Author: Dave Farquhar

I now have a dog.

Dave Farquhar Personal

My wife asked me today if we could go look at dogs. We’ve been talking about getting one for a while. “Well,” I said. “You never just look at dogs. If there’s a dog there, you’ll come home with one.” I know these things. So I asked if we were ready if we came home with one.

She said we were. Next thing I knew, we were driving home with a dog in the back seat of our 2002 Honda Civic, trying to worm her way into the front.

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How to organize your thoughts and notes

Dave Farquhar Software

I know a lot of people keep notebooks pertaining to their hobbies. Any time they find something good on a discussion forum or elsewhere, they made a copy, print it out, punch holes in it, and put it in the notebook. Some people even put their own notes, from experience or discussions, in there.

These notebooks are a good way to learn a lot and retain it–you may forget some things over the years, but reading through the notebook again will refresh your memory.

There’s just one problem with notebooks–finding the information buried within.Notebooks are, after all, reference works, not something intended to be read cover to cover. The key to a good reference work, though, is a good table of contents and index.

Who wants to spend the time putting that together? But that’s the perfect use of the piece of software I discussed yesterday.

Just install LyX, learn how to insert a table of contents and index, learn how to flag something for inclusion in the index, and then, as you find things, copy and paste them into your “virtual notebook.” As you add things to it, you can print new copies of your notebook, and your notebook will have page headings and page numbers and a table of contents and an index so you can find stuff quickly. Keep your working copy for adding new stuff in LyX, but output a PDF from Lyx that you can read on your computer(s), and print a copy that you can keep in the basement where you’re actually going to use a paper copy.

The better you organize it, the better it’ll work, but even that isn’t strictly necessary since you can flip to either the front or the back to find stuff.

I can’t think of a hobby that this wouldn’t help. I don’t believe that information overload is so much a problem of too much information as it is a problem of not being able to sort through the information available to find the bit that you really need.

Where’s this software been all my life?

Playing around with LyX

Dave Farquhar Software , , , ,

In what little free time I’ve had the past few days (we have a project that has us in the midst of a death march at work), I’ve been messing around with LyX, a typesetting program for Windows, Unix, and most other operating sytems. I remember messing with it about six years ago, when there wasn’t much else resembling a word processor available for Linux, but this time, I’m more impressed with what I see.LyX is a front-end for a typesetting system called TeX. TeX was developed by the legendary computer scientist Don Knuth when he was dissatisfied with the appearance of his galley proofs for the second edition of The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth had an eye for fine typography, and because hand-set type was increasingly being replaced by machines, he looked for a way to make a computer play by the same set of rules that experienced typesetters have used for the past 500 years.

I had my first exposure to TeX when I was working on a business analysis project with Charlie Sebold. There was a department Charlie and I both did a lot of work for, and supporting these 8 users had ballooned into a full-time job in itself. We had an expensive contractor billing an average of 45 hours a week to the department alone over the course of a year, and when I replaced him, I wasn’t able to knock that down much below 40. We believed there was something wrong with a department of 8 users spending $200,000 a year in computer support. Come to think of it, that may have something to do with why I don’t work there anymore, but I digress. Charlie and I embarked on a project to figure out what we could do to cut those costs. I don’t remember anymore how the writing duties got split up, but Charlie typeset the report in TeX. I remember him being surprised to hear that I didn’t know much about TeX, especially since I had written a book for O’Reilly at that point, and if you look at the early O’Reilly books, they look like they were produced by TeX on the default settings.

Well, intentionally or unintentionally, using TeX for the report was a stroke of brilliance, because the most influential people in the department were design snobs, and TeX produces better-looking output than anything PageMaker could ever do. The text is beautifully justified, with no rivers through it, and the kerning is always set just right, and it will even use ligatures when appropriate. Basically, it does all of the hallmarks of elegant design that they taught me in journalism school–stuff that takes hours to do by hand–and it does it in minutes.

