Random Fluf Archive

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Sunday, 28 Jan 2001
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I read an extraordinary book today: My War Gone By, I Miss It So, by Anthony Loyd. Part confessional, part journalism, all horrifying. Rootless after five years in the British armed forces, descendant of doughty soldiers, brought up on stories of heroism but disappointed by the anticlimax of the Gulf War, he took a photojournalism course and drifted into the dissolution of Jugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s. He tells of awful things, including the wilderness in his own head and heart. One of those books you read, and then say to yourself, "Self, compared to these people you've never had a problem in your whole life. Shut up and quit yer whining."

Sunday   Monday   Tuesday   Wednesday   Thursday   Friday   Saturday

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Monday, 29 Jan 2001
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Today I get to play with a new category of toy: factory automation software. Constructing Man-Machine Interfaces for real-time monitoring and control of automated processes. That's different. Hey, I don't get a factory to play with yet. Just the software. Slightly Visio-like, with a strong dose of VB. Could be fun. I'll let you know.

So, yeah, I changed the page format again. Back to tables, which Netscape 4 renders pretty well. Old browsers apparently don't understand absolute positions, but this seems to work reasonably well. For now.

Sunday   Monday   Tuesday   Wednesday   Thursday   Friday   Saturday

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Tuesday, 30 Jan 2001
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More tweaks to the page layout, for the sake of neatness. Apparently even Netscape 4.08 is happy(ish) with the present layout, though of course it ignores the absolute positioning of my three little brown-noser icons. But the puzzling thing is that it properly positions my Gyro Java dude in the top right. Will I ever understand this stuf? Ah, well... if we waited till we understood everything, we'd never get anything done.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my brother-in-law's CPU upgrade left him with an old AMD K6II-300 and 64MB of DRAM that he didn't need, which he thoughtfully donated to me for my assistance. (I was the one slapping him in the back of the head and yelling "NO! NOT like THAT, you ninny!") So I found an old Amptron mobo on eBay, the type of item that in my long-gone hot-rodding days we used to refer to as "NOS": New Old Stock, for things that were out of date, but had never been sold or used. The Socket 7 board goes up to 300 MHz and supports SIMMs and DIMMs, and with shipping I paid a little over $30. If it works as advertised, I'll be reasonably tickled. It'll be just fine in a system for my 15-year-old daughter.

Then I found a guy with a pile of 13 GB Seagate IDE drives, supposedly pulled from new Gateways to be replaced with bigger drives. I asked him to ship me two, which he promised to do for $85 apiece including shipping. I know, $170 for 26 GB isn't awesome, but I didn't want  a 20 or 30 or 40 GB drive. I wanted multiple drives, of a reasonable size each. So far only one's come in, but he copied me in on an email to his shipper, who presumably messed up. I should have the other in a couple days. Then to rebuild my daughter's system. I'll probably put my old 8 GB Maxtor in it, and 128 MB of DRAM. Then she'll be able to chat online and listen to illegal N'Sync downloads in style. Fortunately, she's not a diehard gamer. This'll be quite enough for her, for the next year or two. (Famous last words, right?)

I am a bit leary of eBay and other long-distance purchases. But I know what I'm doing, and I'm aware of the possibility of highly variable results. My realtor Jodi tells me that some people are even buying houses online, sight unseen. That's nuts. I buy bits and pieces, pay by credit card (or Paypal), and try to deal with businesses more than with individuals. So far I'm mostly pleased.

And finally, I appear to have gotten my Palm III lost or stolen. I looked in all the places it should have been in, but it wasn't in any of them. Ack. Double ack. Ack with knobs on. So now what?

Speaking of Palms, here's a tangentially-related quote that's just too good to pass up; Palm Chief Technology Officer Bill Maggs, at a Palm 4 (16-bit color, Bluetooth, USB... woo-hoo!) demo, while being trounced by a game developer at a fighter plane game: "Note to self: People with purple hair are better at games." Story here. Not that I'll be buying one of those any time soon.

Sunday   Monday   Tuesday   Wednesday   Thursday   Friday   Saturday

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Wednesday, 31 Jan 2001
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Last night I fired up the first Seagate HD, and used PowerQuest DriveMagic to dump the partitions from my 8 GB drive to the new 13 GB. I told PQDI to just leave the three partition sizes alone, leaving the rest of the drive as free space. Everything went perfectly. When it finished, I used PowerQuest PartitionMagic to move the Caldera eDesktop 2.4 partition to the end of the drive, and then to expand the FAT32 Windows 98SE partition to fill the remaining space. Then I booted into Win98 and installed PowerQuest BootMagic, which automatically detected all three bootable partitions. With that installed, I test-booted into MS-DOS 6.22, at which point HIMEM.SYS told me I had bad RAM at such-and-such address. Well, the RAM might be bad, but in my experience to date, it's more likely to just need reseating. So I did that, and the error message disappeared. Here's hoping... Finally I booted into Linux, and it came up with no problems. So far so good. But I still want to make Mandrake install.

BTW, you'll note that I've finally made it into the Bottom 95% Of The Web. I'm hoping that with due diligence, I can continue to work my way down.

Sunday   Monday   Tuesday   Wednesday   Thursday   Friday   Saturday

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Thursday, 1 Feb 2001
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This morning I got an interesting email. Well, more thought-provoking than interesting. And actually more spam than email. (Wow! My spell-checker red-flagged "spam". It knew "Spam" the canned pork product, but not "spam" the unsolicited commercial email product. I must rectify this. There. Done.) Basically, it offered me a pretty extensive list of products that came with varying rebates, all the way up to 100%. Every kind of product was offered, from a little refrigerator to a little scooter to an IBM keyboard to a little boombox... and way more. I wondered to myself, "Self, if they give these away for free, how do they make money?" So I looked again at the pre-rebate prices on the items. For some of them, it was similar to what I'd expect to pay in a store; a PC game for $30, a clock-radio for $25, and so on. But for the vast majority, the pre-rebate prices were much higher, indeed sometimes STUPEFYINGLY higher that a reasonable retail price. Like the afore-mentioned IBM keyboard for over $100, and even a Dexxa keyboard for a similar tariff. A generic 10/100 PCI network card for $89. You get the picture.

