Some day…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , ,

It was some day. And someday I’ll get a clue. I had a major confrontation at work today, though it was with someone who never did like me all that much. Everyone who’s heard the story says she was being unreasonable. But I just can’t help but notice one thing: Every major confrontation I’ve ever had in the workplace during my professional career has been with an older woman. By “older,” I mean 20+ years my senior.
I don’t like that pattern.

On a brighter note… I was quoted on CNET! It’s Linux’s 10th birthday, so CNET solicited some opinions. A lot of people said Linux can overtake Microsoft, an equal number said no way, but I don’t think anyone said what would have to take place for it to happen.

Essentially, I said someone with an anti-Microsoft chip on its shoulder would have to bundle Linux and StarOffice, already configured and ready to go (meaning it boots straight to a desktop when you turn it on–no setup questions or license agreements whatsoever), price it at $349, and make it available in places people normally shop.

That’s not the only scenario that I see working, but it’s the one that’d work best. History states people will sacrifice the status quo if the price is right–Commodore and Atari mopped up the floor of the home market with Apple and IBM for most of the 1980s, because they gave you twice the computer for half the money. It’d be impossible to do that today, but if someone with name recognition (say, Oracle or Sun) stamped its name on Taiwanese-made clones (made by, say, Acer or FIC) and got into the distribution channel, pricing it below an eMachine and using an ad campaign like, “We made performance computing affordable for big businesses. Now we’re making it affordable for you,” they’d stand a chance. They’d probably need to go outside the company to run the operation. Maybe Jack Tramiel, a veteran of both Commodore and Atari, could be coaxed out of retirement.

What about applications? An awful lot of home users live with Microsoft Works. StarOffice is better. Internet access? Take a cue from the iMac and stick an icon on the desktop that signs you up for Earthlink. Games? There are tons of open-source games available for Linux. Include any and every game that doesn’t crash XFree86. Cut a deal with Loki to include demo versions of all their games, and maybe the full version of an older title. Loki needs the exposure anyway. Digital imaging? Include The Gimp, along with drivers that talk with a certain type of digital camera. Include a coupon for a decent-sized discount off that camera.

It won’t dominate the market, but I can see it grabbing a decent-sized chunk. It’d do everything a small percentage of the population needs to do, and it would do it cheaply and reliably and quickly.

Will it happen? I doubt it. It’s a risk. For a company to be able to pull this off, this operation has to have little or nothing to do with the company’s core business. Shareholders don’t like ventures that have nothing to do with your core business. As much as Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison hate Microsoft, I don’t think they’re willing to risk hundreds of millions of dollars just to try to steal a couple million sales from Microsoft each year. The company that does it would have to have name recognition, but it’d be best if the general public didn’t know exactly what they sell. A company like IBM or HP couldn’t do it, because they can’t afford to offend Microsoft, and the general public expects an IBM or HP computer to run Windows apps.

What God has to say when someone in your familiy just died

Dave Farquhar Christianity

One of my best friends called me last night with news you never want to hear.
“Dave, is this a bad time?”

“No.”

“My mom died yesterday.”

Like there’s such thing as a bad time for news like that. Wait. There’s never a good time for news like that, but you’ve always got time for a friend with news like that. I don’t care if it’s Game 7 of the World Series, bottom of the 9th, two out, the bases are loaded, my team’s down by a run, I’m due up and I’m the team’s superstar. Sorry, Mr. Manager, I know the team needs me but you’d better get a pinch hitter ready because I’ve got a friend who needs me more.

What she needed, besides someone who would listen, was a trio of Bible verses for her mom’s funeral mass. I guess I was the logical person to call, because her dad asked who she was talking to, and then he must have asked something like, “Why’d you call him?” because she said, “Because he’s putting together a Bible study for tomorrow night.”

Actually at the time my phone rang, I was laying on my futon thinking about cleaning off my coffee table–hard drives are not appropriate coffee table decoration, and you don’t have to be Martha Stewart to know that–but I did spend some time putting together a Bible study, yes.

