A journalist\’s take on how to eliminate snoring during sermons

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , ,

First things first: I am not a pastor. While I have nine years of Lutheran primary and secondary education, my degree came from the University of Missouri and I have exactly zero days of formal, master’s-level theological training.

But I am a published author, I spent four years and thousands of dollars (and thousands more of scholarship money) studying journalism. So hopefully what I lack in Bible knowledge, I make up for in writing knowledge. And if denominations are to grow, especially the more conservative ones, I think more of the latter is going to be a necessity.I am writing this because I heard a sermon today that was relatively good. It disappointed me mostly because it could have been one of those sermons that people remembered for the rest of their lives. So let’s get down to business.

Write on a sixth-grade reading level. Your morning paper is written on that reading level. Newspapers are publications for the masses, so they are unwilling to assume that the majority of people can digest anything more complex than that level. Jesus made a point of demonstrating that Christianity is simple enough that a child can understand it. Therefore, a child ought to be able to understand the pastor.

And I’ve got something else shocking for you. What about the more intellectual publications? They’re written on a 10th-grade level.

So how do you write on that kind of a level? I’ll give you some tools. Eventually it becomes automatic.

Lose the big words. Most Lutheran pastors are academics. When it takes four years to get your master’s degree, you have to be. And if you want anyone outside of your own congregation to listen to you, you almost have to go back and get your doctorate.

But the problem is that while pastors and their colleagues are academics, the overwhelming majority of the congregation is not. The people who most desperately need to be reached certainly are not. And while I firmly believe that the pastor can stand in front of the congregation and read recipes for 20 minutes and God will make sure the person who needs to hear Him will hear exactly what He wants, I also believe it’s better for God to work through the guy standing up front more than in spite of him.

If your English Composition teachers were anything like mine, they required you to use five words you’ve never used before in every piece. But your English Comp teacher isn’t in the audience. Good writers know the rules of writing. Great writers know when to break them. William F. Buckley Jr. isn’t the rule. He’s the one guy who can get away with breaking so many.

Lose the long sentences and paragraphs. Your English Comp teacher probably told you a paragraph is a minimum of three sentences. That should be the first rule you learn to break. Short, punchy paragraphs are fine, and so are short, simple sentences. There’s nothing wrong with an eight-word sentence.

Practice writing on a sixth-grade level. If you use Microsoft Word, you can easily turn it into a tool for checking your writing. Go to the Tools menu, select Options, click Spelling & Grammar tab 4, and tick the box next to “Show readability statistics.” Now run a spelling/grammar check, click ignore on anything it flags, and it’ll give you your reading scores.

Try shortening up on some words and simplifying some sentences to see how the changes affect your work.

Relevance. A single mother of two who has never had a healthy relationship with a male doesn’t care about the original Greek or Hebrew in any given Bible passage. That’s an extreme example, but virtually everyone who walks through the doors of a church comes in carrying some baggage. It’s usually the only way God can get them there. It’s when life becomes its least bearable that people are most willing to find out what the Creator of life has to say about it. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems like the place you’re least likely to hear what God has to say about life is church.

That’s unfortunate. When you read the four Gospels, it’s clear that part of the reason thousands of people followed Jesus instead of the Pharisees was because Jesus talked about the things that mattered to them, while the Pharisees did not. If that contemporary church down the street is growing and your conservative church is not, the reason might not necessarily be the guitars and drums. The reason might very well be that the pastor gives good advice every week on how to get through this life.

I know plenty of people who attend my church for exactly that reason. They have no great love for the electric guitars and distortion–but they put up with it so they can hear how to have a better life every week.

While you don’t want to single out anyone and talk about his or her problems to the whole congregation, speaking about issues in general terms is good. Does the Bible have anything to say about credit card debt? Diet? Spoiled children?

I’m no fan at all of daytime talk shows–I think they’re God’s curse on the unemployed and unemployable–but I do believe that this world would be a better place if pastors would tune in to them once in a while. It gives you an idea of what kinds of problems people think about and face–and may not be willing to talk to you about–and it gives you some idea of what the world is saying about them. Your job is to tell the congregation what God says about those problems.

