Self-Perpetuating Depression

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

My longtime friend Steve brought up a good point as we discussed our job situations. He said he read that some companies may be using the current DEPRESSION (I hate that r-word, let’s call things what they are) as an excuse to lay people off that they’ve been putting off because it would hurt morale.

The idea makes a lot of sense.I’ve been privvy, unfortunately, to management waiting for an excuse to get rid of people in the past. It’s a strategy that can backfire, but nobody likes confrontation, and waiting for an excuse is an easy way to avoid confrontation. Or to avoid having to fix problems you really don’t want to deal with.

But that creates a problem. While one business is using economic depression as an excuse to cut staff, so are lots of others. That puts more people out of work. That means they have less money, and that means they spend less.

So your neighbors’ former employees aren’t patronizing you anymore, and your revenue drops. Welcome to the vicious circle. At some point, you probably end up laying off people you really never wanted to get rid of.

It kind of sounds like a conspiracy, but really it isn’t. All it takes is a few people having that bad idea.

And there’s no real way to prevent it. Everywhere I’ve ever worked, going all the way back to high school, I’ve seen people in management positions who had no business being there. And that won’t change.

You can try to work in depression-proof industries, but is there such a thing? Everything’s connected together.

You can do what I did and minimize the way a depression can affect you. With no mortgage and no car payment, I could support my family on very little.

Of course, economists wag their fingers at people like me. Part of the problem is that people like me aren’t buying new cars because we realized there’s nothing at all wrong with the cars we have. Bad Dave.

Then again, unlike some people, after I borrowed large amounts of money, I paid it back. And part of the reason for that was because I didn’t sign on the dotted line until I did the math to figure out what life was going to be like with that mortgage payment and whether I was willing to live like that. If more people had actually paid attention to the amount of money at the end of the document–the amount that you’re going to end up paying over the course of the mortgage–and been scared, then we’d be in a lot better shape than we are now.

I do think this depression is forcing us to be a little less materialistic. And I think materialism and conspicuous consumption was what sucked us into this hole to begin with.

And in the meantime, it’s forcing some companies to look at themselves and make some hard decisions. Some aren’t surviving. Some will be missed more than others.

It’s affecting me a whole lot more now that I’m suddenly in the job pool with that other 7.2 percent. I’m sure I’ll complain a lot more. I know it’ll take a lot longer than I want for me to find employment because it already has. But I’ll be OK. I’m Scottish. I’m scrappy and tough.

And I think in the long run our country will be OK. Maybe we’ll even be better for it.

How far we’ve fallen

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

It’s job interview time again. I haven’t lost my job, at least not yet, but I’m not waiting around to see if I’m going to. I’m hitting pavement, talking to potential employers, whether they’re connected to what I’m doing now or not.

So, it was off to the mall to buy some clothes this weekend for the interview because all my dress clothes are from 1991. They fit (I wore them to my last interviews in 2005), but when your clothes are old enough to vote, it’s probably time for something new.What I found at the mall was depressing. There were lots of vacancies, including places I remember having something the last time I was at the mall. That might have been October, but October isn’t that long ago. And I’m not talking as someone who owns clothes that are old enough to vote. In business, October is yesterday. I’m still dealing with projects at work that started around then.

I also found people with college degrees working retail. Not 2-year degrees. I’m talking 4-year degrees from good schools.

At a job fair today, someone scoffed at my journalism degree. Frankly I’m getting tired of apologizing for my journalism degree, especially from people who wouldn’t know how to spell "journalism" correctly, or at least don’t know that paragraphs generally have more than one sentence in them. Engineering isn’t the end-all of life. And a journalism degree from the University of Missouri isn’t a cakewalk. It’s one of the top three schools in the country, and there’s a reason for that: It’s hard.

And I won’t apologize for it because that degree allowed me to write an O’Reilly book at the age of 24.

I also won’t apologize for it because if I’m not deemed worthy to keep the job I’ve been doing for three years, I should be able to make enough as a freelance writer to keep the utilities on and keep food in my son’s stomach without being a burden on the taxpaying public.

