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…

A Gospel according to Judas?

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I don’t know if I should be admitting I watched the segment on Primetime on ABC tonight about the alleged Gospel according to Judas. But I made a conscious effort to watch it.

You don’t get much depth in television sensationalism, er, news, not even in a 10-minute segment. So my reaction may be a bit unfair. Still, I’ll give it, for what it’s worth.First, although Christian tradition says a lot of things about Judas, the Bible itself says very little about what happened after Judas took the money. Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Then, at some later point–I was going to say when Judas realized Jesus was going to be killed, but that’s actually more than the Bible says–Judas was remorseful, and tried to return the money, saying he had betrayed an innocent man. The high priests told him that wsan’t their problem. The Bible then says Judas hanged himself.

That’s all it says. The Bible doesn’t say there’s a special place in Hell for Judas. He hanged himself. Done. End of story. For Judas, at least.

One of the questions the Primetime segment raised was the possibility that Judas could have been forgiven. Well, it didn’t even state it as a question–it’s a "controversy."

There is no controversy. There is one and only one difference between Judas and Peter, the disciple who denied three times that he even knew Jesus (and added profanity for emphasis the third time). Peter asked for forgiveness. Judas didn’t.

There are a couple of places in the four Gospels where Jesus makes comments such as "One of you is a devil," which we interpret as Jesus meaning Judas. From that, we can take it to mean Judas wasn’t penitent.

Now, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John aren’t exactly unbiased sources, of course. Judas killed their hero and friend (assuming Luke knew Jesus–while Christian tradition may have an answer to that question, the Bible itself doesn’t). If one of my friends played a role in the death of another friend, I wouldn’t have nice things to say about him either. Of course those four guys were bitter. And while Christianity teaches that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, the individual personalities and feelings of the writers are still present. That’s the main reason I don’t like Eugene Peterson’s The Message–you can’t tell from reading The Message that Luke was a better writer than Mark, because the only voice you hear in The Message is that of Eugene Peterson. But I digress.

Growing up in the ultraconservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, I remember virtually every year there was a service that dealt with Judas and explored that very possibility.

Betraying Christ wasn’t Judas’ biggest sin. If he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. The forgiveness was there. Judas just didn’t reach out and take it.

The other "controversy," whether Jesus asked Judas to betray him, also isn’t a controversy. It’s right there in John 13:28: "What you must do, do quickly." There is a difference between Jesus knowing beforehand that Judas would betray him, and Jesus wanting Judas to betray him. You and I both know that if my car sits outside long enough, it’s going to rust. That doesn’t mean I want it to rust.

But Jesus knew that the entire reason for His life was His death. The message of the four Gospels can be summed up in this: Since God didn’t want to live without us, He became a man and died, because to Him that was the preferable alternative.

Nothing they said in that 10-minute news segment contradicts that.

So, on to the other questions. Who wrote it? That’s difficult to say. Judas didn’t live all that long. But the book is only 13 pages long. I suppose Judas could have written it before he hanged himself. I can think of two times when something really traumatic has happened to me and I wrote down the whole story right after it happened. It didn’t take me very long to do it. And one of them probably was about 13 pages long in its first draft.

The segment dismissed the possibility of it being a forgery, based on the obscure language it was written in, and the age of the papyrus. But being written in a language Judas might have known, and being approximately the same age as the oldest known Biblical manuscripts doesn’t prove Judas wrote it. It could just as easily be an old forgery, intended to embarass someone.

I can just imagine if someone were to unearth my library in 2000 years. Not every statement in every book on my bookshelf is true. But when you find an old book in isolation with little else to compare to it, it can be difficult to know whether what you’ve found is that day’s equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, or the Weekly World News.

And "Lost Gospels" aren’t exactly new. The Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas are two examples that have been with us since very close to the beginning of Christianity. What happened to them? They aren’t in the Bible because they weren’t considered reliable by the people who saw what happened.

A Gospel of Judas, hastily written in the hours between the time he betrayed Jesus and the time of his death, would certainly qualify. The Gospels of Matthew and John were carefully considered, after the fact, and undoubtedly the conversations and recollections of the other 10 surviving disciples colored what ultimately went into those books. Mark and Luke weren’t disciples, so they weren’t even there to see firsthand much of what is in their accounts; the books were assembled from eyewitness accounts. Mark was a good friend of Peter, while the introduction to the book of Luke suggests it might have been a commissioned work.

This doesn’t make a possible Gospel of Judas an uninteresting work, nor does it necessarily make it unimportant. And without having read the upcoming books or the big feature in National Geographic, I don’t have enough to say much about it. But from what little I have to go on, even if this book is exactly what it claims to be, I don’t see that it shakes Christianity at all.