Get out more. I used to know someone who was required by his congregation to spend some time hanging out in bars. Ostensibly his job was to win converts. But I think it accomplishes some other things too.

First, it gives you a good feel for how people talk. Since these are the people who most need to be reached, you need to sound like them (minus the four-letter words).

Second, it gives you an idea what these people care about. You’ll probably overhear more about women and money than anything else. Significance and security are two very basic needs; if you can manage to illustrate every Sunday how God is the ultimate source of these two things, the size of your church will probably double every five years.

Granted, you don’t have to hang around in bars to hear people talk, but bars are where the broken people are most likely to go, and if your goal is to do what Jesus did and reach broken people, I think it helps to know what one looks for and what a broken person looks like.

The end. Like I said before, I’m not a pastor. I’m just a writer of above-average intelligence. It’s rare that a sermon sails over my head, and that was nearly as true when I was in the 4th grade as it is now.

But I’m not everyone, and the college-level dissertations that are all too common in many denominations every Sunday don’t do much, in my experience, to strengthen the church. Yes, to a degree I am advocating the dumbing down of the Sunday sermon. Hebrews 5 is relevant. You can’t assume anymore, in this day and age, that the majority of the people in the congregation can handle spiritual solid food. The Sunday sermon is the place for milk. The place for solid food is in Bible study, whether it occurs on Sunday morning before or after the service, or on some weeknight. And even then, I believe a lot of studies need to be serving milk.

But if every church serves milk long enough, the general public’s knowledge of the things of God will progress to the point where it can handle solid food on a much more regular basis.

Coming back

Dave Farquhar Personal , , ,

The phone rang this morning, around 9 AM. I’ve gotten used to that; my recruiter’s been calling me around 9 for the last few days. But this time there was a different tone to his voice. He was nervous.

Great, I instantly thought. Another rejection. What is this, high school?But I let him finish, because he said he had some good news. "Dave, they’re excited about you. But there’s a problem. Do you think there’s any way you can start tomorrow?"

Tomorrow. He’d told me yesterday he thought they’d probably be interested in me, and that we’d be preparing for a start day of July 5. Being able to start tomorrow was about the last thing I expected.

I wasn’t the least bit prepared, but in reality, what did I have planned for tomorrow? A trip to the post office, certainly. A trip to a thrift store or two, most likely. Maybe I’d get ambitious and change the oil in my wife’s car, and maybe I wouldn’t. So I’d make $7, maybe $15, and I’d save another $20.

I figure that every day I didn’t work cost me between $150 and $200 (pre-tax). So you do the math. I told him I’ll start tomorrow.

Actually this was a longshot if there ever was one. The job position involves Unix administration. I’m not a stranger to Unix, but it’s been a year since I’ve done any Unix on a regular basis. I pulled out all the stops on the job interview, showing up in a suit and tie on a 90-plus degree day on just a couple of hours’ notice. It was all downhill from there. The entire department of five interviewed me, plus one guy who’d been recently promoted out of it. They peppered me with Unix and e-mail questions. One of them asked me why to never type "rm -rf /" and I asked him whether the "r" was uppercase or lowercase. Apparently in Solaris it doesn’t matter. It does in every Linux distribution I know. But I got the rest of the question right. I struck out on the others, sometimes badly.

I left the building with a little more than a thank-you for my time from the supervisor. I made a note to myself to make sure my recruiter briefed me better on what the responsibilities would be, and to get me enough time to actually brush up so I’d look like I know something, and not some idiot off the street who can barely spell "Unix."

Then they started interviewing other people. And with each passing interview, my recruiter felt more hopeful. I started to feel hopeful too. I didn’t count on anything–my wife and I all but started a business last week, and we’re profitable. It won’t pay the mortgage, let alone make us rich, but we made more than enough to pay the electric bill, and we did it on our terms.

