Author: Dave Farquhar

I’m only gonna ask this once.

Dave Farquhar General

There’s a commercial on TV. It’s using a dang AIR SUPPLY song in the background. Would somebody please tell me what product that commercial is for, so I can make sure I never buy it?And then if I see anyone else using that product, I can lecture him or her.

I have two coworkers who like to irritate my boss on occasion by seranading him with "Islands in the Stream." If they want to be even more annoying, I could float this idea past them.

Then again, if I did that, my boss would have every right to fire me and burn down my house. So I’d better not.

A story of a truck, some trains, a vet, and a possible scam

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , ,

I think I’ve been taken for another Internet scam.

Of course the Internet is ripe for this kind of thing. The story of Kaycee Nicole Swenson is one infamous example. Unfortunately I fell for that one too, although not as hard as some people did. All I really wasted in that case was some bandwidth and a little disk space. That’s more than I can say for the people who sent her gifts and other things.Some people are skeptical of everything they see online. When I was younger, it made me mad. Not anymore.

People can come and go as they please with their blogs, but forums are an even easier target. Back in April, a disabled veteran showed up on a forum that I frequent. He had an interest in trains. My father in law, Jerry, was a disabled Vietnam vet. Jerry was hit by machine gun fire the first time he saw combat and received a Purple Heart. He never walked without a brace again. I don’t want to say the time in Vietnam ruined Jerry’s life, but it certainly sent everything off in a different direction.

By the time I met Jerry, he wasn’t bitter. He shared my love of baseball. He was a rabid Cardinals fan, so we’d talk baseball. We’d also talk about playing baseball and softball, because we both used to be outfielders. It’s always fun to hear another person’s take on playing the position you played. The difference was that at 29, I could still play center field. By 29 I had almost certainly lost a step out there, but my loss was due to age. At 29, all Jerry could do was coach. Jerry’s loss was from serving his country in an ill-advised war.

Jerry died in 2005. He had cancer, but his treatment was working, or so we thought. Then one day he started having a lot more abdominal pain than he was used to having. One Saturday afternoon they took him to the hospital for what was supposed to be a routine visit to find out what was going on with the pain, and he never went home.

I didn’t know Jerry very long, but he certainly influenced my life. Jerry was the first person who told me I could be completely debt-free in seven years or less. I didn’t believe him, but he was right. Now I probably had those tendencies before I met Jerry, and maybe I would have gone down that road regardless. But the first time I ever heard the idea was sitting on a porch overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, drinking coffee with Jerry.

I miss Jerry.

When I heard this guy’s story, something reminded me of Jerry.

He came from out of nowhere. He’d bought this old Lionel train at a garage sale. He was a disabled veteran (I can’t remember if it was Gulf War I and Gulf War II, or just Gulf War II), he shopped at garage sales, and he liked Lionel trains. What was there not to like about him?

But there was more to it. He was young, was married and had a kid or two while he was in the war, was wounded in combat, and when he came home, his wife and kids had left him. He’d served his country and nearly died and lost everything that meant anything to him in the process.

Regardless of what you think of Gulf War II, that story tugs at your heartstrings.

I wanted to help this guy. It started with me offering him some advice on getting that old train running. It was similar to a train that had belonged to my Dad. I’d worked on that kind of thing before, and I had some books with some advice in them. He never did get it running. I couldn’t tell if the problem was his locomotive or the track, so I offered to send him a cheap Marx locomotive and a loop of track. He told me he would have a hard time paying me. I told him not to worry about it because the stuff I was sending was probably worth about $10. It wasn’t; a fair price for it probably would have been closer to $20. It all shipped for about $7. Regardless, we aren’t talking huge sums of money. I can make that in an hour, and it would probably take more than an hour’s work to extract that value out of the stuff.

He thanked me profusely, but then I never heard from him again. Not directly, at least. I assume the box got to him, both because it’s unusual for a package that size to get lost in the mail, and because he made reference on the forum to having a Marx locomotive. But he came back with weekly tales about his garage sale finds. Part of me was a bit suspicious. He was finding stuff every week. I go to a lot of garage sales. I get up about 6 or 6:30 every Saturday morning, drive all over the St. Louis metro area, and the only time I’m home before noon is during December or January when there are only a couple of sales to hit. There have been days that I’ve gone out at 6 am and come home at 2 pm. I find trains about once or twice a month, and it’s probably about half as often that what I find is priced realistically.

