Ugh. I just got home.

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve been out partying. Actually, yes I have. I just got home, and I’m wondering if I’m getting too old for this. One of my best friends is moving to Colorado on Wednesday, so tonight was his going-away party. A lot of people are going to miss him.
Other stuff… What was up with yesterday? Yesterday’s positive karma of 9 has to be my record. I guess I’ll have to tell more work stories or something.

And tomorrow later today I’ll be driving up to Montana Creve Couer to visit Steve DeLassus, who just built a Duron system with minimal phone assistance from me. We’ll do some more tweaking with it, I’ll see if I can coax a little more speed out of it, and I’ll rile up his dog, seeing as the only thing I have to do to rile up Buster is, well, show up.

I wish I had some great, spectacular, wonderful content for you today, but that’s pretty much all I’ve got. And I think it’s time to crash.

Well, I thought it was time. I fell off the ‘net there for a minute. My Linksys router just decided to quit forwarding port 80 for whatever reason. I re-ran the setup and it worked fine. It was faster than cycling power, which might have worked too. But I’m understandably nervous now. Maybe I need to go back to a Linux box for routing.

Things I learn at work

Dave Farquhar General

So, Davey, what did you learn in school today?
Oh. Wait. I’m 26. Never mind. What’d I learn at work today?

My employer has four locations. I split time between the biggest and the second-smallest. I like the second-smallest, partly because at the big location, my group is segregated, and we’re a boys’ club. We’re all male, we act male–for example, my boss is the only one of us who knows what fabric softener is for (and that’s because he’s 43–he’s had more time to have that kind of knowledge shoved into his brain than the rest of us).

At the other place, there are eight of us in IT. Five of us are male. Three are women. Apparently I provide some of the comic relief. When I’m really torqued off, apparently I’m bloody hysterical. This morning, I was greeted first thing with voice mail from a remote user in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, whose hobby appears to be breaking NEC computers. Yes, I know NECs are junk (they should stick to monitors) but we’ve got 50 of the things and he’s the only one who has recurring problems with them, and we’ve sent him four different ones. And the laptops he’s been through have been just fine once we got them in the shop, re-imaged them, and sent them back into the field. So as I listened to his message, I just yelled, “No!” to every question he asked–never mind that he can’t hear me–and struggled with the voice mail system. I didn’t want to waste any time deleting the message but my voicemail didn’t want to cooperate. (I put the right person in touch with him later–the best way to get on my nerves is to call me direct when your problem is something that’s handled by another group. That’s why we have a helpdesk to route calls to the proper support person.)

Meanwhile, five or six other people were laughing until it hurt. I’m pretty sure they found what I was saying funny, but they probably also find it funny that this guy who can disassemble and reassemble a computer when he’s literally too tired to properly tie his shoes can’t figure out his voicemail.

But one of the women provides a lot more comic relief than I do. She has this old pickup that started off really nice, until one night when someone drove up and down the block with a shotgun, randomly firing in different directions. The shotgun blast holes started to rust, of course, and it was all downhill from there. Well, this truck now needs $900 worth of work to pass inspection, and I’d be surprised if it was worth 900 bucks, seeing as my 1992 Dodge Spirit, in working order, was only worth $950. I can’t remember if her name for the truck is Garbage Scout or Garbage Cow, but whatever its name is, it’s history. Too bad. Whenever someone has car trouble, she offers to loan them this truck, and then we get to hear all these great stories about it. I’ll miss that.

Her 16-year-old daughter is lobbying for its replacement to be a 1998 Ford Mustang.

“Tell her she can have one when she’s 26,” I said. “Wait. I’m 26, and I can’t have one.”

“Wait a minute. I’m 46 and I can’t have one,” she said.

“Oh, it’s easy then. Tell her she can have one when she’s older. Then she’ll go, ‘But mom, that’s what you always say. How much older?’ And then you can say, ‘I don’t know. Older than me, because I’m 46 and I don’t have one.'”

She laughed.

She saved the voicemail message her daughter left and played it for us. It started off with about 30-45 seconds’ worth of stammering. At least. And once she did finally start spitting it out, she still stammered some.

“Now if you’re going to ask me for something, what good does it do to irritate me for five minutes before you finally ask?” she asked. “She doesn’t get it and my husband doesn’t get it either.”

“Dave, remember that when you get married,” one of the other women said.

“Hey, Linda!” I said.

“What?”