And finally, I won’t apologize for it because I’ve survived in this industry since early 1997, in spite of having a degree in a seemingly unrelated field. In the mid 1990s, no four-year university was teaching what I do. Want to guess what the best sysadmin I’ve ever met majored in? Interdisciplinary studies. That’s a polite way of saying "nothing." But the people who come from all over the country to hear him speak couldn’t care less what he majored in.

But I’ve gotten off track. I guess I’m in a bad mood because this week I also had to sit in a meeting where I listened to someone tell 20 people that they won’t be retained, and 20 temporary employees who’ve been with the company for a month will be retained, "because they’re doing a helluva job."

No, those temps will be retained because they’re cheaper. The people in that room have busted their butts for that company for years. But in some cases, the management doesn’t even know those people’s names or job titles, in spite of the number of years and long hours they put in.

Of course you don’t want to let a temp go. You shouldn’t want to let anyone go. But that’s always a risk when you’re a temp. I was a temp twice. Once I was let go myself. The second time they kept me, but let go another temp from the same company who started the same time I did. And I knew from the start that it was a possibility.

But I think the thing that depressed me the most was seeing the long lines at that job fair, where I applied for my current job and tried not to show offense when someone ridiculed my journalism degree. The majority of people who showed up at that fair won’t get jobs. And you could tell from the looks on their faces that a lot of them knew that. But what else were they going to do? They had to try.

I don’t know how much longer this is going to last. A local economist on the news Sunday morning said he expected 6-18 months. That means he thinks things will be bad at least until July 2009, and perhaps as long as July 2010.

And from what I can tell right now, my best bet for recession-proofing my career is Sun Solaris 10. Should I find myself with ample free time in the near future, I’ll probably try to spend a lot of it learning that.

Samsung printer says paper jam but there is none? Here’s the fix.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,
Samsung printer says paper jam but there is none? Here’s the fix.

I had a phantom paper jam in a Samsung CLP-300 laser printer. It was strange. I tried to print yesterday and got nothing but a paper jam message after the click that usually precedes the paper feeding through. So I looked inside all the covers, even flipping the printer over multiple times, looking for that stray bit of paper munging up the works. If your Samsung printer says paper jam but there is none, here’s what to do.

It’s a good thing I fixed it, because I needed to print some resumes. I got the job, too.

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Be careful where you buy your screws

Dave Farquhar Saving money

So my wife wanted to replace the handles on the pantry doors. She went to Lowe’s, picked out some handles, and brought them home.

The screws that came with them were too short. So I went to Home Depot (it’s two minutes away and open late on Sundays) and bought replacements. I learned something.I needed 8-32 machine screws. I started out in the cabinet aisle, mainly because I found it first, but the 8-32s they had there were either too short or too long. The length I needed was sold out.

So I went a couple of aisles down to the general hardware, located the machine screws, and found what I needed. I also noted the price. A package of four 8-32s cost $1 from the hardware aisle. A package of two of them cost $2 in the cabinet aisle. Same screws, just slightly different wording on the packaging. I had no idea.

It’s cheaper still to buy them by the box, if you need a lot of them, but I only needed two. I paid my dollar, took the package of four home, and mounted the handles on the doors. The leftover parts are in my stash of screws and other hardware that I’m saving for a rainy day.

Second impressions: Intel D945GCLF2, aka the dual-core Atom desktop board

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I finally got Windows XP installed on what’s going to be my mother in law’s dual-core Intel Atom computer. I’ve spent some more time with it, and it’s a good board, as long as you’re willing to live with its limitations.First of all, if your Windows CD doesn’t include SP3 (or possibly SP2), slipstream it. SP1 or earlier won’t boot on this board. I used nlite to slipstream SP3 and all the updates. A good way to download all the updates easily is to use CTupdate. Since installing updates can take nearly as long as installing the OS itself, it’s nice to have a CD that’s completely up to date. And while you’re at it, you can remove some useless Windows components like Windows Messenger and MSN Explorer.

