It’s Monday. Have a day.

Dave Farquhar General ,

There’s a band called The Happy Mondays. Whoever came up with that name is sick. And yes, I know I’m a curmudgeon.
I had too much stuff to think about this weekend, very little of it involving me, and talking about most of it here is totally inappropriate. A bunch of different things culminated into me starting to write a long diatribe about discerning God’s will. The problem with it is, there are books of the Bible shorter than what I’ve written, and all I’ve said is a couple of ways not to do it.

The other thing I did yesterday was to get the data recovered off that laptop hard drive I was working on Saturday. After a 14-hour SpinRite session, the drive was readable again under both Win98 and Linux. The drive is still slow and headed for early retirement, but now it’s a whole lot more sound than it was and it looks like it’ll be our decision when the drive retires, not the drive’s decision. I don’t know everything that SpinRite does and I know even less about how it works, but in this case SpinRite didn’t claim to have done anything at all but suddenly, after running it, a hard drive that had been all but unusable is readable again. At $89 for a single license, SpinRite is expensive, but I don’t know how I ever got along without it.

I wish Steve Gibson would quit being the Don Quixote of Internet security and get back to what he does better than anyone else. Not many people in business environments format their hard drives FAT anymore, and SpinRite does nothing for NTFS drives. How about a SpinRite 6.0 that supports NTFS, Steve?

Windows XP has much greater implications for Steve Gibson than just raw sockets. It brings with it the consumerization of NTFS, which means his bread-and-butter product is going to be mostly obsolete. I format all of my drives FAT, partly so that SpinRite remains an option for me, but Gibson can’t count on everyone doing that.

Weekend adventures and Low-profile PCs

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Saturday. I finally managed to drag my sorry butt to work about 11 or so. I went to pay my rent at 10; the office was closed even though it was supposed to be open. The manager called me yesterday about 10, wondering where I was (gee, could it be I was at work, and that sometimes I have things to do other than sit by the phone waiting for her to call?) complaining that they needed to get into my apartment to fix a leak. I called and left a message saying go on in. She called back a couple of hours later and bawled me out for having a busted hose (I didn’t bust it) and for having stuff in the closet with the hot water heater, in violation of fire code. “The maintenance guy said you had a bunch of stuff in there, and that busted the hose, and that’s a violation of code so you have to clean it out.”
I checked when I got home. Apparently a snow shovel (necessary because they never clear the parking lot) and a kitchen mop sitting in the corner opposite everything constitutes “a bunch of stuff.” I put the check in an envelope, and since there was no one there to complain to, I scribled a note on the envelope. “I moved my mop and my snow shovel out of the closet. Apparently that constitutes ‘a bunch of stuff.'”

And Friday night I got out my lease and looked at it. I’d never read it thoroughly and I was shocked. For one thing, playing a musical instrument is strictly prohibited. Even with headphones. That’s a load of bull. If you can play a guitar on the Metro in Washington D.C. as long as you use headphones, then if I feel like strumming my bass inside the four walls of my apartment and no one can hear it, that’s my business. But I found what I was looking for. Since I’ve been here two years, the penalty for breaking the lease is one month’s rent. Losing me for the remainder of the lease hurts them more than the month’s rent hurts me, so I started looking for houses.

One of the girls at church (her name is Wendy) had mentioned earlier in the week that houses in Lemay are inexpensive, and Lemay, despite what Gatermann says, isn’t a bad place. For one, there’s a great pizza joint in Lemay. There’s reasonably easy access to I-255 to get around St. Louis. Plus two grocery stores and a department store. And if Wendy’s comfortable walking to her car at night in Lemay, my black trenchcoat and I will be just fine.

At work, an unexpected but totally welcome distraction happened. My phone rang. I was hoping it was the girl from church, but it was an inside ring. I picked up. “This is Dave,” I said.

“Hi! It’s Heather.”

That’s the name of my best friend from college, and it sure sounded like her voice. But she lives in Florida and she’s been bouncing from dot-com to dot-com since college.

“I saw your car outside so I thought I’d give you a call. I’m here with Olivia and we’re just checking on houses with my computer. I thought you might like to meet her.”