And then the phone call came. A few hours later I drove 10 miles, signed some papers, and it was official. I’m a professional Unix administrator.

How to read electronics schematics

Dave Farquhar Hardware

If you want to read electronics schematics, first you have to know what the symbols mean.

I found this link on electronics symbols this morning. It’s new to me.

I don’t know how many people actually try to read schematics and fix or build things anymore, but since it looks like I may be able to pick up a little extra cash by assembling electronic gizmos for train layouts and modding old video game systems, it’s useful to me, so I’m posting it.

Microsoft buys and then discontinues Linux/Unix antivirus products

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , ,

First GeCAD, now Sybari.

Microsoft has been buying smaller anti-virus firms and discontinuing their Linux and Unix product lines.

Trust, schmust. When your god is Big Business, that means Big Business can do no wrong, so when you’re the U.S. government, you let companies like Microsoft do whatever they want. The problem is that Unix antivirus products are extremely useful, especially in Microsoft shops. Unix viruses are rare, and the heterogenous nature of Unix–never knowing much about the underlying hardware, binary incompatibilities between various dialects even when running on the same hardware, and never knowing for certain which libraries are installed–creates a hostile environment for viruses anyway.

So what good is a Unix server that detects viruses that can’t survive in Unix anyway? It makes a great buffer between the hostile world and the soft and chewy Windows boxes inside corporate firewalls, that’s what.

I love to put Unix boxes in between the world and mail servers that may be running Windows. Just set it up to relay mail to your Exchange or Domino server, but have it scan the mail first. Better yet, have it running on weird hardware. A slightly elderly Macintosh or Alpha or Sun box works great. Since the Intel x86 instruction set is the most common, most buffer overflows use it. While non-x86 processors aren’t immune to buffer overflows, an overflow using x86 instructions will appear to be gibberish and it won’t run. It’s like telling me a lie in Japanese. You won’t fool me with the lie, because I don’t speak Japanese, so I won’t understand a word you’re saying.

Fortunately, there are still antivirus products for Unix and Linux out there. And once Microsoft establishes its antivirus product, it will be more difficult–I hope–for it to simply continue buying antivirus firms and discontinue their products, since now they would be buying off competitors, rather than just attempting to acquire technology that they don’t have the ability to develop internally.

And even if they do buy and discontinue everything, there’s always ClamAV.

Counting change

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

I’ve long used the technique of saving pocket change to pay for stuff I want, but don’t really need. The problem has been turning that big pile of change into a form that merchants will accept.

The problem with the Coinstar machines in the supermarket is that they take a cut, sometimes as high as 10 percent.Some banks and credit unions will process the change for customers for free. The problem is finding which ones will.

I now have two answers. Kansas City-based Commerce Bank will, but only at certain locations. You’ll have to call your local branch.

My wife banks at US Bank. When she called and asked the same question, they said they’ll process the change for free and deposit it straight into the checking account.

That’s just two answers, but two answers is better than a big pile of change sitting on a dresser doing nothing. It’s always best to get the money into an institution as quickly as is convenient, where it can work for you, either by paying bills (your mileage will vary, but paying just an extra $10 per month on my mortgage cuts a full month off the payment schedule) or drawing interest, however miniscule it might be. It’s better for your quarters to be gathering pennies than for them to be gathering dust.

Can Google compete with Paypal?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , ,

There are reports in the news today that Google may launch a Paypal-like service. Most are questioning whether Google can compete with Paypal, which boasts 72 million users.

I believe the answer is yes.Here’s why. I buy a lot of stuff on Ebay. Lately I’ve been selling too, and since the initial effort was reasonably successful, I’m going to start listing more things.

I’ll be listing for the same reason lots of people do. It’s funny how much stuff becomes redundant once you get married and your spouse moves in, and it’s cheaper than having a garage sale and you’ll usually get better prices. And, besides, for the past six weeks or so I’ve been a bit shorter on cash than I’d like to be.