He’s not exactly from a small town, but the metro area is 1/10 the size of St. Louis. There’s every reason to believe he should find about 1/10 the number of trains I find. Maybe less, since much of that area was probably still farmland when Lionel was in its glory days.

Looking back, I probably should have sensed some Tom Foolery going on.

I guess a lot of people started giving this guy some stuff. Train hobbyists can be pretty generous. Stuff we’ll never use tends to accumulate in boxes underneath our layouts, and the stuff we don’t give away probably won’t ever see the outside of that box for a very long time. It’s always been an unwritten rule to let useless stuff go to someone who can make better use of it. I’ve made a few trades in the past with people I’ve met online and never had any trouble. In most cases, I think we both walked away thinking we got the better end of the deal. And that’s how a deal should end–with both parties happy.

Then one day the guy disappeared. That happens. We get busy with other things sometimes. Word came that he was in the hospital. Then he reappeared. He had fantastic stories about his various medical conditions. Only there was one problem–other people on the forum had been in the hospital for the same thing, and the things he was saying weren’t consistent.

Then some people from other forums, one related to remote control cars, boats and planes and another related to the military, came looking for him and posted on the train forum. He’d told similar stories there–but the differences in the stories he told in each forum contradicted each other.

I’ve bounced back and forth between thinking whether it was a scam or just a misunderstanding. At first I wasn’t sure that I cared. Like I said, I’m out about $27. I can recover from that. But there are other people who are out a lot more than $27. At least one person sent him a brand new train set. After shipping, they were probably out closer to $300. Does that guy make 10 times what I make? Not likely.

Actually, I was wrong about not ever hearing from him again. He e-mailed a whole bunch of people, including me, yesterday while all of this was going on. It started out saying, “The evidence against me is overwhelming but this much is true.” And then he went on to rehash his story. It was pretty much all stuff I’d heard before.

The problem is, people don’t like being lied to. When part of the story is exposed as being a lie, it’s impossible to know if any of the rest is true. And then when someone turns up saying he sent him a $300 R/C truck two months ago in trade for something that never showed up, people are inclined to believe the guy. He may be a total stranger, but at least he’s never lied to them. And if the person in question has been scamming this stranger, it’s only natural to wonder if he’s been scamming other people too. Including you and your friends.

I suspect the next time someone comes along on that forum who needs something, a few people might not be feeling as generous. And that’s unfortunate.

And as for this one? I responded to his e-mail. I had several suggestions for him, including that he make things right with the guy who sent him the $300 R/C truck. He told me he would.

We’ll see. I know where to find the guy who sent the truck.

Optimizing a brand-new PC

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

Dell offering PCs free of bloatware and crapware reminds me of the ultimate optimization tip, the thing you should do on Day 1 immediately after unboxing your PC.

Reformat the hard drive and start over.Most PCs get shipped with lots of garbage you don’t want or need. It used to primarily be signups for online services, but there are plenty of applications you’ll never use, trial applications that aren’t fully functional unless you pay for them, and who knows what else.

The reason this stuff gets bundled generally comes down to money. The manufactuer loads this stuff, and the company who made it pays a small fee. The software company is hoping you’ll sign up; the computer maker uses the money to subsidize the cost of the hardware (computer hardware is a very low-margin business).

Software that you install but don’t use slows your computer down, because it chews up disk space, bloats the registry, and it may keep some components loaded at all times. Get rid of that garbage, and the computer speeds up.

When I started working in desktop support way back in 1995, this was standard procedure. We squeezed far more life out of computers than anyone could reasonably expect us to do. But we had to do it–we had virtually no budget to work with.

So, assuming your PC comes with a real Windows CD (not just a system restore CD that reloads the factory image, junk and all), insert that CD when you power on, format the hard drive and install fresh. Better yet, use another computer to set up Nlite so you can install Windows with exactly the components you want. That way, if you don’t want or need, say, Media Player, you don’t have to have it. (Personally, I like to watch videos and listen to MP3s on my servers, especially seeing as they don’t have sound cards.)

If you haven’t ordered your new PC yet, be sure to ask when you buy whether it comes with a system restore CD or a real Windows CD.