Oh. That Heather. She’s a twentysomething Kentucky native who’s lived in St. Louis for about three years. Olivia is her four-year-old daughter. She’s been looking for a house for about the past six months. Extremely nice girl, easy to talk to. Pretty too.

Talking to Heather and meeting Olivia promised to be a whole lot more intersesting than watching SpinRite run on that failing hard drive that forced me into the office on my day off, so I walked over to her area. Olivia saw me first. She hid behind a chair. I recognized her immediately, because Heather’s cubicle is practically wallpapered with pictures of her. I knocked on the side of the cube wall. Heather looked up. “Hi!” she said. She looked around and saw Olivia behind the chair. “Come out, Olivia.” Olivia shyly emerged. “Say Hi.” Olivia waved shyly and said hi. Yep, she’s just like her mom: way tall, and very shy at first. Olivia crawled up into Heather’s lap and started playing with her adding machine. She whispered something to her mom. She looked at her, puzzled. Olivia whispered it again. “You tell him,” she said.

“I like to dig through the trash,” Olivia said.

“Why do you like to dig in the trash?” I asked her. Heather laughed and explained. Olivia keeps everything. When she throws something away, Olivia usually goes digging for it. I told Olivia I used to dig through the trash when my mom would throw my stuff away too.

“Oh! I haven’t told you. We made an offer on a house!” Heather said, visibly excited. I asked her about it. Two-bedroom, nice heated garage, small yard but within walking distance of a park… in Lemay. I smiled.

I told her congratulations, and told her I started looking last night. She said there was a lot of stuff in Lemay. Meanwhile, Olivia and I played catch with beanbags. She has a lively arm on her, not that that should be too surprising. When you’ve got long arms like hers and get them extended, you’ll have some pop. Her first throw hit me below the belt, if you know what I mean. I saw it coming, couldn’t get my arm down there fast enough, and grimaced. Olivia laughed. I don’t think Heather saw. I picked the beanbag off the ground and tossed it back to her. No lasting effects–it was a beanbag, after all. But guys instinctively grimace whenever anything heads that direction, even a Nerf ball. It’s instinctual. Olivia’s next throw sailed past my outstretched hand and plunked the back of Heather’s chair.

“I’m glad you weren’t the second baseman the last softball game I played,” I said to Olivia.

So Heather and I talked houses while Olivia and I tossed beanbags around. I’m like her, I like South County and don’t really want to live anywhere else. She’s been looking long enough to have a pretty good idea what’s available. She printed off a couple of houses for me, and told me a couple of places in Lemay where several houses were available.

Eventually, I thanked her and left. I told Olivia it was nice to meet her.

Then last night, after none of my Saturday plans panned out, I wandered out in search of a haircut and the new Echo and the Bunnymen album. I found neither. I bought some used stuff: Echo and the Bunnymen’s self-titled 1987 release which I’d never gotten around to buying, Peter Gabriel’s fourth album, Peter Murphy’s surprise 1989 hit Deep, and a New Wave compilation that contained a couple of good songs from bands who only recorded one good song, plus a bunch of stuff I didn’t remember ever hearing. The sales clerk reacted to my selections. “Uh oh. Echo and the Bunnymen. Hmm. Peter Murphy. Who was he with?”

“Bauhaus,” I said.

“Was he in Love and Rockets too, or was that the other guys from Bauhaus?”

“Love and Rockets was Bauhaus without Peter Murphy.”

Yep, I was earning the right to wear a black trenchcoat last night. Too bad it’s August. I was impressed that the clerk recognized Murphy, seeing as he was probably born the same year Bauhaus broke up and Murphy’s only had one solo hit, though his post-Bauhaus stuff is really good.

So I hopped in my car, popped in the compilation CD, and went exploring. I found the area Heather told me about. But mostly I explored Lemay–what kind of stuff could I find? Being fairly close to a park would be nice. I found the pizza joint my dad and I used to go to, many years ago. Just about everything I need is pretty close together, and not terribly far from the big commercial district. The houses are older, which can be good and bad, and like Heather warned me, there are some areas that are a little bit redneck, but you’ll find that in a lot of parts of St. Louis. And like Wendy said, Lemay’s not a ritzy place and the people who live there know it, so the pretension you see in a lot of parts of St. Louis isn’t present there. That’s nice.