“Umm, umm, hmm, well, uh, umm, umm…”

She laughed.

“So that’s what I need to remember not to do?”

“Yeah.”

So that’s why I like working in that building. I learn useful stuff there. I need to get a notebook, write “For Future Reference” on the front cover, and take notes.

One way to defeat spammers

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Ever since Brightmail closed up their free filtering service, I’ve been thinking a lot more about spam because I’ve been getting a lot more. I know where these losers are getting my e-mail address. It’s right here on my Web page. But I need to post that so people can contact me. Fortunately, I found a trick. Look at this:
dfarq@swbell.net

That’s just an e-mail link, right? It works just like any other, right? Well, here’s the HTML code for that:

mailto:dfarq@swbell.net

See what I did? I obscured the @ sign with an ASCII code (64), along with the dot (46) and a couple of other characters like the colon. Most automated e-mail address harvesters don’t decode the HTML, so their search routines, which look for things like @ signs and dot-somethings will blow right past that.

So if you run a site, obscure your e-mail address. If you don’t remember your ASCII codes, hopefully you’ve still got QBasic on one of your machines. In QBasic, the command PRINT ASC(“A”) will give you the ASCII code for the letter A. Substitute any letter you like. Or you can remember that A is 65 and lowercase a is 97. A is 65, B is 66, and so on.

When a Web site asks you for an e-mail address, you can see if it’ll let you obscure parts of it. Unfortunately, my forums flag illegal characters, but I may be able to modify that. Some Web sites aren’t that smart.

Obviously this trick won’t work in e-mail, unless you always send your mail in HTML format, which I (along with about half the world) really wish you wouldn’t–it’s annoying. And even if you obscure the mail you send, if I copy and paste your mail to my site, it’ll go up there unobscured. So this advice is mostly for webmasters.

Anyway… On to other things.

We’ve moved, if you haven’t noticed. These pages should be at least a little bit faster. The forums will be several times faster. And the forums are goofy. I haven’t figured out exactly why, but posts are missing and user files are acting up. If you’re having problems (Steve DeLassus just told me he can’t post because it tells him his .dat file can’t be accessed), go ahead and re-register. If you want your post count raised to its previous level, just let me know. I can change that. (Hmm, I wonder if Gatermann would notice if I set his post count to a negative number…?) I’d have preferred to move everything intact, of course.

Anyway. Go play in the forums. See what breaks. If I don’t know it’s broke, I sure can’t fix it. (I may not be able to if I do know, but hey, I can give it my best shot.)

Update: It’s 5:45 in the p.m., and you’re watching… Wait. That’s something else. The forums seem to be working properly now. Lack of uniformity between Linux distributions bites me again… It wasn’t the location of the files YaBB was objecting to, nor was it permissions. It was ownership. Under Mandrake, Apache runs as a user named “apache” and thus files created by CGI scripts like YaBB are owned by “apache.” Under TurboLinux, Apache runs as user “nobody,” and thus files created by CGIs are owned by “nobody.” And when you just tar up your Web site and move it to a new box like I did, those files remain owned by their old owners. Since Linux assumes you know what you’re doing, it happily handed those files over to a non-existant user. So when YaBB came knocking, Unix security kicked in and said, “Hey, nobody, you don’t own these files,” hence those error 103s everyone was getting.

The new server is live.

Dave Farquhar General

The new server is live. And much faster, I might add. We had a dead day in the forums, so I figure this was probably as good a time as any.
So, anyway, I hope everyone enjoys the improved speed that a faster CPU and mod_gzip provide. I know I can definitely get used to this. I notice the difference here.

I’ve extracted the text of the old forums here. At the moment I can’t get a search engine working on it. Sorry. I’ll work on it tomorrow.

Two chipsets from the AMD front

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday AMD formally unveiled and shipped the AMD-760MP chipset. Right now there is one and only one motherboard using it, the ritzy Tyan Thunder K7, which runs about $550 minimum. (Wholesale cost on it is rumored to be $500.) Considering its 64-bit PCI slots, two built-in 3Com NICs, onboard ATI video, onboard Adaptec SCSI, and four available DIMMs, that’s not a half-bad price. It’s obviously not a hobbyist board. This dude’s intended to go in servers.