Online payment systems work because a lot of people don’t want to mess with checks. It’s a pain to write a check and it’s a pain to cash one, and nobody likes waiting the 7-10 days it takes for one to clear. Money orders and cashier’s checks eliminate the waiting period, but they’re a pain for the buyer, who has to go visit the bank during working hours and pay a couple of dollars, or you have to visit the ATM and then find a convenience store that sells money orders, and pay a couple of dollars. It wastes a lot of time. And if you’re buying a $100 item, you probably don’t care about the couple of dollars, but you sure do if you’re paying for a $2 item.

The reason 72 million people use Paypal is because it’s better than dealing with checks or money orders. But it doesn’t take much.

Read through some Ebay listings though, and you’ll find lots of people who don’t take Paypal. The reasons vary, but the people who don’t like Paypal really don’t like it. Those people tout Western Union or Bidpay as alternatives, but those in reality are just an online venue to buy a money order. It saves you hopping in the car. Again, on an item whose price requires three or more digits, you probably don’t care. But they’re horrible for small transactions.

Since Paypal is so widely used but so widely disliked, there’s lots of room for a competitor.

From what I can tell, sellers of merchandise don’t like Paypal because it’s free for the buyer, but big-time sellers take a hit. (People like me who sell casually don’t.) The hit seems to vary, but resellers seem to like to tack 60 cents onto the cost of the transaction when I use it. I generally pay it, since 60 cents is a lot less than it would cost for me to use another online payment service or to buy a money order, and it’s not much more than it would cost me to mail a check.

So it seems to me that there are at least two ways for Google to compete. I’m sure they’ve done some market research on what people dislike about Paypal and they’ve looked into what they can do to provide better service. Obviously one approach they could take would be to simply charge less money.

A second possibility would be for Google to endear itself to the seller by placing the financial burden on the buyer. Charge the buyer, say, a percentage of the transaction cost, with a maximum cap of somewhere around the cost of a postage stamp. Sellers would gladly accept it if it didn’t cost them anything. Buyers won’t like it as much as Paypal since it’s not free for them, but it would give the instant gratification of Paypal while costing about as much as mailing a check. And besides, it’s the seller who sets the terms of the transaction. If the buyer doesn’t like it, the only choice is to not bid.

I believe that sellers who don’t accept Paypal are putting themselves in the same position as a brick-and-mortar store that doesn’t accept credit cards, and sometimes I’ve gotten some real bargains precisely because the seller only accepted money orders, but that doesn’t stop a lot of them.

So I don’t believe Paypal is a juggernaut. It was the first widely successful online payment service. But this field doesn’t give much credit for being first. Just ask Datapoint (inventor of what became the x86 family of processors), Commodore (first successful consumer-level computer to feature pre-emptive multitasking), Digital Research (first popular operating system for microcomputers), or any number of now-defunct pioneers.

I’m not willing to place any bets on whether Google will become the market leader in this arena, especially without having seen their service. But I also don’t think there’s much question as to whether it will survive and/or be profitable. As dissatisfied as the users of other services are, Google Wallet would have to be awfully bad to flop.

Well, Episode III could have been worse…

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

I went and saw Revenge of the Sith tonight. I can say it definitely felt good to see a Star Wars story in the theaters one last time. (This is supposed to be the last time, after all.)

What else can I say? They weren’t the atrocities the first two movies were. Overall I still don’t think it was any better than the originals, but I do think there was a lot of room for improvement. (Don’t worry, there won’t be any spoilers here.)Let’s talk about the good first. First and foremost this is an action movie, which is good, because action is what George Lucas does best. This is a fast-paced movie that doesn’t get bogged down in committees, which is good. If you want committees, you can watch CSPAN and it won’t cost you $8 all the time.

There are plenty of special effects here, but it seemed like Lucas tried to rely on special effects to make up for the shortcomings in the first two movies. There’s less of that in this one. I can’t think of a point in the movie that looked like special effects just for the sake of special effects. In a time when Pixar and Dreamworks SKG each release a movie a year featuring entire computer-generated worlds, that trick doesn’t work anymore, and it’s good that Lucas realized it.