So here's how it must work... I order a product, paying the full listed price. They keep my money for as long as they want to, probably (a guess based on rebates in general) around three months. Then, when they've earned some interest on it in some way, they issue me a rebate check, which I deposit after a few more days, and which is then cleared through my bank and presented to their bank for payment. Probably pads the payback time by another couple of weeks. And all that time, they've had my money, to do whatever they want to with it. Sound reasonable? If you'd like to put this e-marketing power to work for you, the folks at www.flonetwork.com would be thrilled to help you, as they've helped so many happy customers in the past. I've said it before, I'll say it again: "America! What a country!"

Last night I saw my daughter. My ex-wife IMed me (I'm still pretty sure that Instant Messaging is a Pretty Good Thing) to say that she needed a break, and would I please talk to my daughter. So I dropped everything and picked Rachel up after work. At fifteen, her taste in toys is getting more and more expensive, but she's still a pretty cheap dinner date. I staggers me the percentage of deep-fried "food" that passes the lips of teenagers in general. I mean, God help her if she ever loses interest in athletics. We did Wendy's. One of the most delicious fast-"food" bargains available in America is, I'm convinced, the 99-cent baked potato with butter, sour cream, and chives. And to neutralize all those dairy-fat calories, I virtuously selected the "grilled" chicken sandwich. Then I found to my amazement that Wendy's currently offers a condiment that actually contains some form of spicy-hot peppery stuff in the requisite orange goo. I think they called it "chili sauce" or something. But I was pleasantly surprised that it actually made my sinuses sit up and take notice. Enough of that could make even an overcooked chicken breast, a single sad leaf of iceberg lettuce, and a slender slice of pale, hard tomato between two small, flattened bun halves seem palatable. Really.

After "dining" we went to see what video games were on display in suburbia. Rachel found some kewl extreme bicycle game that I'm not cool enough to remember the name of, and she played that for a while. Then we went over to CompUSA to see if they still had a deal on a package of a Logitech game controller and Tony Hawk Extreme Boarding 2 (or something like that). They had the combo for $40; not bad, I guess. We didn't buy it, though. Not until I get her PC upgraded. And that won't be until she's back in her mom's good graces.

Then I looked at the various things one may purchase when one has foolishly lost (apparently) one's trusty Palm III device. Rachel looked at video cameras. See what I mean about expensive taste in toys? No way, baby! I looked at the Palm IIIc color gizmo. Fairly cute, and not that much more than I originally paid for my III. Maybe... And I looked at the HP Jornada 548. Pretty sweet. But $500 sweet? I don't know, man. Not if it's at all likely that I'll leave it lying around somewhere, know what I mean? And I looked at the Handspring Prism, but I'm not sure if I want to spend $450 for something so similar in everyday use to the Palm IIIc. The store didn't have a Compaq iPaq 3600 on display, so I'll have to wait to see how I like them. So I'll probably vacillate for a while, until it becomes unbearable not to have something. Meanwhile I get the dubious pleasure of window shopping. Please feel free to chip in with an opinion.

Sunday   Monday   Tuesday   Wednesday   Thursday   Friday   Saturday

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Friday,  2 Feb 2001
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Well, my second hard disk arrived at work via FedEx yesterday, so I took it home last night and PQ Drive Imaged the contents of my first drive onto the second, then made the newest drive my C: drive, putting the first drive on the shelf for the moment, now that I know it works. The second one works OK, though the Linux partition won't boot. DOS and Win98 come up fine. I'll reinstall (YALI?) eDesktop, unless I feel like first spending whatever it takes to get a decent new video card that Mandrake likes. Might happen, but it can't be a priority right now.

And I'm still burning way too many coasters at work. I have the HP CD-RW as the only drive on IDE2, with the C: drive and the CD on IDE1. I have DMA turned on for all three drives... could that be a boo-boo? I thought "DMA make go fast. Go fast good." But I'm still getting buffer underrun errors. Does that mean the source material isn't coming quickly enough? I'm reduced to copying CD images to the hard drive first, then burning at (usually) 2x. Oy vay. Perhaps there are subtleties here beyond my feeble comprehension. OK, I know I should be using Nero instead of Easy CD Creator, but that means that every time I want to burn a CD-R I have to first uninstall DirectCD, which I need every day, and then reinstall it when I'm done burning. Or does the latest Nero still function when DirectCD's installed, unlike previous versions? Guess some more experimentation's in order. Feel free to comment.

Hey! Whaddya know! Nero 5 does burn CD-Rs while Adaptec DirectCD is running in the background! The last time I tried that, Nero wouldn't even run if DCD was installed, let alone running. Progress progresses. Life gets better. Kewl.

For my own future reference, I'm posting a link here to Brian Bilbrey's Mandrake 7.2 installation guide. I've also just downloaded the first two Debian disks, but I'll probably put that install off for a while on the understanding that Debian is one of the Linux distributions for grownups. I'm still definitely at the grammar school level in the land of the penguin. And while knowing a smart guy's website is not as good as knowing the smart guy himself, it's better than nothing, and wastes less of said smart guy's time. In fact, I'll probably save that page locally in case it goes away before I need it.

Sunday   Monday   Tuesday   Wednesday   Thursday   Friday   Saturday

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Saturday, 3 Feb 2001
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No entry.