Author: Dave Farquhar

"I don’t have enough saved up for repairs on a used car…"

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

I found myself involved in discussion about cars today. Two people are looking to buy something. One’s leaning toward a used car, while the other is bound and determined to buy a new car.

I know which will be retiring first.The logic behind buying used: There are lots of very low-mileage used cars out there, some of which are even recertified, have the bulk of the factory warranty on them, are eligible for an extended warranty, and cost $4,000-$5,000 less than a new car.

The logic behind buying new: For "only" a few thousand more, you get new car with a 100,000 mile warranty in its entirety.

The problem I have with that logic is that I’ve never sunk $4,000 on repairs into a car. The most expensive repair bill I’ve ever faced was $800 for a blown head gasket, and that was on a car that had well over 100,000 miles on it. If you’re paranoid about repairs, you’re much better off, from a financial standpoint, to buy the used car, figure out what the payments on a new car would be, and sock that money away in a bank account so you have it if and when you ever need it.

The person arguing in favor of a new car also argued a new car is more reliable. But not necessarily. A warranty isn’t a guarantee you won’t have problems. It just means that if the problem you have happens to be covered under the warranty, someone else is footing the bill. And no, most warranties don’t cover everything. Sometimes you get a choice between a power train warranty or a bumper-to-bumper warranty which will cover pretty much everything, but that bumper-to-bumper warranty will be a lot shorter.

And a lemon is a lemon, whether it’s new or old. You’re much better off researching what models are reliable and buying one with a little age to it rather than buying something assuming that it’ll be reliable because it’s new. The last thing you need is to get stuck with a lemon and be making high payments on it. Then you have the worst of all possible worlds.

Car companies have programmed us to think we need new cars all the time. It’s a pretty nice scam they have going. They sell us a car, sell us expensive preventative maintenance on it to keep the warranty good, charge a nice fat interest rate on the loan, and then in 3-4 years they convince us it’s time to trade it in for a new one. Then they get to sell the car for a big markup to some other sucker and the cycle starts all over again. Meanwhile, the consumer has nothing tangible or useful to show for it.

Somehow they’re still losing billions of dollars in spite of having one of the sweetest business models ever concocted, but that’s their problem. It shouldn’t be yours.

With proper maintenance (we’re talking things like regular oil changes here), most cars on the road today can go for 200,000 miles. If you’re concerned about breakdowns, carry a cellular phone at all times and get a AAA membership so you’ll have roadside assistance. The cell phone is something most people have anyway, and the AAA membership is a lot cheaper than perpetually making payments on new cars you don’t need.

That’s why the last car I bought was a Honda Civic with about 26,000 miles on it, and I doubt I’ll ever buy a new car again.

Buy a reliable car that you can pay off quickly, and then you can pay your house and other debts off that much more quickly because you won’t be sinking $400 down a bottomless pit every month for the rest of your life.

Getting started in eBay

Dave Farquhar Careers , , , , , ,

When I was hitting estate sales this weekend, an individual holding a sale figured out I was buying things to resell. He assumed I’m an eBay seller and started asking questions about getting started in eBay. I thought they were interesting, so I’ll repeat what I remember of the conversation here.

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Mixing beer and evangelism

Dave Farquhar Christianity

There’s a story in today’s Post-Dispatch about a local congregation and its dispute with the Missouri Baptist Convention. It seems the church has been encouraging its members to go to bars, and the convention isn’t happy about that.

I agree with the pastor of the church: The people aren’t going to come to you, so the church has to find people where they are.I don’t drink. I don’t remember now if the last time I drank alcohol outside of communion was at a friend’s wedding in June 2003, or at my sister’s wedding in September 2003, but in either case, it’s been three years since I had a drink. I generally agree with the Southern Baptist idea that the world would be a better place without alcohol. Alcohol destroyed my relationship with my Dad, and alcohol played a role in the disintegration of two romantic relationships before I met my wife. So I’m not a fan of the stuff.

But there was a time, when I was 23, when I’d go out for a beer with three of the guys from my Bible study group in Columbia, Missouri. We’d meet up for the group, go through the lesson and discussion, then go get a beer. Usually the discussion from the study carried over there. While some fundamentalists disagree, the Bible doesn’t say alcohol consumption is a sin. It says drunkenness is a sin.

