Rebuilding in Kansas City

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , , , ,

Well, the Royals finally did something today.

They traded aging catcher Benito Santiago to the Pittsburgh Pirates for a pitching prospect, and they traded a pitching prospect to the Atlanta Braves for Eli Marrero.

It’s a start.A year ago, Santiago made sense. The Royals were looking for an upgrade over Brent Mayne, and Santiago was arguably the best catcher on the market. He hit .274 and popped a few home runs, but didn’t endear himself to the fans or the press behind the plate, and he only played in 49 games before he broke his hand.

Change of plans: The Royals trade Carlos (there’s only one Carlos) for prospects, including a catcher. That catcher, John Buck, popped twice as many homers in just 25% more at-bats, and after a slow start, showed he’s probably capable of hitting .274 and he’ll make about 10% of what Santiago was supposed to make this year.

Fine, so Santiago’s expendable. Dump as much of his salary as you can, get whatever someone’s willing to give you for him, and spend the savings on something else.

Which brings us to that someone else: Eli Marrero. No longer a youngster at 30, he nevertheless has 4, 5, maybe even 6 good years left in him, and he’s versatile. He’s mostly an outfielder these days, and the Royals probably would have been better off last year letting their pitchers hit and letting the DH hit for their left fielders, if you know what I mean.

Marrero has always been more of a super-sub type player–the most he’s ever played is 131 games–but Kansas City is a good place for a player who’s never really had a chance to come and break out of his shell. Examples in recent years are Joe Randa, Jermaine Dye, and, well, Mike Sweeney. The Royals didn’t trade for Sweeney, but they tried to pawn him off on anyone who would offer a bag of baseballs in return in 1999. Finding no takers, they stuck him on the end of the bench until injuries forced them to use him as a DH. Further injuries and Jeremy Giambi’s–yes, he of the BALCO scandal–unwillingness to learn how to play first base made Sweeney the odd man in, and he responded by hitting .322 in a year when none of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball wanted him.

Eli Marrero has to compete with a guy who hit .156 last year for the starting left field job.

And Marrero gives versatility. The Royals have two guys who can play first base, but last year both of them decided to get hurt. Marrero can move there if need be. And if something were to happen to John Buck, Marrero can catch to give Alberto Castillo a day off, or he can give them a better bat than Castillo on an everyday basis behind the plate while Abraham Nunez, Terrence Long and Aaron Guiel fight for the two available spots in the outfield.

Marrero even gives the Royals someone who can play center field occasionally, even though the Royals suddenly have three other guys who can do that.

I’ve also heard a rumor that Marrero can play third base, in addition to the three outfield spots, first, and catcher, but as far as I can tell he’s never played third in a major-league game. But if the Royals suddenly have three outfielders who can hit, Marrero at third would be an interesting experiment until Mark Teahan–another key to the trade that sent Carlos packing–is ready.

Marrero’s an upgrade. I’m not positive he’s worth $3 million a year, seeing as he’s always been a part-time player, but by parting ways with Joe Randa, trading Carlos Beltran, trading Benito Santiago, and running Juan Gonzalez out of town on a rail, they can afford a few $3 million players.

Ideally, Marrero is the 9th or 10th best position player on your team. Chances are he’s more like the fourth or fifth, playing for the Royals. But when you can get a guy who’d be your fourth or fifth best player in exchange for someone who had a pretty good chance of pitching in AAA all next season, you do it.

So here’s the starting lineup I’d be tentatively planning to use, if I were Tony Pena:

David DeJesus cf
Angel Berroa ss
Mike Sweeney dh
Eli Marrero 3b
Ken Harvey 1b
John Buck c
Abraham Nunez rf
Terrence Long lf
Andres Blanco 2b

Blanco? Yeah. Tony Graffanino is a utility player, not an everyday second baseman. Blanco is a light hitter, but he has a dazzling glove, so I’d play him on the theory that his glove will save more runs than Graffanino’s bat would produce. The Royals have lots of young pitchers, and the best thing you can do for young pitchers is catch the ball. So Blanco brings one of those mystical intangibles with him.

Matt Stairs can come off the bench and pinch hit for him if he ever comes up with a runner in scoring position, and then Graffanino can take over at second.

Even if he only hits .156, having a .156 hitter at second instead of in left field is a significant upgrade.

Here’s a more likely lineup:

David DeJesus cf
Tony Graffanino 2b
Mike Sweeney dh
Ken Harvey 1b
Eli Marrero lf
John Buck c
Abraham Nunez/Terrence Long rf
Angel Berroa ss
Chris Truby 3b

Truby is a journeyman with a little bit of pop that the Royals got as a stopgap until Teahan is ready.

