General

Sorcerer, meet Squid. Squid, meet Sorcerer.

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

I didn’t feel all that well last night. Not sure if I’m coming down with something, or if it’s something else. I’ve actually felt a little weird for the last couple of days, so I’ve been sucking down zinc lozenges, and I remembered Steve DeLassus’ advice the last time I got sick: swallow a raw garlic clove. I felt fine the next day. So guess what I had for breakfast this morning? That’ll solve the problem of anyone wanting to come near me all day…
I napped a good part of the evening, but I got a little work done. I finally got the guts to raise my hand in the Sorcerer mailing list and ask if anyone else was having problems compiling XFree86. Turns out there was a bug. So now I don’t feel so stupid. It took a couple of hours to compile, and at first I configured it wrong, but now I’ve got a usable GUI.

I also installed Squid on the Sorcerer box. There isn’t a spell for Squid yet, and I’m not positive I can write it (it requires adding users and doinking with configuration files, and editing configuration files automatically goes a little beyond my Unix lack-of-expertise), but I may give it a try. One thing that annoys me about Squid: It uses really lame compiler options, and it ignores the system default options. I need to learn the syntax of make files so I can try to override that. The main reason to run Squid is for performance, so who wouldn’t want a Squid compiled to wring every ounce of performance it can out of the CPU?

But at any rate, I installed it, and did minimal–and I mean minimal–configuration: adding a user “squid” and setting it to run as that user, changing ownership of its directory hierarchy, opening it up to the world (I’m behind a firewall), running squid -NCd1, and putting a really lame script in /etc/rc3.d. Here’s the script:

#!/bin/sh
echo “Starting Squid…”
/usr/local/squid/bin/squid

See? Told you it was lame.

Performance? It smokes. There are a few sites that Squid seems to slow down no matter what, but www.kcstar.com absolutely rips now, so I can get my Royals updates faster.

It makes sense. My Squid boxes have previously been TurboLinux boxes, which are nice, minimalist systems, but they’re designed for portability. In other words, they’re still 386-optimized. Plus, they’re running the 2.2 kernel and ext2. This one’s running 2.4.9, disk formatted reiserfs, with everything optimized for i686.

Some day…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , ,

It was some day. And someday I’ll get a clue. I had a major confrontation at work today, though it was with someone who never did like me all that much. Everyone who’s heard the story says she was being unreasonable. But I just can’t help but notice one thing: Every major confrontation I’ve ever had in the workplace during my professional career has been with an older woman. By “older,” I mean 20+ years my senior.
I don’t like that pattern.

On a brighter note… I was quoted on CNET! It’s Linux’s 10th birthday, so CNET solicited some opinions. A lot of people said Linux can overtake Microsoft, an equal number said no way, but I don’t think anyone said what would have to take place for it to happen.

Essentially, I said someone with an anti-Microsoft chip on its shoulder would have to bundle Linux and StarOffice, already configured and ready to go (meaning it boots straight to a desktop when you turn it on–no setup questions or license agreements whatsoever), price it at $349, and make it available in places people normally shop.

That’s not the only scenario that I see working, but it’s the one that’d work best. History states people will sacrifice the status quo if the price is right–Commodore and Atari mopped up the floor of the home market with Apple and IBM for most of the 1980s, because they gave you twice the computer for half the money. It’d be impossible to do that today, but if someone with name recognition (say, Oracle or Sun) stamped its name on Taiwanese-made clones (made by, say, Acer or FIC) and got into the distribution channel, pricing it below an eMachine and using an ad campaign like, “We made performance computing affordable for big businesses. Now we’re making it affordable for you,” they’d stand a chance. They’d probably need to go outside the company to run the operation. Maybe Jack Tramiel, a veteran of both Commodore and Atari, could be coaxed out of retirement.

What about applications? An awful lot of home users live with Microsoft Works. StarOffice is better. Internet access? Take a cue from the iMac and stick an icon on the desktop that signs you up for Earthlink. Games? There are tons of open-source games available for Linux. Include any and every game that doesn’t crash XFree86. Cut a deal with Loki to include demo versions of all their games, and maybe the full version of an older title. Loki needs the exposure anyway. Digital imaging? Include The Gimp, along with drivers that talk with a certain type of digital camera. Include a coupon for a decent-sized discount off that camera.