I’d rather people didn’t drink, but that’s not practical. Nothing I can do is going to stop people from drinking, so there’s no point in me making a big deal about it.

The Bible is very clear about one other thing though. They say to go find hurting people and bring healing to them. And I really can’t think of a better place to find hurting people than at a bar. When people have had a bad day, a bad week, a bad year, or a bad life and they don’t know what else to do, frequently they go have a drink. It doesn’t solve their problems, but at least it helps them forget them for a while.

And that’s no secret. Even alcoholics know that alcohol doesn’t actually solve any of their problems.

And that’s the natural place for a church to come in. The bar doesn’t have any solutions, but the church does.

Evangelism, whether at a bar or anywhere else, is a gift and it’s possible to do as much harm as good. So if the Missouri Baptist Convention doesn’t know how to evangelize in bars and doesn’t want to do that, it should stay out.

But if a group knows how to do it and is helping people–and The Journey must be doing more than one thing right because it has 1,300 members and has planted another church and is planning to do another–then it shouldn’t be condemned for it. Most churches are aging and shrinking; The Journey’s median age is 29. It’s reaching a generation that very few other churches have had any success reaching.

Frankly, other churches need to be learning from it.

Something to try when ERD Commander’s Locksmith doesn’t work

Dave Farquhar security, Servers and Networking, War Stories, Windows

So maybe you’re like me and you’re administering a system that fell off its Windows domain, and the system was built by your predecessor’s predecessor, the local administrator account was renamed, and nobody has any clue what the account name or password is.

And you try ERD Commander because it worked in the past, but not this time…Usually the Locksmith works. But in this case, it didn’t, and of course everyone wanted the server back online an hour ago. We tried everything else we could think of for about three days, including downloading some things that I was sure would get me a visit from a security officer. Nothing worked. At least when I got the visit from the security officer, he just wanted to know why there were repeated attempts to log in with certain accounts.

“I was trying to hack into my own server and it seems I’m not a very good hacker,” I said. Duh.

So I found myself standing at the server with another sysadmin, having used my last idea. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas?” I asked. “I figured if you did, you would have said so by now, but…”

He shook his head.

Finally, I had one last idea. I asked him what he set the password to when he used ERD Commander.

“Password,” he said. “To make it easy to remember.”

Aha! A light went off. This system was hardened to require stronger passwords than just an 8-character alphabetic password. I had a hunch that was what was keeping us from being able to log in using our hacked account.

So we booted off the ERD Commander CD yet again, connected to the Windows installation, located what we were pretty sure was the renamed local adminstrator account, and I reset it to the standard mixed-case special character password we use for the local admin accounts.

We held our breath, rebooted, and tried to log in.

Success. Finally.

So if ERD Commander isn’t working for you, try using a stronger password to satisfy your local system policy.

And just in case you’re wondering why a computer falls off a domain, computers have usernames and passwords just like users do. Occasionally the passwords get reset. If for some reason the domain controller thinks a member computer’s password is one thing, and the member computer thinks it’s something else, you end up with a computer that says it’s on the domain, but can’t authenticate against it. The solution is to log in with a local administrator account, then either run NTDOM.EXE from the Windows Support Tools, or remove the computer from the domain and add it back in. You can just put the computer in a workgroup, ignore the dialog box that says you have to reboot, then add it to the domain, and then reboot.

The suburb where Hornbeck and Ownby were found

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , , , , ,

St. Louis is in the national news again because of the bizarre case of missing children Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby, who were found in the Kirkwood apartment of Michael J. Devlin.

Kirkwood.

Kirkwood?Kirkwood is a largely upper-middle class suburb west of St. Louis, roughly bounded by Interstates 44 and 270. The main north-south drag through St. Louis County, Lindbergh Boulevard, runs pretty much straight through Kirkwood, although its official name there is Kirkwood Road.

While Kirkwood isn’t as ritzy of a place to live as some of the suburbs to the north and west, such as Chesterfield, Ladue, or Town and Country, if you’re a professional there’s still plenty of prestige to living in Kirkwood. It says that you’re successful and have an appreciation of history.

