12/30/2000

Last Updated on April 18, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

Mailbag:
The NOW Generation; VCache
Internet Explorer caching. Internet Explorer’s cache has always been out of control. Reader Andrew Leonard wrote in with CacheSentry, a TSR that uses a scant 58K of memory and corrects some caching bugs in IE 3.0-5.5, including keeping your cache size under control. I’ve been using it for a couple of days and love it.
A link. Long-time reader Pete Moore is trying his hand at Daynoting. He’s over at www.peteranthonymoore.com.
Overheard: One of my readers included me in his mass “Happy New Year” mailing this week. Since this is the real beginning of the century and millenium, he included that as well. One of his friends responded back. Accidentally or not, he hit reply all instead of reply, and he said: It won’t be a happy new year, decade, century, or millenium if it’s anything like the last year, decade, century or millenium.

So cynical, yet so true. I know I sure don’t want a repeat of any of the above.

God, hurry up and make me patient! I uttered those words last night, sometime after having mentioned that my intention in life when I was 21 was to be a famous author, and everyone just looked at me. “That’s a great title,” someone said. “You gotta write that book,” someone else said. And no one would disagree. (Rats!) “You might be famous after all,” yet someone else said. “I need that book,” another someone else said.

“But I’m not qualified to write it!” I said. I should know. Does anyone realize how impatient I am with myself?

Let’s check what’s going on inside Dave’s head: Look at this post! Has Dave ever written anything so worthless in his life? Nothing to say! Nothing! He’ll never attract readers with that. And on a good day he only gets 400 page reads. What’s up with that? He should be up to at least 1,000 by now. Pournelle gets 10,000. Dave would be up over 1,000 if he had anything useful to say.

Okay, my self-talk isn’t that bad–I’m exaggerating some–but you get the idea. I can be patient with actual or potential girlfriends–patient to a fault, sometimes–but outside of that, I’m incredibly impatient. Especially with God, who always seems to have His own ideas about how things are going to go (the nerve of Him! (I hope you recognize sarcasm (and I hope you don’t mind nested parenthesis (aren’t they annoying?)))), and they’re always so different from mine. So I’m supposed to write a book about patience?

Then I remembered a couple of things. Sometimes the least-qualified people are actually the most qualified. And even if that’s not the case here, authors frequently know less than nothing about their subject matter before they take it on. It shouldn’t be that way, but hey, no one said the publishing industry made any sense whatsoever.

Umm, that could be bad, taken out of context. I learned a lot when writing Optimizing Windows, yes, but that was pretty much my specialty even before I started writing it. I wrote the book that I needed/wanted in 1996 when I started learning how to push Windows PCs for all they were worth–I already knew how to push an Amiga or an OS/2 box. I tried once to write a book as I learned the subject matter. I won’t do that again. You were spared, some say mercifully, others say regrettably, from the result of that endeavor.

I do realize most of my generation is very impatient. And it’s getting worse. If I had to sum U.S. culture up in one word, I’d choose the word “Now!” and I’d find some way to emphasize it. So, maybe I do need to explore this subject matter. Assuming 47 others haven’t already.

Mailbag:
The NOW Generation; VCache

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