The $799 Lindows subnotebook

Dave Farquhar Hardware

I let this one slip by this past week, but Lindows has a new coup, to go with the $199 PCs at Wal-Mart: a $799 subnotebook.
What to think about it? It’s an odd mix. It offers high-end features like USB 2.0 and Firewire built in, and a generous 256 MB of RAM. But it has an underpowered VIA C3 processor. Its three-pound weight would be very nice.

But for $799 you’re not getting everything you’ll probably want or need. There’s no CD-ROM or floppy at that price. So if you’re looking for a cheap notebook to load another OS on, you won’t get there for $799. By the time you buy an external CD-ROM, you’re awfully close to the price of the getting-to-be-famous Sotec, which you can sometimes find now for $799 after some rebates. While the Sotec weighs 4.4 pounds, it has everything you’ll need to load another OS on it, and it comes with Windows XP Home, which makes me wonder just how much you’re saving by not having to pay the Microsoft tax.

The laptops Lindows compares it to aren’t really a fair comparison. As a performer, this subnotebook really isn’t in their league. Comparing it to a PDA isn’t exactly fair either. I can’t speak for the PocketPC devices, but the thing I like about the Palm I carry is that it’s an instant-on device. If I power it down with my task list onscreen, the task list comes up when I power it back on, and it comes up immediately. I’m sure with the right distro this laptop could be tweaked to boot in 15-20 seconds, but I don’t want to wait 15-20 seconds to boot up and see my calendar.

I think if it were priced at $499 or even $599, they’d sell tons of them. But the only advantage it offers over the cheap Sotecs is weight.

Skimping on the design would cut some cost, but the obvious places to skimp–a good starting point would be to lose the Firewire and USB 2.0 and offer plain old USB, drop the memory to 128 megs and drop the CPU to 800 MHz–would probably only shave $50 off the price.

To me, the Sotec is much more appealing. There will probably be an initial surge in sales due to pent-up demands for a lighter notebook and/or a notebook with a Linux derivative preinstalled, but I expect them to cool pretty quickly once people realize the Sotec is the better buy.

I just built a PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

It’s late, so I’ll save a lot of the gory details for tomorrow, but I built a PC over the course of the last couple of days. I did it a little bit differently than the last couple I’ve built.
All prices quoted are from Newegg.com as of last weekend when I ordered this stuff.

Case

I used a Foxconn PC115. It’s a two-tone case that looks like the cases the big brands use. Since a lot of the big brands buy from Foxconn, it’s probably a derivative of the designs Foxconn sells to them. It’s heavy enough gauge steel that you won’t hurt yourself with it. The mounting points are labeled. It has 11 drive bays. The included 350W power supply is honestly labeled. It’s a lower midrange case. I absolutely wouldn’t buy any less case than this–c’mon, the thing costs 30 bucks–but it’s nice enough that nobody’s going to be embarrassed with it.

Mobo

I used an AOpen AK75. It’s an AMD board, with a SiS 745 chipset. I’ve never had troubles with VIA chipsets, though to hear some people talk they make Yugos look reliable. I maintain that if you know what you’re doing, VIA chipsets are fine. But SiS has a great reputation of late so I thought I’d give a SiS-based board a try. It’s a nice board. It’s fast, and getting Windows to recognize and utilize the chipset is much nicer. Install the AGP driver and you’re in business.

One note about the board: Part of the Windows installation goes so slowly that I thought the board was defective. Right after the system check, it pauses for a long, long time. I’m talking longer than a Pentium 166. It seemed like minutes, though it probably wasn’t much longer than a minute in reality. Once it gets over that hurdle, it’s fast. This was with Win98 and 2000. I didn’t try XP. I had a legal copy of 98 for the system; I started to put 2000 on it in order to see if it ran into the same problems I thought 98 was having.

I only had a few hours’ experience with the board, which is anything but definitive, but it didn’t raise any red flags, and in my experience, most boards don’t wait until the second date to show their bad side. Usually the problems will show up either on the first day or sometime after the 366th.

