Kaycee has passed on…

Dave Farquhar General

We’ll miss you, Kaycee. “The word ‘goodbye’ doesn’t accurately convey my feelings right now. I think the best I can do is au revoir. We’ll see you again.” -Richard Nixon.
Kaycee died Monday. Old news, but I can’t think about anything else right now. I just found out, because I’ve been away from my e-mail for the past five days. Her post for that day started with, “I woke up to hear the birds singing.” I smiled as I read that. The last words of someone else I admire were “Now I can hear the birds singing.” But this guy wasn’t in Kaycee’s league. Not by a long shot.

I won’t go on and on about this. Truth be told, Kaycee and I never met (of course). I read her stuff, admired her courage, her sincerity, and her transparency, and was inspired by her. I still am. In talk amongst friends, I cited her as a good example of strong faith.

And she did something I’m not sure any writer has ever done. She broke my heart. Her story did that to a lot of people.

I’m sure that someday, after my day has come and gone and God has called me home, Kaycee and I will finally meet. I’m not sure what I’ll say to her. Seeing her trust God helped me to trust God. Reading her stuff reminded me that personal stuff is often more compelling than talk about machines. When I retold her story to some friends who don’t have Internet access, they found her inspiring and I think she helped to strengthen their faith in God. Her courageous stories goaded this 26-year-old to grow up a bit.

But I think I’ll just start with something simple. Like, “Thank you for sharing.”

School’s out, school’s out!

Dave Farquhar General

School’s out, school’s out, teacher let the monkeys out! Those that didn’t leave on their own free will, thta is. I’d do a comprehensive review of the class, and maybe I still will, but I think this says it all. There were 36 people enrolled. By the time the second afternoon break was over, 14 remained.
I got addresses of a few useful Web sites, but they’re in my car and I’m not. I’ll post those later this week.

I’d post all the new secrets I learned so my readers didn’t have to take the class, but frankly I didn’t learn anything that isn’t already common knowledge. I think I’ll post some of the things that were left out though.

Like this: If you don’t want a particular NT/2000 workstation to participate in browser elections or force elections, shut off the Computer Browser service. This will reduce network traffic and give a very slight increase in workstation performance. Remember, you need to have one browse master and three backup browsers per network segment, so be sure to leave the service enabled on four machines per network segment.

If you don’t want your 95/98/Me PCs participating, go into the properties of the File and Print Sharing for Microsoft Networks and clear the Participate in Browser Elections checkbox. You don’t want one of those machines serving as a browse master.

Classes are for appeasing middle management.

Dave Farquhar General

Argh.. Classes. Well, my first day of Windows 2000 school is over. All we did was talk about how MS assimilated certain features from other products (NDS, Win98) into Windows 2000. The longest time we spent on any single topic was TCP/IP. Now granted I’m not an expert on TCP/IP, but I know more than most, and all I need to do my job (and hobby). That which I don’t need to know off the top of my head I can find in 15 minutes or less. I did pick up a couple of tricks I’d forgotten about, but memory’s a funny thing. Frequently a problem will trigger the memory.
I kinda feel bad for wasting my employer’s money on this thing. But I want to move up, so I do what I have to do.

Hello from the land of great barbecue

Dave Farquhar General , ,

I’m in KC. Home of barbecue, the Kansas City Royals, and way too many country music stations. I miss the barbecue and the Royals. So. I’m gone. Gatermann’s in charge.
What am I saying!?

Actually I’ll be checking in periodically. I may even write some stuff up the couple of days I’m gone. Not sure yet. I won’t be checking mail though, so if you have questions, use the comments here or the forum.

It was a decent drive up. I stopped at my usual place, Biffles BBQ in Concordia, Mo., for some brisket. The Royals game was on the TV in the bar, so I stayed and watched an inning. They ended up winning the game 12-4. I don’t get it. The Royals can beat the first-place Twins about as well as anyone, but they can’t beat any other team.

Windows and Outlook

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Outta here. I’m off to a Windows 2000 class in Kansas City later today. Class actually starts Monday, but I’m making an extended weekend out of it, leaving this afternoon, and coming back sometime on Tuesday.
No e-mail while I’m gone, but I’ll have Web access of course, so if you’ve got something to ask me, go ahead and use the comments here or the forum. I won’t be able to read mail until Wednesday.

Windows and Outlook. An old friend wrote in this week. She was implementing some of the advice in the first chapter of Optimizing Windows, and she got to the place where I said to uninstall anything you don’t use. So, logically, she said to herself, “I don’t use Outlook Express since I have Outlook,” so she uninstalled Outlook Express.

Then her contacts list stopped working.