It won’t dominate the market, but I can see it grabbing a decent-sized chunk. It’d do everything a small percentage of the population needs to do, and it would do it cheaply and reliably and quickly.

Will it happen? I doubt it. It’s a risk. For a company to be able to pull this off, this operation has to have little or nothing to do with the company’s core business. Shareholders don’t like ventures that have nothing to do with your core business. As much as Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison hate Microsoft, I don’t think they’re willing to risk hundreds of millions of dollars just to try to steal a couple million sales from Microsoft each year. The company that does it would have to have name recognition, but it’d be best if the general public didn’t know exactly what they sell. A company like IBM or HP couldn’t do it, because they can’t afford to offend Microsoft, and the general public expects an IBM or HP computer to run Windows apps.

Hello again…

Dave Farquhar General ,

I’m rested but not caught up. I semi-successfully built a Linux From Scratch box; it’s easily the fastest computer I’ve ever seen but not everything works quite right. I made the mistake of using Mandrake 8.0 as my source platform. In some regards Mandrake 8 makes sense; it has recent kernel and glibc versions. Unfortunately it also uses the infamous GCC 2.96; an unofficial release of GNU’s C compiler that’s so wretched that Linus Torvalds actually has asked people to not do any kernel development using any OS that uses it. One of the first things LFS does is build its own copy of GCC 2.95.3, but unfortunately, there’s code in my system that GCC 2.96 got its grubby mitts on and stuff doesn’t work. Notably, I can’t build another LFS system using it as the source. Crimony.
Meanwhile, I found out this afternoon that Bible study is at my place on Friday. My apartment’s always a mess and today’s no exception; it’s not as bad now as it has been at times but it is much less than presentable. So that’s my big project for the week. Hopefully I’ll get a mail server going too.

But I’ll try to check in every day.

I think I’m going to take a couple of days off again…

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

There’s an old Oasis lyric that I’ve hated for most of the past four years, mostly because of the memories it conjurs up, and now it really bugs me that it seems appropriate: “‘Cos I need more time just to make things right.”
The other fragments of the song that have survived my efforts to blot them out also seem fitting. “Don’t go away… Say that you’ll stay… Forever and a day…”

So, to ward off those perpetual rumors/fears/whatever that I’m hanging things up, I’ll just say this. I’ve “hung it up for good” before. The longest it ever lasted was 6 months, and that time was due to serious injury. Right around that time, someone insinuated that I should hang it up. We haven’t spoken since that time, and I’m better for it and I don’t give a rip about how he feels.

I fully expect this break to last through Saturday, then run out of gas sometime late Sunday afternoon.

I’ve overextended myself the past month or so. I’m tired. My Web server is running fabulously (it never hiccups, so long as Union Electric keeps the power flowing) but I haven’t come up with an effective way to upload content to it or add new features. I can live with that.

Meanwhile, my mail server’s a royal piece of… Nah. That doesn’t go far enough. My mail server is a Backstreet Boys Fan. It runs like a 16 MHz 386, and I can’t tell if it’s a configuration problem or if it’s just overwhelmed with spam. No matter. I’m overwhelmed with spam. On a good day I get 7. On a bad day I get 60+. I got 38 copies of the same spam message from some stupid online casino Tuesday. I absolutely have to get some spam filters in place, and some priority filters in place.

So the mail needs to be archived, a bare-essentials mail server built (Linux 2.4.8 kernel, sendmail, IMAP, fetchmail, procmail, and whatever else those five things force me to install so they can run, all built from the newest sources of course, using the most aggressive compiler settings known to man), then the archives restored, then spam filters put in place and run. Then I will have regained my ability to communicate and will be able to do something about my guilt over having week-old e-mail sitting around unanswered because it’s buried in worthless spam.

I need to tend to my servers. I need to rebuild a couple of workstations. I really ought to try to salvage the Baseball Mogul season that’s sitting on the corrupted hard drive in one of those workstations… (Though I hesitate to call anything that runs Microsoft Wintendo 2000 a “workstation…”)

Meanwhile, a couple of other projects need to get done, and I just realized today that I haven’t talked to Gatermann in more than a week and for all that group of friends knows, I’ve run off to the ends of the Earth only to find an Internet cafe, so I continued posting. I need to do something about that too.