I looked at an integrated Intel i815 board and very nearly bought it, but the supply dried up before I could pull the trigger. Buying AMD promotes competition, and the AK75 gives a lot more upgrade options in the future, so I’m not terribly sad about it.

Memory

I used a stick of Kingston DDR. It was on sale, I’ve never had a problem with Kingston memory, and back when I was working in an IBM shop, the IBM field techs trusted Kingston memory as much as the stuff IBM used from the factory.

DDR is cheaper than PC133 now, so if you’re building a new system, now’s the time to buy DDR instead. DDR-capable mobos are still more expensive, but they’re faster and you’ll save money in the long run by going with DDR now. DDR is the future. PC133 will stick around a while yet, but it’s headed to the same place EDO memory went.

Video

I used the cheap Radeon flavor of the week. When you don’t do 3D games, video cards don’t matter much anymore. This one was a genuine made-by ATi and I think it cost $29. It’ll stink up the joint if you’re waiting in line to buy Doom 3, but for the rest of us, it’s more video card than we’ll ever need, for a fantastic price.

I don’t have anything against Nvidia, but lately it’s easier to find a full-featured Radeon in the $30-$40 range than an Nvidia offering.

Modem

I used a USR 2977. It’s a real hardware modem and it’s PCI so it’ll fit in modern boards. At $35, it’s not that much more expensive than a Winmodem. And Winmodems steal anywhere from 10-20% of your available CPU power. People go to great lengths–either doing lots of time-consuming and sometimes downright foolish stuff, or spending lots of money–to achieve much smaller performance gains, so it’s stupid not to buy something like the 2977.

Hard drive

I used the flavor-of-the-week 7200-rpm 20-gig Maxtor. It cost $65. At that price I’m not going to be too picky, especially because I was working on a tight budget.

Operating system

Windows 98. Why? It was legal and adequate. Linux would be fine except for a few apps the new owner needs to run. There’s definitely enough hardware here to run XP, and XP might even outperform 98, but when you’re building a $300 system, spending $100 on an operating system when you’ve already got one doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Extras

I stole the CD-ROM, floppy, keyboard, mouse, and monitor from the PC this one was replacing. Along with all the cables.

How DOS came to be IBM’s choice of operating system

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , ,

The urban legend says Gary Kildall snubbed the IBM suits by making them wait in his living room for hours while he flew around in his airplane, and the suits, not taking it well, decided to cut him out of the deal and opted to do business with Bill Gates and Microsoft, thus ending Digital Research’s short reign as the biggest manufacturer of software for small computers.

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How IBM and DOS came to dominate the industry

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
How IBM and DOS came to dominate the industry

Revisionist historians talk about how MS-DOS standardized computer operating systems and changed the industry. That’s very true. But what they’re ignoring is that there were standards before 1981, and the standards established in 1981 took a number of years to take hold.

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My experience with online dating doesn’t match PC Magazine’s

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , ,

OK, I guess it’s time I come out of hiding and make a confession: I’ve used an online dating service. And, if I found myself single and unattached again, I’d probably do it again.
I don’t know if the stigma around online dating still exists, but the inescapable fact is I’m terribly shy in person, especially with women. But I can write a little and when you read a little bit of what I’ve written, you get to know me pretty well. So the computer allows me to get past that shyness.

I saw the service I used reviewed on PC Magazine’s web site this week. It was pretty critical. Every other review I’ve heard about it gushed. And truth be told, in early September I was gushing pretty nasty things about it. I even told some people to stay away from it. It turned things around after a month. Maybe two. I can’t remember the time frame anymore.

The service is eharmony.com. I got that out of the way. Now let me tell you that if you heard about it on Dr. Dobson, which was the original source I heard about it from second- or third-hand, Dobson was gushing about it. Frankly I don’t care much what Dobson has to say about singlehood. Live 10 years listening to people ask you what’s wrong with you because you don’t have a girlfriend, and then I’ll listen to you. I’m not terribly interested in the opinions of this week’s fifty-something who got married in his early 20s on how to cure the disease called singlehood in the early 21st century. (Since when is it a disease anyway?)

