Had a problem with VirtualBox not launching. I fired up Console to view the console messages and found the following error message:

Cannot trust the directory “/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS”.

Turned out to be a permissions issue with the root user owning a directory. I fired up Terminal.app, ran the following commands, and all was good:

sudo chmod 755 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS
sudo chmod 755 /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/components

If you have Mac OS X Server and are running a VPN daemon, enter the following the settings on the Windows XP client:

General Tab:
put your server’s address of resolvable name (vpn.yourserver.com)

Security Tab>Advanced>Settings…:
Require encryption ()disconnect if server declines
Microsoft CHAP Version 2 – only thing that should be checked

Security Tab:
IPSec Settings…:
Your share secret – the one you put in the Mac OS X server VPN

Networking Tab:
Choose “L2TP IPSec VPN”

Woohoo! I was able to bike to LRT to catch a train and plane to Omaha for work. This is my fastest recovery yet!

I booked an appointment with Meyer to see him this Friday. Maybe he’ll cut the stitches out for me, as they feel like they’re pulling on tissue beneath my skin when I do physical therapy… Speaking of which, I can bend my knee a good 90 degrees today and sometimes further in my ROM exercises (lifting the knee with my arm and pushing it down using my quad muscles). I’ve scaled back the use of the cryo-cuff, as I’m just getting tired of filling it with ice every day. Up until now, it was providing great relief. Oh yeah, maybe stopping the cryo-cuff was a little premature, as I noticed a good amount of blood/bruising on the inside of my knee and its also fairly swollen still.

The pain is a little less today, but still achy with a growing-pain-like feeling in and around my right knee. I’ve started to do 2 steps at a time, up with the good, down with the bad, but walking around is still one step at a time. Again, this feels slower than past surgeries, but maybe its just slipping my mind?

So, the pain seems less today which is good, but now its a cross between dull aches and growing pains. Still taking ibuprofen and by the end of the day I started to go up stairs, one step at a time 🙂

Yikes, I thought the pain would be less this time, as I was getting a cadaver tendon for my new ACL, but the pain is a little more fierce than I remembered. I’ve already weaseled off my bandages and jumped in the shower this morning and it feels darn good. I’m taking baby steps now, which is better than yesterday, and trying to fire my quads… Time to start working on ROM (range of movement).

Man, I seem to have quickly forgotten how painful the post-op recovery is after the block wears off. Funny, you’d think I’d have it all memorized the third time around… As expected, the block faded away after midnight (about 3 AM this morning) and the pain poured on soon after. Just for an idea of how long the block lasted, my surgery was at 9:50 AM yesterday. I may have compounded the pain by refusing to take Vicodin when I went to bed… Anyway, at 3 AM I woke up and I popped a couple ibuprofen to alleviate pain and swelling and another vistaril to alleviate the post-op effects from the general anesthesia. I’ve made it this far without a narcotic, so I’m sticking with ibuprofen the rest of the way.

I’m planning to replace my the LUKS MR11C 20 degree spot 6 volt 15 watt (7 H) bulb in my discontinued NiteRider Evolution Smart with one of these bulbs. It appears the new one could be a flood bulb, but its a fraction of the price of a spot bulb, so I’m willing to roll with it and report back.  Also, I was a little confused with the entire lighting system when the bulb was dead.  The NiteRider system still flashed the the first red LED and the third overall LED (green) from the right when the bulb was dead, but none of this was documented in the manual that shipped with the system.  The previous bulb was only about a year old, so I was skeptical the bulb was in fact broken…

If you’re like me and need to access file paths for files and folders and prefer to do it via a contextual menu item in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, these directions and screenshots should show you the essentials to get it working:

“Services” have taken over in Snow Leopard and you have complete control of them via System Preferences->Keyboard. If you want to add a new Service to allow you to right click on a file in the Finder and place its file path to the clipboard, fire up Automator and configure it as this screen shot shows and save it as a “Service”. Here’s the code for copying and pasting into Automator:

set itemPath to “”
set uPath to “”
tell application “Finder”
activate
set itemPath to selection as string
set uPath to POSIX path of itemPath
set the clipboard to uPath
end tell