Intel's dual-core Atom boardSince I don’t play 3D games and my mother in law doesn’t either, I have no idea what the gaming performance of this machine is, but I doubt it’s very good. That’s fine; it’s not what this board is designed for.

For productivity apps, it’s a perfectly reasonable PC. I can switch back and forth between my 2 GHz P4 and this Atom and not feel like I’m missing anything.

Due to the D945CLF2‘s size, it has some limitations. It only has two SATA and one PATA connectors. Hooking up her PATA hard drive and CD-RW got interesting. I managed to do it, but it isn’t pretty. If I’d known this was going to turn into a system rebuild, I would have bought a SATA hard drive instead of the PATA drive I got. If you’re thinking of one of these boards to upgrade an old PC, keep that in mind, especially if the 3.5″ bays aren’t very close to the 5.25″ bays.

There’s only one PCI slot. That’s less of a problem than it sounds like, as it has onboard video, audio, gigabit Ethernet, and lots of USB ports. But if you want to add a TV tuner or Firewire ports, you can only choose one or the other.

There’s also only one memory slot, and it can only take 2 GB. So there’s no dual-channel memory, although the chipset and BIOS support it. The CPU is AMD64 compatible, but the main reason people go 64-bit is to be able to run 4 GB of memory or more. It would have been nice if Intel could have crammed one more memory slot in there somehow.

Nvidia is talking about releasing a chipset for the Atom that will give better performance than Intel’s. Intel pairs the Atom with a very old chipset, and Nvidia says they can make it perform better. Intel doesn’t want the Atom to compete with the Celeron, so they’re not making performance a top priority. Even still, it’s not bad. I would imagine Nvidia could make it an even nicer setup.

But at any rate, this is a nice board. It’s reliable, cheap, and fast enough. If I decide to modernize any of my computers in the next year, I would consider one of these. They run cool and quiet and consume very little power. Lately I’ve been a big proponent of buying off-lease 2 GHz P4s, but I think an Atom rig is also worth considering. It’ll cost a little more, but its power usage is so low, it’s likely to more than make up the difference over the course of its lifetime.

Pale Divine: St. Louis’ biggest band

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , , , , ,
Pale Divine: St. Louis’ biggest band

“[Pale Divine singer Michael Schaerer’s] life didn’t turn out the way fans expected, but chances are neither did theirs.” Perhaps nothing sums up Pale Divine, St. Louis’ biggest band in 1991, better than that line from the December 21, 2008 issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In the early 1990s, Michael Schaerer was the frontman for Pale Divine, a local band on the verge of breaking onto the national scene. They played sold-out shows on Laclede’s Landing, they had a record deal with Atlantic Records, and the radio stations even played some of their stuff sometimes. And then they broke up before they could finish a second album. For years, Schearer got solo gigs playing cover tunes, though he’s raised his profile in recent times. His former bandmate, guitarist Richard Fortus, is in Guns ‘n Roses. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

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First impressions: Intel D945GCLF2, aka the dual-core Atom desktop board

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I was never able to get my mother in law’s computer to misbehave, but my son was. He’d crawl up to it, press whatever buttons he could find, and invariably it would reboot and give beep codes.

Intel's dual-core Atom boardSo I decided the best bet would be to drop in a new system board. I went against all my usual practices and bought an Intel. Further research showed the stock board was made by MSI. I’ve never had good luck with MSI boards, although I know they’re popular. This one lasted five years, which is five years longer than the other two MSI boards I’ve seen. I was able to find an exact replacement, but the $70 price scared me off. Especially without knowing whether it was the board or CPU that was bad. With an Award BIOS, beep codes generally mean bad memory (a memory tester vindicated that), a bad CPU, or bad motherboard. Not very specific.

I wanted something reliable, cheap, and no slower than what she had. With an unlimited budget, I’d buy an Asus board, since I have a 6-year-old Asus board in the basement that’s still humming like new. Gatermann ran an Asus P55T2P4 for 10 years before it died, and I’ve seen lots of other Asus boards reach old age. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an Asus motherboard/CPU combo for less than $100.

