windows user would have no idea what a route was.

Check out how obscure the solution was: and try and tell me this is in any way user friendly, intuitive or "just works". I needed to run the command line program as an admin, I needed to deal with manually uninstalling services from the command prompt, I had to deal with the services control panel and I needed to reboot. I am attaching the solution as a PDF in case that website goes away. ::READ PDF::

This whole process took me several hours as I tried so many combinations of virtual box settings, drivers, installing other guest OSes to make sure it wasn't just a virtual box issue - all before getting to the real problem. Now that its working I made a snapshot for (e:Terry) to roll back to, next time Windows 7 gets fucked up.

The bird and I just took nap. I am tired after a busy day of the garden walk. I didn't actually go to any gardens but people came here because we are on it this year.

We didn't get many visitors because we aren't in a cluster but a lot of my family members stopped by which was great. Surprisingly our street has very few gardens on the walk.

The tortoise was an even bigger hit than the garden. I pretty much spent the whole day feeding him fruits to entertain people. We were like a circus side show.

My mom came by and made fried zucchini flowers that we half picked from the garden and half bought from the farmers market. We paired it with avenue boys sausage from the farmers market and beans from the garden. The whole thing was delicious.

I wish I took more pictures but I was so busy I forgot.

Considering I ate some egg, a slice of watermelon and a yogurt in the last 24 hours - I think a chicken finger club and fries is in order.

This one just seems straight up gay. No pun intended.

I was working on an update to the estrip android app which checks for network connectivity first instead and displays a nice little message instead of force quitting. I added this little homage to (e:tinypliny) who is the one that discovered the issue as I had never tried the app on a device with no network connection.



Just to give you an idea how unusual this is on a mobile android device - this is the message for the google marketplace. I think mine looks better.