So when Charlie handed that report out at the first meeting, he got us a whole bunch of instant credibility.

What I like about LyX is that it removes the markup stage from TeX. You apply an appropriate document style–book, letter, article, report, or whatever–and you mark lines as whatever they happen to be–standard paragraphs, headings, chapter titles, document titles, author, or whatever–and it handles all of the layout and everything else for you. It’ll even generate the table of contents for you. And if you want an index, just flag words as you write or edit, and it can generate an index.

It also handles the most frustrating aspect of writing that I faced when I was writing my book back in 1999. A good book shouldn’t spent a lot of time repeating itself, so there’ll be times when you’ll refer the reader to a specific chapter, or even a specific page. The problem is, these things change. I not only re-ordered the chapters about halfway through the writing process, I actually took a couple of chapters, combined the like topics, and turned them into two completely differently titled chapters. Finding my cross-references and keeping them straight was such a pain that I really didn’t do it all that much. With LyX, cross-references are easy. You just label a section, and insert a cross-reference to the label, and it inserts the page number and the name of the section for you. You can put a cross-reference on every page and not slow down a bit.

Now that I’ve spent a few hours with it, I heartily recommend LyX. In college I found I got better grades when I turned in papers using fonts other than Times and Arial, and the output from LyX adds a whole new degree of elegance to it. Succeeding in college is as much about playing the game as it is anything else, and LyX gives you that slight edge.

And, as you might suspect, I’ve been playing with LyX for a reason. I’m writing again. Over the course of the past year, I’ve prepared a 133-page manuscript (that’s single-spaced Times with no pretty pictures or formatting, so it’s more than it sounds). I’m in the process of editing and typesetting it now. It’s highly specialized, so I’ll be self-publishing it, rather than using a publisher. I’ll be happy if it sells 1,000 copies and thrilled if it sells 10,000, and no publisher is willing to touch a book anymore if they think a book will only sell 10,000 copies. If it sells 1,000 copies, it will have been worth my while to write. Modern print-on-demand technology makes that a much safer risk than it was in 1999, when I wrote and published my first book.

And while there are times when the help of a traditional publisher definitely makes a better book, I think this is a case where I can create a better product working on my own.

I’ll keep you posted.

Living without electricity for five days

Dave Farquhar Personal

On July 19, a fierce storm pounded St. Louis. At around 7 pm, the power flickered, then it went out. The sky looked threatening and the winds were relentless, so my wife and I gathered up flashlights and a portable radio and headed for the basement.

What happened next wasn’t at all what we were expecting.First, let me emphasize that this was nothing compared to what happened to the Atlantic Gulf Coast last summer. It was maddening and inconvenient, but at least it pretty much ended at that. With that aside, let’s get on with the story.

For whatever reason, the portable radio was already tuned to 1120 AM, which was KMOX. I knew KMOX would interrupt whatever they had going on to cover this. At first I heard good news. The worst was to our east. I learned in the fourth grade that weather moves from west to east, so this was just a typical midwestern thunderstorm that would blow over in about 20 minutes, and then the utilities would send workers out, and we’d probably have power back in an hour or two.

But this wasn’t a typical thunderstorm. This storm did the opposite of what typical weather does and it moved southeast. One minute, the worst was to the east of us. The next minute, they were saying a tornado touched down at Jefferson Barracks. That’s only a few miles away.

It seemed like a couple of hours passed, but it probably was closer to 45 minutes before the storm let up. We could hear pinging on the gutters. Hail? The thunder and lighting was spectacular–not in the good way–and the sky was an eerie color. There wasn’t much rain, but there was more than enough of everything else to make up for it.

Finally the storm moved to the south of us and fizzled out. We took our flashlights and cell phones and the radio upstairs. It was cooler in the unfinished basement, but there really wasn’t anyplace to sleep down there. The living room, being on a sunken slab foundation that was added to the house later, is always a bit cooler than the rest of the house, so we’d sleep there that night.