After a little digging, we came up with some stuff. And that’s how Protestant Boy here ended up injecting his two cents’ worth into a funeral mass.

“Somewhere in the Bible, it says, ‘Fight the good fight,'” she said.

“That’s St. Paul if I’ve ever heard him,” I thought as I got out my concordance. It was an easy find: 1 Timothy 6:12.

The books of 1 and 2 Timothy are really cool books, because Paul was well along in years when he wrote them–2 Timothy may have been the last thing Paul wrote before he died. Timothy was a dear friend, about 30 years Paul’s junior, so Paul regarded Timothy as the son he never had. So these two books read like a father’s last words to his son–“Since I don’t have much time left, let me make sure I say these last things to you now,” you can hear Paul saying.

A mother-daughter relationship has similarities to that, and Jeanne’s mom spent the majority of her life fighting the good fight. I wasn’t about to suggest any other verse.

For the gospel lesson, there was only one obvious choice: John 11.

“Jesus told her [Martha], ‘Your brother will rise again.’

“‘Yes,’ Martha said, ‘when everyone else rises, on resurrection day.’

“Jesus told her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die like everyone else, will live again. They are given eternal life for believing in me and will never perish. Do you believe this, Martha?’

“‘Yes, Lord,’ she told him. ‘I have always believed…'” (John 11:23-27a, NLT.)

In a mass, you have Old Testament, New Testament, and Gospel lessons. 1 Timothy gets New Testament out of the way. For Old Testament, there’s the old standby, Psalm 23. I stumbled around looking for an alternative. I looked in Job 7, which was a mistake–that just gets you depressed. I looked at a verse in Isaiah that my Bible recommended, but it didn’t seem to fit.

I found a passage in Psalm 91 that I underlined long ago:

The Lord says, “I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them. I will satisfy them with a long life and give them my salvation.” (Ps. 91:14-16, New Living Translation.)

Then I read it in a couple of other translations and didn’t like it so much. Maybe the NLT played it a little too fast and loose with the translation; others didn’t sound appropriate for use in a funeral mass.

So I flipped around to what’s probably my very favorite Psalm: Psalm 18. It’s a little unconventional, as it’s a prayer of praise after deliverance from your biggest enemy, but compared to heaven, isn’t this world your biggest enemy? Even though it’s not the first passage that comes to mind, it just seemed to fit:

“I love you Lord, you are my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my savior. My God is my rock, in whom I find protection. He is my shield, the strength of my salvation, and my stronghold. I will call on the Lord, who is worthy of praise, for he saves me from my enemies.” (Ps. 18:1-3, NLT)

Jeanne liked it. The more I think about it, the more I like it. Jeanne’s mom was a brilliant woman; she held two advanced degrees. Her health held that brilliant mind captive for the majority of her years. I don’t understand her illness; I won’t go into any details because I have none. For the people left behind, it’s no good. But this life truly was her greatest enemy. Now God has set her free.

And just as with the rest of us, in due time God will set Jeanne free too. Then they’ll see each other again, each the way God intended them to be all along. What can be cooler than that?

Today, it’s no good. Tomorrow and the next day won’t be much good either, and neither will next week. If she’s like me, she’ll wake up sweating and panting, having just dreamt it was all just a terrible mistake and her mom just walked in the room. My dad died almost 7 years ago, but I’ve had that dream at least once this year. And there’ll be days next year that won’t be so great.

But one day, when God calls us all home, none of that will matter anymore. In the meantime, God still needs us here. And he’s put people around us to deal with getting through all that.

