OK,

So here is the long awaited update.  We have had a few major things hit our family pretty hard right here at the end of the year and it looks like 2010 will be a long rough year as well.  I figured the best way to convey what has happened is by letting my dad tell the story which he did through an email to our close family and friends:

Beth had surgery for a subcutaneous cyst Monday before Christmas.  Late Wednesday the surgeon called and informed us it was not a cyst.  It was a B-Cell Lymphoma (http://www.lymphomainfo.net/nhl/b-cell.html).  The tumor was slightly smaller than a golf ball.

On the positive side, with Beth working on the Oncology/Orthopedics floor at Wake Med she was able to reach out to an Oncologist she is most impressed with.  They chatted Saturday morning and he said it was fine to make our trip to Baltimore to be with family.

We went to Baltimore; but by Sunday morning Beth was having extreme difficulty breathing.  We had to have EMS take her to Carroll County Hospital Center in Westminster, MD.

To make a long story short, she has blood clots in both her lungs and in her left leg (Bi-Lateral Pulmonary Embolism and a Deep Vein Thrombosis in the lower left extremity).  They are pumping her full of Heparin to dissolve the clots and thin her blood.  There are multiple possible reasons for the clots including a downstream effect from the Lymphoma.  However, no one seems sure how we got where we are and they are just trying to get her blood and pulmonary function back to a therapeutic level.  That is a good thing because she could not walk 10 feet before she was totally out of breath and her heart rate spiking.

So with that being said it is now New Years Day and she has still not been released from the hospital.  We are currently expecting her to be released sometime early next week.  Once she returns we begin to meet with oncologists and others to figure out exactly what to do next.  In the mean time we appreciate all of the thoughts, prayers and help from all of our friends and family.

-Brent

I ran into this problem recently with a Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 machine hosted in a Hyper-V environment where repeated 1054 errors are logged on the client machine.  At first in my research I found that this is an old problem originally reported with AMD Opteron CPUs with multiple cores. (http://blogs.technet.com/perfguru/archive/2008/02/18/explanation-for-the-usepmtimer-switch-in-the-boot-ini.aspx).  It all stems from a problem where Windows was not properly counting CPU cycles on dual or multi-core systems.  Many times this problem is found with Negative Ping times where the initial time for a ping request may come from CPU Core A and after the request is made the time stamp may come from CPU Core B.  The problem though is that the time from CPU Core B was less than the original time returned from CPU Core A thus the negative ping time and in the end the request would fail as Windows could not handle the negative ping time return.

Theoretically this problem was fixed with a patch from AMD and SP2 of Windows Server 2003 however I am not sure why this problem has resurfaced.  The apparent problem arises in the Hyper-V environment because Hyper-V provides a pool of CPUs to the virtual machines to use.  So it is possible that even though the server uses a single CPU core it still is load balanced among the entire pool of CPUs by the Hyper-V Hypervisor and therefore the CPU clock can still return a bad time stamp.

The problem only appears from what I can see to reproduce itself in Windows Server 2003 and R2.  With that being said it is a very easy fix, there is even a Microsoft KB article for a step by step procedure.  However you can simply do the following:

1. Edit the Boot.ini file
2. Add the Load Operator “/usepmtimer”
3. Verify the edit by running “cmd bootcfg”
4. Restart the machine
5. All is well!

If you want more info from Microsoft see the KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895980

Additional References:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tvoellm/archive/2008/06/05/negative-ping-times-in-windows-vm-s-whats-up.aspx

http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?forumID=75&threadID=93813&tstart=60

-Brent

Had to get this clip from Mercy on NBC.  The best lines about beloved NJ:

Thank you Hulu!

Brent

I was watching a show sometime later this evening and the first one has hit.  Our favorite little PC girl is back and she demos the new OS in this pretty cool little video.

Cool stuff!  Oh and Windows 7 so far is most everything they claim.

-Brent