I never lived in Kirkwood, but my first job was at a roast beef joint, long since closed, in Kirkwood, exactly 1.7 miles from the apartment where they were found. I went to 8th grade at a private school in Kirkwood, less than half a mile from the pizza joint where Devlin worked as a manager. The church where I was confirmed and took Holy Communion for the first time is also the same distance away. I bought the last Christmas gift I got for my dad before he died at a hobby shop just a block or two north of that pizza place.

Although there are exceptions, Kirkwood isn’t exactly a cheap place to live. Founded in 1853 and named for James P. Kirkwod, the first chief engineer of what became the Missouri Pacific Railroad, Kirkwood is a very old suburb, and it shows. Northern Kirkwood is known for its large, majestic Victorian-style houses. Although the edges of the town have taken on the look of post-1950s suburbia, Kirkwood has a very old-fashioned downtown, with storefronts that bring the first half of the 20th century to mind. There are lots of specialty shops there, and numerous restaurants that are either local chains or one-of-a-kinds. It’s a pretty good place to take your significant other for a night out. For that matter, if you wanted to take your kids out for pizza and ice cream, downtown Kirkwood offers several good choices for both.

The pizza parlor where Devlin managed is one of those choices.

To the south, there’s a large, modern commercial shopping district bounded on the north by Big Bend and on the south by Interstate 44, that has lots of big-box stores like Target, Lowe’s, Hobby Lobby, Wal-Mart, Office Depot, and the like. Virtually everyone who lives in the populous suburbs of south and west St. Louis County has probably had occasion in the past year to shop at least once in this district. Devlin lived in a $495-a-month apartment less than two miles away from this busy shopping district.

Also less than two miles from where Devlin lived, and less than half a mile from where he worked, is The Magic House, a very popular, nationally known children’s museum.

All of this probably has a lot to do with why this story ended up on the front cover of Newsweek magazine this week. It’s unusual to find not one, but two missing children, including one who had been missing more than four years, in the same place. But it happened in a populous suburb where so many people gladly take their children to spend an enjoyable weekend afternoon or Friday night.

Some people have questioned how Devlin could have escaped detection for as long as he did. But speaking as someone who knows Kirkwood well, Kirkwood is the last place I would have thought to look.

Kirkwood’s motto isn’t "Where America takes its families," but if Kirkwood wanted that title, it would have as much right to it as anyplace.

We never thought that included kidnappers.

Are Google\’s corporate perks excessive?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , ,

Google’s corporate perks are the subject of a Fortune magazine article. I’m going to take what I suspect is a contrarian view on this. I think Google’s excessive spending on its employee perks is a good thing.

Why? Because I’ve seen what happens with the opposite.I know of one company whose ultimate goal is to use temporary contractors as much as possible. The reason is simple: Overhead. Find a company that gives its contractors as little as possible to keep rates low, use those people, and then you don’t have to mess around with giving benefits like vacation and sick time and vacation days aside from Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Personally, I think the guy’s an idiot, and you can quote me on that. I once worked at a struggling company that used a ton of contractors. None of us had any of that messy and expensive sick time. So when a contractor got sick, rather than give up a week’s pay, he or she just sucked down Dayquil like it was water and showed up for work. The result? An epidemic. I’ve never seen so many sick people in September in my life. And guess what? The rest of cold/flu season wasn’t any better.

That particular company wasn’t profitable when I worked there, and it isn’t profitable today. I wonder if it’s because nothing gets done from September to February because everyone’s sick?

I worked someplace else that was paying me about $15,000 less than what the job search engines said I should be making. I was having a hard time paying my bills some months. Did it make it hard for me to concentrate on things at work? Absolutely. I knew from year to year I was only going to get a cost-of-living raise whether I did well or poorly, so I didn’t really try all that hard to excel.

Knowing what I know about that particular employer’s bottom line and customer satisfaction, I suspect they could really have used the results of a couple of my projects from the last year and a half or so.

So when I see that Google gives its employees free food and does their laundry for free and gives them $500 worth of takeout food when they have a baby–among other things–I don’t exactly think that’s a bad idea.When an employee doesn’t have to solve those kinds of personal problems, that’s that much more energy the employee has to devote to the company. And, hopefully, the company’s needs are more interesting to the employee than laundry.

