So, there has been a lot of controversy by people on how do you actually get to vote when trying to vote for people in the RedEye Vibin Bachelor/Bachelorette contests.

Hopefully this little tutorial will give you the basics you need in order to vote! (And if I’m still in this contest at the time you read this, a vote for me ;))

First step is to Find the contest in question – My contest is accessed via this URL  Hello Bachelors! Voting is now open

You’ll see something looking like this: And once you scroll down a little bit, you’ll see this which tells you how to vote, yet obscured by other text on the screen! Leave a vote for your favorite bachelor in the comments…

So, it seems pretty straightforwardish now – I simply need to comment, right?! Well, that requires me to log in via Twitter, Facebook or ChicagoNow!

So, if you want to login via each of the services you’ll get different options

Clicking on Twitter gives you: Enter your credentials and it grants you the ability to comment using Twitter as your auth!

Clicking on Facebook is mostly a wash – comes up fine! but after putting in creds I get FAIL!

Leaving your only other option to be “Create an account”

I’m not opposed to the create an account function (okay, seriously I really am.. At that point, I’d rather you create a twitter acct ;))

So, once you’re finally logged in, scroll down to the “Leave a Comment” box and say something like “I love you christopher!” or whatever ;)

And there you go then! You aren’t the first to hit challenges while trying to vote, and may not be the least! so until then… here are the tools you need to vote!

So get out there, vote early and vote often (Hey, that’s a chicago thing!)  And if you’re looking to vote for me, I appreciate the vote!

Everyone wants to be sure to say things to guarantee they won’t be retweeted!  Well, here a breakdown of top items to guarantee YOU won’t get retweeted!

#10 – Be a douche!   We’ve all met the guy who frankly is a douche! You’ve seen his tweets! If you ever see an @ conversation with him and someone else you know it is obviously a typo!   He’s all about him-him-him! He clearly puts the TWIT into Twitter!    So rise up, take action and be sure to talk all about your new SEO techniques to make you millions, only $59.99 today!

#9 – Treat people like an idiot!    You’re all self important, you’re never wrong, so why change that personality once you get on twitter! I’m sure you and your 129 followers are loving your candid and quirky little ways, when even when proven and cited wrong with reference able material you continue down your track record of “Well, they’re just idiots!”

#8 – Ask people to retweet your lame tweet!     You definitely have a message to deliver, even if that message is “I must have 1000 followers by Tuesday, so please retweet my senseless plea for help!”   Far from it from me to suggest you obtain a personality and engage in conversation or sharing of information, definitely reach out to the RT-o-sphere!

#7 – Constantly start fights on twitter     I know we were having a conversation, but now I want to be rude and find something to fight about! Retweet me calling you bad names, yea!

#6 – Complain about how Twitter is getting too big!    You can’t help but complain! If it’s not that Twitter is growing too fast, it’s that it’s down today, you have an API limit, you’re following 2000 people and you cannot follow anyone else!  You’re going to switch to identi.ca today! Damnit, Twitter is like Facebook, or isn’t enough like Facebook! I MISS FRIENDFEED!

#5 – Be Racist on Twitter      Wow! You’ve sure reached a new level of engagement! Let’s take our own shallow selves and put it out to a mass of readers and listeners so we can appear ignorant on a global scale!   Racism wasn’t cool in person, and it’s even less cool when put into a social media context.   Let’s take it up a notch and get over your insecurities.

#4 – Talk about Tea Parties in every tweet     Yea, we get it.  You’re upset about something, and now you’ve decided to back a social movement which involves an idea of our founding fathers, but not taking into account the modern social meaning of the term ‘tea bagging’ and then you further don’t understand why we laugh when you talk about it?    Welcome to the internets!

#3 – Talk about your new ebook which will guarantee you thousands of followers on Twitter!   Hey, I opt’d to look at your profile instead of your ebook first, turns out you have 39 followers. WTF? Where is your credibility? If your $59.99 ebook works so well, why don’t you have more than a hand full of followers as you’re promoting?  That’s as good as the Hobo’s guide to CEO operations.

#2 – Be an unfunny contrarian    Hey, be a contrarian, I’m definitely game for that as I like taking an alternative position with an intelligent perspective on it.  But if you’re going to be contrary, at least be funny while you’re doing it.   You might even earn a retweet out of the deal!

And last but not least! Infact the number one way to guarantee you won’t get a retweet on twitter…!

#1 – If you don’t retweet me I’ll unfollow you!    Yea, I get it.   The very fabric of the universe rests upon whether this particular tweet is RT’d by me where I am.  I woke up to see I was unfollowed by the masses throughout the night because while I slept, I wasn’t auto-retweeting your hilarious antics of racist douchey contrarian bitching about the Tea Party failing to be understood by the “Idiots” in america.  IF I COULD ONLY BE ON O’REILLY FACTOR ALL OF THE PROBLEMS OF TWITTER WOULD BE SOLVED.

Yea, I get it.

Now, I encourage you to go out there, and Retweet away! And if you’re retweeting folks like above, be sure to let them know you’ve done them a special service!  And if you’re not or you feel there are even more appropriate ways and reasons someone shouldn’t be retweeted, pass that on as well!

So, I discussed this before in a few places, but just incase we forgot! Act now or forever lose your Microsoft Certification discount!, Getting Microsoft Certified in the United Arab Emirates! and Certification and MeasureUp Discounts 20% off Certs!