Regardless, it looks like the Royals have a better team this year than they did last year. Unfortunately, so does everyone else in their division…

Fixing a computer that shows the wrong partition size after resizing

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting, Windows , ,

So, I’ve got these Windows 2000 boxes that didn’t have enough space, so I resized some partitions. No error messages, no problems. I reboot, and the drives still show their old size, even though in Disk Administrator they show the right size.

What gives? Microsoft acknowledges this issue in Windows XP, but hasn’t released a fix yet. But these aren’t XP, they’re 2000.

I’ve got a crazy solution.

If you have a copy of Ghost by Symantec, take a Ghost image of the partition that’s sized wrong. Then, immediately after creating the image, write the image back to the partition you just Ghosted.

Makes no sense, right? Well, but Ghost doesn’t do a bit-by-bit copy. It makes sure it gets good copies of your files, but it saves an interpretation of the partition, rather than the partition itself. So when it writes it back, minor errors that were there before get wiped out.

Now, why there can’t be a disk utility that does this same thing to a partition without the imaging runaround, I don’t know.

I just know I’ve brought a lot of computers with weird disk problems back to life over the years by making Ghost images of them and then writing the image back. This one today is just the latest in that long line.

Why do people pay $35 for lists of paid survey sites?

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

I’ve been seeing more and more advertisements for paid survey sites. And the promises keep getting more and more ridiculous.

I think it’s a scam. You can make a little bit of spending money filling out surveys, but don’t let anyone hoodwink you into thinking you’ll get rich. Look at it as a way to spend a couple of hours a week to make a little bit of extra money, and nothing more, and you stand to do OK.

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Now that’s customer service

Dave Farquhar Toy trains ,

In this day and age, I’ve come to expect lousy customer service. Even when my employer pays thousands of dollars a year for customer service, I’m used to getting someone halfway around the world with questionable knowledge of the product, even less command of the English language, and I’m used to being kept on the phone half the day trying things that I’ve already tried.

And then there’s Lionel.I am one of the few who ordered my Polar Express train set early. And on Monday I got it. Happy early birthday to Dave. Woo hoo! I excitedly unboxed it, forgot about everything else I was going to do that night, and set up the loop of track around my living room. I loved it. The locomotive smoked, it whistled, and it was the smoothest running train I’ve ever seen.

I ran it for half an hour. Then I made dinner. Then I ran it for another half hour before I realized I was just watching a train go around and around in a circle. So I did other things for a while. Then before I went to bed, I wanted to run it one more time. I plugged in the transformer and… uh oh. Where’s my green light that tells me it’s plugged in and on? I tried it without an extension cord. Nothing. I tried a different outlet. Nothing. Dead.

I grabbed a transformer from the 1950s I had laying around and plugged it in. It was great.

My brand spanking new Lionel CW-80 transformer was dead.

So I e-mailed Lionel. I told them what I had done. I said the set worked fine with a postwar transformer. I asked if there was anything else I could try. This was about 11:30 at night.

First thing the next morning, I had a terse response: Mr. Farquhar, please send us your address and we’ll send you a new transformer. Reference this e-mail. –Lionel

I was expecting it to take a week to get back to me, and then to have to do all sorts of pointless things, but no. Send ’em my address, and they’ll send me a transformer.

Three days later, the transformer showed up. I opened up the box and found a transformer box inside. It was already opened. I guess they tested it for me before they sent it. Inside was an invoice with my problem description and the words "no charge." I plugged it in and it worked.

This used to be the way every company acted. Now it seems like most companies have legions of managers who try to dream up ways to torque off customers while saving four cents a day. I guess Lionel figures that while they’re pinching pennies, pinching pennies on customer service isn’t wise because chances are if people get good service, they’ll buy something else from you.

If that’s what they’re thinking, they were right about me. I was disappointed that the train didn’t work, but they didn’t waste much time making it right.

Ways to keep your NT/2K/XP system defragmented

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Defragmenting on a regular basis isn’t the only thing to overall system performance, but it’s a major factor. Fortunately there are some free tools that do a good job of it. Unfortunately they don’t come with Windows.

Here’s how to automatically defragment your system and your registry.

You can defragment the registry using PageDefrag, a utility by Mark Russinovich of WinNT Magazine fame. I’ve been known to set it to defragment the registry and page file at boot time; after the first time it doesn’t add much to the boot time at all. And XP can still get itself defragmented and booted faster than NT4 usually could manage to boot.

