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Sunday, 11 March 2001
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Well, we finally got a bite on the house. I was starting to wonder if there actually is a sucker born every minute, because they seemed few and far between in my neck of the woods. Outside of my mirror, anyway. A nice young couple (I'm told) has already acquired a VA (as in Veterans Administration) mortgage, and they are apparently willing to apply it to purchase the old homestead, for just about what we were asking. Subject, of course, to a VA appraisal to make sure they aren't getting ripped off, and an engineer's report to make sure that the old place isn't going to simply ooze down into the swamp and vanish from the ken of mankind. Or blow up with a gas leak, or whatever kind of stuf actually happens to houses that aren't sufficiently inspected before money changes hands.
And apparently I've been washing my laundry in an illegal manner, since my washer just spews its foamy effluent into our sump, thence to be pumped noisily to wherever the sump pump pumps sump. The legal way to do it in our county is to plumb the washer outlet directly into the septic system or sewer. And all these years I never even knew I was a criminal. Somehow I have the feeling that doing my laundry would've been more fun these past few years if it had carried the taint of illicitness. But the only taint that came to my attention in all that time was more intimately related to well-worn socks. Ah well...
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Monday, 12 March 2001
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Mike Barkman from way at the bottom of the world seems to think I got a good deal on the compact flash card for the Jornada. He writes:
Lucky you ... I've just paid $US515 equivalent for a 128 MB Lexan CF for my Nikon Coolpix 990. The difference is in the transfer speed from camera to CF -- I think they said it was 4 times as quick, which is a hell of a difference when you're waiting to take the next shot. And probably if Nikon is selling the card, it's been certified OK five ways from Sunday.
Ouch! Yeah, small stuf costs big bucks, and small fast stuf costs even bigger. But with the Jornada, I'm pretty sure that speed isn't ever going to be a major consideration. It does what it does at its own little pace, and I'm pretty sure even world-class tweaker Dave Farquhar couldn't speed this baby up. Though of course I'd be happy to hear differently.
I'm starting to realize (I always was a slow learner) that while I'm spending all the money on computer-related kit, the rest of my life is starving for the occasional cash infusion. It's way past time for me to go through all my guitar stuf and do some major pruning and updating. I just restrung my only functioning guitar, and noticed that the frets at the top of the neck are worn down to an alarming degree. That explains the funny whiny little buzz from the B string... I have another old axe sitting in my bedroom with its electronic guts all eviscerated and trailing on the floor, and I extremely need to finally get it working again. In fact, the last time I actually played it may have been shortly after brother Farquhar was born. But it's something I designed myself, and I really like it. Doggone it, for the money I spent on the Jornada in the last month or so, I could've bought a truly sweet axe. Man, I'm gonna do it. Not buy a new one, just fix the old one. The one I'm using now I wired myself, but that was even longer ago. Men generally solder like apes, and I'm no exception. So this time I'll bite the bullet and pay somebody who knows what they're doing. Then I'll be able to take my working guitar out of service long enough to have it refretted. And then, THEN, for the first time in almost twenty years (!), I'll have two good working guitars.
Man, when I was actually in a recording and touring band, my equipment was only a little short of pathetic, other than the two guitars. An old Ampeg 60-watt amp head that weighed like 60 pounds, a beat-up Orange speaker cabinet with eight 10" drivers, and an assortment of buzzy footpedals and short-circuited cables. The best bit of music kit I owned was probably my trusty gray felt Elliot Ness-style fedora, for stylin'. Nowadays, in contrast, other than the aforementioned dearth of playable instruments, I have rather an embarrassment of riches piling up, in the form of unused accessories. Two rack-mount guitar tuners, a couple rack-mount digital effects, a 10-watt practice amp, a spare multi-effect footpedal, a couple of spare speakers... Some of that stuf could probably be converted to cash money, which could significantly defray my planned upgrades. Kewl.