Now I’m not sure that this is universal. A company like Google is going to have a higher rate of return on this kind of investment than, say, Radio Shack.

Let’s take a look at another company. Everybody knows eBay, and the company is always profitable because it doesn’t have to do a lot of work, and it makes money whether the stuff sells or not. It’s a nice situation to be in: Millions of people are working extremely hard to make sure eBay is profitable, simply in hopes of making lots of money themselves (and while some do, many don’t).

Yet eBay’s stock price is in the toilet. The problem is that eBay isn’t growing anymore. They have a monopoly on the online auction business, but they’re pretty much expanded as much as they can, and the company hasn’t had a second great idea. They’ve had several lousy ideas in the past year, and they’re likely to have a bunch more and lose lots of money in the process of chasing the next great idea.

If Google wants to not be the next eBay, it needs to keep cranking out a steady stream of profitable ideas. Its market share in search keeps growing. Meanwhile, it’s turned advertising into a big cash cow. Maybe YouTube is Google’s next big cash cow. Maybe not, and maybe Google Base is the next one. Or maybe it’s something that hasn’t been publicly unveiled yet.

But the only reason Google got to where it is was because it had lots of brilliant people working for it, and they were free to try lots of wacky ideas. Those wacky ideas that succeeded have turned it into a juggernaut. So I think taking care of the basic needs of those fertile minds is a great idea. That means those minds have that much more energy to concentrate on coming up with great ideas. And if those minds are happy, they’re more likely to come up with great ideas for Google than profitable side projects for themselves.

The formula seems to be working. Google can pretty much hire anyone it wants at this point. The few exceptions I can think of, such as Bill Gates, probably don’t have much to offer Google anyway.

Meanwhile, people are leaving Microsoft like crazy. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing for Microsoft remains to be seen, but Google is able to retain the people it wants to retain, while Microsoft appears to be having trouble doing that.

I think the perks have a lot to do with it.

Of course, the perks won’t do much good if Google doesn’t hire the right people–I can think of some people I know and have known whose extra brainpower isn’t worth having–but Google finds itself in the position of being able to pick and choose its hires.

If Google tanks in five years, people will look back at today as a time when Google blew it by wasting revenue on excesses, but I don’t think Google will tank in five years. I think it’s more likely that in five years, everything that comes to mind when people think of the Internet will be something that Google owns.

It’ll be interesting to see.

I got a Pentax K110 digital SLR camera last month

Dave Farquhar Photography ,

When the Nikon D40 came out in November priced at $599, it seemed like the whole world went ga-ga over it. After all, we’ve pretty much been conditioned to expect to pay $1,000 to get into the digital SLR game.

But then I found out about the Pentax K110D. It’s also a digital SLR, and costs about $100 less than the Nikon. There wasn’t much information out there about it. So, after consulting the one person whose opinions on cameras I trust, my wife and I got one.Pentax isn’t the biggest name in cameras but is hardly a no-name either. The Pentax K1000 camera, first released in 1976, is a legend.

The K110D is a basic 6-megapixel digital SLR. It uses SD flash memory cards for storage and rechargable NiMH AA batteries for power. (Batteries are included, an SD card isn’t. But I couldn’t tell if the batteries were rechargeable because the writing on them is in Japanese.)

Most importantly, someone like me, who knows very little about photography, can take a good shot with this camera. While you can set all of the ISO settings you want, you can also put the camera on fully automatic, where it decides everything for you. In fully automatic mode, if you can frame a decent shot and get it in focus, the camera will take care of the rest.

You can see some shots I took this way with the camera at The Gauge. I shot these through a department store window, so there’s some glare. That’s not the camera’s fault.

The camera’s quality is good. You don’t want to play catch with it or expose it to any rough handling that you can possibly avoid, but it doesn’t feel fragile in your hands either. In case you’re wondering, the camera is manufactured in the Phillipines, while the lens is manufactured in Vietnam.

While 6 megapixels may seem a bit wimpy in this era of 10-megapixels and above, you don’t really need the extra resolution unless you’re making really large prints. A cheap 10-megapixel point-and-shoot could actually take a worse image than this camera if its optics and sensor aren’t of comparable quality.