If a new PC doesn’t come with a real, bootable Windows CD and I don’t have any other means to get one, I wouldn’t buy the PC. Period. That’s how important this is.

Why study genealogy?

Dave Farquhar Genealogy

Mom made one of those rare but very valuable genealogical finds recently: A cache of information about a family line that’s more complete than what we had. It seems like the longer you do this, the less often it happens, but the more you appreciate it.

It got me thinking about why these kinds of finds are exciting. Indeed, to a non-genealogist, it probably seems weird.First, there is a religious element to it. I’m not one who believes there’s anything I can do for my dead relatives–they’re either in a better place now or they’re not. But the Bible does say to honor your father and your mother, and that’s the only commandment that comes with a promise: That it may go well with you, and you may live long on the earth.

Recovering and preserving your family history is one way you can honor your parents. So that’s a motivation.

About 10 years ago, when I was dissatisfied with where my life had gone, I was reading a book that encouraged you to write down what you remember about your parents and grandparents. That book argued that if you understood them, you would understand yourself better. I’ve seen myself make the same mistakes Dad made in his professional career, or at least start walking down the same roads he did. Recognizing the potential to make those mistakes hasn’t completely prevented them, but I do move around less than Dad did–and Dad worked in an era when people did tend to spend entire careers in one place, as opposed to my era, when virtually all workers are regarded as mercenaries and people start to wonder what’s wrong with you if you stay more than five years in one place.

The more I study genealogy, the more merit I think there is in that. When I read about my ancestors, I see I have some of the same traits as people who lived a century or more ago, who I never met. I can’t sit down and talk with my great great grandfather, Andrew Davis McQueen, about his philosophy about debt and money, but to my great great grandson, our stories would look very similar. I don’t hide money as creatively as he did, but banks are more closely regulated now–they have to be more honest now than they were then.

I find it ironic that the same career choices the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory said I should consider are the careers that tend to run in my family lines. But maybe it’s not ironic. Those traits came from somewhere.

You can tell from looking at me that I’m a Farquhar, both from the way I look and the way I act. But there’s plenty of Kimrey and McQueen in me too. And now that I’m fresh from reading about the Tope line, that explains where some of my other tendencies might have come from.

But there’s one other thing that motivates me to study genealogy.

There generally are only two things that kill Farquhar males, and those two things are heart attack and stroke. Heart attacks are a more recent phenomenon, but get into the early 20th century, and virtually every Farquhar male whose cause of death is recorded says the same thing: apoplexy. In today’s language, stroke.

Because I study genealogy, I know how long most of them lived and how they died. Because of that, I live with the belief that I have a choice: I can be watching myself right now and take precautions knowing that I’m prone to those two things and I can share that information with my doctor, or my life can be more than half over now.

I can choose life. And if the other Farquhars are like Dad, they’d be glad I did.

I don’t know what interest, if any, future generations will have in my family history. I have no idea whatsoever what information they’ll be able to glean from it that we can’t now. But I do think it’s fairly certain there will be someone who will want it.

I’ve lost some of my zest for pursuing information. I’m sure that will return because I’ve seen it come and go before. But so far I’ve proven to be pretty good at preserving that information. And that’s probably about as important.

How I saved $380 on a cellphone plan

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

I read earlier this year how some families are spending more than $1,000 a month on cellular phone bills. To me, it’s absolutely ridiculous to pay more than some people pay for their mortgage for communication. When I was growing up, a second phone line ($25 or so per month) was a luxury most families didn’t indulge in.

To me, the cel is primarily for emergencies. I have a pretty liberal definition of emergency–if I’m on my way home from work and my wife wants me to stop at the grocery store to pick up a couple of things, I think that’s reasonable. What I don’t think is reasonable is the expectation that I’ll spend all the time I spend in my car yakking on the phone. If it’s going to take more than a couple of minutes, we’ll talk on my landline when I get home.

Here’s how to have a phone for emergencies for less than $9 per month.The first thing is to get your hands on a phone. You may very well be able to avoid buying one in the store or signing a contract you don’t want to sign in order to get a free one. My mother in law gave us her old phone after she upgraded to a newer, snazzier one. That saved us around $20.

Chances are you may have to buy a prepaid phone outright. Some of them cost as little as $30, which isn’t bad, considering you could easily spend $30 trying to hunt down a new battery and charger for a used phone.