The radio kept giving updates on power losses. The numbers kept getting higher. All in all, nearly 400,000 homes lost power that night.

The Gatermanns called that night to ask if we’d lost power. My wife said we had. They invited us to stay with them. I was already asleep; otherwise, we probably would have taken them up on the offer.

I had to work the next morning, so our first full day without power impacted my wife more than it impacted me. She said she’d run a few errands once it got hot, then find a library that was open and go there and read to stay out of the heat.

Before I left, I called over to the office to make sure it was still there. The preliminary reports were that the Illinois side, where I work, was hit harder. Some of my coworkers had lost power, but the office was still in good shape. So I headed out, but not before I opened the fridge to try to salvage a few things. My wife’s insulin was still cool, so I grabbed it. There was a fridge at work, so I figured I might as well use it.

As I drove to work, I got my first real glimpse of the damage. There were tree limbs everywhere. Some were small, but some were huge. Then I saw a utility pole snapped in two. The top part was hanging by what was left of the wire. I saw some orange cones on the ground. It was keeping people away from another downed wire.

As I drove home that night, I meant to go home a different way to avoid the area with the snapped utility pole. But of course I forgot. The pole was still hanging by that thread of a wire. The cones were gone. I saw the wire still on the ground. I could imagine the scene behind that story: "Bobby, go move those cones so I can back out my pickup and go sell some propane. Try to stay away from the sparks coming off that wire."

When I got home, my wife was there and electricity wasn’t. We gathered up a handful of things and headed off to the Gatermanns’. They welcomed us in, and even took us to dinner. There was damage in their neighborhood too, but not everyone had lost power. They were one of the homes that hadn’t.

At the restaurant, people were complaining that there was no ice. The manager explained they were out of ice and trying to get more, but all of the ice suppliers in the city were sold out. That was fine by me. Using ice just to keep my drink cold seemed wasteful when there were more important uses for a scarce commodity that night.

The next morning, we drove back home so I could get ready for work. My wife was going to tackle the freezer and the fridge. She’d just filled both earlier in the week because there were some good sales. It was a shame to lose it. It could have been worse, I said. I repeated it to myself too. It could have been worse.

That night, there was another storm. This one hit the parts of St. Louis the other storm hadn’t hit so hard. Another couple hundred thousand people lost power, including the mayor of St. Louis.

My wife actually stayed around the house quite a bit. It was hard for her to leave home. We ate out, of course, because preparing food without electricity is difficult. Finally on Saturday I remembered we had a gas range. I turned on the burner, lit a match, and ignited it. We could cook! So we went to the store, bought about a meal’s worth of stuff. It was a simple meal, but it was one we made at home. Eating out every day gets old really fast.

We got used to hearing the sound of our neighbors’ generators. By the time I thought about getting one, our food had spoiled, so there wasn’t a lot of point. We worked in the yard a bit, clearing the damage. We’d been told to drag our downed limbs to the curb, and the county would come pick them up. I dragged five huge limbs from the back yard up to the curb. All of them were taller than me.

There’s not a lot to do without electricity, so we read an awful lot. As the daylight faded, we lit candles to help out. We gathered every candle in the house up and set them in the living room. Usually it let us read for another 30-40 minutes.

The biggest adventure was the stoplights. St. Louisans don’t really seem to know what to do when confronted with a red light (most people seem to think they have a grace period, kind of like credit cards), but when a signal is completely out, it can be very dangerous. About two miles from us there’s a major intersection that had its lights out, and every time we drove past, there was at least one smashed-in car at the intersection. We got used to hearing sirens. "Sounds like someone else ran the light," we’d say when we heard them.

When we had to go out, we avoided that intersection.

At about 3 a.m. on Monday morning, my wife got up to use the bathroom. She walked back in and flipped the light on and off in the living room in celebration. "What?" I asked as I woke up. It usually takes a while for things to set in when I first wake up. I’m known for that.

"It’s back on!" she said.

