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Sunday 1/21/2001
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Spent all day Saturday cleaning the house up, preparatory to putting it up for sale. It was my mom's house, and I've been living here for some time. Got some help from family and friends at church, and it was good. It's a funny time in my life, actually. We moved to this house when I was fifteen. My parents, one brother, and two sisters. At the time, it cost something like $25,000. Fair-sized old place, built in 1928, big trees, double lot, gumwood trim and hardwood floors throughout. And it's held up reasonably well.
Now I'm all by myself in it, rattling around with only God and my memories for company. I did a lot of stuff here that I'm sure my parents never knew about. Then when I divorced for the first time in the late '80s, my widowed mom had a place here for me. I stayed about a year, then remarried. When I divorced again in the mid '90s, she made me welcome once again. I think it was Snoopy who said "Home is the place that when you go there, they have to let you in." Or words to that effect. I've been very grateful to have a home, in that sense. I know there are millions who don't.
It just feels very odd to be more or less camping in the ruins now. The whole house is empty except for my stuff in two bedrooms and the kitchen; part of the process of settling my mom's estate. No furniture, no rugs on the old oak floors, no pictures on the walls, no knick-knacks on the shelves, no cats underfoot... and no family. Just a lot of "this is the room where I used to..." And echoes. Lots of those. This week it'll be a year since I followed my mom's ambulance to the hospital, when she left the house for the last time. The echoes will be louder for the next few days, I think.
I'm looking forward to turning the page. This is a book that can't be reread. I can only move forwards, one page at a time. I'm so grateful for the family and friends who are helping me along.
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Monday 1/22/2001
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Today I try again to figure out how to make my aging Soyo 5EHM motherboard work with network cards. When I boot up, the text-mode display says that the video card gets IRQ 10 and the NIC gets 11. But when I get to Windows, it's reversed. And though Device Manager says all is conflict-free and copacetic, it just ain't so, cuz I can't see the network. Not with my faithful Netgear FA310, not with an industry-standard 3Com 3c905. It's gotta be the IRQs, right? And unfortunately, this mobo is not one where I can assign specific IRQs to specific PCI slots. Argh! Or maybe Ack! So I'll tinker and futz and finagle, and ask myself why I keep cobbling stuff together myself out of stone knives and bearskins instead of buying one with a brand name on it, or even better, assembling a best-of-breed box
out of new, known-good, brand name parts. Oh yeah, I'm poor. I keep frittering my money away on food and gas. Oh well... gotta go cobble.
¤later¤
Well, I cobbled. If plug-n-pray won't play nice, turn off as much of it as possible. I couldn't assign the IRQs I wanted to specific cards or motherboard slots, but I could set various IRQs to "Legacy/ISA," which is what I did for the afore-mentioned egregious offenders. Bingo presto, badda-bing-badda-boom, and we're back in business. I took advantage of the fatter pipe here at work to download the latest set of Band-Aids from the Microborg website, even the most trivial of which frequently causes the PC to require a post-prandial* reboot. And indeed much rebooting was had by all. Then to reinstall Office 2000, Partition Magic 6, and various little tweezes of the sort that I list on my free stuf page.
*According to the Merriam-Webster (even more a propos these e-days, eh?) Online Collegiate Dictionary:
Main Entry: pran·di·al
Pronunciation: 'pran-dE-&l
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin prandium late breakfast, luncheon
Date: 1820
: of or relating to a meal.
So first the PC lunches, then it regurgitates. Frequently, and with maddeningly repetitive sound effects. But, it blankety-blank sees the expletive deleted network when I want it to. Onward and upward.
Oh, and by the way, eBay is a little bit too much fun. One must tread with both caution and care, but it beats watching the Home Shopping Network. Hot tip: when I see something I like, I often just email the seller (I stick to commercial, rather than private, sellers) with an offer, especially if I'm interested in buying more than one. Sometimes they bite, and I get an even better deal, on my own terms, and I get to feel as if I've gotten away with something. No thrill so cheap as to be utterly beneath consideration...
And that reminds me (well, something did)... I opened the hood of my car this morning to top off the bug juice (I suppose we have to call it "windshield washer fluid" when there are no bugs, as now), and found a lovely little mouse nest atop the engine; piles of cozy-looking fluf nestled 'twixt my spark plug wires. Happily no rodents in residence at the moment. I played slumlord and performed some quick urban renewal. One hears stories...
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Tuesday 1/23/2001
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Well, Win98 SE is finally happy again (for a fleeting while) on my home PC. (I always remember the trainer who referred to Windows as "the only operating system with a half-life.") I suppose what I did to it was what the estimable Dr. Keyboard might refer to as "re-fettling" it. I had Win2K Pro on it for a while, and I like that pretty well. But IMHO, that's best on a PC that stays on most of the time (taking as it does a generous moment to booooooooooooooottttt), and will generally not be used for games. Hmm... wait a minute. I leave my PC on most of the time, and I hardly ever play games. Maybe I'll have to rethink this. Over and over redundantly again and again. I wonder if the stuf I globbed onto
the C: drive this time might squash nicely down onto a single CD-R, a la Norton Ghost. Or even better, PowerQuest's Drive Image. Then I could tinker as I please. Note to self: please look into this ASAP.
Meanwhile I have to learn how to live in my house while keeping it from looking as if anybody lives there. Probably the safest way to do that would be to live in my car. But then there's the inadequate plumbing... I have a meeting set up with the realtor for Wednesday after work, at which time I will get to Sign Papers and stuf. I wonder where I'll live next... sometimes life is just too doggone exciting. That's what happens when you make it up as you go along, I suppose.
