Some goodies for your CD burner

Dave Farquhar General , ,

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a really long time! Everyone and his uncle who has no clue how CD burners work wants a networked CD burner, for some reason. But it’s not as easy as just throwing the drive in a server and sharing it out with write access, as you probably know.
Leave it to someone else to think of combining the power of CGI scripts and the Unix command line to create a Web-based networked CD burning solution. So with this and a minimalist PC (any Pentium with 24 megs of RAM and a 1-gig hard drive ought to be more than enough) and a Linux-compatible CD burner, you can give controlled access to a CD burner to anyone on your network with a Web browser. It’ll even burn bootable CD-ROMs for you.

So now I’m half tempted to permanently install my 2X CD burner in my 486 so that any of my computers can use it, any time.

Speaking of bootable CDs… I’ve mentioned Bart’s way to create bootable CD-ROMs before, but it warrants another mention. Bookmark it. Bart Lagerweij has a great collection of boot floppies as well, and some good utilities, including low-level SCSI utilities.

Windows CD burning software. So you got a great deal on an OEM CD-R or CD-RW only to find it didn’t include software? What to do? You re-use the copy of Easy CD Creator that came with your old CD-R, that’s what. And then you’ll upgrade Windows and you’ll really regret that–Easy CD Creator is one of the most finicky programs I’ve ever seen about Windows versions. Upgrade Windows, you’ll have to buy a new version of Easy CD Creator. So if you’re smart, you’ll tell Roxio where to go and what to do with itself and buy Nero Burning ROM.

If you’re smart and cheap, you’ll pay this site (watch out for the annoying popups and popunders, sorry) a visit. It’s free CD burning software for Windows, based on GNU tools. It comes with dated versions of cdrecord, so you’ll want to download a newer version of CDRTools (current version as I write is 1.10; v1.11 is pre-release code so you use it at your own risk) and extract it to the directory you installed the front-end.

It’s not as flashy as the commercial tools and it doesn’t necessarily have all the features you’ll find in a retail shrink-wrap package, but it’s functional, and some people will find it easier to use. It happily runs on any 32-bit Windows. You can make as many copies of it as you want and install it anywhere you want. It’s legal, and much less invasive than the commercial tools. Good deal.

Doughnuts and the Evil Internet Exploiter Empire

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Doughnuts. My phone rang last night. It was my sister.
“What are you doing?”

“Eating doughnuts.” Actually that wasn’t what I said, but it sounds better. People tell me I should label it when I write fiction. Usually they mean that as an insult. But they can get over it. Nobody makes them read me. But I took their words to heart. So that line is fiction. The rest is true. If I told you what I really said, you’d think my mind wanders, and I don’t want you to think that.

“I see.” (And probably you do too.)

“I was real tired after church. Brad told me I looked fried. So I went out and got doughnuts.”

“And what’s that have to do with being tired?”

“Nothing. I just felt like some doughnuts.”

“I see.”

“I got a dozen so I can have doughnuts for breakfast too.”

“Da-vid! You got a dozen doughnuts?”

“Yep.”

“It’ll take you a year to eat a dozen doughnuts!”

“Nuh-uh. I had two already. So I’ve got 10 left. That’s enough for breakfast. Besides, doughnuts are good for you. They have wheat, and… What else is in doughnuts that are good for you?”

“Not a thing.”

“There’s gotta be something.”

“Sugar’s not necessarily bad for you, but there’s nothing else I’d call good. I wouldn’t eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but–“

“Now there’s an idea. Wait a minute. I can’t. I’ve only got 10 left. If I weigh 300 pounds next time you see me, you’ll know why.”

Internet Explorer. The word is out about Internet Explorer and why you shouldn’t use it. Because Microsoft in its infinite paranoia wisdom decreed that a Web browser is an indispensable component of an operating system (just like pinball), IE has a vulnerability that can allow it to run arbitrary code. Because no other browser on any other platform feels the need to join itself at the hip, elbow and head to an operating system, the vulnerability doesn’t exist elsewhere. I wanted to point out this problem in Optimizing Windows, but if I recall correctly, my editor’s comment to that section was, “Spare us the editorials.” Or something. That’ll teach me to insult his favorite Web browser.

So now I know that I was right, and that O’Reilly are Microsoft lackeys. But I can tell you something useful too.

You can liberate your computer from the Evil Internet Exploiter Empire. Your computer doesn’t have to be part of the Browser Wars Battlefield.