Read more

I want to go live with the new server…

Dave Farquhar General ,

And for a few minutes last night I had it cranking. It was fast and wonderful until I got into the forums. Everything was there, but when I tried to read the messages, I got error messages. I’ve had that problem all along. At first I figured the problem was due to the files being stored somewhere else under TurboLinux, so I reconfigured Apache to store everything in /var/www like it does under Mandrake. Then I figured the :8080 in the URL was throwing it off. So I flip-flopped the two servers, so as far as YaBB knows, it hasn’t moved. All the permissions are the same on everything. But it still can’t find the files if I move it.
I’m really sick of this P-120’s speed, or lack of it, especially since I’ve got a Celeron-366 sitting under my desk in a case that once housed a Pentium-75 (how’s that for irony?) that’s fast and lovely and chomping at the bit to go.

We’ve got 149 messages on the forums at the moment. A couple of the topics are active. Nothing’s stopping me from grabbing the text of the messages and dumping them somewhere on the site where the search engine can still find them and the wisdom (or lack thereof) they contain.

Anyone have any thoughts? If there aren’t any big objections to it, I’ll make the move tomorrow night.

In the meantime, I’m not feeling so great. So I think I’ll just rev up the Farquhar Time Machine, make my server think it’s Tuesday, post, forget that there are such things as e-mail and telephones, and call it a night.

What the press doesn’t want to tell you about Kaycee

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Dan Bowman forwarded me a string of e-mail yesterday that raised a number of questions about the press. Apparently there is at least one reporter trying to find out how many people gave gifts to “Kaycee,” and that’s raising some concerns. Why? And why does the reporter want names and phone numbers? And how do you know if the guy’s legit or if he’s making some kind of sucker list?
Being a former reporter myself, Dan solicited my opinion. Maybe he figured a former reporter would recognize one of his own. And I do.

One concern was the reporter’s apparent use of a free e-mail address. This doesn’t cause me any great concern. Not all newspapers have a mail server because not every newspaper can afford to pay a mail administrator–or maybe they’re just not willing to justify keeping a full-time IT guy on hand who’d make more than the editor in chief. Plus there’s the portability issue–use a free, Web-based mail service, and you can read your mail from anywhere with Web access. No need to mess with VPNs or direct dialins or any of that nastiness.

Another concern is why does the reporter want a phone number. Practicality is one issue; a five-minute phone conversation can glean far more information than a mail conversation that takes all day. And the reporter probably wants to hear your voice; the sound of your voice tells a lot. The reporter can’t print that information, usually, but that gut feeling provides valuable guidance. Plus the reporter needs to verify that you really exist, which is something that anyone who had any contact with “Kaycee” will understand.

But if the reporter were any good, he’d be able to track you down, right? You bet he could. But that’s ruder than establishing contact via e-mail. You want the source to be as comfortable as possible. Plus it takes time to do that. In something like this, you’ll cast a wide net as painlessly as possible. If I were writing this story, my very first step would be to go to Weblogs.com, do a search on “Kaycee,” and when I find sites that mention her name a lot, I’d read the posts to get an idea of whether there was any relationship, and if I find any indication, e-mail that person. I may e-mail 100 people. But it only takes three sources to make a story.

Will the reporter honor your wishes, like not printing your full name, or your real name? Quite possibly. I know MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan knew Julie Fullbright’s identity. (Bob taught one of my journalism classes way back when, back when he was a grad student at the University of Missouri. I e-mailed him after his story hit the Web.) He didn’t publish her name–he said her identity couldn’t be confirmed at press time. A white lie? Kind of. But I know Bob didn’t knock on Julie’s door and confirm it. I don’t know whether he called her on the phone and asked if the pictures were her yet still chose to say her identity was unconfirmed. Bob said he wanted to protect her privacy, and knowing Bob, I take him at his word on that. If this was going to turn into a three-ring circus in the press, Bob didn’t want to be the ringmaster. Once her identity became common knowledge, you started seeing her mentioned by name in the news too, and not just on the Weblogging sites.

Chances are very good that the reporter(s) will talk to dozens of people and probably run the best quotes he gets from some of them. For example, I found a nugget in one of Dan Bowman’s messages: “Shelley would really like to know who ate her cookies.” Yes, on one level that’s funny. But baking cookies for someone is a fairly universal act of love, and just about all of us–even baking-challenged superbachelors–can understand the feeling of betrayal when you bake up a batch of cookies and send them to someone, then find out they never got to that person. And if that person didn’t exist at all, it hurts even more.