Contrary to what Dobson’s gushing might have you believe, eharmony isn’t a magic bullet. Now don’t get me wrong: It does have potential. When one of my friends called me up all excited about it and he described its process, I was willing to humor him. It starts out with a psychological profile. I remember doing a psychological profile using a program called Mind Prober on a Commodore 64 in the late 1980s. It did a pretty good job of profiling me. It got a few details wrong, but I grew into those. Spooky, huh? So if a computer with 64K of memory, 1 megahertz of processing power, and 340K of available secondary storage could profile me, a modern computer could do just fine so long as the profiling algorithm and data is good. So I believe in computer psychological profiling.

Another part of the idea is that you interview thousands of married couples. Happily married couples who’ve been that way for a very long time. That’s a small percentage of people who get married. Take a large sample set, profile them, and you can eventually get an idea of what personality traits are compatible long-term. Nice theory. I buy that. I’ll definitely take it over guesswork.

PC Magazine expressed doubts over use of science in finding love. Considering the success rate of the traditional methods, I’ll take whatever edge I can get.

Here’s what happened with me.

PC Magazine’s reviewer bemoaned her lack of initial matches. I was the opposite. Christian males seem to be a rarity, or at the very least, highly outnumbered. But I think I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

It started off with a questionaire. It took PC Magazine’s reviewer 45 minutes to fill it out. I’m pretty sure it took me closer to an hour and a half. It’s important to consider the questions carefully and answer honestly. A lot of the questions were things I hadn’t thought about in a long time, if ever. By the time I was done, I felt like eharmony’s computer probably knew me better than most of my closest friends. It was that exhaustive. Some of the questions are about you, and some of them are about what you’re looking for. Again, it’s important to be honest. And specific. And picky. The important questions for me were about faith. I won’t date someone who doesn’t share that with me, period. It understood that. It went so far as to give me a list of denominations and ask which ones were OK and which ones weren’t. I ticked off all of the evangelical-minded denominations, then I ticked Lutheran, just because it felt weird to leave my own out. Then I un-checked Presbyterian, only because the girl who will always have the title of The Ex-Girlfriend was/is Presbyterian. We all have baggage, and that’s some of mine.

The system immediately found four matches. Over the course of 2-3 months (I don’t remember how long I stayed) it would find close to 20. I started exchanging questions with one of them right away. I don’t remember the exact process right now. I know early on you’d read a superficial profile of the person–excerpts from their interview. You’d learn things like where they’re from and how to make them smile. If you’re both interested in talking, you pick from a list of questions to exchange back and forth. The first set is multiple choice. One question I asked everyone, without fail, was “If you were going out to dinner with a friend, what kind of restaurant would you choose?” And there were four answers, ranging from a fancy restaurant to a greasy spoon. I wanted to weed out the snobs, which was why I asked that one. I think you got a second round, where the questions were still canned, but you got to write out your own answers, limited to a couple of paragraphs. (I usually pushed the limit. Surprise!) I don’t recall if there was a third, but if there was, it was a shorter-still number of questions, permitting a longer answer. When you got through that round, you entered “Open Communication,” which is basically e-mail, with no restrictions.

The first girl I talked to was from Defiance, Missouri, which is about 45 minutes northwest of St. Louis proper. As I recall, she was 30 and she worked in sales. She was really interested at first but got pretty cyclical. We’d talk a couple of times one day, then a week might pass. It didn’t pan out–one day I got the notice she’d chosen to close communication to concentrate on other matches. One nice thing about doing this online–rejection’s a lot easier when it’s not in person.