Low-profile. Dan Bowman sent me a couple of links yesterday to low-profile cases that would be suitable as low-end servers or routers. Over at CSO they’re selling Dell low-profile Pentium Pro-200 systems for $99, with 64 MB RAM, 2.1 gig HD, and a NIC. A Pentium II-266 runs $129. Specs vary on the PII.

That got me thinking and looking around some more. Over at www.compgeeks.com, I found a couple of other things. An ultra low-profile LPX case (sans power supply) is running $10.50. It only has three bays, but that’s plenty for a floppy, CD-ROM, and single HD. An Intel HX-based LPX mobo (with built-in video) runs $19. It’ll take up to a P200, non-MMX though. The LPX riser card is $4.95. CPU availability is limited there; a P90 runs five bucks. Back at CSO, a P166 runs $15.

If you’re really cramped for space, building an LPX-based system is your best bet. But the CSO deal on the Dell is tough to beat. You won’t build an LPX system that even comes close for $99.

Tough day yesterday.

Dave Farquhar General

Yesterday was tough. Upon arrival at work, a nasty Mac problem hit–a totally dead machine that wouldn’t boot. I dinked around with that for a couple of hours. And when my boss saw me, he told me I’d be working out of another building for the next week. On a normal week I wouldn’t have any problem with that. Last week and next week don’t look to be normal weeks.
The Mac problem ended up being an extremely corrupt system folder. The drive was perfectly readable, but wouldn’t boot (and the drive made a lot of unpleasant noises while trying). I copied the contents to another drive and it did the very same thing. Hopefully this user has learned not to screw around, but I doubt it. That’s a huge advantage of Windows NT: The user is much more limited in what’s permitted. At a couple of points during this fiasco I exclaimed, “Get a real computer!” One of the people in the department said, “Bind and gag that man!”

But the statistics back me up. The people in that department running NT have a small percentage of the number of problems the people with overdesigned, overpriced, unreliable Mac boxes have. There are times when I’ll give someone a PC, then I never hear from them again until it’s time for the machine to be replaced or a mandatory upgrade goes around. But if a Mac doesn’t get intense monthly maintenance, you can forget about the thing ever being reliable.

I got the Mac running by installing a new copy of the OS and dragging all the preferences over from the corrupt system folder. I left the extensions behind since it was well past 5, I had to be somewhere at 5:30, and I didn’t cause this problem.

On top of all that, I had a laptop from the field come in. It had been giving the user problems for a while (he didn’t say how long), and the symptoms he described sounded to me like the hard drive was failing. I asked if he had a recent backup. He did not. He sent me the laptop. I powered it up, and it’s no longer capable of booting. It tries but never gets far. I pulled the drive and put it in another machine so I could try to recover the data. Linux won’t even mount the drive, it’s in such bad shape. NT won’t read it because it’s formatted FAT32 (that’s it–this next build for deployed users is using FAT16 so I can recover their data with whatever OS I want, seeing as I’ll have to do a lot of it since they refuse to make backups), so I’m spending my Saturday building a Win98 box so I can read the drive and hopefully get some data back. Good thing I get time and a half…

Friday hodgepodge.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Now are we going to take viruses seriously? Top-secret Ukranian documents leaked out to the Ukranian press, courtesy of SirCam, including the president’s movements during the upcoming independence celebration. An assassin’s delight, to be sure.
Lessons learned:

1. Macro viruses can do damage without trashing your computer. Sometimes they can do more damage if they don’t trash your computer.
2. Don’t count on anti-virus software to save you. SirCam hides out in places McAfee Anti-Virus doesn’t look, and Norton Anti-Virus is reportedly not 100% effective against it either, especially if a document was already infected with another virus.

What can save you? Download your software from reputable sources only, and don’t open strange attachments. I used to say it’s much better to miss the joke than to wipe out your computer. Now we can amend that. It’s much better to miss the joke than to wipe out your computer or get the president of the Ukraine killed.

