SiS rises from the ashes, and tries to bring AMD and DDR with it

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Well, I’m back from Bible study (I was teaching on one of those things that can change your life, so I put all kinds of pressure on myself, and I have no idea whether I delivered), but we won’t talk about that right now. No surprises on the Daynotes circuit today; the Weblogs circuit is mostly talking about Kaycee still. I think I’m done with that. I haven’t had time (or will) to go do the cable re-routing necessary to get my new Duron-700 working perfectly.
So, what to talk about…?

How about DDR chipsets?

VIA makes more DDR chipsets than anyone else, and they’ve surprised everyone during the past 18 months, producing chipsets that were much better than anyone expected while Intel produced chipset after chipset that was, for the most part, far worse than anyone’s come to expect of them. Current Intel chipsets work, but they’ve yet to deliver a truly worthy successor to the classic BX chipset. But so far, VIA’s DDR chipsets so far have been disappointing, which makes me wonder if inability to follow up is contagious.

AMD makes a pretty good DDR chipset–at least it gives better performance than PC133 SDRAM, unlike ALi’s DDR chipset and VIA’s DDR chipsets most of the time, and, to be fair, unlike Rambus chipsets–but finding a motherboard based on it can be difficult. AMD’s not very interested in producing the 760, and it shows.

So what’s the DDR chipset to get for AMD CPUs?

Right now, it’s the AMD 760. But very soon, it looks like it’ll be the SiS 735.

Yes, I know, it sounds like I’ve been smoking crack. SiS has a well-deserved reputation for making underachieving chipsets. Just ask Steve DeLassus what he thinks of his SiS 530 integrated video. He’ll throw an Okidata 180 printer at you (ouch) and then tell you it’s almost as bad as the service you get from GPS Computer Services, that’s what.

And the SiS 735 probably isn’t ready for release just yet, as the problems discussed in this review seem to indicate–though whether the problem is with the chipset, the prototype board, or the BIOS, who knows. But the benchmarks indicate the SiS 735 is about 5 percent faster than the AMD 760-based FIC AD11 while costing much less.

Yes, the AD11 isn’t the best-performing 760 board out there, but then again, prototypes aren’t known for stellar performance either. So this sounds promising. Based on these results, it would seem that an Asus or an Abit could produce a very nice-performing board with the SiS735. And as for SiS’s ability to produce a good chipset? Well, these are strange times. Two years ago, AMD bet the company on the Athlon. They had a new, expensive fab they couldn’t afford, dwindling market share and reputation, and a history of botching product releases. If they did everything right and Intel did everything wrong, they had a chance of surviving. Well, AMD executed while Intel fumbled and fumbled. And VIA executed. Intel got caught off guard, and while they’re still king of the hill, they’re embarrassed.

And there was a time, about five or six years ago, when SiS chipsets were actually very sought after. SiS was the first company to produce a chipset that truly brought out the best in Cyrix CPUs, and people who were concerned with raw applications performance sought them out, because the SiS/Cyrix combination outperformed anything Intel was making at the time.

Can SiS rise again? Maybe. It looks like we’re about to find out.

Integrity and fiction on the Web

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

I had thoughts that I thought best not shared, but then I read Frank McPherson’s excellent take on the hoax, so maybe I have something more to share after all. I’d really rather let the topic die, but since it appears there are still things for us to learn, let’s learn. Take consolation in that we can learn without me ever saying that name that begins with “K.” OK?
Here’s Frank:

For most of the last three or four months Dave Winer has been promoting the idea of amateur journalism. His point being that today’s mainstream media cannot be trusted, and does nothing but lie. Dave feels he can’t trust writers of BigPubs because they could be bought out by some person or company. He questions their integrity.

I’m trained as a professional journalist. I’ve seen the corruption from the inside. But I also know the source of the corruption, and that individuals inside can rise above it. I have classmates and former colleagues all over the place. CNet’s Troy Wolverton was in my New Media class. MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan taught my Editing class. The Associated Press’ David A. Lieb was my first editor in college. The AP’s Justin Hyde entrusted a newspaper column to me at the tender age of 19. My mentor as a columnist was Andrew Blasko, now a writer/pr contact/editor (strange combination) at The Heritage Foundation. USA Today’s Elizabeth McKinley was in my Editorial Writing class.

Those are just the people whose bylines I’ve seen recently, or who I remember for one reason or another.

I trust these people. I don’t always agree with them. I trust their ability to get the facts straight, partly because some of them were among the people who helped me learn to get the facts straight, and all of them learned to get the facts straight from the same people I did. Plus I spent a lot of time with them. I know they have integrity because I saw it. Not only do I trust them to get the story straight, but I wouldn’t think twice about tossing my car keys to any of them.