I’ll be back. I have the same love/hate relationship with writing that most writers have. It’s like breathing after running a couple of miles on a brisk day in early March. I always hated breathing after that, because it hurt so badly. But no matter how much it hurt, I couldn’t stop.

Eliminating Flash ads

Dave Farquhar General

Flash and popunder ads begone! Normally I prefer to just use a hosts file with common ad servers redirected to 127.0.0.1 to eliminate annoying online ads, but that often doesn’t eliminate annoying Flash ads. Putting sites that use Flash in the Restricted Sites zone can help, but only in IE, and when you do that, other things cease working (such as Acrobat). The Restricted Sites setting also kills a lot of popup and popunder ads, but at the same cost.
So what to do? The Web’s not going to get any less annoying, so I turned once again to a big gun that I used to use all the time: Proxomitron.

Occasionally I have to bypass Proxomitron for a site to work right, but I’d say 90-95% of the sites I visit work just fine with it enabled, and it clears out the junk nicely. And the memory usage isn’t really any higher than that of the various popup killer programs.

So if Flash ads are getting you down, and popunders are really starting to get you riled up (I hate finding I suddenly have 17 browser windows active that I didn’t open, and as leaky as IE is, such behavior is downright rude), give Proxomitron a long, hard look. You’ll be a whole lot happier.

Open mouth, insert foot. At work, we’re an NT shop, and we format our drives NTFS for security purposes. A few systems formatted FAT16 slipped out, but we had a project about a year ago to go back and convert all those systems to NTFS. Well, today, we were doing an Office 2000 upgrade on a system and it lacked sufficient free space. So I went up to have a look. I found 50 megs here, 50 megs there that I could clear out, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the drive up over 300 megs free. So, out of desperation, I went to look for some data I could compress, and I found compression wasn’t enabled. Huh? So I checked the drive. It was formatted FAT16.

So I ran back to my office to ask one of my coworkers if he still had the batch files we used way back when to convert FAT to NTFS. I walked into his cube.

“Sharon’s still FAT,” I said.

He gave me a funny look. “Well, I know she just got off maternity leave,” he said.

I turned red. “No, no, Sharon looks fine,” I said. (Yes, she just got off maternity leave but you wouldn’t be able to tell from looking.)

“Oh, you mean her computer’s not NTFS,” he said as everyone else in the office got a good laugh.

“Yeah,” I said.

The moral of the story ought to be really obvious. I got the batch files, scurried back up to her cube, converted her drive to NTFS–freeing up about 600 megs due to NTFS’ much smaller cluster size–and got out of there. I didn’t tell her the story.

What are you gonna do with your life?

Dave Farquhar General

I heard the most amazing story yesterday. On Aug. 13, 1993, singer/songwriter Don Wharton was on board a twin-engine plane flying from Russia to Alaska when the plane ran out of fuel and landed in the Bering Sea, 27 miles from Nome, Alaska. Floating on an empty five-gallon gas can, he survived in 36-degree waters for 55 minutes. The other six on board the plane survived as well, lasting anywhere from 35 to 70 minutes in those waters until they were rescued.
The human body can only survive 10-15 minutes at that temperature. Up to that point, no one else had ever survived a plane crash in the Bering Sea.

Wharton said they stayed in contact with each other and encouraged each other by shouting memorized Bible verses to one another.

“This is… STILL the day the Lord has made. We will… STILL rejoice and… STILL be glad in it!” one of them shouted.

Wharton paused in his delivery. He said he wasn’t sure he was as enthusiastic about rejoicing at that particular moment as the guy who’d said it.

“Let me describe going down,” Wharton said. “Your life, up to that point, is IT. That’s all you’ve done. You’ll do nothing more.”

I don’t know what he said after that because I was still thinking about that. How do you know when you’ve accomplished enough? You don’t, really. And you’re never completely satisfied, but I got to wondering if I could be more satisfied. That answer, of course, was yes.

I’d heard Wharton’s story before, second- and third-hand, but here was one of the seven survivors, in the flesh, talking about it. And, yes, I’ll admit, at one point in his message I felt tears well up. He’s the second person who’s made that happen to me in two weeks. And, being male, I can’t say I’m particularly happy about that, but he made me think a lot so I’ll let it slide.

And being in my mid-twenties, which is an introspective time anyway even without some guy standing in the front of the room asking probing questions, I’m wondering if a change of direction isn’t on the horizon.