If you use Outlook, you use Outlook Express because Outlook uses code from Outlook Express (and Internet Explorer) extensively. It makes no sense, and you’d think Windows would leave the DLLs from Outlook Express that Outlook needs when you uninstall Outlook Express, but evidently it’s not that smart. A shame, but typical.

More Like This: Optimizing Windows Windows Outlook

Short takes

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

AMD. According to the latest rumors on Ace’s Hardware and The Register, the Palomino core, when released, will be known as the Athlon 4. This is a marketing move; the Palomino is a less radical change to the core and the architecture than Thunderbird was. I think it’s a good marketing move, but it won’t do anything to make people less confused.
Tech support story of the day. A user one of my colleagues supports received an LS-120 superdisk in the mail. This user had no LS-120 drive, only a floppy drive. So my colleague went up to look at the disk and locate an LS-120 drive to read the disk. When he hunted down an LS-120 drive, he stuck in the disk, looked at it, and found a single file on it–a Word document. The file size? 32.5K!

But I guess it could have been worse. At least it wasn’t a 4K file…

Discussion groups. I’m not the least bit happy with how they look, and the performance isn’t so grand (an upgrade next week should help that), but I’ll go ahead and open up my forums. They’re at https://dfarq.homeip.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi. At the moment they’re totally open. I’ll bolt them down if spam, flame wars, or other things become a problem. I tend to be very open until that openness is abused, then I become a dictator.

I believe you can register without giving a true e-mail address, so you can use a spam filter if you’re afraid of that. Cookies are just used for automatic login and for timeouts–they’re good cookies.

The board is powered by YaBB, a free bulletin board written in Perl. Some things about it I like better than UBB, which is what most forums out there seem to use. I don’t like its color handling, but I’ll sacrifice that to gain other features.

Go ahead, take a look around, start posting stuff, and offer suggestions.

Why the forums when we’ve got comments? Well, I assume people want to talk about more than just what I talk about on a given day. This is preferable to e-mail because I have more options for reading it and it’s already online. Plus there’s always the chance someone else could pipe in with an answer.

More like this:AMD YaBB

Who was the most influential woman in your life?

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

My good friend Brad came to me with a question a couple of weeks ago: Who was the most influential woman in your life?
He wasn’t looking for my answer so much as he was looking for what I thought people’s answers would be. So I countered with a question: Married or single? He asked what difference that made. “Well, if you’re married, the right answer is your wife, whether it’s your mother or not,” I said. “And if you’re single, the right answer is your mother. Now the true answer could be something totally different.”

Brad laughed. I think he might have said I’ll be good at staying out of trouble with a wife someday, but I’m sure I’ll be very good at getting in trouble, or at least getting lots of dirty looks. Guys live for that.

Brad was looking to shoot another video together, with that as the theme. The pieces just didn’t come together this year so we had to shelve the project. But his question lingers on.

Who was the most influential woman in my life?

Certainly I learned more from my mom than anyone else. She taught me weird ways to remember how to spell tough words. Do you ever have trouble remembering how to spell “Wednesday?” It’s the day the Neses got married. wed-Nes-day. Got it? And how to remember the capital of Norway. Well, I knew Oslo was the capital of some Northern European country, but I couldn’t remember which. So she wrote “nOrway” on a slip of paper. I never lost the Oslo/Norway connection after that. (That’s probably not very impressive to my European readers, but Americans are notoriously bad at geography. I don’t know how many Americans know Norway is in Europe. Some Americans may not know what Europe is, for that matter.)

And yes, mom taught me how to tie my shoes and how to blow my nose and how to brush my teeth and lots of stuff like that. And when I didn’t understand girls (which was often… Who am I kidding? It is often) she was always there to listen.

But the question was who wasn’t that. It was: Who was the most influential woman in my life?

Well, there was this girl that I met right after college. I told her I loved her, she told me she loved me, she changed my life, and set me off in an unexpected and (mostly) better direction and…

AND she couldn’t hold a candle to my grandmother, my mom’s mom, so even though I was devastated at the time, in retrospect I’m really glad we broke up.

What can I say about Granny? She grew up in southern rural Missouri, in the Depression, one of about a dozen kids (my grandparents came from families of 12 and 13, and I can never keep straight which came from which, especially since both had siblings who didn’t live to adulthood). Now, she got in some trouble growing up, but I think that experience, along with having lived through the Depression, helped her learn how to do the right thing even when resources seemed limited. She moved to Kansas City during World War II and got a job at Pratt & Whitney, working on an assembly line making airplane engines. She married a Kansas Citian. On a truck driver’s salary, they managed to raise four kids.