Motherboards. The Good Dr. Crider e-mailed me (among others) earlier this week asking for motherboard advice. He wanted respectable power for under $200. Interestingly, just the day before I went looking at mwave.com for motherboards for no particular reason. I spied the ultra-basic Gigabyte GA-7IXe4 motherboard (AMD 750-based) for 66 bucks. It won’t win any glamour contests, but it’s a fine meat-and-potato board at a fabulous price, and it’s not made in China so you’re not supporting an immoral government with your purchase either. You can pair that up with a $36 Duron-750 and a $10 fan and have a great start on a fantabulous bang-for-the-buck system. Of course, with a budget of $200, it’s possible to step up to a Duron-950 and still have a little left over.

Speaking of bang for the buck, here’s a review of the first commercially available SiS 735-based board. Put simply, right now it’s the fastest DDR motherboard you can buy. Pretty impressive, especially considering it’s coming from budget-minded ECS. I can’t wait to see what Asus or Abit will be able to do with it. But I know I’ll be waiting. ECS has manufacturing facilities in China.

Why the big deal about China? I’m not exactly in favor of slave labor–we freed our slaves about 135 years ago and we should be ashamed it took us that long. But slave labor exists in China today. I’m tired of China provoking the United States every chance it gets. I’m tired of China persecuting people who believe in Christianity and/or democracy. Need more reasons? OK. Fair warning: Some of the atrocities on this site will make you sick.

Completely boycotting China when buying computer products is tough. Really tough. For example, Intel’s Craig Barrett publicly advocates Chinese manufacturing. Does that mean Intel’s next fab will sit on Chinese soil? Fortunately, a Web search with a manufacturer’s name, plus the words “manufacturing” and “China” will almost always tell you conclusively if a company produces any of its stuff in China. If you want American-made stuff, good luck. Supermicro and AMI make motherboards in the States, but neither has a very diverse product line.

Need a dictionary? OK. Visit www.wordweb.co.uk.

Building 98 boxes

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

I knuckled down yesterday at work and started building a new laptop image for some deployed users. What they’re using now isn’t stable and it isn’t fast, and much of the software is dated. So rather than patch yet again, we’re starting over. I built a 98 install, leaving out anything I could (such as Drive Converter, since we’re already using FAT32 over my protests, and Disk Compression, which isn’t compatible with FAT32 and I just know it’s only a matter of time before some end user decides he’s too short on disk space and runs it only to be greeted by a PC that won’t boot).
Law #1: The more you install, the slower the system runs, and no amount of disk or registry optimization will completely make up for that.

After I got a decent 98 install down, I did some cleanup. All the .txt files in the Windows directory? Gone. All the BMP files? See ya. Channel Screen Saver? B’bye. I got the C:Windows directory down under 150 entries without losing any functionality. There are probably some GIF and JPEG files in there, and some WAVs possibly, that can also go. I’ll have to check. And of course I did my standard MSDOS.SYS tweaks.

Then I defragmented the drive, mostly to get the directories compressed, rebooted, and timed it. 18 seconds. Not bad for a P2-300.

Next, I installed Office 2000. Once I got all that in place, Windows’ boot time ballooned to 32 seconds, which just goes to show how Microsoft apps screw around on the OS’s turf entirely too much–Office makes more changes to the OS than Internet Explorer–but the boot time is still well below what we’ve come to expect from a P2-300.

One of my coworkers had the nerve to say, “Don’t forget to run Cacheman!” Cacheman my ass. I can put vcache entries in system.ini myself, thank you very much. And I can change the file and path cache in the Registry myself, without having to use some lame program to do it. And cleaning up the directories makes a much bigger difference than those hacks do. It just doesn’t make you feel l33t or anything. Heaven forbid we should ever do anything simple and effective to improve system performance.

Law #2: Most of the tweaks floating around there on the ‘Net do little more than let you feel like you’ve done something. I condensed the useful tricks into a single book chapter. And I also told you what those tricks really do, and the side effects they have, unlike a certain multi-megabyte Web site hosted on AOL… You can do the majority of the things you need to do by practicing restraint and judiciously using just a small number of software tools.

I know how to make a fast Win98 PC. It’s not like I wrote a book about that or anything…

Oh, but how am I ensuring stability? I’m forcing the issue. Yes, I see that list of 47 software packages they have to have. Here’s Windows and Office 2000 and ACT!. Now they have to test it. Does it crash? OK. Now we’ll add the remaining 44 things, one at a time and see which one is breaking stuff. If it’s unstable by the time all of that’s done, it’s because the end users who were testing were sloppy with their testing.