I can’t remember where the next girl I talked to was from. Across the river in Illinois but I don’t remember the town. She was 24 or 25, and worked in banking. We took off like a rocket. The first time we talked on the phone, we talked for three hours or something obnoxious like that. I had serious hopes for this match, until we met in person. Everything right had come out all at once, and then, everything wrong came out all at once. She found out I’m not as good at communicating in person as in writing. And she found out I can be distant. I had some red flags too. She seemed to want to move a lot faster than I would be able to, and there were personality traits that weren’t necessarily bad, but they just weren’t right for me. And I knew I would never live up to the expectations she had for me. I may be smart and I may be a nice guy, but I am still human. I felt pretty bad after this date. I stopped believing in the approach and took a serious look at what other options I might have.

Then along came the girl from Manchester, Missouri. She was a year older than me. She played guitar. She led Bible studies. She was a math teacher by trade. I was enamored before we even started talking. And it started off great. She answered every question with the response I was looking for. We started talking, and I thought we were going great. Then she got cold feet and started to withdraw. We talked on the phone a few times and it was pleasant, but she seemed to be big into rules and guidelines, whereas I’m more interested in learning the rules to follow and understanding them well enough to know when to break them. (The exception being 10 particular rules you never break, which you can find in Exodus.) We went on one double date. Once again I wasn’t as strong of a communicator as in writing, and I got the distinct impression she wasn’t very interested in continuing. I was questioning whether I was myself. I’ve still got her phone number somewhere but it’s been four or five months. I doubt I ever use it.

Meanwhile, the girl from Troy, Illinois came into the picture. She and the girl from Manchester were contemporaries, but the girl from Manchester got the head start. I’m pretty sure it was the guitar. She was a student, age 21. I was concerned about the age gap. That was the only question mark about her. Her answers to my questions were mostly the second-best answers. The questions she chose to ask me puzzled me a bit–I had trouble figuring out what it was she wanted to know about me. (With all of the other girls, it was plain as day what they were trying to find out.) We stumbled into open communication, talked for a while, and I still couldn’t get over that age thing. Finally she asked me, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but where’s this going? Do I ever get to meet you?”

So we met in Belleville, then went to O’Fallon, had dinner, and drove around O’Fallon for a couple of hours, talking. My eharmony subscription was up for renewal in a week or so. I let it lapse.

I won’t go into specifics because our relationship is half her business, and I don’t make it a habit to go putting other people’s business on my blog. For the first two months we dated, she got irritated with me once. I’m pretty sure that’s a world record. Most people are doing well if they only get irritated me once over a 24-hour period. Lately I screw up once or twice a month. Most couples I know are thrilled with just once or twice a day.

At one point I seriously questioned the relationship, even to the point where if I’d had to make a yes or no decision right then and there I would have ended it. But that’s not unusual and it’s healthy. And I’m used to being on the other end of that every couple of weeks.

The bottom line is, while we surprise each other, most of the surprises are good ones, and the bad surprises generally aren’t huge surprises. For about 25 years, the only women who understood me at all were my mom and my sister. She’s rocketed onto that list, and frankly, they all probably jockey for that #1 spot. Not bad for someone I first met in person in October. I think at this point my biggest complaint about her is that she doesn’t like mushrooms or olives. I’m sure she’s got bigger complaints about me but she keeps coming around anyway, so they can’t be too big.

I’m not going to say that eharmony is the only way to meet someone, and I won’t say it guarantees you’ll meet someone. I know in at least one case I was a girl’s only match, and it couldn’t have felt good when we flopped. It’s not a magic bullet, no matter what anyone says. I had 17 matches at one point and it still took three months to find someone I felt like I should be dating. Roughly a third were interested in me but I wasn’t interested in them, about a third I was interested in but they weren’t interested in me, and about a third had enough interest on both sides that we talked. If you’re looking for a date this week, you won’t find it on eharmony but you might very well find it somewhere else. And eharmony is definitely expensive.

But I was looking for something long-term, and I think I found it.

Like I said earlier, I’d go back. And that says something.