I remember a lot of things about her. She always had time for her family. She never wanted anyone to make a big deal about anything she did. She really knew how to cook. She made the best quilts in the world. And before anyone starts complaining about her falling into female stereotypes, I’ll tell you this. She absolutely loved working in her yard, and one of the things that pained her the most was her deterriorating ability to take care of her yard as she got older. Besides, she built airplane engines! Have I ever done anything that manly? I’m doing well to change the spark plugs in my car.

But if I had to sum Granny’s life up in a sentence, I’d say this: When it came to doing more with less, she was one of the very best.

What am I known for? A book and a series of magazine articles about doing more with less.

So, who was the most influential woman in my life? I think it was Granny.

Granny died a little over six years ago. I miss her.

A lot.

I had a conversation with my mom a while back about my two grandmothers. Granny had nothing for most of her life. My other grandmother wasn’t like that. She was a successful doctor, a psychiatrist. She married a successful doctor. He was a general practitioner, and one of the best diagnosticians you’d ever see. I can say a lot about him, but I’ll say this and have my peace: His father spent a lot of time hanging out with tycoons, and must have learned a few things and passed them on to his son. The guy had money, but in a lot of ways he lived like my other grandmother, who had nothing. A good rule of thumb is that if you have money but live like you have none, you’ll end up with a lot more.

I’m talking a lot more about my dad’s father (he wasn’t a dad) than I am about his mother (she wasn’t a mom). Frankly I know more about him. I know she was brilliant. Yes, she was smarter than my mom’s mom. Granny didn’t always have all the answers. My other grandmother always had an answer. And it was usually right. It was also usually long. (I get that from somewhere.) I remember asking her once if Cooperstown, NY is close to New York City. It took her half an hour to answer that question.

But I never had much of a relationship with her. Neither did my dad. He’d talk about “my mother,” or “my father.” I heard him call his father “Dad” once. They were arguing. About me. As for her, well, I never heard him call her “Mom.”

I haven’t seen her or spoken with her since October 1990.

It’s hard for me to talk or write about this, because I don’t want to rag on my relatives. I always had a great deal of respect for them. I know what they were capable of, and I think that’s why I’m disappointed in them.

My dad grew up being told he’d be a failure all his life. He didn’t get good grades, and he was rebellious. I suspect a lot of that was because he had two absentee parents. But Dad was smart. It seems his biggest problem growing up was that he mostly used his great mind to figure out when he had to perform and when he could get by with slacking. He also couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted to do with his life. He had the same gifts his father had, but he wanted to be as different from his father as possible, and that posed a dilemma for him. He once told me his father didn’t know what to do with him. But that’s OK. Dad was only two years younger than I am now when he finally figured out what to do with himself.

The decision was made that my dad’s younger brother would carry my grandfather’s torch after he died. I don’t know what role she played in the decision, but she stood behind it. My dad watched as his brother made mistakes and both his brother and his mother paid for them. My dad tried to help. He didn’t want his help. She didn’t want his help. Finally my dad gave up. Dad had made himself a success; in his own mind, he’d proven them wrong. I don’t think he was interested in proving them wrong in their minds; he just didn’t want to see them struggle. Loyalty runs in the family.

I asked my mom which of my grandmothers really had more? Her mom thought she struggled all her life, but she was always able to provide for herself and others. Always. Had she been able to see that, I think she’d still be alive today.

When Granny died, she left enough for her four kids to fight over. But they didn’t fight over it. That wasn’t how she raised them.

I know one of my duties is to provide for my relatives, and in that regard, to be perfectly honest, I always let my dad’s mom down. But I guess I always assumed since she never wanted my dad’s help when he was alive, why would she want mine? To my knowledge, she never attempted to contact me after he died, so I had no way of knowing any different.

Dad’s mom died yesterday. All I have on her living conditions is hearsay, but I know poverty when I hear it described.

More Like This: Personal

Just the bang, and the clatter, as the server hits the wall

Dave Farquhar General

Looks like we’ve hit the wall. Some times during the day, this P-120 just isn’t keeping up well, and last night when I experimented with setting up forums, the speed was acceptable locally but really sluggish outside where latency is much higher. So it’s looking like I’ll have to move the system to a faster machine.
I dropped the number of days’ worth of posts on the front page to three days, instead of seven, to help a little. That’ll cut the amount of data sent when the homepage hits by 50 percent, but I see that as a temporary fix. Earlier in the day I added the site’s URL to the Google and AltaVista search engines, which means more traffic, particularly as more content moves in. So the situation won’t get any better over time.

I’ve got some options, and I’ll have more options when my new Duron-750 arrives because it’ll displace another system.