Now you’re probably expecting me to say something about Linux for the umpteenth time. But you don’t even have to run Linux to set yourself free. Head over to www.98lite.net and download IEradicator. It’ll remove IE from Windows 9x, and it’ll even remove it from Windows 2000, as long as you’re not running SP2 yet. So remove IE, then install SP2. You’ll get a faster and more secure OS. And you can run your choice of browsers. Opera’s not half bad. Mozilla’s not half bad. And if you like small and lightweight, there’s K-Meleon, which is a small, browser-only IE lookalike that uses the Mozilla engine. And there’s Offbyone, which fits on a floppy. Offbyone isn’t full-featured like the others and it’s only HTML 3.2 compliant, but it’s a great emergency browser you can use to download something better in a pinch. It’s saved me at least twice now. You’ll never find a faster browser in Windows, so if you’re in a hurry and the site you want to see renders fine in it, you can have the site up in Offbyone before one of the other browsers has finished displaying a splash screen.

More perspective on video editing

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

I read Bill Machrone’s current PC Magazine column on PC non-linear video editing with a bit of bemusement. He talked about the difficulty he and his son have editing video on their PCs, and he concluded with the question: “How do normal people do this stuff?” and the misguided answer: “They buy a Mac.”
You don’t have to do that. In fact, you can do pretty well on a PC if you just play by the same rules the Mac forces you to play by.

Consider this for a minute: With the Mac, you have one motherboard manufacturer. Apple tends to revise its boards once a year, maybe twice. Apple makes, at most, four different boards: one for the G4 tower systems, one for the iMac, one for the iBook, and one for the PowerBook. Frequently different lines will share the same board–the first iMacs were just a PowerBook board in an all-in-one case.

And the Mac (officially) supports two operating systems: the OS 9 series and the OS X series. You keep your OS at the current or next-most-recent level (always wait about a month before you download any OS update from Apple), and you keep your apps at current level, and you minimize compatibility problems. Notice I said minimize. PageMaker 7 has problems exporting PDF documents that I can’t track down yet, and I see from Adobe’s forums that I’m not the only one. So the Mac’s not always the bed of roses Machrone’s making it out to be.

Now consider the PC market for a minute. You’ve got two major CPU architectures, plus also-ran VIA; 4-6 (depending on who you ask) major suppliers of chipsets; at least four big suppliers of video chipsets; and literally dozens of motherboard manufacturers. Oh, you want an operating system with that? For all the FUD of Linux fragmentation, Microsoft’s in no better shape: Even if you only consider currently available offerings, you’ve got Windows 98, ME, NT4, 2000, and two flavors of XP.

So we go and we buy a video capture card and expect to put it in any old PC and expect it to work. Well, it probably ought to work, but let’s consider something. Assuming two CPU architectures, four chipset manufacturers, four video architectures, and twelve motherboard manufacturers, the chances of your PC being functionally identical to any other PC purchased right around the same time are 1 in 384. The comparable Mac odds: 1 in 4. But realistically, if you’re doing video editing, 1 in 1, because to do serious video work you need a desktop unit for its expandability. No Blue Dalmation browsing for you!

So you can rest assured that if you have a Mac, your vendor tested the equipment with hardware functionally identical to yours. On a PC you just can’t make that assumption, even if you buy a big brand name like Dell.

But you want the best of both worlds, don’t you? You want to play it safe and you want the economy of using inexpensive commodity PC hardware? It’s easy enough to do it. First things first, pick the video editing board you want. Next, visit the manufacturer’s Web site. Pinnacle has a list of motherboards and systems they’ve tested with the DV500, for instance. You can buy one of the Dell models they’ve tested. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer like me, you buy one of the motherboards they’ve tested. If you want to be really safe, buy the same video card, NIC, and SCSI card they tested as well, and plug them into the same slots Pinnacle did. Don’t worry about the drives Pinnacle used; buy the best-available SCSI drive you can afford, or better yet, two of them.

Video capture cards are cranky. You want a configuration the manufacturer tested and figured out how to make work. Otherwise you get the pleasure. Or the un-pleasure, in some cases.

As far as operating systems go, Windows 2000 is the safe choice. XP is too new, so you may not have drivers for everything. 98 and ME will work, but they’re not especially stable. If I can bluescreen Windows 2000 during long editing sessions, I don’t want to think about what I could do to 9x.

And the editing software is a no-brainer. You use what comes with the card. The software that comes with the card should be a prime consideration in getting the card. Sure, maybe an $89 CompUSA special will do what you want. But it won’t come with Premiere 6, that’s for certain. If I were looking for an entry-level card, I’d probably get a Pinnacle DV200. It’s cheap, it’s backed by a company that’ll be around for a while, and it comes with a nice software bundle. If you want to work with a variety of video sources and output to plain old VHS as well as firewire-equipped camcorders, the DV500 is nice, and at $500, it won’t break the bank. In fact, when my church went to go buy some editing equipment, we grabbed a Dell workstation for a DV500, and we got a DV200 to use on another PC in the office. The DV200-equipped system will be fine for proof of concept and a fair bit of editing. The DV500 system will be the heavy lifter, and all the projects will go to that system for eventual output. I expect great things from that setup.

