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.

A couple more ideas for saving gas

Dave Farquhar Saving money

Chrysler criticized oil companies a couple of weeks back for padding their profits and not trying to do anything to help gas prices. There were some fallacies in their arguments; I’m not even going to try to touch it. I’d rather try to solve the problem: Figure out how to burn less gas. So here are some tricks for saving gas.

I’ve got two cheap tricks that seem to work.You can try the first one the next time you get your oil changed. The last time I changed my oil, the guy at the quick-lube place said my oil looked awfully dark and that I ought to have them flush the oil reservoir (at a price, of course–$15, if I remember right). I said OK. I had the same treatment done on my wife’s car when I had hers changed later the same day.

All I can say is that since having that done, my car gets better gas mileage. Right when I first got it, it could occasionally get 39 miles per gallon on the highway. Gradually, my highway mileage declined. Well, after that treatment, I’m back up in the 39 MPG neighborhood again in my 2002 Honda Civic.

I’m sure that having it done every time is overkill, but it’s not a terribly expensive experiment. I have a 12-gallon tank. If it saves me two miles per gallon (which is about right), that saves me a gallon roughly every second tank of gas ($3). Since I get about 400 miles per tank of gas, that’s 10 fillups between oil changes. So the maintenance will pay for itself if gas prices hold.

I’ve heard about another trick, where people are putting a couple of ounces of acetone into a full tank of gas and reporting better gas mileage and better engine performance. I don’t really want to mess around with acetone. But one of the advocates said something interesting: He claimed that the main ingredient in most fuel treatments is acetone.

Well, I’m pretty sure fuel treatment won’t void my warranty, although I’m not sure about acetone.

I used to giggle at the “Use every tank!” sticker on gas treatment. When gas cost $1.09 a gallon, it didn’t make much sense to spend $1.50 to try to squeeze out another mile or two per gallon. But at $3 a gallon, it makes sense to use at least every other tank.

Here’s a tip: Don’t buy it at the gas station if you can avoid it. It’s cheaper at discount stores. Sometimes I even see it at dollar stores. When the goal is to save money by burning less gas, it doesn’t make sense to overpay for gas treatment.

I think both of these things are worth doing, even if they prove only to be break-even propositions. If everyone did them, it would reduce usage, and when demand falls, price usually goes along with it.

I noticed one other thing yesterday. At my sister-in-law’s, 89 octane gas is actually cheaper than 87, at some stations, because the 87 octane gas is 100% gasoline, while the 89 is 10% ethanol. When there’s a price difference, buy the cheaper one.

Upgrading my mother in law’s Compaq Presario S5140WM

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

About the time my wife and I started dating, my mother-in-law bought a new computer. With an Athlon XP 2600+, that Compaq ought to be faster than anything I own. Even though it’s almost three years old now, it ought to still be pretty good.

It wasn’t. I fixed that.It has the Compaq name on the front but anymore that doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s a clone made in the Far East, with bog standard parts inside. When I visited earlier this month, she complained about its speed. I couldn’t find anything obviously wrong, but I checked the memory usage. It was over 250K with nothing loaded. Not good.

I happen to know the F-Secure-based security suite her ISP issued her can use nearly 256 megs all by itself sometimes. Not good.

So I paid Newegg.com a visit and ordered her 512 megs of memory. For 35 bucks, shipping included, why not? It’s overkill, but memory requirements are going to go up before they go down, and there was little point in buying half as much memory for 10 bucks less.

I bought Viking. I prefer Crucial or Kingston, but in my days doing desktop support, the people who insisted on Viking did OK, and it was cheaper the week I ordered it, so I got it. Don’t buy the cheap and nasty no-name stuff; the failure rate on no-name commodity memory has always been very high–somewhere near 30 percent, in my experience, and computers are more sensitive to memory today than they were in 1995 when I got my first job doing desktop support.

When I got the computer open, I saw it has an AGP slot. I really should get an AGP video card to put in the computer. Built-in video steals some system memory, which isn’t a big deal when you have 768 megs, but it also steals memory bandwidth. It’s like that bridge I cross over every day to go to work–it’s normally three lanes, but they have it closed down to two or even one lane some days. So it takes a longer time to get over that bridge. If I put a video card–even my old Nvidia-based card I bought back in 1997, if I could find it–with its own memory in her computer and disabled the onboard video, it would be like reopening that lane, and her CPU would have a full three lanes to work with when accessing memory.

I just checked Ebay, and found an Nvidia TNT2-based card for 99 cents Buy-it-now, with $9 shipping. The shipping is a ripoff, but the seller is probably paying a couple of dollars for the card and making $4 on shipping. At $10, the card is more than anyone needs for word processing and Internet use, and it’s probably better than the built-in video would be for light gaming. It’s a cheap way to soup up a computer like this.

If you can’t afford to buy any memory for this or any other computer with built-in video, but you’re running short on memory, here’s a free upgrade: Go into the BIOS, and set the amount of memory dedicated to the video card as low as you can. In this case, I can go to 8 megs. You won’t be able to run high colors at high resolution after doing this, but if you’re happy with 1024×768, it’ll give your system some memory back and make it a little more peppy.