Read this before you tell me what to believe

Dave Farquhar Christianity

You may have noticed I haven’t written about faith and Christianity in a while. And I’m not sure when I will again. Probably not until someone asks a question that consumes my every spare thought for a day or two. That happens more often than you might think–a couple of times a year–but definitely not every day.
The reason not to write about that subject matter every day is pretty simple if you look at my inbox. My inbox is littered with evidence that people believe that if they read something about what I believe, then I am obligated to read exactly what they believe. The problem with that particular belief is that 637 people visited this site yesterday, and yesterday was a slow day.

And, invariably, the mail states that they too, are a believer, but they place their faith in science. Or reason. Or logic. Or something else that’s inherently good, but in and of itself doesn’t provide every answer. And then they say that all I have is faith in some Jesus and I can’t prove that what I believe is any more correct than what a Hindu believes. Or any other religion, for that matter.

The temptation is to convince them. Look at the fruit. Find me a Hindu who lives a life as fulfilled as mine! Next thing you know, a bunch of us are grunting and flexing our spiritual muscles, trying to show each other and God who’s the most buff. That’s pointless. It doesn’t work. It proves nothing and accomplishes nothing other than burning up some excess testosterone.

So I can fall back on the argument that we have more indication that Jesus existed than we have that Shakespeare existed, and that we have a much closer representation of the original text of any of the 66 books of the Bible than we have of any of Shakespeare’s plays, despite the language barrier, and in spite of the ages of the texts involved. But what does that accomplish? Knowing that is comforting if you already have faith. But it doesn’t give you faith.

I can appeal to logic, and say that no other great religious figure made the claims Jesus made, and if He said that He is God and He is the only way to God and you don’t believe that, then believing anything else He said is just like putting any weight in the things Jim Jones taught or David Koresch taught, because they made the same kinds of claims and were later shown to be madmen. But again, that’s comforting if you already have faith. It’s just an argument if you don’t. It won’t give you faith.

But it’s not my job to convince them. Giving in to that temptation is to dive headlong back into the Garden of Eden and try to be God. Only God can give faith. I can answer questions. I can make you think. But I can’t give faith.

Try this exercise, if you dare. Read the Gospels of John and Luke, in that order. Read a chapter a day. You don’t have to buy a Bible–just go to bible.crosswalk.com, type John 1, John 2, etc. up to John 21, and Luke 1, Luke 2, etc. up to Luke 24, and pick a translation. The New King James Version is possibly the most true to the original languages, whereas the New Living is the easiest to read.

Why Luke and John? John was writing to a Greek audience rather than a Jewish audience, so those of us who are of European descent have an easier time understanding John than we do many of the other books of the Bible. And of all the Biblical authors, Luke was the best pure writer of the bunch.

If you dare, each time before you begin, ask Jesus to show you what’s different about Him. You can just say those words. Or you can just think them. It’s even easier than e-mailing me to tell me I’m wrong. Trust me. I can’t guarantee what you’ll find. I can guarantee that some days you won’t find much of anything. Other days, you’ll likely find the most provocative thing you’ve ever read.

Give that a shot. Trust me, I lived for years with things like logic and reason and history being my god. It didn’t get me anywhere. So before you tell me how great that is, and try to get me to come back over to someplace I’ve already been, spend six weeks over on my side.

Then we can talk.

The bloatware antidote for Windows

Dave Farquhar Software , ,

I needed a Windows MP3 player that wouldn’t take over my system and wouldn’t take as long to download as the typical alternative Web browser circa 2003. Which meant I went looking at one place.
That place is tinyapps.org.

I found what I was looking for (besides a way to legally download a song for $1.75, which is beyond these guys’ control). It’s called Coolplayer. It’s a 170K download that expands out to a 350K executable that uses an ini file in the same directory. Installation consists of putting it where you want to store it. Uninstallation consists of deleting the executable and the ini file. Excellent.

Coolplayer plays MP3s and has a simple playlist editor. Nothing fancy, just the basics. Well, and I guess I should mention it keeps me out of the eternal war between Microsoft, AOL Time Warner, and RealNetworks over control of whatever PC I happen to be using. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a feature, and maybe its best one. No, Realplayer, you may not take over the filename association for textfiles! If I wanted a text editor, I’d have run Metapad!