So I went with Intel’s desktop dual-core Atom board by default. Intel motherboards are as unexciting as they come, and I hate monopolies, but the board has a 3-year warranty and I know from my experience supporting Micron desktop PCs with Intel boards in them that it’ll last at least that long.

I had to change the ATX backplate, but I was glad to find the Compaq front-panel connector had the same pinout as this Intel board. Removing the old backplate was the hardest part of the installation, as the board mounts with just four screws.

I entered the BIOS on powerup and was disappointed to see I couldn’t disable the onboard video. I really wanted to plug a video card into the lone PCI slot and disable the onboard video to save some memory and bandwidth. I also found enabling USB boot was clunky, but other than that, the BIOS was predictable.

The board itself runs extremely cool. The power supply fan doesn’t blow out hot air or even warm air–it’s cool.

You have to slipstream SP2 or SP3 to install Windows XP on this board. I haven’t done that yet, so I don’t know yet how well it runs XP. But being a dual-core, 1.6 GHz CPU, it should be OK. When XP was introduced, 1.6 GHz single-core CPUs were mainstream. It may not keep up with the old 2.1 GHz AMD Athlon XP the system came with, but without all the crapware Compaq loads at the factory, I’ll bet the system will be faster than it ever was even if the new CPU isn’t quite as fast as the old one.

A shift may be coming

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

I’ve been seeing news segments and stories about how people are choosing not to replace things, but rather, repair them, saving money in the process, but hurting the big-box stores as well.

I can see how this could be a good thing in the long run, though.Think about it. Big-box stores sell cheap goods made overseas, paying underutilized and/or unskilled workers less than $10/hour to do it.

Repair is semi-skilled or skilled work, depending on what it is you’re fixing. By definition the work has to occur on the local level. And the local level is where we’re hurting for jobs.

Not only that, it’s easy to find storefront space, assuming the repair doesn’t take place on-site. Most commercial districts have some vacancies; go into the older parts of town or into shopping malls, and you can find lots of vacancies. Last weekend I ran into an acquaintance from high school who just opened a store; he said rent is dirt cheap right now. Landlords are begging people to lease storefront space.

In the long run, it’s almost always cheaper to spend a little more money on a higher quality product (say, a pair of shoes) and then repair it when it needs it. So it’s a win-win all around.

It’s bad for the big-box stores I guess, but having worked in a big-box store myself, I know firsthand that big-box stores aren’t good for anyone but the corporations who own them and the corporations who lease to them. They don’t utilize their workers to their ability, they don’t encourage their workers to better themselves, and if they pay a living wage, they just barely do it. That’s if they bother to pay the worker at all–in my second stint at a certain big-box store, they missed two pay periods before I got fed up and told the store manager I needed my money so I could pay my bills.

I’d love to see more big-box stores close and more small, independent specialty stores and repair shops open in the business districts that the big boxes destroyed. Society as a whole will save money, and it will create jobs that are actually worth having.

New life for a Compaq Presario S5140WM

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I’m fixing up my mother in law’s Compaq Presario S5140WM. She bought it about five years ago, a few weeks after her daughter and I started dating. It’s been a pretty good computer for her, but lately it’s been showing signs it might be overheating.

I took the shotgun approach, replacing pretty much everything that I would expect to be at or near the end of its life at five years.Since we seemed to have a heat problem, I picked up a better copper heatsink/fan for the CPU. The copper heatsink promised to lower the temperature by 5-10 degrees on its own. Since I rarely get more than 3-4 years out of a CPU fan, this was pretty much a no-brainer.

I also picked up a Seasonic 300W 80-plus power supply. I doubt the machine will put enough load on the power supply to actually get it to run at peak efficiency, but I also figured an 80-plus power supply would probably be better built and more reliable than a more traditional power supply. Seasonic is hardly a no-name, acting as an OEM for a number of big names, including Antec and PC Power & Cooling.