I sure wish Intel or AMD would steal the old Amiga concept of chip memory, which was a bank of memory that could be used by either the video chip or the main CPU, at the expense of speed of course. But slow memory is still way faster than the swap file. The system just gave priority to the main memory (called fast memory) when it was available. It’s amazing how many good ideas were out there 20 years ago, some of which we’re enjoying today but some of which are sadly lost to history.

And, as always, a newer, faster hard drive is a good way to hot-rod an aging PC if it feels a bit sluggish.

But, $35 worth of RAM and a $10 video card goes a long, long way.

Recapturing the charm of someone else’s dad’s American Flyer train

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

My buddy Todd brought over his dad’s American Flyer train today. It had been a gift from his dad on his first Christmas. It was from 1938.

That was a peculiar year, because it was the first year that A.C. Gilbert, of Erector fame, built American Flyer trains. Previously American Flyer had been an independent company in Chicago.

This model was a Gilbert design, and at most produced from 1938 to 1941.Late last year, Todd had asked our mutual friend Tom about how to go about getting the train repaired. Tom referred Todd to me, since 3-rail O gauge isn’t Tom’s specialty. Of course Tom knew the answer: Marty Glass, of Marty’s Model Railroads in Affton.

So Todd took it to Marty earlier this year, once the Christmas rush had died down. Todd called me yesterday and said Marty had finished it. He brought it over.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but he brought out an intricate 4-6-4 Pacific. It had far more detail than anything Marx ever made, and far more detail than any O27 locomotive Lionel ever made too. It had an intricate set of linkages, which turned out to be its downfall because they got bound up on us once. Marty had run the train for Todd when he picked it up–I suggested Todd have him do that, since 68-year-old trains always need some adjustments after they’ve been repaired. It ran fine on Marty’s layout.

Before we ran the train, I fixed the light in the Pullman car Todd brought over. He hadn’t taken that to Marty. The wire had come loose from the pickup on the underside of the car, and the light bulb was rattling around inside. I fished the bulb out, examined it (it looked fine; the old light bulbs in these trains is almost always fine, even after being shipped across the country), put the bulb in the socket, and re-soldered the wire to the pickup. I solder like a plumber, but judging from the pickup on that train, so did the Gilbert employee who built it.

With the car ready to go, I put it and the locomotive and tender on the track. We quickly found that the oddball American Flyer link and pin couplers didn’t line up right. Time for some more adjustments. I finally got the coupler heights adjusted correctly, then I hit the power, expecting since it had run in the store, it would run just fine on my layout.

Not so much. It ran for a few feet, then stopped in a shower of blue sparks, leaving a buzzing sound on the layout that I’ve come to associate with a short circuit.

The handrails were the biggest problem. There are two holes in the cowcatcher assembly that the handrails are supposed to slide into. Had I been doing the design, I would have made the rails longer, so they could be bent further underneath. But that’s irrelevant now. With the handrails not in the holes, they were pushing the cowcatcher down low, there it could short out the third rail. S gaugers can gloat that this wouldn’t be a problem on 2-rail S gauge track, but they really ought to respect their elders.

So I fixed the rails, and put a dab of solder on the underside to hold them in place (solder won’t stick to the zamac boiler). I noted the Phillips head screws Marty used to put it all back together. I’ll have to give him a hard time about that the next time I see him. Phillips screws didn’t come into widespread use on toys until the ’50s.

With that problem taken care of, it ran, but then it locked up hard. I gave it another thorough examination, and found that some of the intricacies on the drive rods had come misaligned, causing it all to bind up. I had to take it apart to free up enough space to realign everything. I took off the front truck, then the cowcatcher, guided everything where it was supposed to go, and reassembled everything.

And what do you know… It ran. It was a bit herky-jerky at first, but in my experience, old motors are always that way when they’ve been sitting for decades. They seem to need to get some running time in before they get used to running smoothly again. Todd told me that Marty said the motor was fine; the only problems he found were structural. From the sound of the motor, Marty obviously had lubed it–they tend to squeal a lot after 50 years, let alone 68, and this motor sounded like new–but I guess that’s all it had needed.

I found out the hard way that this locomotive (an American Flyer 531) really hates O27 curves. It derails every time, even on curves where you lead into the O27 and back out with a wider curve. So we moved it from my inner loop to my outer loop, which is mostly O42 except in one corner, where I had to do O34 to make everything fit. It made me nervous on O34 curves, but it did manage to stay on the track. It was much happier on the O42, which makes sense, because American Flyer O gauge track was 40 inches in diameter, just like its S gauge track.

Once we were confident it was running, we packed it back up. Todd was going to go surprise his dad with it. It’s been a long time since its last run. I hope he’ll enjoy seeing it roam the rails again.

Now that I’ve seen some of the late prewar 3/16 scale American Flyer up close and personal, I have a new admiration for it. I own a number of the Flyer freight cars from that period, but none of the locomotives. The detail is very good, and they run smooth and are geared low, so they have plenty of pulling power.

I’m sure Todd’s dad will be happy to see it running again. I know I sure enjoyed fine-tuning it.

Excuse me while I go check eBay…