Author: Dave Farquhar

How to find motivation to balance your budget

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

This week I read a story on Get Rich Slowly about a couple who refuses to budget. The conversation ended when the person who needed to budget bragged about getting five shrubs on sale for $10 each. She didn’t need them, but the deal was too good to pass up.Consumerism is an easy trap to fall into because of easy credit, and the messages are all around us. Most people who know me probably categorize me as an extreme cheapskate. Certainly there are lots of things I could be doing that I don’t, but even by doing a few little things you can improve your financial situation immensely.

Watch less TV. I think this is a really big one, because TV is the primary source of marketing messages. It’s not just the commercials either. The TV shows give lots of messages about how you’re supposed to live. It’s not a realistic picture.

At one point in my life I was able to go a year without watching TV, just watching the World Series each year. I watch more now. I try to catch This Old House on Sunday evenings and sometimes I’ll watch a show with my wife, so I probably watch 3-4 hours a week now. But that’s a lot less than average.

My advice to someone who wants to watch more TV than I do would be to watch older movies (1940s-1960s), as that would make it harder to compare your life to someone else’s. Plus, there’s a lot less product placement and other marketing shenanigans going on, and if you watch it on video, no commercials.

Have realistic expectations. A lot of 20-somethings seem to think they have to have furniture as nice as their parents. That’s unrealistic and sometimes impractical. The previous generation didn’t always have what they have now. Walk into the home of a 50-something, and some of the furniture will be new, but some of it will be 10-15 years old, possibly more. The furnishings were bought over the course of many years. Plus, nicer things are impractical when you have kids running around. There will be spills and stains and dirt. Kids need to be taught to respect things, but what’s the point of ruining a $1,000 sofa to teach the lesson? It’s better to put something older and cheaper in harm’s way instead–much easier on the credit card and on your sanity.

Budget. A budget isn’t some mystical thing. It’s a simple list of your money as it comes and goes. It can be as simple as a spreadsheet. In one column, list all your sources of income–your paycheck, plus anything you make on the side. Add up that total.

In another column, list your monthly expenses. That’s everything–your car payment, rent or mortgage, credit card bills, utility bills, gasoline, food, and entertainment. You may have to save your receipts for a month to do this realistically. Add up that total. Hopefully it’s a smaller number than the first total.

I first did this in college when I was treasurer for my fraternity. We were in serious financial trouble but nobody knew why. I grabbed the checkbook, did the simple analysis I described above, and figured out we were spending more than $400 per member every month. We were only charging $380 a month for people to live there.

When we couldn’t raise rates, I started cancelling things. I cancelled the Super Bowl Party. I cancelled cable TV in the lounge. If it wasn’t a basic necessity of life, it went. It made me unpopular and it didn’t balance the budget, but it cut the shortfall.

I’m guessing most of the people who voted against me raising rates are having more trouble paying their bills today than they need to.

The expenses involved in a personal budget are different than for an organization, but the principles are identical. You still need to have more coming in every month than comes out, and if you can’t figure out how to make more, the only way to have more money is to spend less.

Reward yourself. Practically. A few years ago my budget was tight and I’d taken on an expensive hobby. Then I realized what I spent on food every day. It started with $1 for a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Lunch was $5 at the cafeteria. And usually I spent another dollar or two in the vending machine. I let my ego tell me it wasn’t worth my time to pack a lunch.

Then I did this math equation: (365-52-52-10-10)*7 and came up with $1,687. I was spending $1,687 a year on (mostly) bad food because I thought I was too important to pack my own lunch.

I was also making about $15,000 a year less than I make now. Dice.com tells me I’m slightly underpaid now, let alone then. Who was I kidding? That $1,687 was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

So I went to the store, bought a Thermos and a big can of coffee, bought some instant oatmeal and some breakfast bars and granola bars, and started packing fruit and sandwiches. What was left became my hobby budget.

I couldn’t motivate myself to cut that expense just to have more money, but being able to afford something I otherwise couldn’t was enough motivation for me. Eventually I shrunk the hobby budget and started using that money to pay down debt.