And I just let the cat out of the bag. The key is to buy a prepaid plan, rather than getting on the monthly contract treadmill.

If you buy a prepaid phone, all you have to do is activate it. If you get a secondhand phone, you need a new SIM card. In our case, they charged $10 for the new card. This is why I’m not too keen on spending money on a used phone because by the time you buy a SIM card, a new battery, and a charger you can easily spend more getting a used phone going than you’d spend on a new one. If you luck into a good, working phone for free like we did, great. If not, spend the 30 bucks.

The salesperson will undoubtedly try to upsell you to a monthly plan. In our case, she didn’t even try to upsell us to the cheapest monthly plan–she tried to sell us the $40/month plan, not the $30/month plan. Don’t let the salesperson get very far into the pitch. I told her we expected to use the phone once or twice a week and not for much more than 15 minutes a day.

It’s hard to upsell you to a 500-minute plan when you say something like that.

And this is the key to saving money on all purchases. Do your homework, and go in knowing what it is you want from the start. The salesperson’s job is to get you to buy a phone that does more things than most people do with their computers. Since most of us carry a phone so we can either be reached in an emergency or reach someone else in an emergency, we don’t need a computer. Keep the goal in mind and refuse to pay extra for functionality you aren’t going to use.

After she swapped the card in the phone, we just had to buy minutes. We buy minutes in $25 increments, and we get 90 days to use them. In our case, it costs a dollar a day to use the phone (you’re only charged on the days you use it), and 10 cents per minute. The other plan charges a flat 25 cents a minute. Depending on how we end up using the phone, the 25-cent plan might be better. We’ll find out. The nice thing is that since we have no monthly contract, we can walk away just as soon as we’ve used up the minutes and switch to something else.

And after the first day of use, I can say it’s not bad. At the end of every call, I get a text message telling me how much is left on my balance. That makes budgeting the minutes very easy. I’ve never seen a monthly plan do that.

I think we can get what we need with the prepaid plan. We have a land line, which we use for normal, everyday calls. That costs $24 a month if you eliminate all of the extras. You don’t need call waiting if you have a cellular phone–people can call you on that and leave a message if your line is busy. You don’t need call notes if you have an answering machine. Those cost $10 and you only have to pay for them once. Call forwarding is useless. Caller ID is useful for screening your calls, but you can screen your calls with your answering machine too, and that doesn’t cost anything.

If you’re subscribing to those things on your land line, I suggest you take a long, hard look at those features and see if you’re getting any real benefit from them.

Some people suggest getting rid of the landline altogether, but I’m not so keen on that. For $24 a month, I can make all the local calls I want for free, with no restrictions on use. And people can call me all they want for free. Plus, having the phone line lets me get DSL for $20 a month. The long distance stinks, but we don’t make a lot of long-distance calls.

I’m almost certain I would quickly end up spending more than $24 per month to make up for not having the landline.

I’ll have a better idea in 90 days if this is going to work, but for now it looks like I’ll be able to meet my cellular needs for a Scrooge-like $8.34 a month.

Improve your Internet connection speed by adjusting your MTU

Dave Farquhar Windows

Way back when the majority of people used 56K modems to access the Internet and I was writing my book on system performance, a favorite computer enthusiast’s tweak was the MTU.

Don’t make the mistake I made though, and assume MTU adjustments are just for people with modems. They aren’t. I just adjusted the MTU on two of my Windows boxes and the speed improvement was dramatic.
I’ve had to adjust the MTU on my Web server to deal with a weird connectivity issue some people were having, but it never occurred to me that my workstations would benefit from a similar adjustment.

Figuring out the optimal MTU and then digging out the place to make the change can be a difficult process. It’s much faster and easier to use a utility that does the job for you. Visit TinyApps, one of my all-time favorite web sites, and scroll down to “Other Network Tools.” There you’ll find TCP Optimizer. It’s a 400K download so it’ll go pretty fast. You’ll be able to download it and run it much faster than you’d be able to read about the process.

I like this tool because it’s small and you can just download and run it, without installing it or anything. When you’re done with it, you can keep it in case you think you might ever need it again, or you can just delete it and not have any leftover mung clogging up your PC.

The default settings for Windows assume an Ethernet connection, but they don’t take any overhead into account. If you have DSL and your ISP uses PPPoE authentication (which most do), that takes overhead. If you’re using a router to firewall your network and share your cable or DSL connection between multiple PCs (which you should do), that takes overhead.