We closed up the windows, I turned the air conditioning back on, and crawled back into our real bed. Usually when I’m roused at 3 a.m., I don’t go back to sleep. But I didn’t have any trouble getting back to sleep that night. Sleeping in my own bed felt too good.

Well, that was fun.

Dave Farquhar This weblog

We’ve been offline for a long, long time. I don’t know exactly when the problem started. Last month, St. Louis got rocked by a huge storm and we were without power for five days. When it came back, my web server didn’t.

I restored from the last good backup I had, but unfortunately that was a couple of months old. So the last three months’ worth of entries are gone. That wasn’t a lot, but it’s something.On a more personal level–a more personal level than I’ve been willing to write on my blog in several years–I have to admit I’ve been putting it off. Part of it is that I’ve just been completely slammed at work. But I’ve gone through other times in life when I didn’t really have time for anything but work and sleep, and yet I still found time to write, even if it was just a little.

It’s like in baseball, when you get into a slump, you try lots of other things, and pretty soon you forget the things that made you successful in the past, and it’s almost like you’re not the same person anymore.

And I have to be honest. When I look in the mirror anymore, I’m not sure who that guy looking back at me is. It isn’t the real me.

Blogging is dangerous. I learned that several years ago, when a girl I dated briefly e-mailed me after six months and recounted the time since we had last seen each other in greater detail than one of my best friends would have been able to do. There were details in that message that even I’d forgotten about. It was spooky. So I started being a bit more evasive about certain details.

Fast forward another year or two. I found myself in a troubled relationship and I wrote about it. My then-girlfriend didn’t read my blog, so I figured I was pretty safe, but what I didn’t know was that her mother read it. Oops. I still don’t think anything I said then was out of line, but she saw things differently, and that was the end of that. Now that I’m married–to someone else–that doesn’t matter much anymore.

But today there are legal issues too. Threats of being sued by employers or clients have closed down more than one blog, including one that I enjoyed reading.

I have to figure out how to balance that. I haven’t worked in journalism in years, but I still consider myself a journalist and I still find myself referring to myself as one. When I don’t write, I’m not happy. Period.

So I’m going to try to write more often. I don’t know about what. I can’t really write much about work, partly because detailed accounts of what I do at work are only useful for those nights when you can’t sleep, and partly because of the legal issues. The journalist in me doesn’t like that very much. I tried really hard this weekend to make time for my hobbies, but found I’ve pretty much lost interest in them.

Basically I’m facing a reprise of the first crisis of my professional career, which happened back in 1998. I was overworked, underappreciated, and work was a wrecking ball, crashing down every boundary I’d ever set. With no room for a life outside of work, things got ugly fast.

I’m back there again, only now there’s even more at stake because I have a wife and a house to take care of.

Hopefully writing will help hasten the healing process. Boundaries are an important thing. That sounds like a good topic to tackle.

Dealing with being laid off

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , ,

Well, it’s been just over a year since I was laid off from the only job I was ever willing to relocate for. Layoffs are never fun. Dealing with being laid off is hard. Looking back, with the perspective of a year and two days now, it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

But I’ll be honest: That doesn’t make it hurt much less. But I know the shoes I was in a year ago try on someone new every day, and every year around this time, one or more of my former coworkers finds themselves in those shoes. I don’t know if I can help, but I’m going to try.

It’s harder for guys. For men, work is a big part of their identity. In most parts of the world, when you’re introduced, the second question people ask after your name is what you do for a living. (In St. Louis, that’s the question they ask after where you went to high school). But seriously, losing your job involuntarily is a really big deal, so feeling bad about feeling bad about it is counterproductive. Of course you feel bad about it. Grieve. Don’t hold it in–you’ll just get depressed, and everyone around you will sense you’re depressed, and it’ll make it that much harder to get another job.

Be a miser. You just lost your job. You don’t need it to cause you to lose everything else. I haven’t talked to a lot of homeless people, but more than one of them was once a highly skilled, productive worker with a lot of education. Homelessness is a complex thing, but loss of job plus depression plus running out of money can equal that.