But had my situation been different I don’t think it would have been a bad thing, necessarily, to keep using that to fund a hobby. It’s easy to get discouraged when it seems like everyone else is passing you by, even if they’re passing you by on borrowed money.

Look at opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is about the only thing I remember from college economics. The theory goes like this: The cost of a new car isn’t $20,000. It’s what else I could have done with that money. So the cost of a new car is a plasma TV ($5,000), a high-def DVD player ($500), a nice computer ($1,500), a new high-efficiency furnace ($4,000), a nice vacation ($3,000), all three current generation video game systems (roughly $1,000), a new living room set ($2,000), and you’d still have $3,000 left to replace two or three appliances with high-end models, or all your major appliances with new low-to-mid-range models.

Would it be worth driving an older car for a few more years to be able to afford to go on a home-improvement binge like that?

Or here’s the way I prefer to look at it. I could invest that money conservatively, using a no-load index fund that just does exactly what the Dow Jones Industrial Average does. Historically, money invested in the DJIA doubles every seven years. Some seven-year periods are better than others, of course. If I dump $20,000 into that kind of a fund, it will be worth $320,000 in 28 years.

The sticker price on the Honda Civic sitting in my driveway was around $15,000, but that’s not what it cost me. It didn’t cost $16,500 either (I paid some interest on it because I didn’t have the cash to buy it outright immediately). It cost $264,000.

I know some people look down on me for driving what’s now a five-year-old car, but I can build myself a very nice nest egg just by keeping my cars two or three times as long as everyone else does. Will they still be looking down on me if I retire at 65 and they have to work 10 more years because they still have debt to pay off?

If the cost of a secure future is driving a car typical of what 16-year-olds drive, I’ll pay that price. It’s a bargain.

Don’t pay interest. If you have a choice between financing something and waiting a while and paying cash, wait and pay cash. Paying interest is like paying rent. It’s paying money off and having nothing to show for it in the end.

I do use interest-free periods to buy things because that gives me a little more time to get the money together. I financed a furnace earlier this year because they offered 6 months same as cash. I probably could have paid cash on the spot but it would have been less comfortable. Being able to spread my payments out over six months allows me to pay more on the mortgage, which does charge interest.

Run the right version of Windows for your PC

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , ,

I said I was done writing about system optimization. I changed my mind. I have one more thing, and it seems appropriate, now that Vista upgrades are available.

Be very wary about upgrading your version of Windows.There are a few Vista-only titles out there, and there will be some more, but the majority of titles aren’t. Walk into a software aisle and you’ll still find a lot of software that will run on Windows 95 (or possibly 98), assuming the computer meets the hardware requirements.

I’m typing this on an 800 MHz HP Pavilion 6835. Sure, it’s outmoded–for around $125, I could swap in an Athlon 64 motherboard that would give me 4-5x the CPU power and that would be considered a low-end PC by today’s standards–but this one’s peppy. I run Windows ME on it. Windows 2000 would be more stable but I’m lazy. I wouldn’t try XP on it. When XP came out, this system was already old.

Technically, XP will install on a 133 MHz Pentium if it has enough RAM. I’ve seen it done, and I’ve seen it try to run on one. It’s not pretty. I really wouldn’t try running XP on anything less than a 1 GHz PC with 256 megs of RAM, because that was the standard PC at the time of XP’s release. But believe it or not, if you install Windows 95 and Office 95 on that Pentium-133, it’s a reasonably nice machine–because that was a high-end box in 1995 when Windows 95 and Office 95 came out.

So when you’re refurbishing an old machine, try to install whatever the current version of Windows was when it was new. The PC will run a lot better. Here’s a guide.

Windows 95: Released August 1995
Typical PC of the time: 486, 66 MHz
Hot PC of the time: Pentium, 133 MHz

Windows NT 4.0: Released July 1996
Typical PC of the time: Pentium, 75 MHz
Hot PC of the time: Pentium Pro, 200 MHz

Windows 98: Released June 1998
Typical PC of the time: Pentium, 233 MHz
Hot PC of the time: Pentium II, 333 MHz

Windows 2000: Released February 2000
Typical PC of the time: Pentium III or Athlon, 600 MHz
Hot PC of the time: Pentium III or Athlon, 1 GHz

Windows XP: Released October 2001
Typical PC of the time: Pentium 4, 1.5 GHz
Hot PC of the time: Pentium 4 or Athlon, 2+ GHz

Windows Vista: Released January 2007
From what I understand, even a hot PC of 2007 has difficulty running it. I haven’t seen Vista yet; my employer is still running XP for everything.