Oh, and what about Jar Jar Binks? He makes a brief appearance, but it’s just a few seconds at most and he doesn’t say anything.

So what’s wrong with it?

Dialogue still isn’t Lucas’ strong point. It’s better this time than sometimes (at least someone asks "What’s the matter with you?" in this one; I remember an earlier movie having a line "What’s troubling you?" which just isn’t the way anyone talks) but the things people say still seem contrived, and at times it seems like the actors and actresses might as well be reading cue cards.

Examples? The most blatant examples surround the character of Anakin Skywalker (played by Hayden Christensen), of course. The movie centers around Christensen’s struggles. And that’s the problem. We don’t get to see him struggle so much. We see him cry, but that seems out of place. I feel safe in saying this, since I think everyone knows what happens to Anakin Skywalker, so I’ll say it: Would Darth Vader cry? No? So why is Anakin Skywalker, the 20something hotshot Jedi, crying? It’s out of character. So what does someone who can’t let his guard down but really wants to cry do? Unfortunately, you won’t find out by watching this movie.

Similarly, Natalie Portman’s talents are wasted on the character of Padme. There is no actress alive better suited to play the prodigy Padme. Padme would have been a lot better with more Natalie Portman pontifications and fewer George Lucas pontifications coming out of her. The relentlessness of Portman’s character from Garden State is missing. And at at least one point in the movie, she breaks Anakin Skywalker’s heart. Portman proved in the movie Closer that she can break a heart like nobody’s business. Had she been allowed to truly break the heart of Hayden Christensen and every male in the audience, it would have been a better movie.

Both Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) get very angry with Anakin Skywalker in this movie. At one point, Jackson says, "If you’re right, you’ve earned my trust." Inappropriate. Where’s the Samuel L. Jackson attitude? The cold stare? "You’ll earn my trust when you’re right!" is a good start. Of course in most movies, Jackson would include a couple of f-bombs and end the sentence with a word that starts with the letter "b." Especially if the person he’s talking to happens to be male. Lucas keeps that kind of language out of Star Wars, but Samuel L. Jackson can say those words with his tone of voice even without the actual words coming out. He should have been allowed to.

Ewan McGregor is similarly handcuffed. At the movie’s darkest hour, McGregor’s words don’t match his actions. McGregor sorely needed to drag back out some of the attitude he showed in Trainspotting.

The writing suffers also. Some of the characters are inconsistent. There are minor characters in the movie who seemed larger than life earlier in the movie, yet they died without a struggle. I understand needing to get on with the story, but had they died fighting, it would have been all the more tragic. And besides, had those stories been told, maybe then there would have been 30 seconds spent on the love story rather than 10 minutes.

Gatermann tells me there were some lame attempts at humor in the movie. I didn’t catch anything that even sounded like an attempt at humor. It’s not like this movie had bad actors in it, so this movie should have had its moments.

Kevin Smith compares the movie to Othello or Hamlet. Well, for some in my generation, I’m sure it is. But this movie isn’t going to be remembered much past my generation. My generation’s children will like it for a while because we dragged them along to go see it. But will it capture their imaginations the way it did ours nearly 30 years ago? No. Will it take a seat next to The Wizard of Oz, or Gone With the Wind? No.

And that’s what’s frustrating. George Lucas came up with a good story. He did his homework. All the elements are there. He studied his mythology and mimicked it well. His psychology seems pretty sound. And his characters, especially the key characters, are all very compelling.

This movie had all of the potential for greatness. Probably not Shakespearean greatness, but it had the potential to be the movie of the decade, and, like Anakin Skywalker, it just didn’t live up to it. It won’t even be the best movie to come out this year.

That observation does more to help me understand how Obi-Wan Kenobi felt than Ewan McGregor’s acting did. And that’s really a shame.

Whatever happened to risk-takers?