Optimizing Linux. Part 1 of who-knows-what

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , ,

Optimizing Linux. I found this link yesterday. Its main thrust is troubleshooting nVidia 3D acceleration, but it also provides some generally useful tweakage. For example:
cat /proc/interrupts

Tells you what cards are using what interrupts.

lspci -v

Tells you what PCI cards you have and what latencies they’re using.

setpci -v -s [id from lspci] latency_timer=##

Changes the latency of a card. Higher latency means higher bandwidth, and vice-versa. In this case, latency means the device is a bus hog–once it gets the bus, it’s less likely to let go of it. I issued this command on my Web server to give my network card free reign (this is more important on local fileservers, obviously–my DSL connection is more than slow enough to keep my Ethernet card from being overwhelmed):

setpci -v -s 00:0f.0 latency_timer=ff

Add that command to /etc/rc.d/rc.local if you want it to stick.

Linux will let you tweak the living daylights out of it.

And yes, there’s a ton more. Check out this: Optimizing and Securing Red Hat Linux 6.1 and 6.2. I just turned off last-access attribute updating on my Web server to improve performance with the command chattr -R +A /var/www. That’s a trick I’ve been using on NT boxes for a long time.

Baseball. I’m frustrated. The Royals let the Twins trade promising lefty Mark Redmon to the Tigers for Todd Jones. Why didn’t the Royals dangle Roberto Hernandez in the Twins’ face? Hernandez would have fetched Redmon and a borderline prospect, saved some salary, and, let’s face it, we’re in last place with Hernandez, so what happens if we deal him? It’s not like we can sink any further.

Meanwhile, the hot rumor is that Rey Sanchez will be traded to the Dodgers for Alex Cora, a young, slick-fielding shortstop who can’t hit. Waitaminute. We just traded half the franchise away for Neifi Perez, an enthusiastic, youngish shortstop who can’t hit outside of Coors Field and is overrated defensively and makes 3 and a half mil a year. What’s up with that?

Moral dilemma: Since the Royals don’t seem to care about their present or their future at the moment, is rooting for Oakland (featuring ex-Royals Jermaine Dye and Johnny Damon and Jeremy Giambi) and Boston (featuring ex-Royals Jose Offerman and Chris Stynes and Hippolito Pichardo and the last link to that glorious 1985 season, Bret Saberhagen) to make the playoffs like cheating on your wife?

Back in the swing of things

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , ,

Here are some odds and ends, since I’ve gone nearly a week without talking computers.
Intro to Linux. I found this last week. It’s a 50-page PDF file that serves as a nice Linux primer, from the experts at IBM. It’s a must-read for a Windows guru who wants to learn some Linux.

Linux from Scratch. Dustin mentioned Linux From Scratch last week. The idea is you download the source to an already-installed Linux box, then compile everything yourself. Why? Stability, security, and speed.

Security. You’ve got fresh, updated code, compiled yourself, with no extras. If you didn’t compile it, it’s not there. Less software means fewer holes for l337 h4x0r5 (“leet hackers,” or, more properly, script kiddies, or, even more properly, wankers who really need to get a life because they have nothing better to do than try to mess around with my 486s–Steve DeLassus asked me “what the #$%@ is an el-three-three-seven-aitch-four…” last week) to exploit.

Stability. Well, you get that anyway when you liberate your system from Microsoft’s grubby imperialistic mitts, but it makes sense that if you run software built by your system, for your system, it ought to run better. Besides, if you’ve got a borderline CPU or memory module or disk controller and try to compile all that code with aggressive compiler settings, you’ll expose the problems right away instead of later.

Speed. You’re running software built for your system, by your system. Not Mandrake’s PCs. Not Red Hat’s PCs. Yours. You want software optimized for your 486SX? You want software optimized for a P4? You won’t get either anywhere else. And recent GCC compilers with aggressive settings can sometimes (not always) outperform hand-built assembly. It’s hard to know what settings Mandrake or Red Hat or those Debian weirdos used.

I really want to replace my junky Linksys router with a PC running LFS and firewalling software. The Linksys router seems to be fine for Web surfing, but if you want to get beyond serfdom and serve up some content from your home LAN, my Linksys router’s even more finicky and problematic than Linksys’ NICs, which is saying something. It’ll just decide one day it doesn’t want to forward port 80 anymore.

