Survey sites, revisited

Dave Farquhar Saving money

Back in December, I warned against paying anyone $35 for lists of survey sites.

If I was convinced then it was a bad idea, I’m even more convinced now.The hucksters promise you can make a hundred dollars an hour or more. If you do the math, that can be true–I suppose if someone offers you $35 to take a survey and you finish it in 15 minutes, you’ve essentially been paid $140 an hour–but that’s numbers trickery. You’re not going to get enough surveys to do a 40-hour week at that rate, unless you’re a whole lot luckier than I am.

I signed up at several paid survey sites, starting in late November. Within a week, I got a couple of $10 surveys. After a month or so, a couple of $25, $35 surveys came in. It was nice. Some of the surveys took longer than others, but I don’t think any of them took me much more than 30 minutes.

I think I may have made $100 in my best month.

But here’s the rub. The marketing research people who do these sites don’t want career survey takers. If you take a survey about, say, potato chips, they don’t want to hear from you again for another six months.

My best month, I made about $100. These days, I’m making more like $5 a week. I’m not complaining, because it’s usually a fairly easy five bucks, and while that’s a small amount of money, it’s about the smallest amount of money that you can actually do something with. But is it worth paying $35 to get at a list of people who are willing to shoot five bucks your way every once in a while? No.

The other thing that works against paid surveys being the secret of the universe that leads to financial independence is the speed. Some of them pay you within a couple of weeks. Some of them take months. If your rent is due next week and you’re a few bucks short, don’t count on filling out a bunch of surveys to make up the difference–you’ll be lucky if the money gets to you in time to help you with next month’s rent.

So don’t pay that survey site. If you’re curious, click that link above to the entry I wrote back in December. In the comments, there’s a link to a good site with links to literally hundreds of survey sites, both paid and unpaid. Sign up for a Yahoo mail account and use it to register for a few sites and see what happens. Maybe you’ll do better than me and make a couple hundred bucks one month. Maybe you’ll just make $15. But at least you didn’t pay $35 to find out.

Fixing Backup Exec with Hisecweb installed

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

If you run your web servers on Windows under IIS, you’d better install the Hisecweb security template unless you want to find yourself hosting a warez site.

But Hisecweb breaks Backup Exec. So what do you do when upgrading to Apache and Linux isn’t a solution?The problem is that Hisecweb makes the system state (shadow copy components in Windows 2003) and SQL server not show up in the selection list. Not only does it not show up in the selection list, Backup Exec cannot find the resources. So backups fail, and if you have to restore from them, you won’t have the registry or a number of system files, which vastly reduces the value of your backup.

The solution is to tell Backup Exec not to use null sessions on those components, which seem to be one of the many things disabled by Hisecweb. On the server being backed up, go into Services and disable your Backup Exec Remote Agent. Now, fire up Regedit. Navigate to HKLM\Software\Veritas\Backup Exec\Engine\NTFS and locate the key called Restrict Anonymous Support. Set this value to 1. Close the registry editor and restart the Backup Exec Remote Agent service.

SQL Server and the system state or shadow copy components should now show up in the selection list for the server you just changed.

This registry hack can also fix visibility problems when the two machines are on different sides of a firewall.

Who’s in hell?

Dave Farquhar Christianity

One of my coworkers told me today that on his way back from lunch, he heard a preacher say on the radio that Pope John Paul II was in hell right then.

I know for a fact that Pope John Paul II wasn’t in hell right then. He was in a bed in the Vatican, still alive. Some faux pas, huh?

Even still, no Christian has any business saying something like that. Never. Even after the person’s death actually is confirmed.Saying someone’s in hell when he or she has been confirmed to still be alive just makes you look like an idiot. No great harm done, I guess. But who’s in hell and who isn’t actually isn’t my decision, nor is it yours, nor is that radio preacher’s.

I grew up hearing poorly educated church workers tell my Dad that he was going to hell. They told others the same thing too, I’m sure. Dad wasn’t going to hell for the normal reasons people tell others that they’re going to hell–he wasn’t sleeping around, or cheating on his taxes, or stealing, or voting for the wrong political candidate. No, Dad was going to hell because he believed the wrong thing.

I’ll be the first to admit that Dad had an unusual combination of beliefs. But Dad had an unusual combination of degrees and life experiences too. But among those beliefs was the single sentence that will keep you out of hell: Jesus died to pay the price of my sins.

Believe that, and God doesn’t care if you believe the sky is orange and dogs say moo.

Don’t get me wrong. The Pope’s beliefs and mine differ in some very important ways. The Pope was wrong about a lot of things. That radio preacher’s beliefs and mine differ in some very important ways. He’s wrong about a lot of things too.

And I know God and I will someday have a very long conversation about where what I believed was wrong. I hope that conversation will be shorter than God’s conversation than that radio preacher, and His conversation with the Pope. But I’m not willing to bet the change in my pocket that it will be. Am I both smarter and less stubborn than either of them? Only God truly knows the answer to that question.