Most of the apps linked at Timyapps are substantially under 1 MB in size and provide just the basics most people need.

If the executables are still too big for you, there’s UPX. UPX is a modern-day PKLite that works on Windows apps as well as DOS apps. Among other things. I used an old version of it–I haven’t downloaded the current version 1.24, which has better compression–to pack the CoolPlayer executable down to 173K. The superfast, minimalist Off By One Web browser packs down to 359K.

If you’re building a super floppy or CD of Windows utilities, packing them with UPX is a good way to get more space for them. (Betcha didn’t know you could fit a Windows Web browser, MP3 player, and a text editor on a 3.5″ floppy and have room to spare, did you?) Or if you’re stuck with a way-too-small hard drive, UPX can gain you some space.

See, if you’re stuck with Windows 95 on a 386DX40 with 8 megs of RAM and a 170MB hard drive, you can get the basics you need to turn that into a useful computer. And the tricks still work if you’ve got something better.

Pretentious Pontifications: The word of the day

Dave Farquhar General

The word if the day is “gat.” I understand that David’s boss did not know what that means. I take that as a sign of aristocracy, for among gentlemen, only those with a love of linguistics tend to know the meaning of words utilized by rabble like my black-sheep brother David.
I trust I need no introduction. I am R. Collins Farquhar IV, David’s consanguineous twin brother. I got the good genes. David, if you are wondering, is not here tonight, so I took it upon myself to fill in for him. My best guess is that he is out trying to buy a “gat.” I understand they are available relatively inexpensively in the neighborhood surrounding the building where he works.

The word is commonly heard on the streets, where I am sure my impecunious brother would gladly spend much of his time if his boss did not keep a very tight leash on him. But I propound that the word actually has a quite fascinating history, which is very unusual for the topics David brings up. So I will take this time to share a descant with you.

The patent for the first practical machine gun was granted on the 4th of November of the year 1862 CE to Dr. Richard J. Gatling. The Gatling Gun stayed in use until 1911 CE. Although little more than a gewgaw today, the Gatling Gun was revolutionary in its time.

Some simpleton historians suggest Dr. Gatling’s goal was to obviate war by making it so devastating that men would no longer melee. Of course, that did not happen. Just ask the French, who succeeded in having themselves overrun and devastated twice in the 20th century CE and had to be bailed out by the Scots, many of whom had to come back across the Atlantic from America to do it.

Dr. Gatling was a doctor, as in medical doctor. Watching the dead return from the Civil War, he noticed that a small percentage actually died of gunshots. It was apparent to his eye that the most parlous thing about war was disease, not bullets.

In a letter dated 1877 CE, he wrote: “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine–a gun–which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.”

He was irrefragably right about exposure to disease. His theory about battle was less considerably cogent. He would have learned, had be bothered to ask me, that exposure to battle was not as easy to cure.

While the Gatling gun is no longer in use, the word “gat” came to be a slang phrase, generally meaning “handgun” or “pistol.” You still hear the word used in the streets today. Or so my sources tell me.

Mozilla 1.3 has gone beta

Dave Farquhar Software

I noticed that Mozilla 1.3 hit the beta stage today. I’ve been running the alpha version under Windows 2000 since mid-December, both as my primary browser and mail client, and I found it to be buggy, but its bugs were very predictable.
Predictable is good. Predictable means you can work around it. I worked around them easily enough that I didn’t report them, which was a mistake, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who saw them. I’ll report them if they’re still present in the beta.

Aside from those couple of predictable bugs, none of which ever caused the application to crash, it was reasonably stable. The main reason for calling it an alpha, I think, was feature incompleteness rather than stability. Stability wise, 1.3a was at least the equal of the original (pre-service pack) IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0, if not better.

So now I’m running 1.3b. I had issues with installing it. If you have 1.3a, disable startup acceleration. If you have a previous version of Mozilla hanging around and you intend to install 1.3b and you want to be absolutely safe, disable startup acceleration, then reboot, then install.