The most difficult part of my last video editing project (which is almost wrapped up now; it’s good enough for use but I’m a perfectionist and we still have almost a week before it’ll be used) was getting the DV500’s video inputs and outputs working. It turned out my problem was a little checkbox in the Pinnacle control panel. I’d ticked the Test Video box to make sure the composite output worked, back when I first set the board up. Then I didn’t uncheck it. When I finally unchecked it, both the video inputs and outputs started working from inside Premiere. I outputted the project directly to VHS so it could be passed around, and then for grins, I put in an old tape and captured video directly from it. It worked. Flawlessly.

One more cavaet: Spend some of the money you saved by not buying a Mac on memory. Lots of memory. I’m using 384 MB of RAM, which should be considered minimal. I caught myself going to Crucial’s Web site and pricing out three 512-meg DIMMs. Why three? My board only has three slots. Yes, I’d put two gigs of RAM in my video editing station if I could.

OK, two more cavaets: Most people just throw any old CD-ROM drive into a computer and use it to rip audio. You’ll usually get away with that, but if you want high-quality samples off CD to mix into your video production, get a Plextor drive. Their readers are only available in SCSI and they aren’t cheap–a 40X drive will run you close to $100, whereas no-name 52X drives sometimes go for $20-$30–but you’ll get the best possible samples from it. I have my Plextor set to rip at whatever it determines the maximum reliable speed may be. On a badly scratched CD sometimes that turns out to be 1X. But the WAV files it captures are always pristine, even if my audio CD players won’t play the disc anymore.

Editing my second video…

Dave Farquhar Video , ,

You know it’s a different kind of church when you see one making music videos. You’re probably not too surprised to hear that’s the kind of church I go to. And you’re probably not too surprised to hear I’m involved.
I spent a healthy chunk of time Monday editing video. A local radio personality recorded a version of “Mary Did You Know?” a few years back. I know, that doesn’t sound good, but his version is pretty powerful. I’ve heard several versions of it, and I think I like his best, and I’m not just saying that because I know people who know him. I’m also not just saying that because he gave us permission to use the recording. If that version wasn’t good, I’d have assembled a band to re-record it–one of the guys in my Bible study group plays guitar, and another one of them plays drums and has a recording studio in his basement.

So anyway, I’ve got a song I can legally use, and we secured permission to use a couple of different movies about Jesus so we’d have some footage to put to the video. And I gave myself a crash course in Premiere. Put the emphasis on “crash,” because I did bluescreen 2000 at one point. I muttered something about toy operating systems and got back to work. I hope Adobe eventually gets a clue about Linux–there’s plenty of proprietary, high-end video stuff out there for Linux, but nothing in the prosumer arena yet. And I do believe that if you build it, they will come.

After too many hours, I had something halfway workable. Since I was dealing with professional footage, I had a giant headstart. My partner in crime, Brad, had written up an outline that I more or less followed. There were one or two minor points where I didn’t agree with him about where the video fit, so I changed them, but I’d say I went with his outline 75% of the time, if not much more.

So I called Brad and asked him if he wanted to come over. I figured out how to get my DV500 to output to my ancient Commodore composite monitor, which was a good thing, The video was showing up much too dark on my computer screen, but when I exported to NTSC it was beautiful. I’d been playing with levels trying to get it right; I ended up just undoing all of the changes.

What I had can’t be considered finished product; the transitions are pretty lame where there are any at all, and I had a couple of gaps where I didn’t have any video that fit so I threw in a Rembrandt painting. Then I noticed that it didn’t matter what you did to the color on a Rembrandt painting; it still looked far better than any video I’ve ever seen, so I went looking for other Rembrandt paintings to put in. So the video was substantially done, but there’ll be minor changes.

It blew Brad away. I’ll admit, I learned from our first video, so the big mistakes that were in the first video aren’t in this one. And Premiere has great tools to help you avoid those mistakes–you can set the timeline to show every single frame in the video, and to show the waveform of the audio, which takes the guesswork out of transitions and lining things up.

At the end of it, Brad turned to me. “Dave, you are an artist. Do you know that?”