Of course, if you install as much memory as the system will take, you can push your limits, since Windows is often more memory-bound than CPU-bound. I also try to replace the hard drive with the fastest model I can budget for. Don’t worry if the drive has a faster DMA rate than the controller on the board; you’ll still benefit from the faster seek times and better throughput of a newer drive. If the new drive saturates the bus, it could be worse–I guarantee the old one didn’t.

How I became interested in system optimization

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

I’ve talked system optimization a lot over the past week. I think I’m done for now, so I’ll talk about why you would want to do these things, and how I got interested in it.My first computer was a Commodore 64. With Commodores, all optimization was software. The hardware was all finely tuned and the timing was precise, so you couldn’t just ramp up the clock speed of the CPU to make the system go faster. But there were lots of things you could do in software to do things like improve the speed of the disk drive.

I moved to an Amiga in the early 1990s and I became interested in a project called ARP, short for AmigaDOS Replacement Project. The Amiga had a command line, and its command line tools were mostly ports of old tools from an obsolete operating system called Tripos, written in BCPL, a predecessor of C. ARP tools were written in either C or 68K assembler and gave the functionality of the originals, but they were smaller, so they loaded and ran faster. I always looked for ways to make my Amiga run faster and use less memory.

In 1994 I took a job selling PCs. My boss talked about how his 16 MHz 386sx felt more responsive than the 33 MHz 486s we sold so many of. So I started learning about PC optimization too. There was a lot you could do just in software.

So I’ve remained interested in this idea for probably 20 years.

Just this week I put an old Windows ME box through the regimen, and it’s definitely a lot peppier now.

I talked about registry optimization and file cleanup, defragmentation, antivirus, firewalls, and defragmentation again.

Do these things, and in most cases you can squeeze at least an extra year out of the life of a system. I squeeze more like five.

How to defrag when defrag just keeps starting over and over

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

I’ve seen many spyware-infested Windows 95/98 boxes that just won’t defrag no matter what you do. Defrag starts, gets part of the way through, then the disk changes and it starts over again. Leave the system alone for dozens of hours and it might finish, but probably not.Microsoft has some remedies, starting with hitting ctrl-alt-del and killing everything except explorer and systray, and disabling your quick launch bar (right-click on the gray bar on the bottom of the screen, select Toolbars, and de-select Quick Launch). That can help, but not always.

I’ve also heard of downloading the Windows ME version of Defrag.exe and running that instead of the older version if you’re running an older version of Windows 9x, since Windows ME’s defrag is supposed to work better. I guess that and the USB support were the only things in Windows ME that worked better.

Disabling your antivirus realtime scanning also helps, since it’s always accessing the disk.

But sometimes even doing those things won’t work. The system in my living room is a prime example. It’s clean, has no spyware or anything else but still won’t defrag. I could blow it away and reinstall, but I’m too lazy. For the most part the system works well enough for what I need it to do, so I’d rather not mess with it too much.

One thing you can do is reboot the system into safe mode, and run Defrag from there. The performance won’t be stellar since Windows will be using generic drivers rather than the optimized drivers for your particular computer, but Windows won’t be running anything else special, so the process will be able to finish without interference. Boot in safe mode, give your computer a few hours, and it will at least have a chance to finish.

Another option is to boot off a live CD, such as BartPE, and run JKDefrag on it. This would give you the advantage of a fully 32-bit environment with better drivers than Windows 9x safe mode, so the defragment will finish more quickly.

Defragmenting this way is terribly inconvenient of course, but like I’ve said before, it’s something you don’t have to do very often. Once a year will probably keep your computer running acceptably.