The only Internet chain letter that actually works

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire

One of my coworkers got a phone call this afternoon and immediately started laughing. It was his wife on the phone, and she was telling him about how a bunch of people in her department had gotten a chain letter that promised if they forward it to a certain number of people, a picture of Tweety Bird or something will appear on their screen. They were wondering why it didn’t work. For all I know, they were ready to call the helpdesk and complain their computers were broken because the chain letter didn’t work. His wife, knowing better, started laughing and immediately shared the story with her systems analyst husband.
That gave me an idea. Why not devise a chain letter that absolutely will do what it says it will do, especially if it manages to go five or six generations without the chain breaking? Here goes nothing:

Dear friend:

This is another one of those Internet chain letters. You’ve undoubtedly received tons of them before and deleted them. This chain letter is different. It actually works.

Below you will find a list of 100 e-mail addresses. The way this works is simple. Remove the top address, then add your e-mail address to the bottom. Forward a copy of this message to all 99 people ahead of you. If there are no addresses at the bottom of the message, insert the e-mail addresses of 99 of your friends or co-workers, and forward a copy to them. Be sure to include your own address at the bottom. If you really want to get results, attach a 40-megabyte MPEG movie as well.

Very soon, one angry person, or if you’re very lucky, an angry mob, will appear at your doorstep or cubicle and beat you to a bloody pulp for clogging up their inboxes with useless junk. If you’re not so lucky, you’ll get a nice visit or phone call from your mail administrator politely telling you to cut it out.

Pretty neat, huh?

Your friend,

Dave Rhodes

Disappointment… Plus Linux vs. The World

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , ,

It was looking like I’d get to call a l337 h4x0r to the carpet and lay some smackdown at work, but unfortunately I had a prior commitment. Too many things to do, not enough Daves to go around. It’s the story of my life.
And I see Infoworld’s Bob Lewis is recommending companies do more than give Linux a long, hard look–he’s saying they should consider it on the desktop.

He’s got a point. Let’s face it. None of the contenders get it right. So-called “classic” Mac OS isn’t a modern OS–it has no protected memory architecture, pre-emptive multitasking, and limited threading support. It’s got all the disadvantages of Windows 3.1 save being built atop the crumbling foundation of MS-DOS. I could run Windows 3.1 for an afternoon without a crash. I can run Windows 95 for a week or two. I can usually coax about 3-4 days out of Mac OS. Mac users sometimes seem to define “crash” differently, so I’ll define what I mean here. By a crash, I mean an application dying with an error Type 1, Type 2, or Type 10. Or the system freezing and not letting you do anything. Or a program quitting unexpectedly.

But I digress. Mac OS X has usability problems, it’s slow, and it has compatibility problems. It has promise, but it’s been thrust into duty that it’s not necessarily ready for. Like System 7 of the early ’90s, it’s a radical change from the past, and it’s going to take time to get it ready for general use. Since compilers and debuggers are much faster now, I don’t think it’ll take as long necessarily, but I don’t expect Mac OS X’s day to arrive this year. Developers also have to jump on the bandwagon, which hasn’t happened.

Windows XP… It’s slow, it’s way too cutesy, and only time will tell if it will actually succeed at displacing both 9x and NT/2000. With Product Activation being an upgrader’s nightmare, Microsoft may shoot themselves in the foot with it. Even if XP is twice as good as people say it’s going to be, a lot of people are going to stay away from it. Users don’t like Microsoft policing what they do with their computers, and that’s the perception that Product Activation gives. So what if it’s quick and easy? We don’t like picking up the phone and explaining ourselves.

Linux… It hasn’t lived up to its hype. But when I’ve got business users who insist on using Microsoft Works because they find Office too complicated, I have a hard time buying the argument that Linux can’t make it in the business environment without Office. Besides, you can run Office on Linux with Win4Lin or VMWare. But alternatives exist. WordPerfect Office gets the job done on both platforms–and I know law offices are starting to consider the move. All a lawyer or a lawyer’s secretary needs to be happy, typically, is a familiar word processor, a Web browser, and a mail client. The accountant needs a spreadsheet, and maybe another financial package. Linux has at least as many Web browsers as Windows does, and plenty of capable mail clients; WP Office includes Quattro Pro, which is good enough that I’ve got a group of users who absolutely refuse to migrate away from it. I don’t know if I could run a business on GnuCash. But I’m not an accountant. The increased stability and decreased cost makes Linux make a lot of sense in a law firm though. And in the businesses I count as clients, anywhere from 75-90% of the users could get their job done in Linux just as productively. Yes, the initial setup would be more work than Windows’ initial setup, but the same system cloning tricks will work, mitigating that. So even if it takes 12 hours to build a Linux image as opposed to 6 hours to build a Windows image, the decreased cost and decreased maintenance will pay for it.