The most important thing it brings up is what the news segment didn’t say, of course. If forgiveness was available to Judas, and if God had a plan for Judas, both are true for you and me as well.

Stock up on compact fluorescent lighting

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

Compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs are on sale at Kmart this week. I bought a bunch.

I’ve been gradually replacing the light bulbs in my house with CFs as they burn out. CFs cost enough that I wasn’t comfortable throwing out 30 perfectly good bulbs and buying all CFs in one hit, especially not at 2002 prices.

I’m glad I took that strategy, because today’s CFs are better and they’re cheaper.Here’s the idea with CFs: a 23-watt CF gives off about as much light as a 100-watt traditional incandescent bulb. But it consumes 77 watts less power. So the 23-watt CF will save you, theoretically, about $40 in energy costs over its lifetime. Plus CFs generally last about 7 years in regular use, so you save the cost of replacing bulbs too. So that $6 light bulb could end up saving you almost 50 bucks.

With energy costs escalating, that savings estimate might actually be a bit low. Also, it doesn’t factor in the heat. If you have 15 100-watt bulbs going in your house, it’s like running a space heater in the summer time. Your air conditioner has to make up the difference. So 15 23-watt CFs generate 77% less heat.

The other thing I’ve noticed now that I’m not living alone anymore is that light bulbs burn out a lot more often. Particularly those vanity globe lights in the bathroom. CF vanity globes last almost three times as long, use less power, and they only cost 50 cents more. My bathrooms had 25-watt bulbs in them All I can find are 11-watt CFs, which are roughly equivalent to 40W. So I’ve been using half as many bulbs, leaving burned-out bulbs in place so the fixtures don’t look funny. The light from eight of those CFs might be blinding.

New CFs light up more quickly than the ones I was buying in 2002, and I think they give off more light now too. The equivalence on the package used to be pretty optimistic; an old 23-watt CF didn’t give off quite as much light as a 100-watt bulb. Today’s bulbs seem to give off comparable light, or sometimes even a bit more.

The light from a CF is still noticeably more blue than incandescent light. My mother in law likes it better. I’m not sure if I like it better or not. But I’ve been mixing CFs with traditional bulbs to tone it down, so I still get quite a bit of savings without dealing with weird light.

And while that 7-year lifespan claim may seem optimistic, I can say this: I’ve been buying CFs for 3 1/2 years now, and I haven’t had to replace one yet. Last year, during those lean times when money was short and I couldn’t really think about the long term, I was buying regular light bulbs again, and some of those have burned out already.

The biggest problem with them is that the dimmer switches in a couple of the rooms make CFs sing. I need to take the dimmer switches out and replace them with regular light switches if I want to use CFs in those rooms.

CFs aren’t the future: I believe the future is LED light bulbs. You can’t buy those at your local Kmart just yet. But white LEDs aren’t cheap enough yet that I would consider them practical. A 2.5W LED bulb gives out comparable light to a 40W incandescent and has a life expectancy of about 17 years, but it costs $30. The equivalent of 60 watts costs about $60. For $10, I’d consider the 2.5W for some applications, but not for $30.

Maybe the technology will be ready when my CFs start burning out. I hope so.

Well, at least this year the Royals showed up to play

Dave Farquhar Baseball , ,

I enjoy reading Rob & Rany on the Royals, but I just can’t feel as negative as they do about the team. I know signing 5-6 free agents who are basically average players isn’t going to make them win the World Series, and I know the Royals lost 3-1 to the Tigers yesterday. But I’m encouraged.

They did the little things.First of all, Scott Elarton, the ace pitcher who would be a #4 starter on a contending team, kept the Royals in the game. He gave up two home runs, yes, but they were banjo shots, and one traveled an underwhelming 333 feet (the wall is 330 feet away). In other words, that one doesn’t go out of every park.

And those two home runs were the only runs he gave up. If any other pitcher pitching for any other team goes 5.2 innings and gives up two runs, he’s done his job. Seven hits and three walks against three strikeouts in 5.2 innings isn’t Walter Johnson, but it’s a big improvement over Jose Lima.

Encouraging sign #2: They caught the ball. Mark Grudzielanek and Doug Mientkiewicz, signed primarily to steady the Royals’ league-worst defense, both made plays that nobody since Frank White and Wally Joyner make. When those guys catch the ball, and teach young and impressionable Angel Berroa and Mark Teahan how to catch the ball, it helps the pitchers when singles that would have turned into rallies become outs.