You can’t know when you’ll have another paycheck, but you can figure out how long the money you have will last. You have a pretty good idea what your mortgage or rent and utilities cost. Throw in a couple hundred for expenses like groceries and gasoline, then divide that total by what you have left, and you have a pretty good idea how quickly you need to find a job.

Cut all the non-essentials. Quit eating out, buy generic products instead of name-brand, and do what you have to do to stretch what you have left.

Occasionally, my lunch was a package of Ramen noodles, half a can of fruit and half a can of mixed vegetables. Extreme? You bet. Fun? No way. But it helped keep me out of debt while I looked for work.

Search. Go to the library and get your hands on a copy of What Color is Your Parachute? The current year’s edition is always checked out. Don’t worry about it. Things change year to year, but that doesn’t mean the 2003 edition is worthless. The world doesn’t change that quickly. This book helps you find a job, but the more important thing it does is help you figure out what you should be doing. If your job isn’t worth having, trust me, Bill Lumbergh will notice it, and you’ll be on his list of jobs to cut. Lumbergh may not know anything about running a business, but he knows enough to keep the people who are happy to be there.

Interview. I called up everyone I knew who might know about a job opening somewhere that I would be qualified to do. I got my first job interview less than a week after I lost my old job. I lost the job on a Thursday, and I think I had an interview on Tuesday. I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t get one from the second place I interviewed with either, but they got me in the mode.

I will say one thing: If you get a second interview somewhere, don’t turn down an interview somewhere else. I quit looking for a couple of days because I thought I had a job in the bag. That didn’t pan out, and I lost valuable time and momentum. Interview at multiple jobs–you know they’re all interviewing multiple candidates, after all.

There are books that coach you on interviewing. Reading about interviewing is helpful, but frankly, a magazine article’s worth of advice on interviewing is all you need. Dress like you’re interviewing for the position of CEO, make sure you give a firm, warm handshake (visit the bathroom and wash your hands with hot water and dry vigorously just before the interview if you’re like me and you’re known for having cold hands), and be confident and personable. You don’t really need a 200-page book to tell you how to do that. Practice is what you need the most.

Trust me. From ages 16 to 25, I interviewed for exactly five jobs, and I got all five of them. At 25, I interviewed for another one and didn’t get it, but the guy interviewing me had his mind made up that he wanted a C++ programmer, something I’ve never pretended to be, so I didn’t get that. I’m 2 for 6 since age 30–but given what was going on at those four companies that didn’t hire me, nobody would feel bad about being turned down by them.

Think twice about taking the first offer. I got my first job offer about five weeks after my layoff. The main interviewer told me during the interview that the company was in trouble. One of the guys with him didn’t like me from the start and I could tell. They offered me the job. I took it, for a variety of reasons. I was going stir crazy. I’d just gotten married and my wife wasn’t working either. It paid $6,000 a year more than I had been making, with less responsibility.

I had a bad feeling about it, but I was desperate. I took it. It might or might not have been the best decision. Five months later I was looking for a job again. It wasn’t anything personal, they were just out of work for me to do. Had I clicked better, they may or may not have tried harder to find work for me to do. I’ll never know.

My point is, if you have a bad feeling about it, talk it over before you say yes.

Find someone to talk to. When it’s been a couple of days since the phone last rang and you’re feeling down about the situation, find someone to talk to. Talk to a trusted friend in the same job field. Talk it over with your SO. Talk it over with family members.

If you can’t do that, or you need more, there are other places to turn. The State of Missouri happens to have a career center within walking distance of my house. Had I not gotten my current job when I did, I probably would have gone there the next week. I would imagine every state has that type of resource–employed workers are good for the state, and unemployed workers are bad for it, after all.