And on a slightly lighter note… If things weren’t already complicated enough, I think I’m in love on top of all this. No, this is only indirectly related to Wendy, the girl I spent three hours talking with after church a couple of weeks ago. Nothing against her, of course. I’ve had a number of long conversations with her after the end of a very long day, and it’s been great. She’s said a couple of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me (which takes some doing), and she’s said the same of me.

Now she’s left town for the next week and a half, and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her, and that bothers me some because I really wanted to. I also didn’t get to tell her I really hope she has a great time.

Is that love? Well, it’s certainly fondness, which is a type of love I suppose. But I met her seven months ago. We started talking beyond superficial how-you-doings about a month ago. That’s enough time to wish, but not enough time to know. A month isn’t enough time to get past the things you’ve fabricated about a person and really know the person she really is.

So, Dave says he’s in love, he just described the thrill of the chase in a really weird way, and he claims that has nothing to do with it. What gives?

A book, that’s what. Last week, Jim Cooley wrote me raving about The Brothers K, by David James Duncan. He described it as a book about God, baseball, and love. Then he said he reads me every day, so he feels pretty safe in saying I’ll love it. I got to thinking. God, baseball, and love. What else is there? He provided a link on Amazon, so I clicked it. Aside from being a book about everything that matters, the reader reviews claimed the book was funny on top of it! How can a book about baseball and religion be funny? I wondered about that. Then I went for a drive. I didn’t want to wait for Amazon or anyone else to deliver it to me. I hunted down a copy that night and bought it.

And what can I say? It’s a story about baseball. It’s a story about heartbreak–a fantabulous pitcher injures himself in a freak accident and that’s the end of his career. He starts drinking. It’s a story about God–his wife is a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, and his kids are mostly very confused Seventh-Day Adventists. His eldest has a crush on his Sabbath School (Adventists don’t worship on Sundays) teacher. And the girl he describes, aside from eye color, sounds so much like Wendy. And the butterflies he describes are so familiar… That part of the story makes me glad to be 26 and not 13.

I guess what makes the book funny is the perspective from which it’s told. Women might find the book enlightening (it seems to be as much about growing up as anything else, and it includes the details guys usually don’t include when they’re talking about their own adolescence), but to me, this seems to be a guy book. So many of my old fears are right in there, and the way the characters handle those fears hits home in such a way that I can’t help laughing.

I didn’t think I could possibly love any book as much as I loved The Great Gatsby, but this one stands a chance. And this book, like Gatsby, has me asking a question. Why don’t I even try to write fiction anymore?

It’s Friday.

Dave Farquhar General

It’s Friday and I’m tired. I was tired last night too, so I just laid around and read. I’ll write some more this weekend as I have time.

Now.. Generations.

Dave Farquhar General ,

Generations. Today I relate better to 40-year-olds than I do to 19-year-olds. I have friends in their 30s who relate really well to me, and to everyone else I know who’s close to my age, but I can’t step down the same number of years that they can.
One possible explanation is intelligence and/or maturity level, but I know some 19-year-olds who are more mature than I was at that age, and I know our 18-year-old intern at work is one of the most brilliant people I’ve met. So that explanation, though it may have had some merit when I was a lot younger, doesn’t have much now.

I’ve found a possible explanation.

The theory of generations goes like this. There are four basic generation “personality types,” if you will. They’re cyclical. We hiccuped once after the Civil War and skipped one type, but that’s the only time we’ve done so in the roughly 500 years that people of European descent have lived in the Americas.

Quick disclaimer: All of the examples I’m about to cite are male. My source doesn’t include a lot of female examples. Knowing the birth dates, obviously, you can fit female examples into these.

The first type is the Civics. The book says this is the most basic type, but it’s the one I understand least. They’re very rationalist and value social harmony. The two Civic generations of recent memory were born in 1901-1924 and 1982-2003. Historical figures from Civic generations include Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. Two recent examples of Civics are Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. (This was the generation we skipped immediately after the Civil War. That makes sense–that time period wasn’t very compatible with rationalism and social harmony.)