I also believe in amateur journalism. As far as I’m concerned, Mike Royko was the greatest journalist of all time. You know how Royko learned journalism? He went to the Chicago Public Library, grabbed every book on journalism and newswriting he could find, and spent a weekend reading them. He learned the principles and ethics of journalism, combined that with a God-given knack for writing that he may or may not have realized he had, and became a legend.

The key word Frank McPherson brought up is integrity. The individuals I mentioned have integrity. The National Enquirer lacks integrity. NBC’s Dateline lacks integrity. Debbie Swenson lacks integrity. Corporations are inherently no more and no less capable of integrity than individuals.

But corporations may have a slight edge in ability to maintain their integrity, because of accountability. Corporations, being made up of individuals, have a certain amount of accountability built in. Individuals can get accountability or they can reject it. I know if I say something that makes people wonder if I’ve been smoking crack, Dan Bowman or Dustin Cook or Pete Moore or a host of others will call me on it. They’ll chime in with their twenty bucks’ worth (that’s the price most people put on my words, and theirs should be worth what mine are), the truth will come out, and we’ll all be the better for it.

And that doesn’t just apply to my writing. When I teach a Bible study, there are usually two masters’ students among the audience. Those guys are slumming. While there are many preachers who have less formal training than I have, Matt and John know far more than I do. I have no idea what they can learn from me. But I appreciate them being there, because if I’m wrong, I know they’ll speak up, and they know I expect them to.

Integrity and accountability aren’t so much something you get so much as they are something you live. And yes, you should look for them, and if someone appears to lack them, then no, you shouldn’t trust them, not even for the sports scores. Don’t give them the eyeballs the advertisers look for.

Now, Frank brought up Bo Leuf, who brought up the question of fiction. Bo observed that when fiction writing first appears in a new medium, it looks like fact, and outrages people. And some people still can’t tell the difference years later. Having lived next door to people who truly believed the X Files were real, I know this firsthand.

Personally, I love the idea of a fictional weblog. We’ve been trying for years to figure out ways to exploit the unique capabilities of the Internet, and the weblog lets us do that.

The idea hit me as I read the end of this Oklahoman article. “I think [Swenson] wanted to tell a story. But she should have written a book or something.” Those were the words of Julie Fullbright, the local hero who unknowingly gave her face to the fictional character whose name I promised not to mention. That’s the kind of quotable quote a journalist lives for. I read those words just before I left work for the day, and I’ve been thinking about them all night.

I thought she was right then, and I think she’s still right now.

Now, having written a book, and having fallen victim to a publisher’s whims, I know what it’s like to try to write a book. I know what it’s like to try to get someone to publish it. And I know what it’s like to try to get someone to buy it. The difficulty increases with each step of that wretched process.

So, I’m sitting here with a novel about half-written, and no desire to have anything to do with a publisher until I’ve managed to acquire some clout. Now I don’t know for sure what having clout feels like, but I’m pretty sure I’ll know it when I feel it. But I can set up another weblog. I’m comfortable with that. I can give it the following subhead: “A work of fiction by David L. Farquhar.” The novel occurs in the past. That makes life easy. I just put it on its own server, with the clock set back. When today’s entry is dated 1992 or whenever, that makes it look a whole lot more like fiction.

Besides, Murel, my cubicle neighbor, has been telling me for months that I’d end up writing my novel in pieces here and one day I’d just have to tie it all together. I think he was on to something.

I won’t make any money, but that’s OK. I didn’t make any money off the one and a half books I wrote either. At least this time I won’t go in there with that expectation. If something happens that makes it profitable down the road, fine. End aside.

The character can be no more compelling than the author. That was the problem I ran into when I initially wrote the novel. I was trying to write about a 19-year-old, but I wasn’t finished being 19 myself yet. I’m not certain that at 26 I have enough perspective. But I have more than I did then.

And yes, sometimes life is better than fiction. But fiction intertwined with life kicks royal booty. The best thing about The Great Gatsby is that Jay Gatsby’s fears and insecurities were F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fears and insecurities. Jay Gatsby made his money by running drugstores that sold other stuff out the back room. F. Scott Fitzgerald made his money peddling words. But Jay Gatsby was all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s worst fears wrapped into a character. He was vulnerable and honest. Vulnerable and honest people are compelling. Heck, vulnerable and dishonest people can be compelling.

So do I launch another weblog? I’m severely tempted. This isn’t the time to do it. I need to get my server in order and start getting content migrated to this site from its predecessors and make sure everything’s working smoothly. That’ll take a while yet.

But I know the formula. I have the plot, and the plot’s captivated everyone I’ve tossed it out to. I have some characters, and they’re far more compelling than the characters in the 1994-95 draft because I’ve spent the past seven years getting to know them. A few pieces still have to come together. But I think I really want to try this experiment.

