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Sunday, 25 February 2001
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Sunday was just really good. Other than occasionally using my Jornada, I never touched a computer. But church was good, and some people came who I hoped would come, and they received a blessing. It's difficult to talk about that kind of stuff in a sort of general-purpose forum such as this one. People who aren't interested in spiritual things would blow it off immediately, and those who are might wish for a more detailed exposition, and nobody comes away really pleased. But since the idea of a journal-type page is pretty much whatever we choose to make of it, and since I frequently find that my favorite parts of the various Daynotes pages are the more personal bits, I'll try to write things that are meaningful to me, and let everybody else take it or leave it, as they choose. (Not that I really have any choice about that part.)
What did I enjoy so much? I guess the most important thing for me is when I see someone becoming spiritually aware. It makes me think of a flower slowly beginning to open. People often come to church, especially to a new-to-them church, in search of a nameless "something" that they haven't yet found elsewhere. Maybe they grew up in a church that was completely rule-bound and dry-bones dusty and arid. Or maybe a church that was very noisy and unruly. Or a church where there were little cliques of people, and various exclusionary "in-groups". Or a church where the minister was caught with his hand in one or another sort of cookie jar. Anyway, these people are hurt, and/or wary, and/or hungry for some sort of deeper experience.
If you're a person who has a deeper spiritual life than average, to see someone like that begin to let go of their hurts and fears, begin to open up to new friendships and experiences, begin to actually have a more meaningful experience of the presence and activity of God in their life... Wow. That's what I really live for. And whenever I see it happen again, it's a wonderful thing, no matter how many times I've seen it before. It's impossible for that experience to get old.
So I got to go to lunch after church with my long-lost brother, who's moving back to town (hurray!) from one of those Warm Places. And he brought a friend he used to work with, who had just received a blessing at church that morning, and another friend came along, who is also just beginning to "get it" about spiritual things. We had a lovely luncheon (mine was Parmesan-crusted Chicken in Something-or-Other Sauce, I don't know — olive oil and butter and garlic and cheese and broccoli and so on over pasta... Mmmm.) And we had a lovely conversation, as well. I must confess, I don't really understand people who love to get together and play cards or Monopoly, when they could be having Meaningful Conversations about Things That Start With Capital Letters. Or about important things that start with small letters, like what's going on in their lives. To me, games are more or less something for people to do if they can't think of anything to talk about. But if they can... then talk!
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Monday, 26 February 2001
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Today I spent almost all day installing a little peer-to-peer network at a new doctor's office. (Not a new doctor, just a new office.) NT Workstation on some fairly cute (in a strictly-business way) little Compaq Deskpro (my spell checker thinks that word should be "despot") EN machines. Cute little solid boxes, definitely not for the adventurous, but just fine in a set-it-and-forget it environment. Got them a little Iomega Zip 250 USB-powered drive to swap back and forth. No power cable — just plug it into a USB port and go. Even works under NT, with SP5 or better. Cute. Didn't get around to breakfast until 2:30-ish. My brain hurts.
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Tuesday, 27 February 2001
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Yesterday I read Bob Thompson's Saturday rant about Microsoft. Oh yeah. Preachin' to the choir, here. Just try and download a copy of Internet Explorer older than 5.0. Go ahead, try. If you succeed, please write and tell me how you did it. If I want to install IE4, I currently have two choices, which may or may not work as desired: I have an IE4 CD from a Gateway computer, that installs a Gateway-branded version of IE4; or I can try and install from an OEM Windows 98 CD (not Second Edition)*. What I can't do is just download all the IE4 files from Microsoft into a folder, burn it to a CD, and go from there. At least as far as I know. And I've tried.
Let's see what happens if MS provokes a real Revolt of the Nerds. Sure, they'll always have thousands of new paper MCSEs, fresh out of Element K and Ikon. But when they've continued to run roughshod over the cadre of seasoned professionals who write computer books and advice columns; those who have some influence over the opinions of others... Let's just see who laughs last. It appears that MS's real goal is to become the PC applications equivalent of AOL (which would more or less excise the "Personal" from Personal Computer). Then, as with the online experience, we'll have two tiers of people: the first will be more or less willingly tied to Microsoft's apron strings for life, like those who find all they need online through AOL; and the second will be running NT4, Beos, or several flavors of Linux, eschewing the smothering hand-holding of a straitjacketed life in the MS camp. Now if we can only keep the Linux camp from making like Republicans in primary season, and eating their young.
I just realized something — I can pretty much live with Microsoft software as it exists now. I dislike just about ALL the default settings of every OS and application they make, and I dislike the hoops it all makes me jump through. But as Jerry Pournelle often observes, it's Good Enough to let me get my work done. BUT, and again but... I have grown to actually hate Microsoft the company. I hate their corporate goal of world domination, I hate their scorched-earth method of doing business, I hate the clear-eyed hypocrisy and disingenuousness of their every public statement. And I guess what I hate the most is simply that they actually do own the world. My fond wish is that they will continue to make themselves increasingly so odious that people will be even more strongly motivated to find ANY OTHER REASONABLE ALTERNATIVE that will also let them just get their work done.