Take some steps to improve your health today

Dave Farquhar Health , , , , , ,

So Michael Moore has a new movie out, this time taking on the touchy topic of health care. I was a very outspoken opponent of Hillary Clinton’s plan 15 years ago. I’m extremely disappointed that the alternative plans crafted by the Republicans dropped as soon as the Clinton plan died.

I won’t argue that the U.S. health care system is terrible now. I will argue that some of the fault belongs to the person in our mirrors though. (And I don’t want to be rude, but Michael Moore needs to take some personal responsibility too.)The best editorial I ever saw about the Clinton plan was written by Andy Rooney. What he said then is even more true today: We drag our lard butts to the doctor because we won’t eat right, and we complain when the doctors can’t cure our problems which are to at least a certain degree, self-inflicted. Then he twisted the knife a bit, pointing out that Clinton was fond of going to McDonald’s with camera crews in tow. He said something like, “Health care is in trouble. Now excuse me while I go have a triple-cheesy-greasy with double fries. Do as I day, not as I do.”

Now to be entirely fair, society encourages us to eat out a lot. It tells us that’s how to be good parents, it’s a good way to take a load off and relieve stress, and who knows how many messages–most of which aren’t true. Remember, the originator of the message is selling something. Always always remember that.

I remember John C. Dvorak once remarking on his blog, “Someone wants us fat.” Give the little man a big cigar! The food industry wants us fat because we’ll eat more. The drug industry wants us fat because we’ll take more drugs. And once both of them get us up on that treadmill, they stand to make billions. If not trillions.

I still believe, with everything I have, that the American diet (if it can be called that) is largely to blame. We eat a lot of empty food that does our bodies no good, but does plenty of harm. Dad was saying 30 years ago that biscuits and gravy cause cancer. Today, guess what? They’re saying that sausages and gravies and highly cooked fats cause cancer. Sausage gravy does all the wrong things about as well as anything, but hot dogs are another good example.

Fast-food hamburgers may not necessarily cause cancer, but they sure do a dandy job of giving you a heart attack.

Vegetarians say they have the answer, but I’m not entirely convinced vegetarianism is absolutely necessary, nor is it a panacea. I see plenty of vegetarian cookbooks that do nothing but douse the vegetables in butter and cheese. Eat like that, and you won’t be any thinner or healthier than anyone else.

I do believe the main reason healthy vegetarians are healthy is because they pay attention. They look at the ingredients to make sure there’s no meat in there, and if there’s anything in the ingredients that they can’t pronounce, they probably end up putting it back since they can’t prove it didn’t come from an animal. And as a result, they tend to end up eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, breads that don’t have a lot of ingredients in them, and other things that provide a lot of nutrition in their calories.

I’m also convinced this is why most fad diets work initially. If you hopped on the Atkins bandwagon in the early 1990s before it became hugely popular (it had actually been around since the early 1970s), it was entirely possible to lose weight, because you would be limited largely to unprocessed meats and vegetables. But I noticed around 2000 or 2001 that a lot of people were on Atkins and weren’t losing any weight at all on it. Atkins was still saying the same things, but it wasn’t working anymore. The difference? Everyone and his uncle was peddling Atkins-friendly junk foods. Instead of being limited to meats and vegetables you cooked yourself, you could microwave processed Atkins-friendly TV dinners and gorge yourself afterward on Atkins-friendly cookies and ice cream.

People stopped losing weight, their cholesterol soared, and lots of companies made lots of money. Then the gravy train ended, but that’s OK because there’s always another one.

This is a boom for drug companies too. When your cholesterol goes sky-high, the commercials say there’s no need to change your diet. You can just pop an anti-cholesterol pill. What they don’t tell you is that the pill not only lowers your cholesterol, it also wipes out your B vitamins. So now your cholesterol is lowered, but you’re depressed and have carpal tunnel syndrome (just two things a deficiency in B vitamins can cause). So now you need another pill. Funny, the same company that makes the most popular drug for cholesterol also makes one of the most popular drugs for depression.

And that popular drug has some side effects such as abdominal pain and/or headache, sexual disfunction, and other things. But there are pills for that too.