Firewalling. And speaking of that, Dan Seto detailed ways to make a Linux box not even respond to a ping last week. It’s awfully hard for a l337 w4nk3r to find you if he can’t even ping you.

A story. My sister told me this one. She’s a behavioral/autism consultant, and one of her kids likes to belch for attention. He’ll let out an urp, and if you don’t respond, he’ll get closer and closer to you, letting out bigger and bigger belts until you acknowledge it. Di hasn’t managed to break that behavioral habit yet. She was telling her boss, a New Zealander, about this kid (he’s 3).

“Hmm,” he said. “Must be Australian.”

An update. I heard some howls of protest about a cryptic post I made last week. Yes, that was a girl I was talking to in the church parking lot until well past 11 the other night. Yes, we met at church. I’ve known her maybe six months. Yes, she’s nice. Yes, she’s cute. No, I haven’t asked her where she went to high school. Remember, I’m not a native St. Louisan… (And if you clicked on that link, be sure to also check out the driving tips.)

No, I’m not really interested in saying much more about her. Not now.

I’m gonna get in trouble… (Or: Why I believe in angels)

Dave Farquhar General

This is my sister’s story to tell, but I’m going to tell it anyway.
Di was driving to work one day last week, south on I-435 in Kansas City, when she spotted a car pulled over on the shoulder ahead of her. Well, it was kind of pulled over, but not very well. She moved over as far as she could in her own lane. Then she noticed something laying in her lane. She couldn’t tell what it was, but since it’s never a good idea to hit unknown objects on the road at 65-70 MPH, her instinct was to get away from it. But she couldn’t change lanes. So she swerved as much as she could within her own lane… and lost control of her car.

(Note to self: A car is only as safe as the tires that are on it. Another note to self: My Goodyears have been good, but I think I liked my Michelins better.)

Now, I’ve lost control of my car a couple of times, and so has Di, but never like this. She did three 360s across I-435 in rush hour, followed by a 180. She ended up on the grassy median between northbound and southbound I-435, facing north. Somehow she did all that without hitting anybody or anything.

That’s what impressed me the most, I think. I-435 doesn’t get as clogged up as, say, I-270 in St. Louis, but it sees plenty of cars. I sure wouldn’t ever try to cross it, or, for that matter, cut all the way across it in my car with a series of quick lane changes.

So Di’s sitting there in her car, absolutely freaking out. I know she was freaking out, because that’s what my family does. Myself included. She never saw that big white van pull up. A lady walked over to her car.

“Did I hit you?” Di asked.

“Oh no, no, you didn’t hit me,” she said. “Are you OK?”

“I think so. I’m just really shaken up.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m praying for you.”

Di looked up at her. “Thank you,” she said.

“This is the second accident like this one that I’ve seen this morning,” she said.

It was early in the morning. Di hadn’t seen any other accidents.

“Are you a good driver? Do you need me to get your car out of here?”

“I used to think I was a pretty good driver,” Di said. “I think I can get it out of here.”

Di needed to get the car out of there herself. I’m the same way. When we get into jams, we don’t like having to rely on someone else to get us out of it.

“OK,” she said. “But let me help you.”

So Di started her car again and started turning the car around. Meanwhile, this kind stranger walked back over to the highway and started directing traffic. Pretty soon, she cleared enough space for Di to get back on the road and get going.

Di never saw what became of that big, white van.

“That was probably an angel,” I told Di when she told me that story.

“I know,” she said. “Mom said the same thing.”

Yes, it might well have just been a well-meaning individual who was in the right place at the right time. On TV, angels call attention to themselves. In reality they don’t do that. But I’m convinced Di’s guardian angels (and probably a handful of mine) kept her from hitting any other cars that morning. I won’t write that one off as luck.