Dave Farquhar Society , , , , ,

I love Disney like I love the Soviet Union. Mainly it’s because the company clawed its way to the top by taking advantage of obscure aspects of copyright law, and then the company bought enough Congressmen to close up the doors they used to get where they are today.

But I read something today about Disney that I found interesting.Ward Kimball was a high-up at Disney. He was one of Disney’s primary animators and had almost a son-father relationship with Disney himself. He wrote a memoir some years back (the link takes you to some excerpts), and it gives me some idea what’s wrong with Disney and, frankly, what’s wrong with us.

Some poignant sections:

Walter Lantz, who made Woody Woodpecker, never gave a damn about quality a day in his life. He always wanted the quick buck.

If you want to know the real secret of Walt’s success, it’s that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of.

It goes against our instincts to do anything like that today. Today, everything’s about the bottom line. If you can save half a cent, you do it. If it comes at the expense of quality, so be it.

He felt that if you put your heart into a project and if you were a perfectionist, people would automatically like it. They would appreciate the quality.

I was going to say I don’t think that’s true anymore, but maybe that’s just because I thought only of the computer industry when I read that. In the automotive industry, part of the reason Toyota is now the second largest carmaker in the world is because of its quality. Twenty years ago Toyota and Honda were two of the least imaginative companies in the industry (and frequently the butt of jokes) but the quality was there almost from the start. So maybe this does still work, provided you manage to not run out of money.

Artists are pretty touchy individuals; they aren’t brick layers. It takes very little to hurt their feelings. Walt was never quite aware of that.

Neither are most people. I guess that gives me more insight into myself than it does into the world, but I found it interesting.

Walt was a rugged individualist. He admired Henry Ford… Maybe Ford and Walt were the last of the great ones, the last of the great rugged individuals. Maybe that was why they were impatient with people of lesser talent and impatient with themselves when they made mistakes.

Nah, there are plenty of rugged individualists. The problem is they don’t do well when they’re stuck under people with less talent than them. Billy Mitchell is a notorious example. Rugged individualists often aren’t appreciated until they’re gone. I don’t know if I have all of the attributes of one, but “impatient with people of lesser talent and impatient with themselves when they made mistakes” fits me to a tee. I wish I had some insight in how to deal with that attribute.

Guys like L.B. Mayer, Jack Warner and Sam Goldwyn were despots. They were untouchables. You would have to speak to a guy who would speak to a guy who would speak to their secretaries in order to see them. Walt wasn’t like that. He mixed with everybody. You didn’t say Mr. Disney like you said Mr. Mayer or Mr. Warner. [I]f you called Jack Warner by his first name, he’d fire you. Walt didn’t want anybody to call him anything but Walt.

There are a lot more untouchables at the top today than there are approachables. I quickly tire of higher-ups who refuse to call me “Dave.” You’re not my mother! Why not just go all the way and make it “Mr. Farquhar” if that’s the way you’re going to be!

I read a story a while ago about Louis Marx. For much of the 20th century, Marx was the owner of the largest toy company in the world. Somehow he managed to figure out how to consistently produce cheap toys that didn’t break. And when they did break, he usually fixed them for free. Send the broken toy to the factory and they’d fix it for the price of postage, or bring it in person to the headquarters at 200 Fifth Avenue in New York City, and they’d fix it free if they could. Well, I read a story about someone who brought a toy in to be fixed. He had no idea where to go, but he saw a kind-looking old man, so he walked up to him and held up his broken toy. He smiled and asked the child to follow him. The child noticed that everyone treated this man with the utmost respect. He took him to an office where a repairman fixed toys. Well, a few years later this child saw a picture of Louis Marx and he believes the kind old man who helped him was Lou Marx himself.

[Walt Disney] was a man who loved nostalgia before it became fashionable. That’s why so many of his pictures were set in the harmless period of American history, the Gay Nineties or the early 1900’s – because that was when he was a kid.