If you’re looking for more versatility than a point and shoot will give you, but don’t care to spend four figures on a camera and a couple of lenses, the K110D or its bigger brother, the K100D (which adds image stabilization) is a good bet.

I like this camera a lot and would buy it again without hesitating.

Why is it so hard to give something away?

Dave Farquhar net.culture ,

Twice I’ve tried to give something away on Craigslist. Twice I’ve failed. It’s not for lack of interested parties–it’s for lack of follow-through.

I don’t think I’m going to try again.My most recent effort was an attempt to give away a console TV. It’s old but works fine. For five years it was used only to watch the World Series, and for another couple of years it was used less than that.

I got a flood of requests right away, so I took down the ad quickly. With seven responses in 30 minutes, I didn’t want to have to end up telling 100 people no the next morning. So I started making calls.

The first was two brothers who wanted it for their mother. They said they’d be right over. And they were. The problem was neither of them had ever seen a console TV before. They thought a 26-inch TV would fit great on a table. Not this one. At least they were nice about it.

OK, so I thought I’d contact the next person in line. No response.

Number three? He also wanted it for his mother. But when he called to tell her, she’d already sent her other son to go buy a new TV. So much for that.

After another no-response, I spoke with someone with a heavy accent who wanted it. He asked if it would fit in a Honda Civic. I tried not to laugh. I said no. He said he had a friend with a bigger car. I said he really needed a truck or a van. He insisted it would fit in a car. I had the TV sitting right in front of me, I’ve moved it five different times and it won’t fit in any car I’ve ever owned, but what do I know, right? I e-mailed him dimensions (both in English and Metric) and asked him to verify the TV would fit in the car. I never heard from him again.

I guess that’s just as well. The TV feels like it weighs 100 pounds. I’ve moved it five different times, and each time the guy helping me moved it has said he’ll never move that thing again. So I wasn’t about to try to wrestle it into whatever this "bigger car" was. With my luck it would have been a Toyota Camry.

My wife talked to one of the people. As soon as she explained what a "console TV" is, the interest evaporated.

Someone else was interested and said he’d pick it up right away. I said great. He said to call him, and of course the number was long-distance. I called. The phone rang about 12 times before I got an answering machine. I left a message. And you’re right, he never called back.

I guess people see "FREE" in an ad and go nuts, but then when it comes time to actually come get it and they have to do a little work, they don’t want to do it. It’s disappointing. All I wanted was to give the TV to someone who needed it more than me. It still works and I hate to see it taking up space in a landfill just because it’s out of style (and was out of style the year it was made, but that’s another issue).

Well, that’s five hours of my life that I’ll never get back.

The TV’s sitting in the corner of the living room now. It looks good there. We have another TV in the family room (that’s why we were trying to get rid of this one), but since it was getting to be too much of a chore to get rid of it, we’ll just keep it there for a while. Besides, it picks up channel 30 (the local ABC affiliate) a lot better than the other TV does.

Maybe I’ll hook an Atari 2600 up to it and pretend it’s 1982 again.

Before they were Cardinals…

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , ,

I just finished reading Before They Were Cardinals, a history of the American Association St. Louis Browns, by Jon David Cash.

I have mixed feelings about the book.Most people know the Cardinals are one of the oldest baseball franchises. What most don’t know is that the Cardinals didn’t start out in the National League, were formerly known as the Browns (not to be confused with the later St. Louis Browns of the American League that moved to Baltimore in 1954), and that the tradition of the World Series originated here in St. Louis,

This book gives a nice overview of the early history of the St. Louis franchise and the American Association, the league in which the team had its first early successes.

The upside of the book is that it is very academic. It cites everything and the old maps and photographs prove the author spent hours at the Missouri Historical Society unearthing treasures.

The downside is that the book is academic. While I certainly understand the desire to rise above the sensationalist, opinionated late 19th-century journalism that serves as most of the book’s primary sources, a lot of the color that makes the early history of this team interesting isn’t in the book. The colorful and eccentric owner, Christian Frederick Wilhem von der Ahe, is presented as a German immigrant who bought a bar, noticed one day that his patrons all left in a rush for a few hours on Sunday, then returned to spend a leisurely rest of the day. After asking where everyone went and hearing about baseball, he invested in the team and made (and later lost) a fortune doing so.