Is it any wonder we never really get better? We take a pill for one thing, and the pill fixes that, but then we get something else. The domino effect starts, and it’s possible to go from being on no drugs to being on five in a matter of months.

About a year ago, my wife was out talking to someone. She mentioned she was diabetic. The elderly gentleman she was conversing with said he was too. They talked some more, and it turned out he became diabetic as a teenager, just as she had. He seemed like he’d lived a long and healthy life to her, so she asked if he had any secrets to share. He did. “Stay away from junk food, and you’ll be fine.”

Good advice. Simple advice. Unfortunately it’s difficult to follow, seeing as every other commercial between the hours of 4 and 8 is for junk food. Most of the rest are for drugs, with the occasional car commercial thrown in.

Here are some starting points my wife and I have picked up from the books of Dr. Mark Hyman.

1. Avoid processed food. Buy your groceries from the outer ring of the grocery store, staying out of the aisles.

2. Avoid high-fructose corn syrup. This ultra-common sweetener is very cheap, but your body doesn’t know what to do with it. Eat lots of sugar and eventually you feel full, but if you eat the same amount of high fructose corn syrup, you’ll only crave more. Is it any wonder food companies love this stuff? It costs half as much, and you eat twice as much. What’s that mean? Profit!

And guess what? Just about anything that comes in a box or a package has lots of it. When I went in search of a loaf of bread that didn’t have high fructose corn syrup in it, I was only able to find one kind, and that included all of the premium brands that promote themselves as healthy. So what did we do? We bake our own bread in a breadmaker now instead.

3. Avoid trans-fats and hydrogenated oils. Partially hydrogenated is just as bad, it just sounds a little better. This process makes food last longer on the shelf, which decreases costs, but again, your body doesn’t know what to do with it. It raises cholesterol levels but gives no nutritional benefit.

Once again, most products that come in a package have lots of them. Fortunately the tide is turning against this trend. Hopefully it lasts.

4. Eat smaller portions of meat and larger portions of fruits and vegetables. Meats aren’t necessarily all bad, although there’s little question that the hormones and other things the animals are given aren’t exactly good for us. There’s also no reason you have to eat meat at every meal, other than status. I usually have meat at one meal.

Fresh fruits and vegetables give more nutrients than meat and fewer undesirable side effects like higher cholesterol.

5. Eat whole foods that are as fresh as possible. Bleached white flour loses its nutrients. Canned vegetables lose most of their nutrients. Cook fresh, in-season vegetables and you’ll be healthier.

6. Watch the salads. How is it that people can eat salads all the time and still not lose any weight? Look at a McDonald’s nutritional guide and you’ll see most of their salads have as many calories as one of their sandwiches. Or more. They put the same junk in their salads as their sandwiches. It just looks healthy.

And even if you have a simple, traditional salad of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and shredded carrots, watch the dressings. A tablespoon of any of the common, traditional dressings has anywhere from 50-75 calories, and odds are you’ll use at least three of them. Possibly more. You could waste 10 percent of a 1,500 calorie diet on a condiment.

I don’t disagree that there’s something wrong with our medical system. That much is obvious. But the health problems that we’re creating and perpetuating with our current lifestyle would bring any medical system to its knees.

Trust me. The doctors aren’t all happy. My dad was one. He told me that if I ever told him I wanted to be a doctor, he’d lock me in my room for 7 years. Dad didn’t mind being a doctor, but he hated dealing with insurance companies and the government.

One day one of my coworkers was arguing with an insurance adjustor about a medical procedure his wife needed. The doctor said she needed it. The insurance adjustor said she didn’t, and insurance wasn’t going to cover it.

I told him to ask the insurance adjustor where he went to medical school.

Doctors go to school for a minimum of six years. I searched for an insurance adjustor job to see what the qualifications were. A two-year degree was all that was necessary. It didn’t specify that two-year degree had to be in biology or anything else relevant.

The current system is great for the drug industry, the insurance industry, and the food industry. If the system changes, I don’t expect it will get any worse for them. They have lots of lobbyists, and lots of money at stake.

I don’t expect it will get all that much better for us. The best thing for us to do is to take steps to need to use it less.