The Adaptive generations understand the others better than any other type does. They’re compromisers, above all else. Recent adaptive generations were born in the years 1925-1942 and 1843-1859. Interestingly, the current adaptive generation, known as the Silent Generation, has yet to produce a U.S. president and looks ever less likely to do so. Historical Adaptives include Teddy Roosevelt and The Great Compromiser Henry Clay. Contemporary examples of Adaptives include Ralph Nader and Walter Mondale.

Does the Idealist generation need any further explanation? OK. Think hippies. Recent Idealist generations were born 1860-1882 and 1943-1960. Historical examples of Idealists include Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Winston Churchill. Contemporary examples of Idealists include George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Hmm. We was robbed. Or maybe we just gave our Idealists too much power too soon this time around. Churchill was 66 when he became Prime Minister. (It also would have helped if we’d picked an Idealist who could keep it in his pants, but hey. We make these stupid mistakes so future generations don’t have to, if they’re paying attention.)

I don’t think the Reactionist type needs much explanation either. GenX (born 1961-1981) is reactionist. So was the Lost Generation (born 1883-1900) that so influenced the Roaring Twenties. Reactionist Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and aptly described his generation and mine. We’re all or nothing. We produce crooks like Al Capone, we produce traitors like Benedict Arnold, pirates like Captain Kidd. We also produce scathingly perceptive artists like Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and wildly successful tycoons like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. We also produce great generals like Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and can even claim the Father of our Country, George Washington, as one of our own.

Now, here’s the idea. Knowing the cycle and the general characteristics, it’s easier to watch history repeat itself. And while you can’t predict the future, you can predict future trends on this model. You can’t predict who the great leaders of a generation will be, but you can in broad, general terms describe the heroes and goats of a future generation based on the best and worst characteristics of that generation. And since generations define events as much as events define generations, it’s sometimes even possible to describe future events in broad, sweeping terms.

But I think I like it best as a tool for understanding people. I’m not going to understand today’s 14-year-olds by looking at how I was at 14. Sure, there’ll be some similarities but just as many differences. Since today’s 14-year-olds are a Civic generation, in order to understand it, I really have to go back to the next-most-recent Civic generation. In my case, I have to go to my grandparents. If you want to know what GenX is going to be like when it starts hitting the big 50, your best bet is to look at the Lost Generation (those who survived that long–which should, in itself, tell you something) at a similar age.

Based on past history, GenX will have its day, crisis will come–and GenX will prove to be very adept at being both part of the problem and part of the solution–then struggle with and eventually give way to an Eisenhower-like generation, which will either comfort you or scare you.

[added later] Well, duh… I forgot the best example of what GenX coulda shoulda woulda been (and still could be). Unfortunately, not many of us remember the story of Samantha Smith, the 10-year-old from Maine who wrote to Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov in 1982 and asked why the Soviets wanted to conquer the world.

What was remarkable about her? Mostly she was in the right place at the right time. At the peak of the Cold War, here was a child who stepped forward and asked a tough, innocent question no other generation was willing to ask. She asked her question, unafraid of whether she’d be ignored. And her question just happened to be heard.

She’d be 28 now. Who knows whether she would have faded away back into a normal life, or if she would have become a voice of the generation. Unfortunately, she died in a 1985 plane crash.

But we’ve still got time. GenX’s spokesperson doesn’t necessarily have to be Kurt Cobain.

Let the revolution begin…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

I was called in to an emergency meeting yesterday morning. I was up to my eyebrows in alligators, but my boss was insistent. I had to be there. So I went. When we sat down, the tone was somber and slightly meandering. The guy who called the meeting just didn’t want to get to the point. Finally it hit me: Layoffs. That’s what this has to be about. So… Who’s gone? I’m not the highest-paid guy in my group, I’m probably the most versatile, and I’m not the most recent hire, so I’m probably safe. I was right about layoffs, or, more accurately, one layoff, followed by a restructuring. And the layoff wasn’t me.
I think we’re a better fit in our new structure (under our old organization we were married to a group that really didn’t like my group, or at least they didn’t like me, and now we’re married to a group that does, for the most part, like my group), and my boss’ new boss is so busy we shouldn’t have to worry about him messing with much. But I don’t like change, and my Scottish clan’s motto, “Fide et Fortitudine” loosely translates into “loyalty and guts” today. The loyalty side of me has some problems with what happened yesterday, but looking at it strictly from a business standpoint, I sure can’t argue with it.