That’s what makes a tool like this nice. It eliminates the trial and error. You run it, make the changes it says, and then you have a faster Internet connection. And it’s one more thing you can do when you think you need a faster computer. In this case, having the faster computer probably wouldn’t have made much difference at all.

Save energy and money with smart power strips

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , , , , ,

I stumbled across this money-saving tip today. A company called Bits Limited sells “smart” power strips. Here’s how they work: You plug a device into one of the plugs, and when you turn that device on, it switches power on to other outlets. The strip also figures out how much energy the device uses when it’s off, so when it senses you’ve turned that device off, it cuts power to those other outlets.

Here’s an obvious use: Plug your TV into the master outlet, then plug your VCR, DVD player, cable box (or powered antenna if you’re a cable-hating tightwad like me) into the autoswitching outlets.The reason these strips work is because most home appliances use power even when they’re switched off. A powered-off TV uses power because part of it has to stay on all the time waiting for you to hit the power button on your remote. The same thing is true of your DVD player, VCR, and anything else that has a remote. Any device that uses a plug-in “wall wart” transformer is also consuming power. The transformer chews up a watt or two even if the device it powers is turned off.

So if you can bring yourself to walk over to the TV to turn it on rather than using the remote, you can buy the cheapest $31 model for each TV in your house and plug your stuff into that. (To save more money, check for refurbs.)

The manufacturer states one of these devices can save you $11.55 a month, on average, when used with a computer.

The savings won’t be as high with other devices like TVs, but you can expect to save a few dollars and in the summer, you’ll save slightly more because those devices won’t be generating excess heat that your air conditioner has to dissipate. Each strip you buy should pay for itself in less than a year.

Plus, those wall warts will last longer if power is cut to them when they aren’t in use. I’ve come across numerous “broken” old-school video game machines whose only problem was a burned-out wall wart. Replacements can be pricey ($10-$20), so if these power strips save you from having to replace two of those over the lifetime of the unit, they pay for themselves right there.

The company also sells beefier units with more outlets and more protection intended for computers. The idea there is you can plug the computer in, and when you turn your computer off, it will automatically shut off your monitor, printer, and any other peripherals you have in order to save power.

I have mixed feelings on using these with computers. From an energy consumption standpoint, having a computer powered on all the time is comparable to having the lights on in the room all the time–and we’re talking old-fashioned incandescents here, not CFLs. So plugging your computer into one of these devices and turning it off when you’re not using it would save a lot of power. While computer monitors should be turned off when not in use, there’s nothing worse for the computer itself than turning it off and on repeatedly. I leave my computers on all the time, and in the last 10 years, I’ve had two hardware failures. One was a hard drive crash in a laptop (very difficult to avoid), and the other was a dead power supply in an HP Pavillion desktop after a power failure. As underpowered as that power supply was, that failure probably was inevitable too. Two failures in 10 years is a pretty good record.

Electricity is expensive, but computer failures are expensive too. I prefer to leave my computers on, save power where I can (I own several computers but they all only print to one printer, for example), and maximize my computers’ life expectancy.

I’m thinking very seriously about at least ordering one of these for the living-room television. It won’t pay for itself as quickly as the programmable thermostat did, but they only cost about $5-$10 more than a traditional power strip with comparable protection ratings. If I look at them as a $10 investment instead of a $30 investment, they’ll pay for themselves pretty fast.

I did go looking for other manufacturers. It appears that Fellowes made these in the past but has discontinued them. For now, it appears Bits Ltd’s offerings are the easiest ones to find. It would be nice if that changed.

A crude way to get some of the benefit of these is to use an electrical outlet timer. Plug the timer into the wall, plug your power strip into the timer (assuming the timer has a grounded outlet), then set the timer to cut the power off at night. The savings won’t be as dramatic, but if you happen to have a timer or two around the house to control Christmas lights, you might as well put them to use saving you some money during the other 10 months of the year.

Optimizing Firefox

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

Firefox is a better browser than Internet Explorer by a long shot, but at times it’s made me wonder if it’s strayed from its original mission of being a lean, quick, simple browser based on the Mozilla engine.