That’s all fine and good, but it’s a one-dimensional picture of Chris Von der Ahe. Yes, he was an astute and successful self-made immigrant businessman–the embodiment of the American Dream if there ever was one. While some mention of his nouveau riche excesses is in the book, much of what made him so despised outside of St. Louis isn’t mentioned.

My personal favorite Von der Ahe story, the larger-than-life statue of himself erected outside of Sportsman’s Park to celebrate the successful 1885 season, gets no mention in the book. There is mention that Von der Ahe is buried underneath a large statue of himself, but no mention of where the statue came from.

I did find it very interesting that Von der Ahe, convinced there was no money left to be made in St. Louis, plotted to win the 1887 World Series and then move his world championship team to New York where he could draw bigger crowds, more beer sales, and bigger profits. The team never won another World Series under his ownership, however, so Von der Ahe never put that plan into motion.

Unfortunately, the book ends abruptly with the American Association’s merger with the National League, with only a brief epilogue at the end talking about the slow fall of Von der Ahe and his loss of the franchise.

In the book’s defense, Von der Ahe gets more treatment elsewhere while the American Association is little more than a footnote today, so I can see why the author chose to focus on the more neglected subject. It makes for better scholarship. Since this book is published by the University of Missouri Press and not Random House, I can see why the book was written the way it was.

If you want good history, particularly of what it was that made the American Association what it was–and this is fair, because the St. Louis club was the dominant team of that league and era–then this is a great book. If you’re looking for colorful stories about a guy who was like Ted Turner and George Steinbrenner and Charlie Finley and Bill Veeck all wrapped up into one with a dash of Jay Gatsby thrown in, look elsewhere.

I rebuilt a Dell Dimension 4100 last night

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

So, I rebuilt a Dell Dimension 4100 last night. I didn’t make any hardware changes other than replacing the Western Digital hard drive inside, which was on its last legs.

Along the way, I learned a few things.I won’t say much about the WD drive except to say it’s the most recent in a long line of bad experiences I’ve had with the brand. I don’t know anything about current WD drives. But this one was loud and shrill, Windows bluescreened when I tried to install to it, and when I tried to run SpinRite on it, it said it would take 140 hours to test. A drive that size (20GB) should take 8-10.

In its defense, that drive was five years old. But I replaced it with a Maxtor drive that’s almost eight years old. SpinRite processed that Maxtor in 3 hours and found nothing worth commenting about. (Just because SpinRite didn’t say anything doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t do anything.)

The Dell Dimension 4100 does have a proprietary power supply (although it looks like an ATX). If you work on Dells, I suggest bookmarking PC Power and Cooling’s Dell cheatsheet. PCP&C power supplies are expensive, but they are reliable, and their prices are comparable to what Dell would charge for a replacement and they are higher quality than what you would get from Dell–assuming Dell will even sell you the part (they’re in the business of selling computers, not parts). I believe newer Dells use standard power supplies.

If you buy a Micron, you can punch in a serial number and get drivers for the machine. With a Dell, you just get guesses based on the options that were available for the machine.

Download the chipset drivers and other low-level stuff from Dell’s support site. Windows 2000 didn’t completely recognize the system’s Intel i815 chipset and I get better performance afterward.

Nlite offers a lot of promise–automating the Windows install, removing components, etc.–but I had trouble getting it to work with the OS recovery CDs I had. I didn’t have enough time (or blank CDs) to figure out how to get it to work for me. I’m sure it works better with a plain old Windows 2000 Workstation CD, but of course I can’t find mine. But if you have a CD that works with it, it’s nice even if you don’t remove the stuff Microsoft doesn’t let you remove, since it provides a nice interface for slipstreaming service packs and hotfixes and removing all of the prompts during installation.

The tricks in Windows 2000 with 32MB of RAM work pretty nicely, even when you have more than 32 megs. Of course, if you’re ruthless with Nlite and can get it to work for you, you probably don’t need that bag of tricks.

I didn’t try to install it without Internet Explorer. I’d love to try that sometime but I didn’t have time for that. At least disabling Active Desktop (see the link in the paragraph above) gives most of the benefit you would get from smiting IE.

The quality of the Dell hardware is reasonable. It didn’t floor me, but I didn’t see anything that made me cry either.