I think Linux is going to get there. As far as Linux looking and acting like Windows, I’ve moved enough users between platforms that I don’t buy the common argument that that’s necessary. Most users save their documents wherever the program defaults to. Linux defaults to your home directory, which can be local or on a server somewhere. The user doesn’t know or care. Most users I support call someone for help when it comes time to save something on a floppy (or do anything remotely complicated, for that matter), then they write down the steps required and robotically repeat them. When they change platforms, they complain about having to learn something new, then they open up their notebook, write down new steps, and rip out the old page they’ve been blindly following for months or years and they follow that new process.

It amuses me that most of the problems I have with Linux are with recent distributions that try to layer Microsoft-like Plug and Play onto it. Linux, unlike Windows, is pretty tolerant of major changes. I can install TurboLinux 6.0 on a 386SX, then take out the hard drive and put it in a Pentium IV and it’ll boot. I’ll have to reconfigure XFree86 to take full advantage of the new architecture, but that’s no more difficult than changing a video driver in Windows–and that’s been true since about 1997, with the advent of Xconfigurator. Linux needs to look out for changes of sound cards and video cards, and, sometimes, network cards. The Linux kernel can handle changes to just about anything else without a hiccup. Once Red Hat and Mandrake realize that, they’ll be able to develop a Plug and Play that puts Windows to shame.

The biggest thing that Linux lacks is applications, and they’re coming. I’m not worried about Linux’s future.

Hello again…

Dave Farquhar General ,

I’m rested but not caught up. I semi-successfully built a Linux From Scratch box; it’s easily the fastest computer I’ve ever seen but not everything works quite right. I made the mistake of using Mandrake 8.0 as my source platform. In some regards Mandrake 8 makes sense; it has recent kernel and glibc versions. Unfortunately it also uses the infamous GCC 2.96; an unofficial release of GNU’s C compiler that’s so wretched that Linus Torvalds actually has asked people to not do any kernel development using any OS that uses it. One of the first things LFS does is build its own copy of GCC 2.95.3, but unfortunately, there’s code in my system that GCC 2.96 got its grubby mitts on and stuff doesn’t work. Notably, I can’t build another LFS system using it as the source. Crimony.
Meanwhile, I found out this afternoon that Bible study is at my place on Friday. My apartment’s always a mess and today’s no exception; it’s not as bad now as it has been at times but it is much less than presentable. So that’s my big project for the week. Hopefully I’ll get a mail server going too.

But I’ll try to check in every day.

I think I’m going to take a couple of days off again…

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

There’s an old Oasis lyric that I’ve hated for most of the past four years, mostly because of the memories it conjurs up, and now it really bugs me that it seems appropriate: “‘Cos I need more time just to make things right.”
The other fragments of the song that have survived my efforts to blot them out also seem fitting. “Don’t go away… Say that you’ll stay… Forever and a day…”

So, to ward off those perpetual rumors/fears/whatever that I’m hanging things up, I’ll just say this. I’ve “hung it up for good” before. The longest it ever lasted was 6 months, and that time was due to serious injury. Right around that time, someone insinuated that I should hang it up. We haven’t spoken since that time, and I’m better for it and I don’t give a rip about how he feels.

I fully expect this break to last through Saturday, then run out of gas sometime late Sunday afternoon.

I’ve overextended myself the past month or so. I’m tired. My Web server is running fabulously (it never hiccups, so long as Union Electric keeps the power flowing) but I haven’t come up with an effective way to upload content to it or add new features. I can live with that.