I’m not so sure about that one. Brad’s my ideas man. He tells me what he sees in his head, then I try to find a way to somehow put it up on the screen. And every once in a while I’ll get a better idea. Those are usually 3-4 seconds long. So then I revert back to his. And the result is something that looks decent. Plus a number of the things that happened were just accidents. I had some video of Jesus and the disciples walking through a field with some sheep in the background. I threw it in for lack of anything else to put there. Then about the 10th time I’d played through that sequence–you do a lot of playback during editing–I noticed that during the line “Did you know that your baby boy was Heaven’s perfect lamb?” Jesus happened to look down–towards a lamb walking past. I’d be pretty impressed if someone else put that subtle detail in there. But this was an accident. Or, more likely, it was God doing me a favor.

It’s been a lot of work, but a lot of fun.

And, incidentally, if you ever find yourself having to do any video production, Premiere 6 is an excellent product. I really dislike Adobe as a company, and I wish there were a better product out there than Premiere 6, but I sure haven’t found it. At $250, the Pinnacle DV200 bundled with Premiere 6 is a steal. If you’re into home movies and already have a camcorder with a firewire port (or are considering one), a DV200 and a little time will give you the snazziest home movies on the block.

A nice Sunday surprise

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

I had a big surprise Sunday night. A couple of months ago, I was up at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in north St. Louis, and they asked me if I’d come to their Christmas banquet this year. I said I’d love to come to their Christmas banquet. They said they’d send me tickets. “Some” ended up meaning five. They’re generous people. I ended up using one–I didn’t feel like looking too hard for a date, and I felt weird asking a bunch of my friends who’ve never been up there to go with me on a rainy Sunday night.
My relationship with Bethlehem goes back several years. I moved to St. Louis in Nov. 1998, and immediately started going to a church in Oakville, a semi-ritzy, very white-middle class suburb in south St. Louis County. I was driving 30 minutes to go to church every Sunday because I had connections there, and I’d never seen a church that was so on fire. I liked it there. It was a church that made me better, and, as I would quickly learn, it was more than willing to let me make it better too. Mark my words: When you find a church like that, keep it. They’re harder to find than you might think.

In Faith Lutheran in Oakville and Bethlehem Lutheran in St. Louis, I’ve found two. And I’m much the better for it.

The north St. Louis neighborhood around Bethlehem is about as opposite of Oakville as you can get. It’s not ghetto, but the buildings are well past their prime. A number of them are condemned. Many others are boarded up. It’s lower-middle class at best. But there are people there who are trying to make a difference.

I’d been going to Faith Lutheran in Oakville for a couple of weeks when I started receiving its newsletter. And in that first newsletter was a blurb from The Rev. John Schmidtke, the pastor at Bethlehem. Faith is one of five suburban churches that has partnered with Bethlehem to reach out to its community. Pastor Schmidtke’s letter was a wish list of sorts, but he wasn’t wanting money or objects. He wanted people. “Who can help us build a computer lab so we can teach elementary computer skills to the people of our community?” he asked. “Who can help us give our children a safe, welcome place where they can sit down at a computer and do their homework?” At the end of the letter, he gave his phone number.

The next day, I called him.

He said he already had some beat-up PCs that had been donated to him. I asked when I could come look at them. I don’t really remember many specifics anymore, other than driving into north St. Louis in a snowstorm one night to come look at a pair of beat-up Compaq Proliant servers. They were DX2-66s, decked out with external SCSI CD-ROM towers. One of them had three SCSI drives. The other had five. They were pretty snazzy servers… in 1993.

It was a humble beginning. Pastor solicited some obsolete computers from other businesses, and since this was the midst of the Y2K crunch, he was able to find plenty of people willing to give up some 386s and 486s they’d just retired. The best catch was a pair of non-compliant Pentium-75s. One of them even had a hard drive–a 40-megger. No, not a 40-gig drive. A 40-meg drive, like most of us had in our first AT clone.

Basically, we had a whole lot of nothing, and I did a whole lot of nothing with it. Sure, I was able to impress a few people by taking hard drives out of 486s and putting them in those Pentiums and booting up DOS, but as far as doing anything useful, we didn’t have much. So the project pretty much sat there, a pile of beat-up PCs in the corner of a storage room.

Then one day in the summer of 2000, I got a voice mail message. It was Pastor Schmidtke. He sounded excited, but there was a certain plea in his voice. He had a grant for several thousand dollars, and it was pretty much there for the asking, assuming he knew what to ask for. He didn’t know what to ask for. So he asked me if he could have five minutes of my time to tell him the wisest way to spend a few thousand dollars to build a computer lab.

I hopped on the ‘Net and checked it out, then faxed him a shopping list. For the budget he gave me, I figured I’d be able to get several name-brand PCs and a laser printer. The grant needed three competitive bids, so I priced systems from IBM, Compaq, and Dell to give him ballpark figures, plus phone numbers to call to get hard quotes if that was what he needed.

