New Order is back?

Dave Farquhar Music
New Order is back?

A week or so ago I was in the car with my fiancee and a song I’d never heard before but that seemed strangely familiar came on the radio. “Sounds like New Order,” I said. She said she was thinking the same thing but mentioned someone else it sounded like.

“That’s a Peter Hook bassline if I’ve ever heard one,” I said. “Gotta be New Order.”

I heard the song again this morning, and this time, the DJ said who it was. “Yes, the ’80s band,” he added. New Order had a pile of hits in the 80s, including Blue Monday.

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In honor of tax day… Basements.

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , , ,

The St. Louis Post-Disgrace ran a nice article on basements, ironically, on April 15.

I doubt anyone’s tax refund will build anything quite like these.

The article described themed St. Louis-area basements: a medieval ballroom, a malt shop, and a Lionel train layout.All very cool. Of course, I most want to copycat Jack Stein. He doesn’t live far from me at all, nor is he far from the train shop that I frequent. But I don’t believe he and I have ever met.

His 18×16-foot layout would be considered small by most toy train magazines. Something tells me my fiancee wouldn’t consider that small. I’m currently working on designing a more modest 16×5-foot layout for my basement.

Of course, there’s a lot more to life than trains. There’s ice cream. Wouldn’t a malt shop-themed room look nice next to a train room? Yeah, I’m thinking. In 30 years. But you can’t start planning too soon, right?

If you like retro stuff, it’s a worthwhile read. It makes putting a wet bar in the basement seem unoriginal.

Gas-saving sites miss the obvious

Dave Farquhar Saving money

I saw a link today called "Gas Stations Hate Us." It promised money-saving tips. I clicked on it, of course. It had some advice I hadn’t heard anywhere before, like a good credit card for gas rebates, and to fill up in the morning because when it’s cooler, you get more gas per gallon.

It also had some advice on vehicles–it pushed the Toyota Prius, for instance. But it missed something obvious.Now, I have no objections to people trading in their SUVs for a Toyota Prius like the site suggests, on principle. Anything that cuts your fuel consumption is a good thing. The problem with that is there’s a long, long waiting list to buy a Toyota Prius, so you can’t follow that advice. And a lot of people aren’t going to take that advice just because of the Prius’ styling.

But there’s a less drastic way to cut your gas consumption:

Drive the speed limit, and drive nice.

I drive I-70 through St. Louis at least once a week these days. In the course of doing this, I noticed something. An awful, awful lot of people want to drive 70 on I-70. But the best way to find someone who wants to drive 80 on 70 is to pull into the fast lane, speed up to 70, and pass someone. Someone will be on your bumper in a heartbeat. And there won’t be anything you can do about it either, because on the left side, there’ll be people doing 72, 75, or some other speed faster than you, so you can’t even get over.

And of course, once Dale Earnhart gets past you, he floors it for about 10 feet, then slams on his brakes just before he kisses the bumper of the guy who was ahead of you who was doing 72. Then the whole game starts over again, until the maniac gets off the road, either by arriving at his destination or a cop pulling him over. It’s not the latter very often, unfortunately.

The speed limit on the stretch of I-70 that I’m describing is 55 miles per hour, by the way.

I got sick of trying to keep up. So I just pull onto 70, stay as far to the right as I can, and set my cruise control for 55. Sure, people zoom past me. Sure, I get there about five minutes later than I would otherwise. But you know what? I feel a lot better when I get there. I’m less tense.

And my gas mileage jumps. At 70 MPH, my Honda Civic seems to get 32-33 miles per gallon. At 55, I get closer to 38.

I’ve also taken on another habit. My Civic just happens to have a tachometer, so I can look down and get a quick idea of how hard my engine is working. If my engine is doing 3,000 RPMs or more, I back off. My Civic is a light enough car that it can get up to speed even if the engine only does 2,200 RPM. The engine doesn’t work as hard, which saves gas. And I don’t hit the brake pedal as much, which saves gas. And yes, it’s possible to develop a feel for how to keep your RPMs low while maintaining a constant speed. Dale Earnhart won’t appreciate you when he gets right up on you, but if you’re on a stretch of road where the speed limit is 35, do you really need to accelerate to 35 in four seconds?

Now, I’d love to tell people to buy a Toyota Prius. I really would. Because the only way the price of hybrids is going to come down is if more people buy them. But I thought about a hybrid when I bought my Civic. I thought about it long and hard. And this was when gas was $1.35 a gallon and people were bellyaching about it.

My Civic cost me right around $16,000. A hybrid would have cost me around $24,000. That’s an $8,000 difference. Assuming $2 per gallon, which is actually less than it costs today but it makes the math nice, the price difference would buy you 4,000 gallons of gas. That’s enough gas to drive at least 120,000 miles. A lot of people don’t keep their cars long enough to drive that far. And that’s not even the break-even point. Assuming a Prius gets 50% better gas mileage than my Civic (it doesn’t), the Prius doesn’t start paying for itself for another 60,000 miles or so.