If you feel like you should give the reporter a piece of information but don’t want to be quoted, use the phrase “off the record.” Most reporters honor that. If you can give them someone else who’ll corroborate what you say, the reporter is even more likely to honor it. Even if that someone else wants to remain anonymous, once three people say something, a reporter can pretty much count it as fact. And since there is some danger of retribution, a reporter will honor that. Most reporters have a soft spot in their hearts for people in danger.

I know you’re nervous about talking about this with a reporter, because I was a crime reporter. Being taken for money is one thing. People don’t like to talk about that because they don’t like to think of themselves as suckers. I know that. Any reporter you’re likely to talk to knows that. But being taken for love is entirely different. People are far less likely to talk about that. Any reporter you’re likely to talk to knows that too. All too well. He or she isn’t likely to do anything to hack you off when good sources are hard to find.

Why is the press taking this angle? Well, the root word of the word “news” is “new.” This is a very old story by news standards. This is the only angle left to take, and the national media has probably stopped caring. If it turns out that more than $1,000,000 worth of gifts were sent to Kaycee, then it’ll become a national story again. If a few hundred people sent postcards and cookies and trinkets, I doubt you’ll hear about it anywhere but in Kansas and Oklahoma newspapers. But in rural Kansas and Oklahoma, anything new that comes about in this case is news.

Why can’t the reporter just read your Weblog? There’s a decent chance s/he already has. But the reporter will want to know how you feel about this now. (That “new” thing again.) And no one wants to print exactly the same quote some other paper did. If you interview the person yourself, your chances of having verbatim quotes lessen.

Is the reporter in cahoots with the FBI or local law enforcement agencies? Probably not. That would be a conflict of interest. It crosses the boundary between reporting news and creating news.

And how can you tell if a reporter is legit? Do a Web search on the reporter’s name. Chances are it’ll show up somewhere. I did a Google search on the reporter’s name in this case, and the first hit had his name, his employer’s name, his editor’s name, and his newspaper’s phone number. If worse came to worse, I could call that number and ask for him. If he’s not there, you can ask whoever answers the phone if the reporter is working on a story along those lines. There’s no guarantee that person will know, but reporters do talk to one another, and future stories do come up in newsroom meetings.

Hopefully that helps people see this thing from a reporter’s perspective. And I suspect that’s probably the last I’ll talk about Kaycee here–the story seems to be losing momentum and people seem to be moving on. And that’s a good thing.

SPAM from Macromedia regarding Flash; Neatgear NICs; Crash course

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

MAILBAG:
From: “bsprowl”
Subject: Spam ?? from Macromedia regarding Flash

I keep getting offers to down load Macromedia’s Flash. These aren’t e-mail type spam; a window pops up and asks if you want to download it.

I have find it very annoying to get these regularly. I have searched on it and find it will cost $399.00 plus tax and shipping for this web authoring tool after the trail period runs out.

Well duh, that’s expensive and I don’t want to write using it; I use Arachnophia (sp?) which is freeware, saving over $400 for the small bit of web development that I do.

There are also some security issues that I don’t want to deal with (although how a glorified text editor can cause security problems seems insane, the FAQs lead me to believe that it can happen.)

But why do I keep getting offers to download it from so many sites. The latest is weather.com, who you would think would not have ads of this type. And the ad pops up several times as I open the radar map and every time I refresh the map it pops up two or three more times.

I have tried to see if this spam is somehow tied to my computer and have used some of Steve Gibson’s tools ( grc.com ) and updated my virus definitions, etc., to eliminate or reduce it if it is hidden or my system. I found nothing.

Any suggestions?