Meanwhile, my mail server’s a royal piece of… Nah. That doesn’t go far enough. My mail server is a Backstreet Boys Fan. It runs like a 16 MHz 386, and I can’t tell if it’s a configuration problem or if it’s just overwhelmed with spam. No matter. I’m overwhelmed with spam. On a good day I get 7. On a bad day I get 60+. I got 38 copies of the same spam message from some stupid online casino Tuesday. I absolutely have to get some spam filters in place, and some priority filters in place.

So the mail needs to be archived, a bare-essentials mail server built (Linux 2.4.8 kernel, sendmail, IMAP, fetchmail, procmail, and whatever else those five things force me to install so they can run, all built from the newest sources of course, using the most aggressive compiler settings known to man), then the archives restored, then spam filters put in place and run. Then I will have regained my ability to communicate and will be able to do something about my guilt over having week-old e-mail sitting around unanswered because it’s buried in worthless spam.

I need to tend to my servers. I need to rebuild a couple of workstations. I really ought to try to salvage the Baseball Mogul season that’s sitting on the corrupted hard drive in one of those workstations… (Though I hesitate to call anything that runs Microsoft Wintendo 2000 a “workstation…”)

Meanwhile, a couple of other projects need to get done, and I just realized today that I haven’t talked to Gatermann in more than a week and for all that group of friends knows, I’ve run off to the ends of the Earth only to find an Internet cafe, so I continued posting. I need to do something about that too.

I’ll be back. I have the same love/hate relationship with writing that most writers have. It’s like breathing after running a couple of miles on a brisk day in early March. I always hated breathing after that, because it hurt so badly. But no matter how much it hurt, I couldn’t stop.

Eliminating Flash ads

Dave Farquhar General

Flash and popunder ads begone! Normally I prefer to just use a hosts file with common ad servers redirected to 127.0.0.1 to eliminate annoying online ads, but that often doesn’t eliminate annoying Flash ads. Putting sites that use Flash in the Restricted Sites zone can help, but only in IE, and when you do that, other things cease working (such as Acrobat). The Restricted Sites setting also kills a lot of popup and popunder ads, but at the same cost.
So what to do? The Web’s not going to get any less annoying, so I turned once again to a big gun that I used to use all the time: Proxomitron.

Occasionally I have to bypass Proxomitron for a site to work right, but I’d say 90-95% of the sites I visit work just fine with it enabled, and it clears out the junk nicely. And the memory usage isn’t really any higher than that of the various popup killer programs.

So if Flash ads are getting you down, and popunders are really starting to get you riled up (I hate finding I suddenly have 17 browser windows active that I didn’t open, and as leaky as IE is, such behavior is downright rude), give Proxomitron a long, hard look. You’ll be a whole lot happier.

Open mouth, insert foot. At work, we’re an NT shop, and we format our drives NTFS for security purposes. A few systems formatted FAT16 slipped out, but we had a project about a year ago to go back and convert all those systems to NTFS. Well, today, we were doing an Office 2000 upgrade on a system and it lacked sufficient free space. So I went up to have a look. I found 50 megs here, 50 megs there that I could clear out, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the drive up over 300 megs free. So, out of desperation, I went to look for some data I could compress, and I found compression wasn’t enabled. Huh? So I checked the drive. It was formatted FAT16.

So I ran back to my office to ask one of my coworkers if he still had the batch files we used way back when to convert FAT to NTFS. I walked into his cube.

“Sharon’s still FAT,” I said.

He gave me a funny look. “Well, I know she just got off maternity leave,” he said.

I turned red. “No, no, Sharon looks fine,” I said. (Yes, she just got off maternity leave but you wouldn’t be able to tell from looking.)

“Oh, you mean her computer’s not NTFS,” he said as everyone else in the office got a good laugh.

“Yeah,” I said.

The moral of the story ought to be really obvious. I got the batch files, scurried back up to her cube, converted her drive to NTFS–freeing up about 600 megs due to NTFS’ much smaller cluster size–and got out of there. I didn’t tell her the story.