A few months later he had the money. A couple more months after that, we’d turned that money into eight new Compaq Deskpro PCs. I wasn’t going to leave him high and dry at that point–what good is a room full of computers when no one there knew how to make them go? A couple more months after that, some volunteers had turned that storage room into a nicely laid-out computer room. So then I set about taking those PCs, installing network cards, cabling and hubs, configuring them identically, and connecting a printer. We had a usable network. An Internet connection was the tough part. I took one of those Pentium-75s, installed a 56K modem and an Intel 10/100 NIC, and configured Freesco. We were live. While 56K dialup split among 9 PCs isn’t fabulous, it’s better than it sounds–while people are reading pages, after all, their computers aren’t loading stuff. I tried setting up a Squid server to help ease congestion a little, but Squid seemed to hurt as much as it helped, so I scrapped that idea.

So now, three years after we initially met, they have a working, useful computer lab. Neighborhood kids come in and research and type. Pastor’s family comes in, and with that many computers at their disposal, the kids can play around all they want for hours and his wife can get work done. It’s not the best, but it’s worlds beyond a pair of Pentium-75s. And in a neighborhood where a Pentium-200 is considered a luxury item, it’s doing a lot of good.

So I got to the banquet Sunday night and sat down at a table. There was a program sitting there at every place. I looked at it. “That’s nice,” I was thinking. “Star of Bethlehem Awards.” There were two people listed. Then I saw people were picking up the program and flipping pages. So I picked up mine, turned to the inside, and saw there were more than two people listed. Two more on page two, and then I turned to page 3 and saw my name. With a really kind write-up to go with it.

They read the write-up, along with everyone else’s writeup, after dinner. They gave each of us plaques and asked us to say a few words. I don’t remember exactly what I said–I’m not very comfortable giving impromptu speeches. It was Pastor Schmidtke who had the vision and who got the money. And it was Cathy, a member of the congregation, who made all the phone calls and made all the runs to Office Depot to get things like power strips and network cables when I ran out of power outlets or didn’t have quite enough reach. Maybe I could have done it all without them. But chances are I wouldn’t have. No one would have. One person can’t take on a project of that magnitude alone. It’ll kill you.

The speaker who read the write-up on me was interrupted by applause a couple of times. I got a round of applause as I walked up and another one as I sat down. Helping people like them is easy, because they appreciate it so much.

I hung the plaque up right after I got home. I guess that says something about priorities–I have an expensive Jesse Barnes print I bought more than a week ago that isn’t hung yet. But the sentiment behind that plaque is worth more than a room full of Jesse Barnes prints. It’s a nice plaque. It reads:

New Birth at Bethlehem

We Thank God For You

David Farquhar

For your ongoing support, encouragement, and Christian love to the ministry of Jesus Christ through Bethlehem Lutheran Church. You are God’s Star for the ministry of Bethlehem.
…Daniel 12:3

December 16, 2001
Bethlehem Lutheran Church, St. Louis, MO

Daniel 12:3 reads as follows:

“Those who have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven, and those who lead the many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”

There’s just one more thing I wish I’d said Sunday night. They’re a group of people trying to make a difference in north St. Louis. A lot of them are there by choice. They didn’t have to give me an opportunity, but they did. I’m glad they did.

Editing video from DVD

Dave Farquhar General

I spent the day editing video. Editing video from DVD is a trick, and I found instructions online, but they didn’t work. Here’s how I ended up doing it. (I had permission to use the copyrighted material I was using; complying with copyright law is your responsibility.)
Here are the names of the tools you need. Sorry I can’t give you links; I didn’t keep track of where I got them. Plus by the time you read this they’ll probably be somewhere else anyway.
cladMdec
DVD2AVI
VFAPI
VirtualDub

Use your favorite search engine to find them.

First, rip the DVD to disk. I used cladMdec. You use what you’re comfortable with. The idea is you need to have a series of .VOB files on your hard drive, and they need to be decoded.

Now load your VOB files into DVD2AVI. Go to File, Save Project. Give it a filename. This takes a while–on my Duron-750 with a 10K RPM Quantum SCSI drive, a 2-hour DVD takes about 20 minutes.

Now you need a tool called VFAPI. Load the D2V file created by DVD2AVI by clicking Add Job. Grab the file, then hit Convert. VFAPI will spit out a fake AVI file. It looks like an AVI file, it plays like an AVI file, but it’s tiny because it’s pulling the picture out of your VOB files. Pretty cool, huh?