Bob
~~~~~
I know exactly what’s going on. (My site isn’t bugging you about that, is it? If it is, Vinny and Guido will be knocking on a couple of people’s doors because off the top of my head I can’t think of anything I hate more than Flash and my site’s not *supposed* to be using it….) There’s nothing wrong with your computer. You’re getting that question because so many sites use Flash; and most sites, if they detect you don’t have the free Flash plug-in, offer to let you download it. You’d be downloading the free unlimited-use plug-in rather than some trial version of the $399 package.

But Flash animations are annoying (and mostly used by really blinky and obnoxious ads) so I don’t like installing it. I also don’t like the stupid dialog boxes (or sites that install it without asking permission, as some do). When a site offers to install Flash, I add it to the Restricted Sites zone (Tools, Internet Options, Security, then click Restricted Sites, then click Sites, then add, say, www.weather.com to the list). That shuts ’em up, unless they also use ActiveX, in which case IE will pop up a dialog box saying the page may not render properly. But at least they’ll quit bugging you about Flash.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “Bob”
Subject: Re[2]: Spam ?? from Macromedia regarding Flash

Hello Dave,

Oh. Now I feel stupid for bothering you.

I never noticed Flash or Macromedia before this. I don’t really want to install it but I would like the weather maps to update automatically and also to show the past several hours.

I guess I’ll do a backup to CDW and then install it. I don’t have a lot on my system, the C: drive only has about 590 MB so it will fit on a single CD. Then if it’s a problem I can just go back to the original system.

I really am wasting that drive but then none of mine are full. I don’t download music, that’s why I have my stereo; I don’t even have a speaker plugged into my computer.

I don’t play DVDs; that’s what the VCR is for (although I haven’t used it more than once since I brought it; I don’t even know were the nearest video rental place is located.)

A year or two ago I tried to install the latest release of the Asteroids game which I though might be fun but after downloading half a dozen files from several sites (I need something called Direct X) it won’t run and neither would anything else. I tried it on several of my systems from an old 486 with DOS 6 and Window 3.11 to a system with a PII 450 and Windows 2K. I’ve never gotten a game more complex that Mahjongg to run on anything besides my old Atari, so it must be me.

I spend a lot of time reading and I like paperbacks so I don’t download books either. I do have a database of all of the books I’ve read in the last five plus years. And that is linked to my Palm so I no longer buy a book I have already read.

I find your sight to be most useful concerning computer technology and read it everyday. While most of the other daynoter’s are interesting, they are not nearly as useful. I really don’t care what they ate, etc.

Thanks again,

Bob
~~~~~
No problem, I’m sure you aren’t the first to have that question, and I’m sure others are asking, “How do I keep this #&%$ website from telling me to download Flash?” If not today, someday someone will want the answer to that question.

Most recent games do require DirectX, which you can download from here. If the DirectX version is too old, games will complain. The safest way to get a game running, if you’re willing to invest the time, is to build up a system, install Windows clean, then install the current version of DirectX, then install the game. That may be more trouble than you’re willing to go to.

I chuckled as I read the rest of your mail. About two years ago, a box of stuff showed up in my boss’s cube. Nobody knows where it came from. There was some ancient computer stuff, and there was some REALLY ancient computer stuff. One of them was a CompuServe manual, and I could tell from the logo and the hairstyles and tie widths that this thing was from 1984 at the very latest. I flipped through it and chuckled at the words that suggested 1200 baud was something new, and when my boss walked in, I held it up and said, “Now this is a relic from a time when computers were computers, and not washing machines and stereos and VCRs and TVs and fax machines and toasters.”

“You sound bitter.”

“No, just practical.”

I remember my Amiga’s simple elegance. Yes, it invented multimedia, but it knew what it was, and that was a computer, and it did a good job of being one. And I miss that.

And thanks for your compliments of the site. I try to be useful, and entertaining, and compelling. I don’t always succeed, but enough people come back that I guess I succeed often enough. I know Pournelle’s a better writer than I am, and both he and Thompson have a much deeper depth of knowledge than I do (they’ve also had more time to accumulate it). So I do the best I can, and try to make it as easy as possible here for people to find the stuff they do like.

Thanks for writing.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “Steve DeLassus”
Subject: Neatgear NICs

OK, what’s the difference betwen a Netgear FA310 and an FA311? At the price mwave is hawking them, I am ready to pick up 3…
~~~~~
The FA310 uses the classic DEC Tulip chipset near and dear to all Linux
distros’ hearts. The FA311 uses a NatSemi chipset that only very recent
distros know what to do with. The FA311 should be fine with Windows boxes,
and it’s supposed to be fine with Mandrake 8.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “Gordon Pullar”
Subject: Re Crash Course

Hi, I have just read your article in this months “Computer shopper” I am having trouble re-formatting my hard drive (which previously had WIN98SE on it and worked well!) I used FDISK( Got from WIN98 then WIN98SE.) to create a Primary DOS partition,using the whole disk,6.4 Gig. After that I reformated it, it now freezes at writing the FAT table,that’s if I get that far,4 times out of 5 using a boot disk,(I have tried several from differnet PC’s) It gets as far as “verifying pool data” and then freezes.I have checked the HDD drive out with Seagates own diagnostic software and all is OK.(Funny it always boots OK with the seagate software “Seatools”) Changed the IDE cable to the hard drive.I have flashed the BIOS with the latest version.

Is there anything else I could be missing??

Giga-byte GA 5AX motherboard
AMD K6 2 500 Mhz CPU
256 Mb pc100 Ram
Seagate 6.4 Gig ST36451A
HDD Generic video card

Regards

Gordon Pullar
~~~~~
First thing I’d do would be to try to get it to boot off a floppy, then type FDISK /MBR. Both of the problems you’re describing sound like a corrupted MBR, and I don’t think partitioning the drive will zero that out for you. If that doesn’t work, try zeroing out the entire MBR with the MBRwork utility (www.terabyteunlimited.com).

