If at first you don't succeed...

What is it they tell you right away in Scrum, fail fast, fail often, eliminate the bad paths in order to discover the good ones. I am having no problem with that, my attempt to create a VPC Virtual Machine and create an Ubuntu 10.04 instance on it failed, I couldn't even get it to run the live disk version, it would go to the golden orange screen and show the wait icon, and wait I would, and nothing more would happen. I'll try VPC when I need to create a Windows vm, I suspect that will go smoothly.

I went back to Sun VirtualBox and was able to get past the wait cursor, through the 8 pre-install steps and to the end of the install where the virtual machine needs to be rebooted, at this point, I horked things up good.

On reboot it requested that the cd be removed (unmounted) but the mouse was still trapped inside the vm window because the vbox additions have not been installed yet. I now know that I could initiate a reset Host-R then cancel and get mouse control back, but at the time I only knew I could get mouse control back after the screen saver initiated (a 20 minute wait). I tried to short cut that time by hybernating my computer, and wouldn't you know it when it came out of hybernation it went all BSOD on me (that's Blue Screen Of Death).

So after a full reboot, I restarted vbox unmounted the live disk iso, and restarted the newly installed vm and after the GRUB screen there was a big fat nothing, black screen, white cursor, blink, blink, blink.

So I'm starting over on the 10.04 install, this time no funny stuff, meanwhile I fired up the 9.04 Ubuntu vm, am downloading Eclipse and MongoDB on it, and will do some practice runs in C/C++ and then the same in Java. One way or another the rust will be removed before the interviews begin.