Well, in these past posts, I discussed that there were a finite number of countries whereby the 20% off discount would apply.  I did have a spreadsheet I generated and kept on hand.. but instead of sharing the entire spreadsheet I’m only going to include the countries which *today* offer the 20% off discount before they all fall into 10% only discounts.  The important lesson here is: If you live in one of these countries where 20% is available, let me know and I’ll be sure to get you the 20% off voucher before we all lose it forever!

That’s right! If you live, test and certify in one of these countries above, let me know and I’ll be sure to get you some vouchers! You must let me know before August 27th though, or else I’ll only be able generate 10% vouchers after that point!   And yes I will be generating SOME vouchers to keep on hand for these countries just incase, but it’s better to be safe than sorry and ensure you’re all taken care of!

Yay! It’s RTM Weekend! Alright, not for everyone, because as we all are patiently waiting for August 6th as RTM hits TechNet and MSDN, but I needed to get the jump on things because I think I’m busy next weekend!

So, what does RTM weekend entail for me?  Testing was the first ground.   Testing installations on my hardware, and getting a feel for how I’ll architect my deployment model for Win7 and 2008R2!

First things first – Create bootable VHD Images to run my OS out of.    Yes, I planned to deploy my systems via Boot from VHD, so I needed to create bootable images! And for this little decision, I opted to take advantage of WIM2VHD! So, what exactly is WIM2VHD?  Well, that’s pretty simple to explain!

The Windows(R) Image to Virtual Hard Disk (WIM2VHD) command-line tool allows you to create sysprepped VHD images from any Windows 7 installation source. VHDs created by WIM2VHD will boot directly to the Out Of Box Experience, ready for your first-use customizations. You can also automate the OOBE by supplying your own unattend.xml file, making the possibilities limitless.
Fresh squeezed, organically grown, free-range VHDs – just like Mom used to make – that work with Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Windows 7’s new Native VHD-Boot functionality!

All you need in order to be successful with WIM2VHD is:

• A computer running one of the following Windows operating systems:
  • Windows 7 Beta or RC (or RTM)
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta or RC (or RTM)
  • Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V RTM enabled (x64 only)
• The Windows 7 RC Automated Installation Kit (AIK) or Windows OEM Pre-Installation Kit (OPK) installed.
• A Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 installation source, or another Windows image captured to a .WIM file.

Then, simply execute a command like I did below and you’re moving along!

Create a bootable VHD of Windows 7 Ultimate
cscript WIM2VHD.WSF /wim:D:\sources\install.wim /sku:ultimate /VHD:C:\vhd\win7ult.vhd

Create a bootable VHD of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
cscript WIM2VHD.WSF /wim:D:\sources\install.wim /sku:serverenterprise /VHD:C:\vhd\R2Ent.vhd

This frankly takes care of most of the work on your  behalf! (Sure did for me!)

FYI: The image defaults to 40gb, so if you want to change that, use this flag /size:<vhdSizeInMb>

After this point all you need to do is bcdedit and make the system bootable and you’re set!

bcdedit /copy {current} /d “New VHD Description”
    bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Windows 7 Ultimate”
bcdedit /set <guid> device vhd=[driveletter:]\<directory>\<vhd filename>
    bcdedit /set {GUID} device vhd=[c:]\vhd\win7ult.vhd
bcdedit /set <guid> osdevice vhd=[driverletter:]\<directory>\<vhd filename>
    bcdedit /set {GUID} osdevice vhd=[c:]\vhd\win7ult.vhd
bcdedit /set <guid> detecthal on
    bcdedit /set {GUID} detecthal on

And you can perform those same exact steps again for your 2008 R2 VHD as well.   It’s not only pretty straight forward, but it’s so simple anyone can do it! After performing those steps I was up and running on a system which had no data, nothing, notta!

Now, to apply some context and depth to how I chose to use my deployment model.  I’m running on my personal Lenovo T61p, which I have a Kingston 128GB SSD disk inside of.   Because I wanted to have ‘some’ kind of Native OS in order to help work on anything should something go wrong, I opted for a 2008 Server R2 Enterprise (Core) installation.  That gives me a minimal foot print, yet an OS I can feel comfortable and confident in being able to work on and with!  

What this enables is my NOS which runs on the “C:” drive, and has a VHD directory where my images live.  However, when I’m booted into either of my BootFromVHD OS’s on here, the native SSD becomes the “D:” drive whereby I can share files between the two systems!   However, if you forget to copy something to the shared volume and need to access it, feel free to use the mount VHD feature in the Disk Management tool (or Storage in 2008)

I personally prefer to mount it read-only because… I don’t want to take any risks, especially when it comes to “Anti-Virus” or other things. (Unless that is my specific intention)

Now that you have a working and operational system you’re good to go! And if you stick with a NativeOS for Maintenance reasons, you can use it to take hard backups of your VHD’s for migration to other hardware or general recovery to other points in time! (note: You can backup the un-used OS from your active OS if you’d like as well :))

So, hope you have a good RTM weekend coming up, I look forward to being able to generate and use my license keys come August 6th!

Good news! Especially for those of you who have checked out these two posts:

Certification and MeasureUp Discounts 20% off Certs! 

Getting Microsoft Certified in the United Arab Emirates!

Unfortunately, there will be some change on the horizon! That 20% will soon become 10% for all vouchers generated after August 27th, 2009!  Fortunately, all vouchers generated BEFORE August 27th, 2009 will still be eligible for their original discount (Which is great for England, US and other 20% off countries! :))

I’ll generate a number of vouchers to have on hand as applicable, which I’ll definitely take care of for England and the US, and if you have any other countries you want vouchers for… let me know and I’ll be sure to keep them on hand! :)