Encouraging sign #3: The Royals scored one run because three guys did their job. David DeJesus led off the 4th inning and legged out a single into a double. Mark Grudzielanek, who keeps getting criticized for going 0-for-4, grounded out to first base, moving DeJesus over. When the leadoff man gets on, moving the runner over is your job. I don’t care if Grudzielanek doesn’t get a hit all year, if he moves DeJesus over every time, he’s the best #2 hitter the Royals have had in several years. Then Mike Sweeney hit a weak grounder to the pitcher. Sweeney’s job was to hit a single to drive him home and keep the inning going, or at the very least, hit a fly ball deep enough that DeJesus could tag up; he did neither. Then Reggie Sanders, signed almost exclusively to protect Sweeney in the lineup, came up and singled, reminding the world that the Royals don’t have someone with the offensive prowess of Garth Brooks (the country singer) hitting behind Sweeney anymore.

Encouraging sign #4: Nobody in the Royals lineup yesterday makes Royals fans wish Garth Brooks would have made the team when he was in spring training a couple of years back. Yes, the lineup is full of average players, but the biggest problem with the Royals the last few years is that average would have been a big improvement. When you have trouble finding someone who can hit .200 to play left field, which is supposed to be an offensive position, you have big problems. They’ve solved that.

Encouraging sign #5: The league is under pressure to actually make sure baseball players aren’t injesting substances that would be illegal for you and I to take. No more steroids and no more speed. Fifteen years ago, guys like the Royals signed aren’t average players. They’re slightly above average. This lineup isn’t much worse than the lineup the Royals trotted out in 1985. Mike Sweeney isn’t as good as George Brett, but Reggie Sanders and Angel Berroa are a lot better than Steve Balboni and Buddy Biancalana.

I’m not under any grand delusion that the Royals are going to win it all this year. I’m also not under any grand delusion that Sanders and Grudzielanek and Mientkiewicz and Elarton and Mark Redman are going to be productive players for years to come. What they are is short-term solutions. Last year, the Royals fielded their Triple-A team, and they led the league in losses. This year, their Double-A and Triple-A teams are stocked with players who belong there.

In the meantime, the young guys are learning from Mientkiewicz, Sanders, and Grudzielanek how guys who’ve played on championship teams play ball. Grudzielanek is already showing Berroa and Teahan how to shift for opposing batters. In the ’70s, the Royals didn’t just throw George Brett, Frank White, and U.L. Washington out there and tell them to learn how to field. They kept the veteran presence of Cookie Rojas and Freddie Patek out there until Brett was reasonably steady at third and then they brought up White and Washington one at a time.

The Royals aren’t doing exactly what they did in the ’70s, but this year, finally, there’s a method to their madness.

How to get a Commodore 64 for $20

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , ,

In 2006, Radio Shack sold a Hummer racing game based on Jeri Ellsworth’s C64-on-a-chip design.

A number of people spent time figuring out how to turn the Radio Shack game into a full-blown C64. There is a FAQ available.One cool thing about these is that it’s very easy to add a PS/2 keyboard to them. Having a C-64 with an IBM Model M keyboard sure sounds nice…

I also found a forum dedicated to this and other Commodore-related topics.

Ah, memories…

Choosing quality over quantity

Dave Farquhar Society

I saw a story on Slashdot today about Snapper pulling out of Wal-Mart. While Snapper’s competitors were angling to be the brand of choice at various big-box stores, Snapper decided they couldn’t do things the Wal-Mart way and pulled out.I don’t want to spoil the story, but basically Snapper makes premium mowers intended to last a lifetime. Their lowest-cost model costs three times as much as the lowest-cost model at Wal-Mart, but a $349 mower that runs for a couple of decades is a bigger bargain than a $99 mower that only lasts a couple of years.

Wal-Mart wanted Snapper to outsource its manufacturing, and just slap its name on something that was made cheaply overseas. Snapper decided to take a gamble, tell a company responsible for 20 percent of its sales to get lost because it was only breaking even, and concentrate its efforts on its independent dealer network, and hope to make up the difference by becoming more efficient.

I like the story’s description of the way the company builds things. They assemble their mowers very rapidly, but they test each one before they ship it out, and if it doesn’t start right or run right, they pull it aside and make it right before it goes into the box.

Whoever said they don’t make ’em like they used to wasn’t talking about these guys, in other words.

Now that I know that’s how Snapper builds things, I think when the time comes for me to buy a new lawnmower, I’d be stupid not to buy one of theirs. I had no idea anyone was still making lawnmowers in the United States.

I hope I’m not the only one who thinks that way.