Absenteeism

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Sorry I haven’t been around much lately. I’m recovering from last week, trying to put my life kind of in order. Yesterday I was in one of my moods, because the Royals traded half of their heart and soul, Jermaine Dye, for an overpaid shortstop who hasn’t proven he can hit outside of Coors Field. It would appear that the Royals are happy to be the AAA club for the Oakland Athletics. Among the ex-Royals in the A’s starting lineup: LF Johnny Damon, DH Jeremy Giambi, and now RF Jermaine Dye. I’m convinced the only reason the Royals haven’t sent Mike Sweeney to the A’s for a bag of baseballs is that the A’s are loaded at the three spots Sweeney could play.
But that’s insignificant compared to the news one of my best friends gave me yesterday. He’s been laid off, basically the victim of a personal vendetta. He’d been thinking of quitting anyway, but the time wasn’t exactly ripe for him to make that change. He’ll have no problem finding work, but it’s always bad when you lose your job unexpectedly over office politics.

On the bright side, yesterday I had the best (and longest) conversation I’ve had with anyone since summer 1997, easily. I look forward to its follow-up.

Computer stuff will be back soon…

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

I did very little this weekend, since I actually had a weekend this time around. Saturday I read a lot and slept and played Baseball Mogul, Sunday I got up early and did some laundry, went to church, read a lot, caught up with a couple of old friends I hadn’t talked to in a little while, and I ran Disk Administrator on my Duron-750, the system bluescreened, and now nothing can read the drive and I’m hacked off that I’m going to miss a chance to watch Greg Maddux make a run at 300 wins, Pedro Martinez make a run at Walter Johnson’s old strikeout record (Nolan Ryan was still a long way away), and Mark McGwire make a run at Hank Aaron’s 755 career home runs.
Expect to hear more on my data recovery efforts this week. There’s no shortage of tricks I can pull. But supposedly,

Church scared me. Much of the service reminded me of Pepper and Friends, a really corny children’s TV show in Columbia, Mo. Haven’t seen Pepper and Friends? Be glad. Be very, very glad. Imagine Richard Simmons, but even more hyperactive, riling up bunches of kids. Ugh. And now I know what the traditionalists are scared of. As long as it’s just once a year, at the end of Vacation Bible School, I’m fine with it, but now I understand the fear of bubblegum, substance-less church services.

True Confessions of a Male Mercenary. And I found myself playing Older-and-More-Experienced-and-Ever-So-Slightly-Wiser Brother this week. I was talking to someone, and he was telling me about this girl he knows and talking about wanting to ask her out… in a few months. That’s a strategy I’ve successfully used many times in the past… to fall flat on my face. My problem was that as I waited for that opportune moment, whenever that might be, my mind was absolutely racing in the meantime, creating grandiose images of the woman I was pursuing that often turned out to be mere fiction. And what’s the girl thinking as all of this is going on? Let me consult my quote wall:

“The best part of a relationship for most people is when it’s just beginning, and they can make this person in their own mind into this creature that doesn’t exist.”

Ouch. Aimee Mann said that in an interview, years ago, and I just had to write that one down for the wall. She knows a little bit about bad relationships because she was in several of them.

Besides frustrating the girl, we end up investing far too much emotionally in her, and when she fails to meet our expectations–remember, we’ve just spent a good deal of time making her into someone else who exists only in our very vivid imaginations, so it is a matter of when–we fall hard.

So my advice to him was to spend some time with her, now. That way instead of imagining things about her, he’s learning what she’s really like–because, after all, that sweet, innocent-looking thing could be an axe murderer for all he knows–and he’s giving her a chance to figure out what, if anything, she wants. Otherwise she just has to guess–and since the guy is usually expected to make the first move, she can afford to be cautious. Am I the only one who’s noticed girls are a whole lot more likely to say no than guys are?

And if she does say no? Then you haven’t spent months investing emotionally in someone who isn’t going to return it. And you can get on with life. Trust me. Until he finds The One, a guy can transfer all those emotions almost at will. Some scumbags continue to do it even after they find The One. After all, how many songs say, “it’s not cheating if she reminds me of you?” Of course she reminds him of her–guys know what they like, and they naturally go looking for more of it. (For me, it’s usually dark hair and a past.)

I think most girls at least suspect we’re mercenaries like that; none have ever seemed terribly shocked when I’ve admitted we have the ability. They live with it; they have deep, dark secrets too.

Enough waxing philosophical about life. I’m a fixer, not a philosopher. I’ll try to fix something today–a machine, not a person–and tell you all about it tomorrow.