Then again, you may not have any problem at all. I get annoyed when people pronounce something stable or unstable based on trying it on one machine under one set of conditions for a couple of hours, and then they wonder what’s wrong with you if you do the same thing and have different results. So I won’t claim to have the final word.

But I’ll say this: If you want innovation in a Web browser, especially under Windows, Mozilla is pretty much the only game in town anymore. And its mail client isn’t bad either. For that reason alone, it’s worth a look.

And if the “beta” branding scares you off, I don’t blame you, because beta software has a deservedly bad reputation. This one’s a lot better. I won’t say it’ll never crash, because I’m sure it occasionally will. But the more people use it, the faster the bugs get found, and the faster it reaches true production quality. And that’s good for everyone.

Dave goes to the doctor

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , ,

After spending the weekend in bed… wait, that sounds bad. After spending the weekend burning up and feeling like my tonsils were on fire… wait, that’s not much better. After spending the weekend sick, I called my doctor.
Actually, my girlfriend made me do it. From me describing the symptoms, she thought I probably had strep throat. Since she’s had it three times and since I would like to see her again sometime in the near future, I made the call this morning. He had an opening at three o’clock. I said I’d take it. I popped a couple of ibuprofen and crawled back into bed.

At 2:15, I ventured out into the bad, bad world. Let me clarify: Right now, anything that isn’t my bedroom or my bathroom qualifies as the bad, bad world. I went out Sunday for some sickie necessities and that was a big mistake. Not that it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. I can think of worse things that have happened to me. Getting my wisdom teeth taken out wasn’t one of them, however. I stopped off at the ATM to get some fast cash, which I hoped would cover my copay and my script. Then I headed for the doctor’s office, which thanks to the usual spectacular driving on Telegraph Road, took me the better part of half an hour. The doctor’s office is less than five miles away.

Apparently I hadn’t been there since 1999. Or that was the last time I filled out any paperwork, at least. I was pretty sure I’d been in more recently than that. But I wasn’t in any mood to argue. I wasn’t in much mood to fill out forms either, but that doesn’t have anything to do with being sick. I remember one time, early in college, when I had to fill out a questionaire. One of the entries asked us about our favorite activities. I wrote down, “filling out forms.” (Those who know me well know that I’m never, ever sarcastic. Never. Nunca jamas. I don’t even know the meaning of the word, or I wouldn’t if it hadn’t been a dictionary.com word of the day.)

So I filled out the form, including questions about my insurance coverage I had no way of knowing. Some of it was on my insurance card. I guessed about the rest. The time that passed between me filling it out and handing it in would be ample time for it all to change anyway. For all I knew, Aetna wouldn’t be my insurance provider five minutes later. For all I know, it hasn’t been since 2001 and I’ll be getting a really nice phone call in the morning.

But the form satisfied everyone enough that I got to go in to see my doctor. If I committed fraud in the process, well, hopefully they still allow one phone call after they haul you off to jail. I’ll call Benefits and tell them to make sure the doctor gets paid. And I’ll politely ask someone to let my Pastor know I’m in jail. You know Lutherans. They take an offering every opportunity they get, so they’ll welcome an opportunity to take up a collection to bail me out. I hope. He’ll probably do it if I say I’m supposed to be an usher on Sunday.

They put me in a little room with a padded table, a sink, and a couple of chairs. There were certificates on the wall that said my doctor had been in the Army in the early 1980s and had studied at various military academies. There were a couple of expired AOA and AMA certifications. And nowhere was there any indication of where he’d gone to school. There are only two places for a doctor to go to school, of course: Kansas City and Kirksville.

The doctor came in and asked how I was feeling today. In that usual cheerful voice that people expect a terse “fine.” But I didn’t feel fine. I felt like I had a basketball in my throat and I wanted it out. So I told him my throat hurt. He asked how long my throat had hurt. I said since Saturday. He shined a light into my mouth and told me to say ah. After two minutes of trying to see what he needed to see, he gave up, got a tongue depresser, and shoved whatever had been blocking his view out of the way. I could tell you what he said he saw, but it’s gross. It also was something I could have told him if he’d just asked.