Is Pope John Paul II in hell? I can only answer that with another question. Did Pope John Paul II know why it was necessary for Jesus to come to earth and die? If he did, then he’s in heaven. End of argument. And only God truly knows the answer to that question.

So who’s in hell? To answer that question is to pass judgment. Is Adolf Hitler in hell? I can’t answer that. I wasn’t there during his final moments. Did he repent and accept Jesus before he pulled that trigger? Highly unlikely, yes. Impossible? No.

Is Judas Iscariot in hell? I think most people probably believe he is. But they probably believe it for the wrong reason. Judas’ mortal sin was not his direct role in Jesus’ death. Judas’ mortal sin wasn’t suicide, either. Nor was it his love of money. No, Judas is a good candidate for hell because he believed the wrong thing about Jesus. Judas seemed to expect a political savior, not a spiritual one. And Judas died before Jesus was fully revealed as that spiritual savior.

Of course, it was Jesus’ death and resurrection that changed the rules. Judas didn’t live under the same set of rules that you and I now do. Did Judas know that he was a sinner, and was Judas trusting that God would one day provide atonement for those sins?

It’s obvious from Judas’ actions that he realized he was a sinner, and even that he was penitent. And it appears that he knew about God–Judas cast out demons just like the rest of the disciples did. This tree had fruit. So the question becomes, did Judas die believing the right thing?

Were you there? I wasn’t. Only God was. And only God knows. Once again, I can say the likelihood that Judas made it to heaven is very low. But only God can say for certain, because only God knew Judas’ heart.

If I can’t say for certain that the greatest betrayer in human history and the man who Jesus Himself called "a devil" is in hell, then how can I say where anyone else is or isn’t?

The Bible is perfectly clear about where I’m going and why. And that’s a much more productive thing to talk about.

In case you’re still having a case of the Mondays

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire

If your five bosses are bothering you about putting the wrong cover sheet on your TPS reports again and you got the memo but you can’t find the sheets, you can download one.

And if you haven’t seen Mike Judge’s modern classic Office Space, you really need to.If you don’t yet own a copy, that’s curable. And I would be remiss if I didn’t post a link to the red Swingline stapler.

Informercial, out. Now go print out a copy of that TPS report cover sheet to hang on your cell, er, cubicle wall. Or leave it laying on the desk of a fellow inmate who needs a laugh.

Are computer repair people all amateurs like this BBC reporter says?

Dave Farquhar General

I saw this link on Slashdot to a BBC story that calls all computer technician types “unqualified amateurs.”

I think I resent that.I think I happen to be pretty good. Understand, I got that way by being very bad for a very long time. But I will admit I’ve met a lot of IT people, and very few have impressed me. Most are better at sounding like they know what they’re talking about than they are at actually accomplishing anything. I once worked with someone who had the longest resume I’ve ever seen. He claimed to be a budding Windows NT Server administrator with experience in every application you can think of. I got suspicious when he didn’t know how to use a mouse properly. I got severely torqued off when I wrote a whiteboard full of detailed instructions on how to Ghost a PC, left for an hour, and came back to find he had completed three of them, and two of those incorrectly.

But that’s not everyone.

I’m seldom impressed with in-store technicians too. But I can tell you why. The big-box stores have difficulty keeping their good technicians. Headhunters are constantly scouring those stores in search of talent, and it’s only a matter of time before anyone who’s good leaves for greener pastures–namely, a job with fixed or semi-fixed hours and benefits.

So, no, I don’t let my friends take their computers to those places.

I’ve thought about doing what the BBC author did: Posting a notice somewhere offering computer help to home users. I’ve done a bit of it on the side in years past. But there’s a problem. Generally, too many people call, and too often.

Sometimes people seem to think they’re entitled to free computer help for life because they paid you $40 once. Other times they just keep calling you. My biggest problem with it as a part-time gig is that it’s too easy to get buried in it. I work too many hours as it is to come home to three more hours of part-time work every night.

As a full-time gig it would be more tempting, but the problem there is self employment. Thanks to self employment, the government is likely to take half of your earnings, so in order to make what you make in someone else’s employ, you really need to double the number.

That’s my deterrent. There are too many broken computers out there to do this part time, but are there enough broken computers nearby that I could fix 8 of them in a day, and do that about 260 times a year, so that I could make enough money to make it worth my while?

So that’s why I don’t operate a computer repair business out of my home. If someone bribes me enough, I’ll fix theirs, but I can think of better outlets for my entrepreneurial ability.

Just don’t call me an unqualified amateur.

If you’re concerned you might be talking to a hack in a store, here are some questions you can ask to gauge knowledge.

Basic Windows printer troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar Hardware

I “fixed” a printer this weekend. It took me about a minute. That’s because I know Windows printer troubleshooting.

Chances are I can teach you how to fix printers in minutes too–assuming the problem is more software than hardware, like it was in this case.

The first step should always be to turn the printer off. Many printer problems are caused by a job being hung in memory, and cycling the power clears that.