And ironically, if we use the system less and reduce the burden on it, it should get better.

Rod Beck is a sad loss

Dave Farquhar Baseball

Rod Beck was once one of the most intimidating relief pitchers in baseball. Part of it was because he could throw a baseball hard, but part of it was because he looked like the meanest guy in the entire south.

I never was much of a fan, until I read the story of his 2003 comeback. He was pitching in the minor leagues hoping someone would need him, living in an RV parked outside the stadium, hanging out with the fans afterward.

That’s class.Search for a picture of Rod Beck and you’ll probably think the word “class” would be the last thing you’d associate with him, but the shoe fits. He didn’t necessarily look the part, but in his down-to-earth way, he modeled it well.

And he did make it back to the majors that year, signing with the San Diego Padres in early June and he had one last great summer, saving 20 games and compiling a sparkling 1.78 ERA while filling in for the Padres’ injured closer, Trevor Hoffman. But then it was over. The next year, he briefly left the Padres to spend two months in a rehab center getting treatment for drug addiction, and after he returned, he struggled through 24 games acting as one of Hoffman’s setup men. The Padres released him in August, and he retired at age 36.

In this day and age of athletes wearing as much bling as possible, driving fancy cars, and otherwise glorifying themselves, it’s nice to remember a player who would walk out to the parking lot at the end of the game, turn on the light, open up the fridge, and talk baseball with whoever wanted to drop in. He knew he had to make a living just like everyone else standing there, and that pretty much everyone there would love to make a living throwing baseballs if they could, and he just happened to have what it takes to do that.

Beck’s cause of death is unknown, but the story of his career ought to be made into a movie. The story of a guy on top of his game, getting hurt, working his way back, spending time in the minors living in the parking lot and hanging out with the fans outside his RV, and then making it back for one last glorious summer, relying on an 86-mile-an-hour fastball and (mostly) heart and guts.

Sounds like a fantastic story to me, except nobody would believe it.

I hope it isn’t forgotten in two months.

The best way to optimize your firewall: Use hardware

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s get back to talking about utility replacements. We last talked about antivirus programs, but what about the other component of what’s commonly now called a “security suite,” the firewall?

The answer is, don’t use firewall software if at all possible–which means every man, woman and child who has a cable or DSL connection. Use a separate device.There are several good reasons for this. First, there’s the fundamental problem with running your security on the same system you’re trying to protect. If your firewall software goes haywire and crashes, you run the risk of being unprotected. It’s much safer to rely on an external device that doesn’t have an Intel or AMD processor in it and isn’t running Windows. So when someone tries to send a Windows exploit or virus to it, it bounces off because the device just doesn’t understand.

The second reason is price. A plain no-frills cable/DSL router/firewall costs about $20 at Newegg today. The unit I generally recommend is the Linksys WRT54G, which sells for about $50 new or as little as $25 used and adds wireless capability. That’s about the same as the retail price of a software firewall anyway, and it gives you better protection without robbing your system of performance.

A cheaper alternative, which was what I used to do when these devices cost $200, was to take an obsolete PC, put in a couple of cheap network cards, and run Freesco on it. It will run on any PC with a 386 processor or better (I recommend a Pentium with PCI slots for ease of setup). A 100 MHz Pentium is more than powerful enough and if you don’t already have an obsolete PC to run it on, you probably won’t have to ask around very long before finding one for a very low price or free. Today I prefer a Linksys-type box though, since they take less space, consume less electricity, generate less heat and noise, and take less time to set up.

Performance is the third reason. Two years ago I was working at a large broadband ISP that will remain nameless. It provides a “high speed security suite” as part of the subscription price. The system requirements for this suite are ridiculous–the suite itself needs anywhere from 128 to 192 megabytes of RAM all to itself to function. Basically, if you have a PC with 256 megs of RAM (which is what a fair number of PCs out there still have), loading this security suite on it will bring it to its knees. But if your firewall is running on a separate device, 256 megs of RAM is a comfortable amount of memory to run Windows XP or 2000 and basic applications.