Kurt Vonnegut once said that you’re the most honest and your work is the most appealing when it harkens back to your childhood. So I guess the money I spent back in 1998 learning how to un-grow up was a wise investment. Not that I needed Ward Kimball or Kurt Vonnegut to tell me that, of course…

He came from a pretty… poor family. He had four brothers and a sister. There wasn’t any extra money to spend… He loved having that soda fountain because as a kid, he couldn’t spend money for ice cream. His youth was scratching for pennies and nickels and tossing whatever he earned into the kitty at home.

I think you appreciate you have a lot more when you’ve had to struggle for a while. That definitely explains the difference between my Dad and his brother. I won’t elaborate on that any more other than to say I learned a little about how not to live by watching Dad, but I learned a lot more of what not to do by watching his sorry excuse for a brother.

Now the Disney operation is a corporation with many, many bosses and committees. The people who run the place don’t have any personal relationships with the creative people. The thing that made Walt great was that he was a creative himself and he recognized creativity in others.

Mega-success stories often begin with the person at the top being the prototype for the type of person the company needs to succeed. At the very least it makes the person at the top able to recognize the people who do the work.

Marx’s ultimate downfall was that he wouldn’t hire anyone too much like him, because he was afraid of someone usurping him. He didn’t get usurped, but without someone to replace him, his company died a very quick death. He was 76 when he finally retired, and he lived to see his company’s assets auctioned off at bankruptcy.

I suspect a second coming of Walt Disney probably wouldn’t last all that long at Disney now.

There’s no longer any innovation or excitement. The new regime just sits around trying to guess how Walt might have done it. That’s quicksand… So it’s boring. It’s a corporation where they play it safe. You copy yourself copying yourself. Walt would never stand for that. He never repeated himself.

If you have to guess how someone else would have done it, you’re much better off just walking up to someone else and asking, “How would you do it?” You’ll get better ideas that way.

He’d frighten everybody half to death by challenging them that way. But then you’d get with it, and new ideas would come. Walt kept everyone on pins and needles. Everybody getting [angry] at him was very healthy. See, you had a guy steering you all the time, and that made you work to capacity. It pulled the best out of you.

I guess I’m just really reflective right now. I don’t ever want to be out of work again, so I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I’m looking for. I know there has to be a better way to say it, but I think what I’m looking for is someone who takes risks and is usually right.

I don’t believe in rule by committees. I don’t think anything can be done well through group action. This is another thing that made Walt great, because all the decisions on a picture were checked by him, down to the last detail.

Agreed. What else do I need to say?

Speed traps in south St. Louis

Dave Farquhar St. Louis ,

I believe it is my duty to warn people about two speed traps in south St. Louis County. They’re fairly widely known, but not as widely known as I thought.

Both are tiny little suburbs along Interstate 55.The first, and perhaps more notorious of the two is St. George, which is west of I-55 at the Reavis Barracks exit. St. George extends roughly along Reavis Barracks from I-55 to an L-shaped bend in the road where Reavis Barracks becomes Mackenzie.

Rules of the road: The speed limit is 35. I generally keep my speed at 30-32. Funny thing is, when I drive through this stretch at 30, very few people ever pass me. Needless to say, at the stoplight at Huntington and Reavis Barracks, it’s best not to run a yellow light.

Reavis Barracks forms the southern border of the town. If you venture into town at all, make sure you stop for three seconds at any stop sign. Years ago when I did some computer work for someone who lived there, she told me the police will sit there with a stop watch and watch you. St. George is no place for the rolling stops St. Louis is known for.

Also don’t drive in St. George if you have expired plates or anything else that most departments overlook. I was pulled over once for the light above my license plate being burned out. I escaped a ticket, but probably because of my clean driving record. It was only the third time I’d ever been pulled over in my life. I was 27 or 28 at the time.

As far as hiding places go, they like to sit in a parking lot at the intersection of Huntington and Reavis Barracks, or along Reavis Barracks itself.

I have a few relatives who are police officers, and I’m told that St. George got a new police chief a while back and he tells other officers that he’s backed off on the speed-trap tendencies. I still don’t take any chances through there and neither should you.