*I just found out that it's not Win98SE that includes IE4, but Win95C (AKA Win95 OSR 2.5). Or it comes on any NT4 SP4 CD, if you have one of those lying around.
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Wednesday, 28 February 2001
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The Register has a cute article today about the Microsoft trial, which reinforces in me the conviction that MS is simply so big that even the federal government can't really do more than merely harass them. Remedy, shmemedy — MS has metastasized, and no surgery will be effective that doesn't fall into the category of "The operation was successful, but the patient died." But it was still entertaining to read about their chief counsel's attempt to explain why 1) Netscape was a threat to the very survival of MS, so any means were reasonable to reduce it to smoking rubble, and yet at the same time, 2) Netscape's browser was so bad that everybody in the world just freely chose to use IE instead.
Reality check — I use IE 5.x, Netscape 4.x, Opera 5.x, and Netscape 6.x, in approximately that order of frequency. IE is pretty much OK for the way I surf. I use Netscape 4.x to test my web page. I approve of the way Opera 5.x tries to conform religiously to W3C standards, and it's pretty good at rendering the pages I usually look at. And Netscape 6.x is cute, but there's no reason for anybody to use it beyond a blind MS-phobia. That and the fact that it's also available for Linux, unlike IE: if and when Linux becomes my desktop of choice, I'll probably learn to put up with Netscape 6's foibles. Opera's also available for Linux, but only the 4.x shareware version.
Oh, and BTW, I'm really liking DreamWeaver 3. I finally figured out how to make it ftp properly: don't tell it what remote folder to try and open. Just let the login take care of it all. Then I get a neat side-by-side view of local and remote sites, I click on the file I want to ftp, click the "Put" button, and it goes from "hyar" to "thar". Suh-weet. The floating toolbars take a little getting used to, but there's some good functionality displayed there. Weaning myself from MS products will take quite a while, even if I stay with current generation OS offerings. Every little blow against the evil empire makes me smile.
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Thursday, 1 March 2001
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I am a slug today. My morning passed in a dull fog of inertia. I'm even surprised that I can type phrases like "dull fog of inertia". But we're post-lunch now, so my blood sugar's back up again. The headache's receded, and I'm listening to some Johann Sebastian Bach that I Napstered (or just as likely, Gnutella/BearShared; I use both while I can) while the Napstering was good. My theory is that Herr Bach won't mind, under the circumstances. And I'm composing in DreamWeaver. I suppose I should try to extend my de-Microsoft-ization another few increments by downloading the latest StarOffice, though Bob Thompson excoriates it. I notice that Mr. Thompson, who is both much smarter and much busier than I, habitually gives short shrift to things that fall short of his expectations. I, however, being duller and more indolent, might be able to find some use in some of these things. I'll certainly try, since to take one example, Opera's free 5.0 browser doesn't particularly repel me as it does him, despite its ad panel.
Speaking of Napster, I'll just throw in my two cents worth: I use it now from time to time, but it wouldn't bother me a bit if it went away forever, starting right now. This to establish that I have no ax to grind, since I can take it or leave it. But here's what I personally wish would happen in the vague future: I'd like to see a business model that would make selected downloads available as free samples, say one or two from a given CD, on the theory that if I play them and like them, I'll go buy (or maybe even pay a bit less to download and burn) the whole enchilada. See, as a sometime musician, I'd like to have lots of music available to listen to, and maybe teach myself to play, and so on. But as a lifetime member of the impoverished working class, I certainly can't run out and buy every disk that I think I might like. Even if I defray the expense somewhat by, say, trading the rejects back in for a quarter of their price, that still leave me pretty far in the hole, unless I choose with preternatural precision. Won't happen. What will and in fact does happen is, I just don't buy CDs. So because I can't (legally) pre-audition retail art, the artists lose out on my miniscule contribution to their pizza money. But... if I could (legally) try before I buy, I'd probably buy more. And if could also do the aforesaid from the comfort of my desk, with a few mouse-clicks...
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Friday, 2 March 2001
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My traveling users were telling me that when they remotely accessed their Exchange mailboxes via the IIS web access functionality, they were no longer able to forward messages. I was stumped. But I went to the MS web site and found that a Service Pack 4 exists for Exchange 5.5, and I knew we were running the SP3 that came with Exchange when we installed it. Oh ho, thought I. Certainly worth a try. And so try it I did. One precautionary reboot later, things worked again. Of course, for all I know, I might've gotten the same result by simply reapplying SP3. But as I've heard people say, nothing succeeds like success. Or to put it another way, leave it alone and stop rebooting the server. So all's well that ends well. Of course, nothing really ends with software; but we can at least ring down the curtain on this one episode. Whew.
And I spent some otherwise-idle hours today updating my PC inventory database, and running around making sure that PCs are all named consistently, and have the IP addresses I want them to have. Almost make-work, but still actually a useful thing to get out of the way.
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Saturday, 3 March 2001
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No entry.