If you didn’t compile it yourself, it’s not really yours.

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , ,

I’m on my Linux From Scratch kick again. Unfortunately, compiling a complete workstation from scratch takes a really long time (the systems that benefit the most from it, namely low-end P2s, need close to a day to compile everything if you want X, KDE and GNOME and some common apps) and requires you to type a lot of awkward commands that are easy to mess up. The upside: Messages like, “I did my first LFS on a Pentium II 18 months ago and it was by far the best workstation I’ve ever had,” are common on LFS discussion boards.
So what to do…? If you want to learn a lot about how Linux works, you type all the commands manually and let the system build itself, and if you’re away while the system’s waiting for the next set of commands, well, the system just sits there waiting for you. In a couple of days or a week you’ll literally know Linux inside and out, and you’ll have the best workstation or server you ever had.

If, on the other hand, you’re more interested in having the best workstation or server farm you ever had and less interested in knowing Linux inside and out (you can always go back and do it later if you’re really interested–CPUs and disks aren’t getting any slower, after all), you use a script.

What script? Well, RALFS, for one. Just install Mandrake 8 or another 2.4-based distribution, preferably just the minimum plus all the compilers plus a text editor you’re comfortable with, then download the sources from www.linuxfromscratch.org, then download RALFS, edit its configuration files, get into text mode to save system resources, and let RALFS rip.

RALFS looks ideal for servers, since the ideal server needs just a kernel, the standard utilities that make Unix Unix, plus just a handful of server apps such as Apache, Samba, Squid, or BIND. So RALFS should build in a couple of hours for servers. And since a server should ideally waste as few CPU cycles and disk accesses as possible, RALFS lets you stretch a box to its limits.

I think I need a new mail server…

What are you gonna do with your life?

Dave Farquhar General

I heard the most amazing story yesterday. On Aug. 13, 1993, singer/songwriter Don Wharton was on board a twin-engine plane flying from Russia to Alaska when the plane ran out of fuel and landed in the Bering Sea, 27 miles from Nome, Alaska. Floating on an empty five-gallon gas can, he survived in 36-degree waters for 55 minutes. The other six on board the plane survived as well, lasting anywhere from 35 to 70 minutes in those waters until they were rescued.
The human body can only survive 10-15 minutes at that temperature. Up to that point, no one else had ever survived a plane crash in the Bering Sea.

Wharton said they stayed in contact with each other and encouraged each other by shouting memorized Bible verses to one another.

“This is… STILL the day the Lord has made. We will… STILL rejoice and… STILL be glad in it!” one of them shouted.

Wharton paused in his delivery. He said he wasn’t sure he was as enthusiastic about rejoicing at that particular moment as the guy who’d said it.

“Let me describe going down,” Wharton said. “Your life, up to that point, is IT. That’s all you’ve done. You’ll do nothing more.”

I don’t know what he said after that because I was still thinking about that. How do you know when you’ve accomplished enough? You don’t, really. And you’re never completely satisfied, but I got to wondering if I could be more satisfied. That answer, of course, was yes.

I’d heard Wharton’s story before, second- and third-hand, but here was one of the seven survivors, in the flesh, talking about it. And, yes, I’ll admit, at one point in his message I felt tears well up. He’s the second person who’s made that happen to me in two weeks. And, being male, I can’t say I’m particularly happy about that, but he made me think a lot so I’ll let it slide.

And being in my mid-twenties, which is an introspective time anyway even without some guy standing in the front of the room asking probing questions, I’m wondering if a change of direction isn’t on the horizon.

And on a slightly lighter note… If things weren’t already complicated enough, I think I’m in love on top of all this. No, this is only indirectly related to Wendy, the girl I spent three hours talking with after church a couple of weeks ago. Nothing against her, of course. I’ve had a number of long conversations with her after the end of a very long day, and it’s been great. She’s said a couple of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me (which takes some doing), and she’s said the same of me.