Barring that, find a church. Seriously–even if that’s the last place you’d ever go for any reason. Walk in and tell whoever’s there that you just lost your job and you don’t know what to do next. Tell ’em you’re not asking for money, you just need some idea what to do next. A large percentage of pastors today weren’t always pastors, so they’ve dealt with being in the workforce and the issues that go along with it. And pastors in some denominations can be dismissed from their church with little or no notice, so some pastors live with less job security than everyone else is used to having.

Take a chance. While I was trying to find work, I also prowled the library, looking for books about business, trying to come up with a business to start.

I didn’t find a lot of viable ideas. There are better books out today than there were a year ago, but even those aren’t perfect. I probably had a dozen ideas. I actually tried three. The third one–the one that seemed like the longest shot–was the one that worked.

What that business was doesn’t matter. What matters is finding something with low overhead that you can do better than anyone else–something that matches your skills and interests.

My wife was the key on this. For the most part her strengths are where I’m weak, and vice-versa, so we cover each other’s weaknesses. I’ve always suspected I’d be good at selling a product I believed in, and it seems I was right. And as it turns out, my wife is good at it too.

She kept the business going after I went back to work. I help out on Saturdays and on the occasional evening. Some months she makes more money doing this than I made at the job I lost in the first place.

Stay away from “network marketing” (a fancy word for pyramid schemes). You want to actually be in business for yourself. Look for some business books, and if you find places where the author is wrong, you’re on the right track. Think about things you like. If you like music, think about reselling vinyl records. If you like sports, think about reselling baseball cards. If you’re really good with computers and not an extreme introvert like me, go into business doing computer service.

If you happen to be outgoing, you really have it made. The secret of the most successful sellers of vintage Lionel and similar trains is that they talk to everyone about it–they literally hand out their business card to the other people standing in line at the grocery store and say, “If you’ve got old trains or if any of your neighbors do, I’ll buy them. If you refer anyone to me, I’ll give you a commission.” I would imagine the same trick would work a whole lot better for computer service. These days, everyone has a computer, and nobody’s happy with how well it works. And people don’t look at you funny if you talk to them out of the blue about computers.

If I had enough nerve to talk to five strangers a day, I’d probably be a millionaire.

So starting a business might be a good way to go. You’ll probably need to find a regular job for a while, since many businesses are actually a drain on your resources for the first 18 months or so, but if you can find a job to keep you on your feet in the meantime, being in business for yourself could be the ultimate solution to dealing with a layoff.

My $8 secondhand Lionel

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , ,

I hear stories all the time about the Lionel train that someone found at a garage sale for $10. Or sometimes it’s a Marx. The one that bothered me the most was the story about a 65-year-old American Flyer locomotive for $10, and the guy who got it didn’t even like O gauge.

Whatever. Today was my day. I found a Lionel starter set from 1999. The price marked on it: $8. I didn’t haggle. I handed over Alexander Hamilton, scooped up the train set, grabbed a couple of Washingtons, and headed to the car with a train set under my arm.For $8, I didn’t expect much. But I knew the locomotive alone was worth that. I got it home this afternoon and looked it over.

It was a set Lionel made for Keebler: The Keebler Elfin Express. Nope, no real railroad names on this set. The locomotive was cast from the same Scout mold that Lionel has been using for its starter sets since the early 1950s. But this one had a 4-wheel truck up front, making it a 4-4-2 Atlantic.

The cars are traditional 6464-sized: a boxcar and a flat car. The boxcar advertises Keebler products, and the flat has a cardboard load of, you guessed it, Pillsbury products. Nope, more Keebler.

The same traditional SP-style caboose that Lionel has been using since the early ’50s brings up the rear.

It didn’t look like the set had seen much use. The instructions were long gone, but a lot of the accessories are still on the plastic sprue. The lockon was on the track and the transformer was wired to it, so I knew it had been used a little. I set it up on a loop of O27 track and let it rip. It ran nicely. To my surprise, the locomotive has smoke, and the tender has a whistle, so the train smokes and whistles. Not bad for 8 bucks.