Next, before you turn the printer back on, clear the print queue. Go to Control Panel and into printers, double-click on the printer being affected, then click on Printer, and select Cancel all Documents. Or if you’re in a real hurry, you can do it from a command line, which is always faster.

Now turn the printer back on and try printing something. In extreme cases you may have to turn the printer back off, reboot, and turn the printer back on.

Chances are, after doing this, the printer will print fine. Try printing whatever it was that hung you up again. Failing that, try printing something else. If that works, the problem is whatever you’re trying to print.

At this point, look for an updated driver. Or try making a subtle change to whatever you’re trying to print. By subtle change, adding a space somewhere may be enough. Even to the end of a line, where it won’t be visible. Adding a space and then immediately taking it back out may be enough too, for that matter.

Vindicated?

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

This article on Windows installation at Firing Squad preaches all the same things I was preaching nearly six years ago in my Windows 9x book.

Where to find the stuff has almost all changed, and msot of the old utilities don’t work anymore, but these are exactly the same concepts I yammered on and on about. Funny, I’ve been told system optimization is a waste of time…Incidentally, this is the second article on optimization that I’ve seen in less than a month. The other one read an awful lot like a Windows XP translation of an article I published in Computer Shopper UK back in 2000, which in turn was a shortened version of one of the chapters in the same book.

So I guess people don’t just throw their 2-gigahertz computers away and buy new ones when they start to seem slow?

It really makes me wonder what would have happened if, after the book received a gushing review in Canada and was perpetually sold out in stores up north, if those 3,000 copies of the book that languished in a warehouse in Tennessee had made their way into those stores.

That’s OK. That was five years ago, nothing can change it, and I really don’t have any desire to be a computer author anymore. I find the only way to really know a lot about computers is to work with them for 40-60 hours a week in a production environment. Labs don’t cut it–you can never underestimate the effect of 1,000+ users hammering on what you built. Never. And if you spend those hours working, that doesn’t leave enough time to write books and release them in a timely fashion.

So rather than write mediocre computer books or send myself to an early grave by working full time in addition to writing for 30-45 hours a week, I’d rather have a life, make a decent living, and not write computer books.

Moral Dilemma

Dave Farquhar net.culture ,

I saw the following in one of my Backup Exec failure logs (directory names changed slightly to protect the client’s name, and me):

Directory F:\ITWEB\Flash Stuff\Welcome Page Animations was not found, or could not be accessed.
None of the files or subdirectories contained within will be backed up.

Hmm. Flash animations.I’m torn. My duty to the client who is paying me, of course, is to fix the problem so the file is backed up.

But they’re blinky, annoying Flash animations. Flash, of course, is the third worst thing to ever happen to the Internet, behind popups and spam. OK, it’s the fourth worst thing. I’ll put it behind spam. But I’ll even put it ahead of Microsoft Internet Exploiter.

So an opportunity to snuff out some blinky Flash animations that have been foisted on the world is a great temptation.

Or am I the only one who feels this way about Flash?

Incidentally, I turn off animated GIFs too–I find a Web without animated GIFs and Flash is a much more pleasant place. I don’t know if that makes me boring and extremist or what.

Wikipedia hits half a million entries

Dave Farquhar Copyright

Wikipedia made it. Half a million articles. 1.25 gigabytes of raw text.

That’s a lot. I remember when I first read about CD-ROMs, one of the best examples they included to talk about its 600-megabyte capacity–which was unthinkable in the days when 40-gig hard drives were mainstream–was that it was enough to hold a whole encyclopedia with room to spare.

Not this encyclopedia, I guess.It used to bother me that sports figures and entertainers were more likely to have entries than important historical figures. Seeing as my last few entries have been about baseball players–and bench players at that–I guess I’ve mellowed. Academic-style articles will happen eventually. I think Wikipedia’s value is as the people’s encyclopedia, rather than academia’s encyclopedia.

The history that almost nobody will care about in 20 years is being recorded, and I think that’s cool. What bothers me more today is that the history is much richer from 2001 on than pre-2001 will be.

But it’s reached a point where it’s not bad on academic matters either. I remember my first research paper well. It was a horrid assignment. I, along with each of my 8th grade classmates, was given the name of an obscure third-world country. We had to write a minimum 10-page report on the history and politics of the country.

My assigned country was the Central African Republic. I struggled to find any sources that were five pages long. The school library had absolutely nothing. The State Department had some free information. The public library scored me some information too, including what became the backbone of the report–the exploits of dictator and self-styled Napoleon wannabe Jean-Bedel Bokassa.

I note that Wikipedia’s entries on the Central African Republic’s history, politics, and Bokassa are all reasonably long and detailed and very good.

No resource like Wikipedia existed in 1989. I still maintain that assignment was totally inappropriate for an 8th grader–I never had to do anything like it in high school, and while I did some papers that were comparable in length and difficulty when I was in college, I also had twice as long to complete them.

But if any of those teachers are still around and torturing 8th graders today, Wikipedia will make those poor students’ lives much easier.

And did I mention that anyone can freely copy it for their own use, whether personal or commercial? Yeah, that’s pretty cool too.