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Tuesday, 13 March 2001
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So tonight my brother-in-law and I get to start doing some little fix-uppy things to make the inspector types happy. We'll start by fixing that washing machine faux pas, so I don't have to start (yet) doing my laundry at the laundromat, than which there are few places more boring. Doctors' waiting rooms come to mind. But anyway, there finally seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, whatever place I live next won't be as nice in many ways as this old house. But on the other hand, it won't be a huge old echoing empty box overpopulated with memories. I wonder where I'll end up... Real life is usually stranger than fiction, and much less believable.
I don't remember why, but I got this bug in my bonnet about how cheap RAM is, and how unlikely it is to stay that way. So I just ordered four Crucial 128-meg DIMMs for about $52 a pop. One thing that made me think of more RAM is the trouble I had over the last few days in trying to edit a file that's about four megs in size. I had a simple ASCII text file (the Bible in Basic English), and I wanted to import it into an HTML editor and change it to hypertext, and then translate it into an MS Reader file for my Jornada. Simple, right?
WOW! I felt like I was trying to do it on an IBM XT. I vividly remember one of the first genuine XTs I saw — I hit the power button, and after nothing happened but a blinking underline on the screen for about a full minute, I left, thinking that it was broken. It wasn't; it was just incredibly slow. Well, deja vu all over again, as they say. The PC I used was a PIII-600 with 128 megs of RAM, and all non-essential programs closed. WAZZUP? Well, I don't suppose more RAM will actually fix that particular problem, but it started me thinking about bottlenecks and limitations and scarce resources, and I decided that since I don't know what would actually fix that problem, let's at least buy some brand-name RAM while it's still cheap.
Anyway, with all that hassle, I decided to retrench a bit. I broke out just the New Testament part of the file, which was just under a meg, and edited that without much trouble. But I'm not looking forward to tackling the three-meg Old Testament. In fact, I've more or less put that on hold. I dunno — do I need to use a dual-CPU system with NT4, just to manipulate a four-meg text file? Sheesh! Any ideas?
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Wednesday, 14 March 2001
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Well, I just had an interesting half hour. File it under "C", as in "curiosity killed the cat". It started with your friend and mine, those attitude-enhanced Brits at the Register, purveyors nonpareil of IT news, with added sarcasm and salacious headlines. I read their story entitled "New SubSeven Trojan Unleashed", which mentions that said trojan can also be used for remotely controlling other PCs. Or to quote the article,
Also like other Trojans, SubSeven can be used as perfectly benign remote administration program, though the official SubSeven web site unabashedly promotes it as an intrusion tool.
Now I must preface the rest of this story with the following disclaimer: I AM STUPID. Please bear that in mind as you read.
While the Reg wisely declined to provide a link to SubSeven, didn't I just open another browser window and type in www.subseven.com? Which brought me to a page apparently called "Visual.com" that didn't mention SubSeven, or trojans, or anything worth reading about. But while it was busy not mentioning, it was also busy popping up one of those annoying little browser mini-windows with a picture in it. This one had Lucy Liu from the Ally McBeal TV show, wearing an embarassingly (to me, not to her) semi-transparent dress to some big brouhaha like the Oscars or something. When I closed it, another one popped up with a picture of Jennifer Love Hewitt inside what was supposed to look like a Microsoft Media Player window, upon which I was supposed to click, foolishly supposing that it was a real video clip, instead of what I knew it actually was: simply a GIF file of a screen capture.
Here's where the story takes a twist. I decided, somewhat in the spirit of research, to test my mettle against what I assumed was a nefarious trojan-spewing website. So I clicked. I installed their "Browser Enhancement" (with my freshly-updated virus software running in the background). What it said it did, and looked like it did, was to install a search bar at the bottom of my screen whenever a browser window was open. At that point I decided I'd had enough fun for one day, because while this "enhancement" might actually do the things it purports to do, my best guess is that ET is also phoning home to some not-necessarily friendly aliens, and in doubtful situations it's often best to assume "guilty until proven innocent".