PCNation.com: Absolutely not recommended

Dave Farquhar Vendors

Don’t order from PCNation.com. That was the outfit I got my NEC 19″ monitor from. I won’t call them a PriceWatch bottom-feeder, since I’m not sure if they advertise on PriceWatch, and they did actually ship product. I made the mistake of waiting out my slightly-damaged NEC FE950+ monitor to see if its defect was indeed only cosmetic. PCNation offers a so-called 30-day return policy, so I figured I’d give it about three weeks. Big mistake. I should have made them eat the monitor.
I suspected the monitor’s settings were drifting on me. But after I reset everything to 50%, which should theoretically give you an acceptable display on any new monitor, I indeed got an acceptable display. Not as brilliant as it could be, but better than any cheapie, certainly, and with little or no drift. But the flaw didn’t get any less annoying with time. So I called the customer service number on the Web site. I have no idea who the foreign-accented guy was I talked to, but his business sure didn’t have anything to do with computers. So, out of options, I e-mailed their customer service. Six days later, rather than getting a response to my query, I got their true customer service policy (which has a few clauses I didn’t see on the Web site when I ordered, and it also has a different phone number than the one listed on the Web site). The most important bit: All returns must be completed within 30 days of the invoice date. Not the date of receipt. And by completed, they mean the returned box is in their hands, delivered.

Let’s do the math. The order is shipped. The clock starts ticking. Five days later you receive it. You have a problem. It takes customer service a week to respond with their policy. You re-describe the problem. A week later you get an RMA. You ship the product. It takes them five days to receive it. Their 30-day return policy ends up having closer to six days’ usable time. Better hope you find your problem fast. (I found it and I didn’t act on it right away–so much for good faith. No good deed goes unpunished…)

And on top of that, if you order something from them, count on it taking two weeks for you to receive it. It took them more than a week to process my order. Then when they shipped it, there was no confirmation e-mail and their Web page didn’t provide a tracking number. The only way I knew the thing had been shipped was my incessant checking of my order status. Finally the order showed up, with no warning.

Seems to me your best bet would be to immediately start the ball rolling on getting a return the day you place the order. That way you’ll have 20-25 days to make sure everything’s OK.

So, what do they have going for them? Slow order processing and shipment. No way of tracking the shipment. Misleading policies. Lousy customer service. Mediocre selection. The only thing these chumps have going for them is price. I will assume that they didn’t deliberately ship a bum monitor to me. Unlike the very worst of the worst, they did at least ship something, and unlike the worst of the worst, it was what I ordered.

Looks like you have to know how to deal with them. You know what? You’re better off ordering from someplace reputable that takes care of their customers. Mwave.com’s prices are almost as good, they don’t play bait and switch with their policies or their phone number, their customer service is pretty quick, and more importantly, the people are courteous and reasonable. I knew better, and I did the dumb thing anyway.

In retrospect, I should have called them first, before I ordered anything. Not getting the right number would have tipped me off straight up that something wasn’t kosher. Hearing the real return policy would have been another tip-off. When dealing with a strange, new vendor, you can’t know too much. Learn what you can before plunking down your credit card. Check Resellerratings.com (that I did–they turned out OK there). It also wouldn’t hurt to do a Web search on them, and a Usenet search (DejaNews is your friend, and it’s back and better than ever).

But hey, let’s look at the bright side. Now you know not to order from them, and why. And I’ve got a slightly imperfect NEC monitor, but seeing as I’d rather have an NEC monitor that’s been run over by a bus than any other brand, I can live with that.

I get ripped off so you don’t have to. This time.

Deja vu all over again

Dave Farquhar General

In case you haven’t heard about it elsewhere, there’s another VBS-based worm floating about, similar to the Anna worm earlier this year. This one includes a template called homepage.html.vbs. It e-mails itself to everyone in your address book, then opens one of four adult websites in your browser.
My usual advice about never opening any unexpected attachments applies here. Like I’ve said a million times, it’s much better to miss the joke than to infect your computer. If someone doesn’t tell me an attachment’s coming, I immediately reach for the delete key. Some attachments are harmless, but if you don’t know enough to know which ones are (and how to tell the difference between a GIF/JPEG/HTML attachment and a VBS attachment that’s trying to look like a GIF/JPEG/HTML attachment), you’re much better off just deleting it and protecting yourself and everyone else.

Don’t count on your anti-virus software protecting you. I’ve seen many a PC with anti-virus software on it that never updated itself, even though I configured it to do so. Plus, if you get the virus before your anti-virus vendor gets it and writes a fix and your program downloads the update, you’re totally unprotected.

I also suggest you add a line to the end of your e-mail signature that says something like, “This message should have no attachments. If there are any attachments, don’t open them because I didn’t put it there.” Just remember to delete that line if you do send attachments.

Consider yourself warned, today and every day.

–Dave
More Like This: Virus