Reliability is the fourth reason. Every high-speed security suite I’ve ever dealt with, be it a freebie provided by your ISP, or an off-the-shelf suite, hooks itself into winsock.dll. Three of the last four computer problems I’ve fixed have been related to this problem, and the symptoms are difficult to diagnose unless you’ve seen the problem before. Basically the computer loses any and all ability to do any networking, but when you call tech support, enough things work that tech support will probably tell you to reload your operating system. Unfortunately, the WinSockFix utility doesn’t seem to be well-known at ISPs.

If messing around with your Winsock isn’t bad enough, the security suite my former employer provided was overly paranoid about piracy. If you did any number of things, including but not limited to trying to install it on a second PC without getting a second key from the ISP, it would disable itself and not necessarily warn the user that it had left the PC unprotected. It was my job, when I was working there, to go through all of the disabled accounts by hand. It wasn’t an automated process. So if the security suite decided to go jump off a cliff sometime on Friday after I’d pulled the current report, it would be sometime on Monday before I would even be aware of the problem. Given that it usually takes about 20 minutes for some exploit to find an unprotected Windows box sitting on the Internet, that 48-72 hour window that you could be sitting unprotected is anything but ideal.

Things may have changed since I left that employer in November 2005, but if it’s my PC, I’m not willing to risk it. I’d much rather spend $20-$50 on a cable/DSL router to give myself firewall protection that I know I can just set up once and then ignore for a few years and won’t cause my PC to constantly fall behind on the upgrade treadmill.

And finally, the fifth reason to use a hardware firewall is apathy. Software firewalls tend to throw a lot of popups at the user, warning the user that this or that is trying to access the Internet, or come in, or whatever. Most users are likely to do one of two things: either allow everything or deny everything. The result is either a PC on which nothing works, or whose firewall is full of so many holes there might as well not be one. It’s much better to have a hardware firewall that just does its job. If you’re worried about unauthorized applications hitting the Internet, that’s the job of antivirus and antispyware software, not the firewall.

Dave and Emily’s healthy vegan whole-wheat pancake recipe

Dave Farquhar Health

So Emily wanted pancakes. I didn’t mind cooking but I didn’t want to go to the store for eggs. I don’t think we set out to make a vegan recipe, but that’s what we ended up with. This recipe is cheap, easy, and healthy, with no added sugar, no bad fats, and no cholesterol.

It’s only six ingredients, so it’s not much harder than pancakes from a mix, but much healthier.2 cups whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder (I recommend premium aluminum-free baking powder)
1 teaspoon sea salt (table salt works but sea salt gives a little more flavor and lower sodium)
1/2 cup applesauce (I prefer unsweetened)
2 cups vanilla soy milk (vanilla soy milk adds flavor and some sweetness)
2 tablespoons olive oil

Combine the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Add applesauce, oil, and milk. Don’t worry too much if it’s lumpy. Cook on a griddle until you see bubbles, then flip, using a little olive oil to keep it from sticking if necessary. Recipe makes about 12 pancakes.

Serve as you would any other pancake. Try it with fruit and applesauce if you want something healthier than maple syrup.

And here\’s something for you…

Dave Farquhar General ,

Last night my wife and I watched Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, a Steve Martin movie from 1982. It’s a parody of film noir movies from the 1940s and 1950s.Some reviews criticize the plot as being too simple or too unbelievable or too formulaic. I can see the point, but this is a parody. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single parody that had a plot that would have made Shakespeare jealous.

As entertainment, I think this movie is a home run. Even though the movie is about a murder investigation in which Martin’s character gets beat up a lot, it’s not a violent movie. There’s some double entendre in it, but not as much as you would see in a typical sitcom on network TV today. And I don’t think there’s any foul language in it either.

But more importantly, it’s funny, which is good, because that’s what it set out to be. I don’t want to give away the jokes, but the scene where Martin shows up with a puppy for a peace offering had me laughing longer and harder than I’ve laughed in years. And you’ll probably be able to watch the scene two or three times and notice something you didn’t notice the first time.

And if you’re a fan of old movies, you can have fun watching the old clips interspersed within and play guess-the-actor and guess-the-film with them.