Now she’s left town for the next week and a half, and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her, and that bothers me some because I really wanted to. I also didn’t get to tell her I really hope she has a great time.

Is that love? Well, it’s certainly fondness, which is a type of love I suppose. But I met her seven months ago. We started talking beyond superficial how-you-doings about a month ago. That’s enough time to wish, but not enough time to know. A month isn’t enough time to get past the things you’ve fabricated about a person and really know the person she really is.

So, Dave says he’s in love, he just described the thrill of the chase in a really weird way, and he claims that has nothing to do with it. What gives?

A book, that’s what. Last week, Jim Cooley wrote me raving about The Brothers K, by David James Duncan. He described it as a book about God, baseball, and love. Then he said he reads me every day, so he feels pretty safe in saying I’ll love it. I got to thinking. God, baseball, and love. What else is there? He provided a link on Amazon, so I clicked it. Aside from being a book about everything that matters, the reader reviews claimed the book was funny on top of it! How can a book about baseball and religion be funny? I wondered about that. Then I went for a drive. I didn’t want to wait for Amazon or anyone else to deliver it to me. I hunted down a copy that night and bought it.

And what can I say? It’s a story about baseball. It’s a story about heartbreak–a fantabulous pitcher injures himself in a freak accident and that’s the end of his career. He starts drinking. It’s a story about God–his wife is a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, and his kids are mostly very confused Seventh-Day Adventists. His eldest has a crush on his Sabbath School (Adventists don’t worship on Sundays) teacher. And the girl he describes, aside from eye color, sounds so much like Wendy. And the butterflies he describes are so familiar… That part of the story makes me glad to be 26 and not 13.

I guess what makes the book funny is the perspective from which it’s told. Women might find the book enlightening (it seems to be as much about growing up as anything else, and it includes the details guys usually don’t include when they’re talking about their own adolescence), but to me, this seems to be a guy book. So many of my old fears are right in there, and the way the characters handle those fears hits home in such a way that I can’t help laughing.

I didn’t think I could possibly love any book as much as I loved The Great Gatsby, but this one stands a chance. And this book, like Gatsby, has me asking a question. Why don’t I even try to write fiction anymore?

When will this virus crap end?

Dave Farquhar Viruses ,

Who in his or her right mind believes the customer is always right? Not I. I’ve seen too many customers who hadn’t a clue about what they wanted, or worse, who deliberately fibbed when the nice survey taker with the clipboard asked them what they’d like: “Mrs. Ferguson, would you like your next car better if it had a heated cup holder?”
The Mrs. (and Mr.) Fergusons of our great land always want a better cup holder, gearshift, trunk, rearview mirror, hood ornament–whatever it might be. We didn’t get to be a consumer society by not consuming everything we could lay our hands on, and in ever bigger, ever better shapes and sizes.

— Robert A. Lutz, Guts

And that, my friends, is why you can’t get anything done with your computers anymore because they’re virus breeding grounds. Microsoft or Adobe come along and ask if you’d like some useless feature, like being able to script inside Outlook or Acrobat, and of course the clueless embeciles say, sure! I might need that feature someday! More likely, that feature will be used against you someday. But we just don’t know how to say no. We gotta have the newest, the slickest, the most feature-filled. Never mind we never touch 90% of the feature bloat, and we complain that it’s too complicated, and the only people who ever use most of the capabilities on the machines on our desks are the virus writers.

BeOS sure has a lot of appeal to me right now–a no-frills OS that’s just an OS, nothing more, nothing less, with simple apps that just get the job done. And all at blazing speed. So the company’s about to go under. BFD. I stuck with my Amiga through Commodore’s troubles, and even for a couple of years after the company evaporated. If the machine works, I don’t really care who else is running the same stuff I’m running. What about support? It’s not like Microsoft fixes its bugs either, so if I’m gonna run an OS that isn’t going to be fixed, it might as well be one that started off good in the first place.