Editing a 2-hour DVD directly is cumbersome, so you can use VirtualDub to cut it down. Load your fake AVI file into VirtualDub. Go to Video, and select Direct Stream Copy. This makes VirtualDub spit out tiny AVI files instead of huge, unweildy uncompressed AVI files. I did a 10-second uncompressed clip once. It was 600 megs. Trust me, you want to work with the fakes. I never thought my 18-gig SCSI drive would be this crowded. Too bad the 36-gig job was so expensive.

Now you can start slicing and dicing. Locate the first frame that interests you, and hit HOME. Punch through to the last frame of the segment you want, then hit END. Now just go to File, Save as AVI.

I use Premiere to sequence video and add audio. I’m not very good at it yet. If you’re looking to get Premiere cheap, go buy a Pinnacle DV200 capture card. It costs $250 and comes with Premiere. Premiere costs $600. Good deal. If you’re a student, get an academic copy. It probably costs less.

Anyway, it’s kind of fun to get an eye for video editing by making your own music videos, or jazzing up your home movies by punching in some scenes from your favorite big-screen flick. Although it’s probably illegal to do either of those anymore. I get permission before I make a music video that’s going to be shown to more than just a handful of people.

The limits of compassion

Dave Farquhar General ,

My phone rang Wednesday night. I’d laid down around 9, intending to just call it a night, because I was tired. It was 9:30 when the phone rang. I thought about not picking up, but something told me I should. I was glad I did.
It was someone I admire a lot, a relative. She works with a lot of disadvantaged people. She told me about some of them. One woman she works with can’t afford to buy groceries. But the last time she visited her, she was excited. “You gotta see my TV!” she said.

She wasn’t impressed. If anything, she was a bit appalled. We’re talking someone who’s perfectly happy with a 10-year-old Sony 19″ TV and an antenna made from aluminum foil by Yours Truly sometime last summer. But this woman who can’t afford to buy groceries had a big-screen TV and super-premium cable with a couple hundred channels. She asked how she could afford it. “Rent-a-Center,” came the reply.

“You know,” I said. “One of my teachers way back when said that if the government came in, seized all the money in the country, then handed everyone an equal amount, within 15 years everyone would be unequal again, and the money would pretty much be back in the same hands it was before.”

“Because some people do things like make TV a higher priority than groceries,” she said.

Some people have next to nothing because they spend what they do have so frivolously. She said she doesn’t feel sorry for those people. But other people have next to nothing, have their priorities straight, but still don’t have enough to make ends meet. I knew one of those stories. She moved, and when she moved, she forgot to get the name on the utilities changed. So her former landlord went in and cranked the heat, running up a nice four-figure bill. She’s slowly paying the debt down now. It’s easy for me to sympathize with her, having a psycho ex-landlord in my past as well. Fortunately for me, my psycho ex-landlord is dumber than rocks, but I know that’s not always the case. I haven’t met this woman, and I probably never will, but I did what I could to help her. It wasn’t much, but it was the right thing to do.

She knows another woman who had to come up with $350 by Friday to keep her car from being repo’ed. And that was the dilemma she called me about.

“You or I could just write a check, straight up,” she said. She’s right. While not exactly pocket change to either of us, I know I spend about $150 a month just eating out. I could adjust for an unexpected $350 expense without much trouble. I could give up eating out, eating meat, and drinking soda for a month and probably save $200. But I probably wouldn’t. I might give something up, but I’d just dip into savings and get on with it.

Which raises a question: When is it right to help someone out? Doesn’t God want us to help our neighbor?

The answer, of course, is yes. But that just raises another question: How much?

Chances are, if I knew the needs of everyone around me and I met all of them, I’d have nothing left. I saw it at work earlier this year. For a while I was working 50-55 hours a week and still falling behind. Finally someone sat me down and told me that at 55 hours a week, I was running myself into the ground and at the rate I was going would soon be no good to myself or anyone else. I listened, for once, and backed off. What I found was that I could work 40-45 hours a week and be productive. I got more done in 45 hours than I could get done in 55, because I was fresh.

So the answer is, no, you don’t meet every need of every person you know.

Then I asked what everyone expected of her. Her boss expected her to open up lines of communication and listen. Done. This woman asked her to look into whether there was help available for her. She started doing that too.

“So you have helped her,” I said.

And I think she did the right thing. Most people make you earn the right to help them. They don’t want a big favor until you’ve proven that you’re trustworthy, won’t ask something completely unreasonable in return, and won’t nag them about it every time a cloud moves.

And sometimes you just know what to do. I can’t explain it, but you probably understand. You find yourself in a situation and it’s like you were born knowing what to give.

Come later today, if this woman asks for fifty bucks, should she give it? I’m inclined to say yes.