A couple of the track pieces were bent, as if they’d been stepped on. I can fix them. For the price I paid, I’m not going to complain. I’d be able to get clean used O27 curves for a dime or a quarter each at the Boeing Employee Model Railroad Club show in September. But I’ve got plenty of O27 curves in my basement. Those things breed.

It took me forever to find the lockout switch for the reverse on the bottom of the locomotive. At first I figured it had no reverse, but looking at the underside, I noticed it had a lot of electronics in it–far more than would be needed just to convert the AC current from the transformer to the DC current the can motor needed. (Yes, Lionel builds a lot of inefficiencies into its modern equipment to keep it compatible with the old stuff–and that drives up cost.) Finally I found the switch, unlocked it, and the locomotive gained neutral and reverse capabilities.

I don’t mess around with modern-issue Lionel much. I like the old stuff. But for 8 bucks, I won’t be picky.

Windows 2000 without Internet Explorer

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Those of you who bought my book (both of you) know that the biggest secret to speeding up Windows 95 and 98 was removing the extra junk nobody used–especially the stuff Microsoft deliberately made impossible to remove via normal means.

In Windows 95, all it took was modifying INF files with a text editor to remove MSN, IE, and the other obsolete software it shipped with from the get-go. Win98 got a bit more complicated. But with 2000, Microsoft started getting nasty–putting encrypted data in multiple places, so even if you hacked the INFs, it didn’t do any good.

But several people still figured out how to do it.I really like Fred Vorck‘s site, because he’s careful to document everything. He also found out the same thing I did by writing my book–there are lots of people who will whine that your instructions are too complicated, they’ll whine that when they follow the directions and make a mistake it doesn’t work, or they just repeat the Microsoft party line that the software can’t be removed, and your mouse will stop working, your computer will generate horrific RF interference, and gas prices will soar if you remove IE from Windows. (The last part is probably true, of course, but none of the rest is.)

What really happens when you remove IE from Windows 2000 is similar to what happened when you removed it from Win95 and 98: Your memory usage drops (by about 20 megs, in this case) and your boot time is cut in half.

Since some software does break, because some software does use the IE engine, you might not want to do this on every PC you own. But if, say, you want to run Windows 2000 on an old laptop with limited memory so you can run a handful of useful Windows applications, this is perfect. If you want a stable, lightweight (by modern standards) OS for any Pentium II-class machine that might be sitting in the closet, this makes it a viable option too. A lot of computers are sitting in closets today not because they’re no longer useful, but because there’s no practical or affordable way to boost them up to the half-gig of memory that you need for Windows XP to be practical to use on them.

Read Vorck’s site some more, and dig around, and you’ll find that minimal Windows installs have created something of a subculture. I don’t know if anyone’s squeezed XP down to the level I got Win95 down to (the original Windows 95, released on Aug. 24, 1995, can be hacked down to an installation footprint of 17 megabytes without much hassle), but some people have done some pretty amazing things.

Yes, when I get time someday, I’ll be messing around with this. I wish I’d discovered it sooner.

And in case anyone cares, I found this because some know-it-all at work said you can’t uninstall Outlook Express from Windows 2000. I vaguely remembered having seen a piece of software that goes so far as to remove IE, so I said, “You can remove IE from Windows 2000 if you’re willing to work hard enough at it, let alone Outlook Express.” So I did some more searching, just to satisfy my curiosity.

If and when I end up building a minimal Win2000 box, I may just have to bring it in one day to show the know-it-all. But as longtime readers of this site know, I’ve dealt with that type before. So it’s probably not worth the effort to carry it out to the car.

If the site\’s been slow lately, I apologize

Dave Farquhar This weblog

I noticed yesterday that my site was painfully slow, and my server was thrashing like nobody’s business. My access logs suggest that my site has been crawled incessantly by online casinos and other various forms of lowlife, and that it’s been happening for some time.

Hopefully that’s over now.I found that just bouncing Apache helped. The disk thrashing stopped, and when I waited a few seconds before restarting, the thrashing didn’t start back up again. So whatever was hammering me gave up in the interim when the data stopped flowing.

