David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
The third 1935 Goudey card I bought featured four members of the Chicago White Sox, including Hall of Famer Luke Appling. But Luke Appling wasn’t the reason I bought the card.
I bought the card for George Earnshaw and Jimmy Dykes, in that order. Neither of them are Hall of Famers but they mean something to me. That’s the reason we buy a lot of the cards we buy.
I tried to remove black marks from wood floors with Bar Keeper’s Friend recently, and I’m happy to report it worked pretty well.
Here’s the story: I had some mysterious black ring-shaped marks on my hardwood floors. I traced them to metal ends of furniture legs. The long-term solution is to put the furniture on leg cups, but one still has to contend with the damage.
The pros use a floor bleach whose active ingredient is oxalic acid, but finding it is hard, and finding it in household quantities is harder. But there’s a cheap, readily available household alternative: Bar Keeper’s Friend. It costs a couple of dollars and you can buy it at big-box stores like Home Depot, hardware stores, grocery stores, and even some discount stores. It’s usually in the cleaning aisle next to the Comet. It’s good stuff to have on hand anyway, because it does a great job of cleaning up pretty much anything you’d use Comet on, but it literally eats rust spots for lunch so it’ll take care of chores Comet doesn’t.
I was on a conference call discussing the Microsoft product lifecycle with several coworkers and our Microsoft-assigned support engineers when someone asked if a server version of Windows 10 was going to come out.
The Microsoft rep said no comment. Then I chimed in.
“We need to assume they will release a server version, probably about six months after the desktop version, and we need to start testing and preparing to deploy it when it comes out,” I said.
“Shouldn’t we wait for Service Pack 1?”
I went in for the kill. Read more
I cited MS14-066, commonly known as Winshock, this week as a reason to take action on a server. Another stakeholder tried to argue with me. The vulnerability was very old, he said–years old, and hadn’t caused a problem yet.
He’s right. It’s at least 19 years old. But that’s merely interesting, not important.
What’s important is what’s possible now that people know how to look for it and how to exploit it. Read more
Mariott wants to jam wi-fi signals. They claim it’s for security reasons, but really it’s so they can gouge guests by charging them for wi-fi instead of using wi-fi hotspots. The security claims are pure bunk.
The truth is that hotel wi-fi networks are generally horrendously insecure, so it’s really better to avoid using them if you can.
Sometime around the sixth grade I realized that prices on modern cards were very volatile. If a star player had a bad month, his card prices were likely to suffer, while a good month or good season could send prices skyward. I have few regrets in life, but I do wish I’d sold or traded off my Jose Canseco rookie cards when their book value was $300. I could buy several today for $5 or $6 if I wanted more. (I’ll pass.)
That’s about what I paid for my second 1935 Goudey card, which featured not one but three Hall of Famers in Chicago Cubs uniforms: Burleigh Grimes, Chuck Klein, and Kiki Cuyler, along with Woody English. And when I bought that card in the late 1980s, I knew none of them were going to have a bad year the next year.
Dad and I were at the late, lamented World of Baseball Cards on Lemay Ferry Road in south St. Louis County sometime in the late 1980s, flipping through vintage cards. Among the old cards in the pile was a 1935 Goudey 4-in-1 featuring Cleveland Indians players. The most noteworthy was Joe Vosmik, an All-Star left fielder who batted .348 that year.
I was debating whether to buy the card or not when Dad glanced over. “Get that one,” he said. “My dad knew Joe Vosmik.”
This week, Google published a vulnerability in Windows 8.1 after a 90-day countdown timer automatically expired. Microsoft has not yet released a patch.
Controversy ensued. Obviously, yes, an unpatched, well-known vulnerability in Windows is troubling. But the alternative is worse.
I’m collecting baseball cards again.
I collected for most of my youth, but as adulthood set in, other priorities took over. It happens a lot. But now my kids are getting old enough to take an interest in such things, and if my son is buying baseball cards, I might as well buy a card or two myself, right?
On Christmas Eve, I decided to take on a challenge: The 1935 Goudey set. Goudey was the biggest name of the 1930s, but at 36 cards, the 1935 set is small enough that a mere mortal like me can stand a chance of accumulating one example of each, and do so in a reasonable period of time. Most of the player drawings in the 1935 set are reused from the 1933 and/or 1934 sets, so it looks and feels like a classic Goudey set.
It’s not going to be a particularly cheap endeavor, but with one exception, it’s possible to get a low-grade example of each card in the set for $10-$15. A complete set in low grade is likely to cost less than $1,000. And while $1,000 is a lot of money, that’s approximately $20 a week. Most of us spend $20 a week on things that aren’t particularly good for us. Spend two years doing it and it drops to $10 a week.
I took my sons back to the local baseball card shop this week. They had Christmas money, and my oldest son wanted to get some baseball cards. Really good baseball cards, he said.
It turned into a learning opportunity. Read more