Failing that, I’d try using SeaTools to either low-level format or zero out the drive. Usually after doing that, a finicky drive will work just fine.

Bringing the Duron forward

Dave Farquhar General , ,

And my Duron is alive. Right now it’s an all-SCSI system, with a Plextor UltraPlex 40max and a 4.3 GB Seagate Medalist SCSI HD. It smokes. Any time I can turn on Show Window Contents While Dragging and play back full-motion video in Media Player while violently moving the window around the screen and the playback remains smooth, I’m impressed.
The floppy drives don’t work right because I somehow managed to mangle the cable, but I’ll replace it. One of these days. I’ve got a few spare floppy cables hanging around somewhere.

It’s running Windows 2000. I wanted a fast, reliable office suite, so I installed Office 95. Yes, five. It’s nice, stays out of my way, loads really fast, doesn’t crash much, and has some semblence of an idea of distinction between an OS and an application.

I dual-booted it with Mandrake 7.2 (I haven’t downloaded 8 yet). It’s nice. It’s quick. I made this post from Konqueror under Mandrake 7.2.

Look out City, Suburban Boy’s coming to visit!

Dave Farquhar General ,

St. Louis makes a huge distinction between St. Louis City and St. Louis County, much like most cities I’ve visited. One thing I’ll say for the City: Being older, it has a whole lot more character. The St. Louis suburbs are, well, for the most part pre-fab, cookie-cutter, chain-infested boroughs. An outsider would have a hard time telling the difference between Mehlville and Oakville. It takes some looking to find a building more than 50 or 60 years old, and chances are few of the buildings you do find will still be standing in 60 years. I live in the county because I work in the county, and the City taxes you if you live in the City but work in the county–the intent of that law is to punish executives who work in the City but live in ritzy suburbs like Clayton or Ladue or Town & Country, but young professionals like me who live in the city because we like it but who happen to be employed in the county take a tax hit. Really, that kind of living should be encouraged–we’re bringing suburban money into the city, and during rush hour we’re driving against traffic, lessening congestion. And young professionals tend to eat out a lot and spend lots of money. If anything, there should be a slight tax incentive to live in the city and work in the county. But, once again, there are obviously issues involved here that are beyond the capacity of my little brain.
So I now live in the suburbs. But I prefer the City because I like character, and St. Louis is an old enough city to have some character (Europeans will scoff at that, but consider our standards–and really, you can develop some character in 150-200 years).

I’m meeting two friends for lunch later today. Both of them live in the City. One asked where to meet and where to go. I didn’t suggest Burger King in Oakville. But, typical of males, none of us could decide where to go, so I piped in. “Well, aren’t we just the bastions of decisiveness. Look, I’m Suburban Boy. There are great places in both of your neighborhoods, but I don’t know what they are. I’ll defer to your better judgment.”

Well, there’s a deli within a mile or two of where one of them lives that’s supposed to be out of this world. So that’s where we’re going. I know, in this day and age Subway has totally homogenized our idea of a deli, so a good local deli, when you can find one, is a delight. Two local chains used to have locations near where I work. There was Ruma’s, in Concord Village, which was good, and there was Amighetti’s in Crestwood, which was to die for. Both locations are now a Quizno’s. Quizno’s isn’t bad but you can’t get a giant pickle there like you could at Ruma’s, and there’s nothing on Earth that compares to Amighetti’s bread–you could cook yourself up a big ol’ hunk o’ tire and put it on Amighetti’s bread and it’d taste good, if not fabulous. And it didn’t hurt that the girls who worked there were all drop-dead gorgeous. Man, I miss that place. St. Louis has a great Italian heritage, and we’re willing to sell it all out to Subway and Quizno’s.

So.. A neighborhood deli where I can eat outside and converse with two really cool people… Sounds great to me.