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Wednesday 1/24/2001
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Just for fun, I fired up both Drive Image and Ghost, and each of them had no difficulty in saving the contents of my C: partition to another partition. Setting each at highest compression, both squeezed about a gig of stuf into a single CD-ROM-able glob. For the record, Drive Image's .PQI file was a bit smaller, maybe 10% less than Ghost's .GHO file. But they both worked. So I plan to copy the .PQI file onto a CD-R, along with the entire contents of my bootable Drive Image floppy disk. I'm not sure if that will make the CD-R bootable or not, but I'll be interested to see.
A propos of nothing, a link on Zannah's site reminded me of a friend who is wild about cows. This one has ASCII art cows, lots of 'em. I didn't want to forget it, and I don't have any better place to put it than here. You can do that when you have your own website. Hi Cathy.
And speaking of links, the Register has the inside dope on Microsoft's latest OS offering, which is said to combine the strengths of three previous winners: ladies and gentlemen, I give you Microsoft Windows CEMeNT. Coming soon to a desktop near you. Or a construction site.
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Thursday 1/25/2001
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This from Daynoter and author Dave Farquhar: BTW, to make a bootable CD, you need to select "bootable CD" from your burner's menu options (they all put it a different place). It will ask for a boot disk, then it will read the disk and encode the boot info properly on the CD. Bootable CDs are a big-time kludge, but it works so I don't complain too loudly. Thanks, Dave. I haven't burned the CD yet, so I'll try it that way.
<RANT> Speaking of burning CDs, I feel impelled to mention that the wonderful crew that produces Ahead Software's Nero Burning ROM software still need to learn a thing or two about interface design, although their product works extremely well. It's just not necessarily easy to figure out how to get it to do what you want it to do. And fer cryin' out loud, people, if your program works with standard file formats (like ISO files), PLEASE just put the standard formats at the top of the list of user choices. If I download a disk image from some ftp site, I guarantee it ain't gonna be in ANY of your proprietary formats, so why do I have to jump through hoops to burn a CD from an ISO file? And that goes for Adaptec's Easy
CD Creator, too. We all know you guys are smart, and your proprietary formats probably have some genuine advantages over industry standards. BUT, but... news flash: most standard formats, despite real or imagined shortcomings, aren't actually useless cripples. People use them, and we're familiar with them, and they seem to work OK for us. So if your products are going to support them, please don't make us bend over backwards to force your software to work in a non-proprietary way.
And while I'm ranting, I just can't fail to mention again how horribly annoying it is that if I use Adaptec's Direct CD to let me burn CD-RW disks (as I have to regularly at work), I just can't turn off all those wonderful, helpful prompt dialogs, even though each and every one comes with a checkbox that SAYS it will turn off if I uncheck, AND makes me confirm my choice each time by clicking OK. But next time I log in to the PC and put in a (new or previously-used) CD-RW, I get all the same helpful popups in my face. This ain't rocket science, folks. It ain't THAT hard to find a non-volatile place to stick the configuration data, so it'll still be there next time I come back. Ah well, I see my rant is rapidly degenerating into a mere whine, and that's not dignified. </RANT>
Catch you on the flip side...
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Friday 1/26/2001
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One of the coolest things about having a website is that you can use it as a corkboard upon which to stick up all the miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam that would otherwise slip through the cracks, and put it all in one place where you'll be able to find it later. The only caveats, of course, are that you need internet access to put and get them, and you're limited by the amount of space you have on the server.
I just needed that preamble so I could post this link that I'll want again, once more courtesy of the eclectic and electric .Zannah.: it's a guide to logical fallacies that are often used rhetorically in arguments. Use it to calibrate your Obfuscation Meter, or study it as a primer for future debates.
And thinking about logic and debates reminds me of C. S. Lewis, the well-known academician and Christian apologist. (When you have your own website you can free-associate all you want, too.) Lewis was trained by a mercilessly rigorous logician (and atheist; read Lewis' autobiographical Surprised By Joy), and it always showed in his writings. No one that I ever heard of was convinced to become a Christian strictly by argument, and Lewis was well aware that reasonable men can disagree. But whenever I reread his writings, I come away with a sensation as if my mind
has just been tidied up a bit, like when you take a stack of loose papers and carefully sort them and line them up so all the edges match. Many disagreed with Lewis' summations and reasonings, but few found his logic sloppy. He specialized in following trails of conjecture to their logical ends, and pointing out where such ends didn't match what we really observe in the world around us. Read this guy.
And responding to my Wednesday bit about ghosting my C: partition, Daynoter Mike Barkman offers this input:
I have evolved a strategy to assist me in this process: I format my drives with 800 MB for the C:\ partition, and redirect any program install that wants to go there, to a program partition. That keeps the C image rather slim: I delete temp internet files and other temps, defrag, then do the Drive Image. This works out to a tidy 250 - 300 MB, which I keep on a second drive and write them out to a CD-R when I feel paranoid. When the BSOD strikes, I drop the latest Image back in and things work again.
Not a bad idea. As I frequently tell clients, and try very hard to practice myself: Everything Important Must Always Exist In At Least Two Different Places At All Times. But we all know that already. <IRONY> So of course we never, ever lose data. </IRONY>
The good ol' Register pointed me at a website that seems to be full of interesting stuf, for those whose days are taken up with wrestling the Microsoft alligator into temporary submission. Sysopt.com has hardware reviews, news you can use, and cures for the blues.
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Saturday 1/27/2001
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No entry.