To avoid St. George, use the Weber/Bayless exit, just a couple of miles north. It takes you a couple of miles out of your way, but it may be worth your while. Weber hits Gravois very near the intersection of Gravois and Mackenzie.

And speaking of Bayless, the other speed trap is Bella Villa, another small town just east of I-55 along Bayless between I-55 and Lemay Ferry Road. I imagine the correct pronounciation of the town would be something like bay-ya viy-ya, since it looks Spanish, but I’ve never heard a St. Louisan pronounce it. I imagine the local pronounciation is closer to bell-a vill-a.

The speed limit along Bayless through Bella Villa is also 35. Go 30-32. I see a police car virtually every time I drive through Bella Villa, and almost as often as not he has someone pulled over. Very frequently when I don’t see a police car in Bella Villa, I see him along I-55 with someone pulled over.

I have no firsthand experience with the Bella Villa police department, but someone I know who got a speeding ticket there didn’t get her license returned when the officer was done with it. It came back in the mail after she paid her speeding ticket.

If you need to avoid Bella Villa, chances are you’re on I-55 and trying to get to Lemay Ferry or vice-versa. There’s the Carondelet/Germania duo to the north, and either Union or Reavis Barracks to the south. You can only exit on Union if you’re southbound. Go east on Reavis Barracks and you’ll hit Lemay Ferry. Both Carondelet and Germania, which run on opposite sides of the mighty River Des Peres, run east-west between I-55 and Lemay Ferry. Lemay Ferry becomes Alabama at the Germania intersection, and Carondelet is called Weber where it hits Lemay Ferry.

Operating System Not Found, Missing Operating System, and friends

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting , , , ,

So the PC that stored my resume got kicked (as in the foot of a passer-by hitting it) and died, and the backup that I thought I had… Well, it wasn’t where I thought it was.

Time for some amateur home data recovery. Here’s how I brought it back.This machine ran Windows 2000. The first trick to try on any machine running any flavor of Windows is to boot from a DOS boot disk containing FDISK.EXE and issue the command FDISK /MBR. This replaces the master boot record. A corrupt MBR is the most common malady that causes these dreaded error messages, and this is the easiest fix for it.

That didn’t work for me.

The second trick is to use MBRWork. Have it back up the first sector, then have it delete the boot record. Then it gives you an option to recover partitions. Run that, then run the option that installs the standard MBR code. I can’t tell you how many times this tool has made me look like I can walk on water.

No dice this time either.

Next I tried grabbing the Windows 2000 CD and doing a recovery install. This has brought systems back to life for me too. Not this time. As happens all too often, it couldn’t find the Windows 2000, so it couldn’t repair it.

The drive seemed to work, yet it couldn’t boot or anything. I could have and probably should have put it in another PC to make sure it was readable. But I didn’t have a suitable donor handy. Had there been such a system, I would have put the drive in, checked to see if it was readable, and probably would have run CHKDSK against it.

Lacking a suitable donor, instead I located an unused hard drive and put it in the system. I booted off the drive just to make sure it wasn’t a hardware problem. It wasn’t–an old copy of Windows 98 booted and dutifully spent 20 minutes installing device drivers for the new motherboard hardware. So I powered down, installed both drives, and broke out a copy of Ghost.

Ghost, as I have said before, doesn’t exactly copy data–what it does is better described as reinterpreting the data. This allows you to use Ghost to lay down an image on dissimilar hard drives. It also makes Ghost a fabulous data recovery tool. Ghost complained that the NTFS log needed to be flushed. Well, that requires booting into Windows (and I think that’s all that’s necessary), but I couldn’t do that. It offered to try the copy anyway, so I chose that. So it cranked for about 15 minutes. I exited Ghost, powered down, and disconnected the bad drive. I powered back up, and it booted. Fabulous.

Now I can use Ghost to copy the now-good drive back over to the drive that was bad in the first place. I’ll do that, but sending out the resume takes much higher priority.