Finally, of course I replaced the hard drive. Being a parallel ATA model, I was limited in choices. I bought a Seagate rather than a Western Digital, because I’ve had better luck with Seagate through the years, and Seagate has also absorbed Quantum through its purchase of Maxtor. Maxtor admittedly had a couple of rough periods, so say what you will about Maxtor, but every Quantum drive I ever bought still works. I have a Quantum drive I bought back in 2000 still working in my computer downstairs. Yeah, it’s slow and loud, but it’s been ticking away like a Swiss watch for 8 years, in almost constant use! Maybe some of those Quantum engineers worked on this Seagate. To Seagate’s advantage, they do offer a 5-year warranty on their drives, which is really good, considering the conventional wisdom on hard drives used to be that you should replace them every three years because they’d fail soon afterward. Unless the drive was a Quantum, that is.

The question is whether I just clone the old drive onto the new drive, or install Windows fresh on it. I know if I do a fresh installation, the thing will run like a cheetah, free of all the useless crud HP installed at the factory. The question is how lazy I am.

After buying a new hard drive, power supply and CPU fan, I’ve sunk nearly $120 into this old computer. But it’s an Athlon, faster than 2 GHz, so it can hold its own with a low-end computer of today. The onboard video is terrible, but I solved that with a plug-in AGP card. It has 768 MB of RAM in it and tops out at a gig, but since she mainly just uses it for web browsing, 768 megs ought to be enough. I’ll keep my eye out for a 512MB PC3200 DIMM to swap in just in case.

And besides all that, since this Compaq has a standard micro ATX case, if 1 GB starts to feel too cramped, I can swap in a new motherboard/CPU that can take however much memory I want. And the power supply is already ready for it.

But as-is, I think this computer has at least another three years in it.

The Western Electric 500

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Another year, another cordless telephone/answering machine.

I bought a cordless phone to replace an aging and failing 2.4 GHz model this week. Our luck with modern phones makes me long for the old days.

western electric rotary phone model 500
The Western Electric model 500 rotary phone is as indestructible and reliable as it is iconic.

I like the old Western Electric 500 (also known simply as “The Bell Phone”) because it was specifically designed not to break.We own three. My wife and I both have a habit of picking them up when we see them cheaply at garage and estate sales. I see at least five a year, but I only buy if it’s cheap. Maybe there’s some book somewhere that says a Model 500 in a common color is worth $20, but I won’t pay that much for one.

They’re annoying to use for dialing, of course, since they’re strictly old-school pulse. But we can use the cordless phone when we need to dial, or the green Southwestern Bell Freedom Phone I bought for my first apartment, which somehow still works after 10 years.

When it comes to just answering the phone and talking on it, they’re just like any other corded phone, except the handset is a bit heavier.

The other annoying thing is that they don’t ring, but tonight I found a cure for that. Opening the phone up and moving one wire usually cures that problem. (Follow the link and scroll to the last section of the page.)

How reliable are they?

Well, tonight I opened up the one I keep in my office to rewire the ringer, and I found it was made in 1957. After 51 years, it’s still going strong.

We have one in the bedroom too. It’s a later model, made by Stromberg Carlson under license, dated September 1978. Although it looks just like a Western Electric, it feels a little bit lighter and less rugged to me. Nevertheless, after 30 years it still works fine.

Those are really good track records, in an age when we tend to think of things as nearly indestructible if they manage to last five years.

And I’ll admit I like the retro look they have about them. Although I’m not old enough to remember the days when it was illegal to plug anything not made by AT&T or a subsidiary into your phone jack, these are the phones pretty much everyone had up until 1984, when the government temporarily broke AT&T up. My parents and grandparents used these phones. And when my house was built in the mid 1960s, it was almost undoubtedly equipped with a 500 too, and I’d be willing to bet that 500 served as its primary phone well into the 1980s.

I wouldn’t want to trade everything in my house for 1949 technology, but just like my old IBM Model M keyboards, I definitely have a thing for those heavy old-fashioned phones.