If it sounds promising to you, buy it (used copies are pretty inexpensive online–around $5 plus shipping). Or the next time you’re in the mood for a movie and none of the new releases look good, give this oldie a spin.

But don’t blame me if you end up buying it.

Replace your Antivirus software with this freebie and regain your performance

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

Antivirus software is the worst culprit in PC slowdowns. I am not alone in this belief. I don’t suggest going without (not completely) but it’s certainly possible to save lots of money, eliminate subscriptions, eliminate most of the overhead, and still practice (relatively) safe computing while running Windows.

Use Clamwin, the Windows version of ClamAV, and don’t engage in risky behavior (more on that later).Clamwin is free, GPL software, meaning you never have to pay for or renew it. It lacks a realtime scanner, which is the main resource hog for PCs. This may leave you vulnerable to infections, but think about where the majority of infections come from: E-mail, downloads, and drive-by installations. Clamwin comes with hooks into Outlook to scan e-mail attachments for you, and Clamglue is a plugin for Firefox that automatically scans all downloaded files. Of course you’re using Firefox, right? Using a non-Internet Explorer browser is the most effective way to prevent drive-by installations. I don’t use IE on my personal PCs for anything other than running Windows update.

Realtime protection made lots of sense when the main distribution point for viruses was infected floppies, but those days are long gone. This approach protects you against modern viruses without making your multi-gigahertz computer run like a Pentium-75.

I do suggest periodically scanning your system, something that even antivirus packages with realtime protection do. It makes you wonder how much confidence they have in that resource-hogging realtime protection, doesn’t it? Weekly scans are usually adequate; daily scans are better if you suspect some users of your computer engage in risky behavior.

Risky computer behavior

The last virus that ever hit any computer I was using was LoveLetter, which was way back in May 2000. The only reason I got that one was because I had a client who got infected and she just happened to have me in her address book. I don’t know the last time I got a virus before that.

It’s not because I’m lucky, it’s because I’m careful. There are lots of things I don’t do with my computers.

I stay off filesharing networks. Not everything on your favorite MP3-sharing site is what it claims to be, and there are people who believe that if you’re downloading music without paying them for it, they are entirely justified in doing anything they want to you, such as infecting you with a computer virus.

I don’t open e-mail attachments from strangers, or unexpected e-mail attachments from people I know. For that matter, if I don’t recognize the sender of an e-mail message, I probably won’t open it at all, attachment or no attachment.

I don’t run Internet Explorer if I can possibly avoid it. Internet Explorer’s tight integration into the operating system makes it far too easy for people to run software on your computer if you so much as visit a web page. Google tries to identify web pages that might be trying to do this, but a safer option is to use a different web browser that doesn’t understand ActiveX and doesn’t have ties into your underlying operating system.

I don’t install a lot of software downloaded from the Internet. A good rule is not to install any “free” software whatsoever unless it’s licensed under the GNU GPL or another similar open-source license. If you don’t know what that means, learn. Open source means the computer code behind the program is freely available and outside programmers can examine it. If a program distributed that way does anything malicious, someone’s going to figure it out really fast. If I’m going to download and install something that isn’t open source, I only do so when somebody I trust (be it a trusted colleague, a magazine columnist, etc.) recommends it.

I don’t rely on software firewalls. I have a separate cable/DSL router that acts as a firewall and sits between my computers and the Internet. So when the random virus comes around looking for a computer to infect, my firewall doesn’t even speak their language (it doesn’t run Windows and doesn’t have an Intel or AMD processor inside), so the potential infection just bounces right off.

Use a web-based e-mail service instead of a program like Outlook or Outlook Express if you can. If you use something like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, that company’s servers scan your incoming and outgoing e-mail for viruses, so if someone sends a virus to your Yahoo account, you won’t get it. Does your ISP scan your e-mail for you? If you don’t know, you probably should consider getting your e-mail from someone else. Your antivirus should catch it, of course, but it never hurts to have someone else looking out for you too.

If you avoid these practices, you can join me in throwing out your commercial, for-pay antivirus software and reclaim a lot of computer performance too.