But in the meantime I did some changes to my .htaccess file. The always helpful Dive into Mark gave me a good starting point.

I’m sure that I broke lots of legitimate use of my site in the process, but if that’s the price I have to pay to keep evil people from abusing my computer and DSL line, then so be it. Since I pay the bills, I get to make the rules.

Conservative economics vs. the oil crisis

Dave Farquhar Society

I am a fiscal conservative. That should surprise no one. I’m extremely careful with how I spend my money, and I get frustrated when I see corporations and governments do otherwise.

So it’s hard for me to stand back and keep my mouth shut while Washington talks about oil companies.First and foremost, I am all for ending the tax breaks for oil companies. Maybe Rush Limbaugh would say that means I’m not a true Republican. That’s fine with me. When a group of corporations sets economic records for profits one year, then breaks those records a few months later, that tells me the industry no longer needs government subsidies. Giving tax breaks to big oil companies is interference with the marketplace. So who’s the economic conservative now?

True economic conservatives don’t want to give government aid to anybody. The problem is, anymore, the difference between a Republican and a Democrat is who they want to give welfare to–large corporations or people who don’t make much money.

I don’t think that giving a $100 check to every taxpayer who made more than $14,000 last year will accomplish all that much. It’s a symbolic gesture. I spend more than that every month on gas. When I bought my Civic, I drove a bit less, but with similar driving patterns, I would have spent about $40. That $100 will soften the blow at the pump for less than two months.

But then again, I also know that I’ll spend that $100 more responsibly than the government or the oil companies, and even those who choose to spend that $100 on beer aren’t spending it any less wisely than the government (who’d use it to build a bridge to nowhere) or the oil companies (who’d use it to give a bigger bonus to executives who happened to be in the right place at the right time).

Since it won’t make a difference, I’m neutral. But if that $100 check lands in my mailbox, you better believe I’ll be endorsing and depositing that puppy.

I suppose my conservative leanings waver when it comes to gas mileage. But if it’s OK for Rush Limbaugh to be a flaming liberal when it comes to giving handouts to oil companies, I suppose I can be a flaming liberal when it comes to mandating gas mileage. The problem is this: The average gas mileage of a typical American car today is at the same level as it was in 1986. 1986! Would you be willing to trade in your Pentium 4 for a nice PC/XT clone from 1986? The TV in my living room was made in 1986. It’s a nice, swanky fake-woodgrain console. Would you trade any TV being made today for that? Didn’t think so.

But because Americans are fundamentally unwilling to be responsible, by and large we continue to buy cars that are no better than what we were driving in 1986.

The only way we’re going to get better is through regulation. Because people keep buying their Suburbans, which they drive to work–alone, of course. I have no idea how they afford it. I guess they’re skipping lunch a few days a week to keep gas in them. So the pressure needs to come from the other end. Since the marketplace doesn’t care that the Suburban only gets 13 miles to the gallon, the government has to.

But the hybrid tax credit bothers me. It bothers me a lot. Somebody who buys a Ford Escape hybrid, which gets around 30 miles to the gallon, can get a tax credit. But my Honda Civic, which uses an old-fashioned drivetrain but gets better gas mileage and thus causes less polution, isn’t eligible for that tax credit.

I’m all for lower taxes, of course. I’m a fiscal conservative. But those taxes should be fair. If you’re going to give a tax break based on gas mileage, base it on gas mileage, not on what’s under the hood.

Regulation on one end and tax credits that mean something on the other might actually give us good results–make the automakers make cars that get decent gas mileage, and help make the public happy about buying them.

Not that I expect that kind of change. There aren’t a lot of hybrids being made, so there aren’t a lot of tax breaks being given out. Which is good, from the government’s perspective. The government needs taxes to build the Bridge to Nowhere. I guess Rambo-wannabe nouveau riche can drive their Hummers back and forth on it.