So I went to Control Panel — Add/Remove Programs, but of course it wasn't there. So I looked at Startup Manager, and found a benignly-named "browser enhancement" had been added to my Startup folder. Simple as that? thought I, nuking. Nope. So, with "FORMAT C:" dancing in the back of my mind, I fired up RegEdit and searched for "gohip", which was part of the website named in my new, unwanted search bar. Well, eventually I managed to tweeze all the little bits of gohip out from between the teeth of IE and Netscape, and my system seems to be clean. In all this the virus software hasn't winced once ("winced once" — some alliteration for you), so I'm somewhat reassured. But I'll still watch my system for a while, wondering if any lurkers linger longer than I'd like. MAN! Sorry, I gotta go before every sentence starts to rhyme.
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Thursday, 15 March 2001
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Guilty retroactive update: I did do that Old Testament file conversion, and it did take a very long time. But browsing the web in the foreground helped kill the time between cut-and-pastes. The file works quite well in MS Reader, hyperlinks and all. And my Crucial RAM came (woo-hoo!), so I'm going to spend some time playing with RAM disks, a la Dave Farquhar.
And the Simple Technology CF memory card works spiffily (that ought to be a word, if it isn't) in the Jornada. I copied some Reader files and a few MP3s onto it, and they automagically showed up in (respectively) the Jornada's MS Reader and Media Player programs, with nary a further futz nor tweeze from yours truly. Transparent, indeed. And for the first time, I actually have enough storage to consider carrying along the occasional MP3 file. With only the stock 32 megs, fuhget abaht it!
Toys are fun. I like toys. I need more money.
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Friday, 16 March 2001
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Today I'm working on a Gateway notebook, and amusing myself with learning how to report spam. The notebook is both more interesting and more frustrating. (The lack of frustration regarding spam is based mostly on having miniscule expectations of having any positive effect, to begin with.) But the notebook is complicated.
To begin with, the user has NT4 on it. Ugh. As has been often observed and loudly lamented, NT and notebooks don't play nicely together, pre-Win2K. But the user is an engineer, with some critical NT-only software. But... he also gets software from vendors, which won't run under NT. Ack and poop. What this guy really needs, of course, is a new notebook with a factory Win2K installation. But that ain't gonna happen. Sooo... I suggested putting a Win98 partition on his PC. Me and my big dumb mouth. Hey, it's not like I don't have boatloads of experience running multiple operating systems on one hard drive. It ain't even difficult. WHEN YOU START WITH A BLANK SLATE, that is. But attempting to retrofit an existing setup is like jogging through a minefield juggling eggs. Before touching it, I made him swear that all his important files were stored on the network, and I cautioned him that Sometimes Bad Things Happen.
Then, having covered my tuchus, I used Partition Magic 6 (highly recommended) to futz and tweeze his existing partitions around, and make room at the front of the disk for a 2-gig Win98 partition. So far so good. I installed Win98 SE and updated the necessary device drivers from a Gateway recovery CD. So far so good some more. Then I installed Partition Magic and Boot Magic into the Win98 partition. So far so good yet again. Then I booted using Boot Magic, and succeeded in booting both operating systems at will. So far a cakewalk; merely time-comsuming.
But then his NT install stopped recognizing his PC Card NIC. (I always, always pop out all PC Cards before installing Win9x on a notebook.) Win98 had no trouble with it, of course. Same hardware, worked an hour earlier, now a festering pile of vituperation. Sooo... The PC Card-enabling software for NT gave an error message, so I removed and reinstalled it, apparently without major huhu. Reboot yet again, and I get the dreaded "corrupted HAL.DLL — unable to boot" message. Of course, I had no Emergency Recovery Disk, and of course there's no other PC like his running NT, that I could use to make one. And of course, all this happened on an NTFS partition, so I couldn't just boot from a DOS floppy and copy the expletive deleted file over manually. And of course when I tried to do a Repair Installation from an NT CD, it told me there weren't any NT installations on the PC. So there we sat as I left work last night.
At this point, I've blown away the Win98 partition and created a blank FAT16 partition at the front of the hard drive, into which I'm now installing NT from scratch. My theory is that when I get a functioning (and properly Service Packed) install on there, I'll be able to copy the relevant files over to the presumably-now-visible Old-and-Smegged-Up NT Partition. Stay tuned for the next exciting episode, in which Batman is heard to say, "That's funny, Robin! I don't recall ever seeing that error message before!"
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Saturday, 17 March 2001
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No entry.