I think it’s better to buy the most fuel efficient conventional (or diesel) vehicle that meets your needs for size and space, then drive like you would if there was a cop behind you all the time.

As it sits now, I get about 38 MPG driving that way. If I were better about using fuel injector cleaner and changing my air filter, I might get closer to 40. With better spark plugs and a really good synthetic oil like Mobil 1 or Ams oil, I might get 40. That’s not Toyota Prius territory, but it’s better than some people report getting from their Honda hybrids.

Are blogs credible?

Dave Farquhar net.culture

OK, so 60%+ of Americans don’t trust blogs. Do I need to do a Gomer Pyle imitation?

Blogs are media. People generally don’t trust the media either.Ten years ago, which was a time when the Web had about 12 pages on it and almost all of them were personal pages, I was in journalism school and if there was one point the introductory and history classes tried to hammer home, it was that freedom of the press is in danger. Today, a majority of students, when presented with the exact wording of the First Amendment, believe it goes too far.

There’s an old saying that freedom of the press is for those who own one. To a degree, that presented a large barrier of entry. One can safely assume that it will cost more than a million dollars to start a magazine, and that’s been true for a very long time. Newspaper startup costs will be much higher.

But somehow that hasn’t stopped quacks from getting into print. Some quacks are very wealthy. They can buy media outright, and less-wealthy quacks can just buy some space in a newspaper and pontificate all they want about whatever bothers them and act like a syndicated columnist–some even include their picture–and the only way you would know is by the word “ADVERTISEMENT” plastered across the top and the bottom of the editorial.

In contrast, some people will give you a blog for free, and that lowers the cost of entry even further. Now all it takes is some rudimentary computer skills and the willingness to sit down and write. And if people agree with you and link to you, you might even gain some prominence.

Does that make them credible? No. But do the words “of the [insert newspaper name here] staff” give you credibility? It shouldn’t. Journalism is not a licensed profession like engineering or law or medicine. If I can convince someone to hire me and pay me to write, I’m a journalist. The same goes for you. There are just two barriers of entry: People who can string words together intelligently are much more rare than they should be, and the pay stinks. If your goal is to keep a dry roof over your head and drive a car that isn’t falling apart, you’re better off persuing a career as a garbage man. But if you’re willing to live with pay that makes schoolteachers look like aristocrats, there isn’t much keeping you from being a journalist.

The low pay is one reason I’m suspicious of a lot of journalists. To put up with that lifestyle, you pretty much have to have a hidden agenda.

So do I trust blogs? Generally, no. But don’t feel bad. Generally speaking I’m suspicious of television news and newspapers and magazines and other online news services too.

Credibility is earned. I know some people trust me. I know some other people think I’m a quack who blogs because no sane person would pay me to write anything. And that’s fine–in some cases the feeling is more than mutual.

So what to do about those big, bad blogs that have no credibility? Censoring speech is always bad. The solution to speech that needs censorship is more speech. So the answer to bad blogs is more blogs. The best of the best will rise to the top, and quacks always find a way to eventually self destruct.

Punishing the curious for something that should have never happened

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , ,

I saw a story on the news tonight about more than 100 students who won’t be getting into MBA programs. Why? When they applied to a number of prestigous universities, a posting on a bulletin board claimed to let them view their records and see if they were admitted or not.

It didn’t work for all of them. But those who tried to peek are being punished.My question is why is this information on the public Internet to begin with? This is precisely what intranets are for: You put sensitive information on a web server behind a firewall. Then you define one or more computers who can see it. The rest of the world can’t access it, because the rest of the world doesn’t know it exists. But those who are authorized to see it can see it, through the convenience of a web browser.

Leaving this kind of information on a web server that’s open to the public via the plain old Internet is akin to keeping student records, finals, and other sensitive information at the campus library. If it’s out where someone can see that it’s there–or might suspect it’s there–then someone’s going to look. It shouldn’t be there in the first place. I had professors who never kept tests in their office because some student at some point in time had broken in, hoping to get a preview of the final.

Punishing applicants for typing in a link that they figured wouldn’t work anyway accomplishes little or nothing, except to say that some of the nation’s finest universities have given no thought whatsoever to their computer security and network design.

I hope their graduates are smarter than the people who run the place. But that’s probably a given.

What happens when you overclock

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

I’ve never been a big fan of overclocking. I overclocked for a couple of weeks back in my Pentium-75 days but quit when my system started acting goofy. I did it again five years ago when I was writing my book, because, well, everyone expected me to talk about overclocking in it. So I overclocked again, and tried to use that overclocked machine in the process of writing a book. This foray only lasted a little while longer.

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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.