As he got out a long cotton swab, he consulted my records to get some basics on my life so he could ask the kinds of questions that made it sound like he knew me. His acting skills didn’t impress me. Then he took a culture. I didn’t quite cough up a lung while he was doing that, but I tried.

He told me there lots of diseases that can cause a throat to hurt. Then I got an 8th grade Biology lesson. He told me there were two basic types of organisms that can infect your throat. He paused for a really, really long time as he put the culture in its test gizmo and wrote stuff down on my chart. Then he continued: “What I was getting at is that your throat can be infected by bacteria, or it can be infected by viruses.” Then I figured out that he was in the process of explaining to me why he didn’t just automatically write me a prescription for penicillin. So I finished the paragraph for him: “But if it’s a virus there’s no point in giving me an antibiotic because an antibiotic can’t kill a virus.”

I’m pretty sure that 8th grade Biology was the last A that I ever got in a science class. Well, other than Computer Science 103 in college, but that doesn’t count. Even a dumb journalist can get an A in that class.

But yes, I remember my basic biology.

I tested negative for strep. The doctor asked how old I was. I said 28. I hadn’t figured out yet where he was going. He put his hands around my throat–something a lot of people have longed to do for a very long time–and looked for enlarged glands. Then he had me lay back and he felt around my abdomen. Then he checked my breathing.

Then he started telling me about a virus that can make your throat sore: Mononucleosis.

“Mono!?” I interrupted him. I know about mono. I know it’s the bane of college students everywhere. College students tend to get it and it tends to ruin their careers. I remember an uptight health teacher citing mono as a reason why people shouldn’t kiss. Probably the same health teacher who had both of his kids through artificial insemination. With his wife. He was the donor. Yes, he was a bit paranoid. And weird. But I’m getting off topic for about the 47th time today.

“Have you been around anyone lately who has mono?” he asked.

“Not that I know of,” I said. And that’s true. No, I still won’t tell you where I work, but it’s hard to imagine anyone there running around with mono. We’re talking a place where you’re not considered an adult until all of your kids have graduated college. Not to mention that some of those guys’ attitudes about women make me wonder how they ever would have had the opportunity to ever be exposed to mono, let alone the opportunity to have kids who would then grow to college age…

And as far as–ahem–extracurricular opportunities to be exposed to mono, I come up blank there too. I’m not exactly the kind of guy who kisses everything that walks upright and breathes oxygen.

“Well, you’re too old for mono to be very likely,” he said, snapping me back to the present reality. “So I’m going to give you penicillin. But I’m going to order blood work.”

And then I was off for another one of my all-time favorite activities–having blood drawn–but there wasn’t really anything interesting about that. I didn’t look, as usual, it hurt, as usual, and I didn’t know when it was over, as usual, and they put a piece of cotton the size of Texas on it afterward, as usual, held in place by an impossibly tiny band-aid, as usual. The only thing unusual about it was the band-aid had Bugs Bunny on it. Good thing I wasn’t going to work afterward. I’d get teased about that. Good thing only the Internet’s going to know about that.

Then my Bugs Bunny band-aid and I went off to get my penicillin, where I found out that my prescription card is no good. Great, another phone call… The pharmacist said penicillin is really cheap though, so he asked if he should just check the cash price. I said fine. Not having to wait until Tuesday to start my dosage was worth a few bucks to me. The price came up $9.53, Tax Man Carnahan Holden’s cut included. I’m pretty sure my copayment would have been 20 bucks. So not having a working insurance card worked to my advantage, to the tune of 10 bucks.

Then I went home. No light blinking on my answering machine. That’s good, at least if you ascribe to the theory that bad news travels fast, which I do. I popped my first penicillin, and started to wait the 8 hours until my next.

And I checked the usual symptoms of mono. The only ones I have–sore throat, achy joints, diminished appetite–can be symptoms of absolutely anything.

So we’ll see.