I’ve seen several “Optimizing Firefox” guides and most of them talk very little about performance, and the ones I did find were not only disappointing, they also appear to be widely copied verbatim without attribution. So here’s what I do to shaq-fu Firefox into shape.Try out Firetune. Firetune is a wizard-like program that configures most of the common Firefox tweaks based on criteria you select. In my case, since I have a P3-700 with 192 megs of RAM, I selected Slow computer/Fast connection on the Performance tab, and Optimize Firefox memory usage on the tab labeled Other useful settings. For me, the payoff was immediate.

Install PDF Download. If you view a PDF file online, Firefox keeps Acrobat in memory essentially forever, where it does nothing but chew up precious memory until the next time you view a PDF, which might be in a minute, or it might be next month. Take control over this behavior by installing PDF Download.

By default, after installing PDF Download, you’ll get a dialog box asking what you want to do when confronted with a PDF file. If you click the View PDF button, it loads it in your OS default PDF viewer. This behavior is less seamless than viewing the PDF directly in your browser, but it’s much better for performance because after you close the file, the viewer unloads from memory. For even better performance, forget about Adobe’s Acrobat Reader and install Foxit Reader, which is much smaller and faster. By default, when you install Foxit Reader, it will make itself your OS default PDF viewer. Trust me, this is what you’ll want.

On my 700 MHz P3 running Windows 2000, PDF documents display in one second with PDF Download and Foxit Reader installed. That’s faster than Acrobat ever was, even if it was already in memory.

I like the combination so much, I went to Tools, PDF Download Options, and set the default action to Open PDF, rather than displaying the dialog box. Now I no longer dread downloading PDFs from the Web.

Optimize memory usage a bit more. Type about:config into a browser window and scroll down to browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers. The default value is -1, which will determine the number of pages in your browser history to cache based on the amount of memory you have. I set it to 1, since I do tend to use my browser’s back button a lot. If you almost never find yourself clicking the back button, or you have a very low-memory machine, set this to 0. Each page it stores takes up about 4 megs of RAM.

Clear your downloads. Hit ctrl-j to bring up the download manager and clear it out. Too many entries slows Firefox down, partly because it increases memory usage.

Keep your version current. Often newer versions of software are slower and fatter than the old versions, but newer versions of Firefox are often faster than older versions because memory leaks and performance problems tend to get fixed in newer versions. I don’t recommend running beta or preview release versions, and I’m not all that crazy about .0 versions either (when Firefox 3.0 is released, I’ll wait until version 3.0.0.1 comes out). I just upgraded an old computer that had been running a very early Firefox 1.0 to 2.0.0.4, and the difference is incredible.

For what it’s worth, version 2.0.0.4 (the current version) running with these changes feels very zippy on a P3-700 with 192 megs of RAM.

The Police put on an unforgettable show

Dave Farquhar Music

Wow.

The Police weren’t perfect last night, and, perfectionists that they are, they probably weren’t completely satisfied with their performance, but it certainly was more than good enough. I’ll get in lots of trouble for saying this I’m sure, but their performance left me wondering, in terms of raw ability, how much better could The Beatles have been?

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I’m going to see The Police tonight

Dave Farquhar Music

The reunited Police are playing St. Louis tonight. I’ll be there with my wife, sister, and brother in law.It should be fun. It might not even be much of a stretch to call it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. They haven’t toured since 1984, when I was 9.

People talk about the band reworking some of the songs, so they don’t necessarily sound exactly like they did 25 years ago. But that’s to be expected. The Cure has always reworked its songs, if only because its lineup has changed so much over the years. Even when The Police got back together in 1986 they were tinkering with the sound of their old songs. Exhibit A would be Don’t Stand So Close to Me. In an interview published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this morning, Stewart Copeland says they still can’t get that song to sound how they want. I’m guessing Sting wants to play it slower than the original and Copeland wants to play it faster, but that’s just a guess.

I’m looking forward to it. It never sounded like this was going to turn into a full-blown, lasting reunion. When they toured last, in 1984, I was too young to care and certainly too young to go. Given the volatility of the three personalities involved, it’s unlikely they could stay together much longer than one tour even if they wanted to.

The funny thing is seeing The Police referred to as a Classic Rock outfit in print. New Wave initially was a reaction against arena rock (which became what people traditionally call "classic rock") and disco. But their rock-reggae sound was hard to classify when it was new, so I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that it’s hard to classify now.