And if the day passes and this woman doesn’t ask for anything, should she feel guilty? No.

History, from the R.P. perspective.

Dave Farquhar General ,

Back in j-school, news directors and editors and professors extolled the virtues of the R.P. That’s journo-lingo for “Real person.” Not celebrities. Not network talking heads. Not news anchors. Not beat writers with agendas. Real people. People like you. And your next door neighbor.
The reason for that is pretty simple. Journalists don’t trust R.P.s, at least not in my experience, but the masses do. At least they trust R.P.s more than they trust slimy journalists. Not all R.P.s are trustworthy, but if you have to take odds, a higher percentage of R.P.s are trustworthy than journalists. So it goes. As a former journalist, I will have to say one thing about the almighty R.P.: Frequently the R.P. has seen or considered things that talking heads haven’t. Plus R.P.s tend to be more honest, because they don’t feel as much need to protect a public image. So they’re more likely to shoot straight with you.

And that’s why I think this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a really long time. Google somehow got its mitts on some 20 years’ worth of Usenet messages. None of the news stories I saw on it said how they got this stuff, which is what I want to know. I’d love to know how complete it is.

But you’d probably love to know what Usenet is. Usenet is the ultimate public bulletin board system. Yes, most of its bandwidth is dedicated to the swapping of illegal copies of software and porn, but there’s a lot of chatter going on too, about every subject imaginable, plus all manner of subjects you never dared imagine.

The signal-to-noise ratio is really low. But that’s where Google comes in. You can search on a subject with a few keywords, sort by date, and find out what people were saying about an event when it happened.

You can’t find out what real people were saying about the Challenger explosion in 1986. Well, you can ask people who were alive in 1986, but memories fade over time. You’ll find information at the library, but it’s filtered. But you can search Usenet and read people’s emotion dumps, raw, unedited, unfiltered, and uncensored. Granted, the Usenet community was limited in 1986, but any subset of the population is better than what you’ll find at the library.

For kicks, I did a search on Yuri Andropov, sorted by date, and then punched through to the end. What I found at the end were references to the Soviets downing a Korean airliner in 1983. I remember my dad talking about it at the dinner table, flaunting it as just one more example of Soviet evil. I found a long-forgotten joke (“Why did Yuri Andropov shoot down a Korean Airliner? To impress Jodi Foster.” Ten points if you get that.) and emotions running high. Really high. Yeah, the Cold War was nearly over, but no one would have guessed it then. We’ve forgotten that at one time, Yuri Andropov was the most hated man in America.

Where’d I get the name Yuri Andropov? No, my memory’s not that good. I did a vague search, found clues, and then got specific. That’s how.

Maybe I’m the only one who’s excited about this, because I love history and I know a lot of people don’t.

I can’t figure out what to write about so I’ll write about everything I can think of.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Cars. I just found out today that one of my coworkers owns four vehicles. And that’s not counting his Harley. I wondered the same thing everyone else did: What’s a single guy need four cars for?
I guess it would be handy for some things. Like this morning, I started my car, hopped out, started scraping, and when I got back inside, I looked down at my gas gauge and saw the yellow indicator light staring back at me. If I had four cars like (ahem) some people, I could have just shut it down and hopped in another car that had more gas in it. Of course, then I’d just have three more cars I could run down to E, so maybe that wouldn’t work.

I guess the other advantage would be driving something different to work every day, so people can’t keep track of whether you’re there or not. But I’m still having a hard time justifying it to myself.

The Cure. The Cure retired a year ago. Of course, the only thing harder than keeping track of how many times they’ve retired is how many band members they’ve had. So they recorded new material and released their third greatest hits collection, fulfilled their obligation to their record label, and said they’re still a band, but they’re staying unsigned.

As clueless as the record industry has become, it’s probably a smart move. It’d be nice if a few financially well-off artists would get together and form a privately-held record label that’s just about the music, rather than about pleasing shareholders or building huge financial conglomerates.

Cleveland Indians. The disassembly of the franchise continues. Manny Ramirez departed a year ago, replaced by a damaged-goods Juan Gonzalez. Now that Gonzalez has recaptured his old form, he’s gone. Roberto Alomar’s been traded to the Mets for a handful of prospects, plus ex-Twins outfielder Matt Lawton. Speedster Kenny Lofton is gone.

Cleveland was the model franchise of the 1990s. They signed their young players to long-term contracts early and they were only wrong about one of them (Carlos Baerga). The first two young stars they let go, Baerga and Albert Belle, are out of baseball now. They built a new stadium and kept it full. But for all the things they did right, they didn’t get a World Series win to show for it.