Meanwhile, I needed about three minutes’ worth of quality time with that indignant hard drive to get the data I so desperately wanted. I got it. Next struggle: Getting Windows NT to work properly with eighth-rate hardware. This PC has a generic RealTek 8139-based card (so we’re talking a generic clone of a Linksys or D-Link card here… A clone of a clone), Trident Blade 3D video, ESS 1868 sound, and an AOpen 56K modem (at least it wasn’t a Winmodem). The AOpen modem is, by a longshot, the best component in the machine outside of the Gigabyte motherboard and Pentium II-450 CPU. I’ll say one thing for brand-name hardware. Drivers are easy to come by and they generally install correctly the first time, every time. It took me an hour to track down Blade 3D drivers that work, then it took me a good 30-45 minutes to get those working. The Realtek drivers at least worked the first time. I never did get the ESS drivers working. The AOpen modem driver went off without a hitch, mostly because it’s actually a controller-based modem. I stand by my assertion that you can buy $10 components and spend $100 worth of time trying to get each of them working right, or you can buy $50-$75 components from a reputable maker and make them work the first time. Seeing as the more expensive components will probably work well together too and give better performance, it’s a no-brainer for me. Gimme Creative or Guillemot video and sound cards and pair that up with a 3Com or Intel NIC and I’ll be a happy camper.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about my bookstore adventures. I want to go read for a while.

OK, I’m back for a second. I can’t resist. Not quite four years ago, I had a conversation with another Journalism major/history minor (one who, unlike me, actually finished his history minor, if I recall correctly). Over dinner with my then-significant other, he told me all about his theory of generations, as she looked on, entranced. The nasty breakup that soon followed that conversation overshadowed it, and I didn’t think of it again until last night, when I spotted the book Generations, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, on the shelf of a used bookstore. Curious, I looked at it, and sure enough, this was where that guy got his ideas. It was marked six bucks. I bought it, started reading, and gained some insight on myself. Why do I go ga-ga over the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and get chills whenever I read about his personal life because it all feels so familiar? He and I are from parallel generational cycles. His generation thought like mine does, so we grew up in similar peer environments. Why do I understand people 10 years older than me so much better than people 10 years younger than me? I was born 7 years before the end of my generational cycle.

All day I couldn’t wait ’til Tuesday…

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

First, a diversion. I came home, popped in Peter Murphy’s Deep, which I’d never listened to, and I called a friend. An hour later all was well with the world. Well, not really. But Dave’s world was fine.
And Deep… It starts off with a really dark, brooding song, but when you listen to the lyrics it sounds like a love song. A goth love song? Huh? So I looked at the lyrics. I think the song is really about going swimming. I love that kind of irony. I need to make a mix CD:

Not Love Songs
1. Drive — The Cars (about mental illness)
2. The One I Love — R.E.M. (about a barbecue joint)
3. Cruel Summer — Bananarama (not a breakup song–it’s about a hot beach)
4. Deep Ocean Vast Sea — Peter Murphy (sounds like a love song but it’s about going swimming)

I’m sure there are others. I need to go find them.

Work. Yesterday was my first day supporting a new client. And wouldn’t you know it? After we led off the morning with a visit from SirCam in one of the finance departments, the hard drive in the PC sitting in the president of the company’s office conked out. You turn it on and it sounds like a jackhammer. If you let the drive rest for a while, you can operate it for anywhere from 1-2 minutes before it completely stops responding. So I connected the president’s drive to another system and started copying data, a few files at a time. Finally I wised up and optimized the box I was using, while the president’s drive rested. I defragmented the destination drive, and I set the system to load absolutely nothing at startup. It’s NT, so it takes about a minute to boot, but at least I can get about a minute’s worth of copying per hour.

But I just realized I’ve got a P3-866 with a nice 7200 RPM disk in it sitting on the desk, waiting to be rebuilt. I think I need to draft that machine into data recovery duty first. That machine might boot in under 30 seconds, especially with nothing loading at startup. That’d make me at least 50% more productive. I still haven’t recovered his PST file, and that’s what concerns me the most. We’ve gotta get his e-mail back, whatever it takes.

I seem to attract problems like this. At least I have a decent record of solving them. (And yes, I do know the trick of putting a hard drive in the freezer for four hours–I won’t do it this time because the drive is under warranty.)

And in the meantime, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. This might as well be like a chance to hit a grand slam to win the World Series.