I talked a few weeks ago about DIRMS, a command-line defragmenter. I still like it. I recommend that you schedule a defrag at sometime you won’t be using the computer, like 4 AM. It’s easy to do with any version of Windows using the AT command.

at 4:00 /every:Monday dirms c -q

The AT command requires the scheduler service to be running. It does not require Internet Explorer 4.0 or newer to be installed, so it’ll run on NT4 boxes that only have the default IE 2.0 installed. If you want to run on additional days, separate it with a comma.

Now if DIRMS would just sort files by access date when it defragments, it would be the ultimate defragmenter.

Update: I don’t like DIRMS anymore. It failed me once big-time, and then I found something better.

A Linux-based GPL\’ed disk partition table recovery program

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

It seems like I’m recommending the program MBRwork to someone at least once a month. I recommended it two or three times just last week. But there are a couple of things I don’t like about it. One, it’s DOS. Creating DOS boot floppies isn’t as easy as it used to be. And two, it’s proprietary, so it could theoretically disappear any minute.

But similar tools exist for Linux.The most highly regarded is gpart (guess partition), which just happens to be included on the BG-Rescue Linux two-floppy rescue system. Download BG-Rescue Linux and burn the ISO image to a CD, or download the two-floppy version and write it to two floppies, and keep it in your toolbox. Or, of course, they’re on Knoppix.

When a partition table vanishes, or, a more likely scenario, a system quits booting mysteriously, you can boot BG-Rescue Linux and run gpart. You can also check FAT/FAT32 filesystems with dosfsck and NTFS partitions with ntfsfix.

Need to undelete some files in an emergency? You can even undelete files from NTFS partitions with ntfsundelete.

Clearly, skills with a handful of Unix utilities are very useful even in a strictly Windows shop.

Looks like I should explore these tools a bit more in-depth this week.

Quieting and lengthening the life of a case fan

Dave Farquhar Hardware

I serviced a PC last week while my Internet connection was up and down like George Bush’s approval rating. It was making a lot of loud noises and at first the owner thought his hard drive was crashing. But when he described the sound to me, it sounded like a fan.

He sounded relieved and said he’d ignore it, but I told him I should take a look at it.Noisy fans are more likely to die than quiet ones. And while a lot of computers have enough fans in them that they can survive if one of the case fans dies, the likelihood of surviving long with a dead CPU or power supply fan is slim. Case fans should be kept in working order too, just because life expectancy roughly halves for each 10 degrees Celsius the temperature rises.

By opening the case and powering the system on, I was able to quickly isolate the noise to the case fan. It really wasn’t terribly loud–he commented that it quieted down a lot when he brought it to me–but I figured since he’d brought the computer over and I’d looked at it, I might as well do something useful. I peeled back the foil sticker on the fan face that hides the bearing and applied a drop of oil. Use 3-in-1 or a similar oil, or for that matter, a drop of 10w30 or another automotive oil if it’s all you’ve got. Do not use WD-40 or a similar penetrating oil. WD-40 does a great job of stopping squeaky doors and freeing up locks and preventing rust, but at best it’s a mediocre lubricant.

Also, with oil, more is rarely better. The excess will shoot out of the fan and weaken the adhesive on the sticker. It’s much better to put in a little and have to add more later than it is to put in too much from the start.

I replaced the sticker and put the fan back in the case. I powered the system on. It was noticeably quieter.

I don’t know if that fan’s life expectancy is now measured in weeks, months, or years, but it’s a pretty good bet that it’s been lengthened, and it’s going to annoy a lot fewer ears.

Running Knoppix on a Proliant with a SmartArray controller

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking ,

If you’ve ever tried to run Knoppix on a Compaq or HP Proliant with a Smart Array controller, you probably got a rude surprise.

Here’s how to make the hard drive(s) show up.Open a shell window.

Type ‘su’ (no quotes) to become root.

Type ‘insmod cciss’ — you may get a message that it’s already installed.

Type ‘cd /dev’

Type ‘MAKEDEV cciss’ (this is case-sensitive).

Now Knoppix will see your drives so you can mount them and/or edit the partitions with qtparted.

Read this if you are using the free AVG 6.0 antivirus software

Dave Farquhar Viruses ,

Grisoft has offered a free edition of its AVG 6.0 antivirus software for several years. Unfortunately it has discontinued the product and will stop offering updates on 31 December.

The solution is to download their new free version.It’s a pain, but unfortunately, free things almost always have some kind of strings attached. To be entirely fair, for-pay antivirus software often has some strings attached too.

So if you’ve been using AVG, or you have friends who have been, download (or get them to download) the new version and update it.

Some people have been complaining lately about AVG not updating their definitions as quickly as the other vendors. The result is that some viruses that Norton Antivirus would catch go undetected by AVG. If you can afford better virus protection, buying it is probably worthwhile. If not, the AVG free edition is still better than no protection at all.