And I don’t see any indication with this trade that the Indians have learned their lesson. Clearly they’re in rebuilding mode, dumping salary and getting younger, cheaper players in the hopes of making a run for it again in a few years. But they traded Alomar for two outfielders and a relief pitcher. The Cleveland teams from the mid-90s on featured terrific offense and enviable defense that was at times spectacular, but little in the way of pitching. And the lesson of Arizona is that starting pitching plus one big bat is all you really need, even in these high-offense days.

So I’m shocked to say that between the Royals and the Indians, right now the pitcher-hoarding Royals are much closer to doing the right thing.

Should I be laughing at this? Gatermann sent me this link and I got a good laugh out of it. I can’t figure out if I should feel bad about that.

Viruses. My work laptop, or, more specifically, the Windows partition on my work laptop, was a victim of last week’s data recovery efforts. I have no excuse. I temporarily took leave of my senses and I didn’t write-protect the DOS boot floppies I made. So I booted off the troubled computer, then I booted the laptop off the same disks, and the next thing I knew, the laptop was infected too. It was, to say the least, my finest moment.

Yesterday I finished rebuilding the Windows partition and booted the laptop into Windows for the first time in half a week. I didn’t do any special tricks; I just wiped and reformatted the partition. But since installing Windows wipes out your Linux boot sector, I used a trick. I booted into Linux, inserted a floppy, and issued the command dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1 to save the boot sector to a floppy. Then, after Windows was installed, I booted off a single-disk Linux distro, replaced the floppy, and reversed the command: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 Bingo! I had a dual-boot system again.

Virus hoaxes. I just got e-mail from Wendy (the friend whose computer taught me a whole lot about data recovery last week), who got e-mail from a classmate. She’d received a fairly common virus hoax via e-mail, one that advises you to search for and delete the file SULFNBK.EXE
alleging it to be a virus. In actuality that file is part of Windows, so it’ll be present on every Windows 9x system. I personally can’t remember if it’s critical or not, but Steve DeLassus tells me it is.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but any time you get virus e-mail like that, check it out with an IT professional. My rule of thumb is this: I disregard any virus information I get via e-mail unless I’ve also heard about it on the news. And by the news, I mean the morning news, the news on the morning drive on the radio, the front page of the local newspaper–stuff like that. Believe me, any time there’s a legitimate virus story, it’s big news. Many of the powers that be in the media are still computerphobes, so they relish any bad news regarding computers that they find. So the mainstream media is really good at hunting down and reporting virus stories.

Meanwhile, I hope she didn’t delete that file. But at least it’s easy enough to replace if she did.

Not just a haircut…

Dave Farquhar General

I got my hair cut yesterday. I’m pretty stoked about that.
Someone seeing me today will notice I got it cut, but they probably won’t make any comment. It pretty much looks like I usually get it cut. Maybe there’s more gray in it (and I think when it’s shorter the gray is more noticeable because it glistens more), but that’s not due to the cut. That’s due to me getting old. It’s a haircut. There’s nothing on the surface to get excited about.

The fact is, my head doesn’t tell the story.

Emily cut my hair last night. Some of you may remember her. I met her about three months ago, and within a couple of weeks, she had a car accident and spent some time in the ICU. She wasn’t able to work for a long time for fear of aggravating her internal injuries, but on top of that, she wasn’t regaining much use of her left arm. She was getting physical therapy but wasn’t really improving. She went in for an MRI, fearing a torn rotator cuff, and instead they found a shoulder fracture.

But that was good news. A rotator cuff usually requires surgery and takes a couple months to heal, even when you’re 20. A mild shoulder fracture doesn’t. The doctor was pretty distressed she’d been receiving physical therapy though. That would have made the shoulder a lot worse, and he was surprised to see it was healing. But one of our seminarians put it best: Emily’s made of rubber right now. God’s really looking out for her.

At some point I told myself I wouldn’t get my hair cut until Emily was able to cut it. If that meant I ran around looking like Samson for a while, so be it. I didn’t want anyone else touching my hair, and I was pretty adamant about it.

We hung out last Tuesday and she seemed fairly normal–her left arm pretty much hung there and didn’t do much. But when I saw her again Friday, she was holding her glass with her left hand and even drinking with it. I commented about that. She got a twinkle in her eye and said yeah, she was moving around better, and she gave three haircuts that day. Then she smiled really gleefully, like a kid in a candy store with $100 to spend.

I asked her if I could have an appointment. She told me to call her.

It feels weird to be excited about a haircut. But it’s not the haircut. The haircut’s immaterial. What’s important is what the haircut represents. It represents the livelihood of a friend who nearly died, and has had to work really hard to get back to the point of being able to give a haircut again.

I’ll never have another one quite like it.