More Like This: “/cgi-bin/search.cgi?terms=weblogs&case=insensitive&boolean=and”>Weblogs Fiction Personal

An untrustworthy vendor

Dave Farquhar Vendors

First things first. About a month ago I ordered an FIC AZ11 from GPS Computers. One of my readers recommended them because he found Duron motherboard/CPU combos for a Backstreet Boys song there. I agreed. The price was unbelievable.It took about three weeks, but I got my order.

Steve DeLassus found their service to be worse than the very worst Backstreet Boys song.

He ordered a motherboard a couple of days after I did. They charged his credit card on May 1. But Steve still hasn’t received the order. He never received the courtesy of a tracking number (neither did I) or even confirmation e-mail (neither did I). My order just showed up one day. After that, I was wary of doing business with them again, but I wanted to see how Steve’s experience went.

Steve had a couple of e-mail exchanges with Terry Holmes, GPS’ president. Holmes promised to expedite the order, so he should have received it on or around May 17. That didn’t happen. Since then, Steve’s repeated efforts to contact them via e-mail and telephone have failed.

Their initials are pretty appropriate. Their service reminds me of a gigantic pile of s–uh, never mind.

I’m not gonna call them crooks, so I’ll just let this suffice: Steve gets ripped off so you don’t have to.

And I notice Mwave.com has the same board for $72. That’s still a good price. They’re charging a bit more for the CPUs, but when you actually ship all of your orders and not just half of them, your margins are a bit lower, so I guess they have to charge more.

Fun with gasoline… Wait, that sounds bad. How to save gasoline.

Dave Farquhar Saving money ,

Gas prices are driving me up the wall. I’m glad I opted for a Dodge Neon and not a Dodge Avenger last year when I bought a car, since the Neon gets better gas mileage, but right now the VW Jetta is tempting me and is 45 MPG sounds really sweet (my Neon gets 25-30 driving locally and about 35 on trips). My lease is up in two years, so I’ll get it right then. Until then, I’ve gotta do what I can. Yes, small cars are more dangerous than big cars, but if most people drove smaller cars and didn’t drive like they have a death wish, that wouldn’t be such a big deal now, would it?

So I went hunting for gas-saving tips. I found a bunch. Nineteen, I think.

First things first: Bookmark gaspricewatch.com. Punch in a zip code, and it’ll give you the lowest fuel prices within a radius you define. More importantly, it lets you watch trends. More on that in a second. Also bookmark www.stretcher.com. They’ve got some gas saving tips (not as many as I’m about to give you) along with every other thing imaginable.

1. Buy the same brand and type of gas whenever possible. Your car’s computer adjusts to the fuel you use. Using a different brand of gas every tankful doesn’t give the computer a chance to adjust, so buying at a different station to save a penny a gallon can end up costing you money.

2. Inflate your tires properly, and check them once a month. You can assume you’re going to lose 1 PSI per month. There’s a sticker on your door that gives the manufacturer’s recommendations. Go with the higher number if one’s given. A tire’s maximum PSI is listed on the rim of the tire itself. Don’t inflate to the maximum, because you gain 1 PSI for every 10 degrees’ temperature increase, but if there’s a discrepancy between the tire maker and the car maker, meeting them halfway will improve gas mileage. And make sure your wheels are properly aligned.

3. If your car’s going to idle for a minute or longer, such as at a drive-thru, shut off the engine. It takes less fuel to start the engine up again than it does to idle for just 10 seconds. Better yet, park and go inside.

4. Use the thinnest-viscosity oil your car manufacturer recommends, usually 5W-30. A low-viscosity synthetic can improve your gas mileage by 3 percent.

5. Replace your air and gas filters periodically–usually once a year.

6. Drive slower. Every one mile per hour over 55 MPH decreases your gas mileage by 1-2 percent.

7. Avoid sudden acceleration and braking, and use your cruise control whenever possible. Aggressive driving–tailgating, weaving, speeding–decreases drive times by about four percent on average, but can increase fuel consumption by 39 percent.

8. Clean out your car. Excessive weight harms gas mileage. Each 100 pounds in your car decreases gas mileage by about one-half mile per gallon.

9. Replace your spark plugs on time, and replace them with high-performance spark plugs, such as Bosch Platinums, and gap them properly. Platinum plugs don’t wear out as quickly, and while the jury is out whether platinum plugs inherently give better gas mileage, a set of old platinums will have an edge over a set of old cheap plugs. Two bad plugs can decrease your gas mileage by 20 percent.

10. Use your air conditioner on the highway, since open windows increase drag. Turn off the air conditioner and roll down your windows in stop-and-go traffic. And in the winter, using the defroster decreases your gas mileage, although using the heater won’t.

11. It only takes 10 seconds in warm weather and 30 seconds in cold weather for most engines to warm up. Warming up longer than that burns fuel without giving much other benefit.

12. Use overdrive if your car has it.

13. Avoid gimmicks that claim to increase gas mileage. Simple maintenance makes a bigger difference than anything else you can do.

14. This should go without saying, but don’t drive out of your way looking for the lowest gas price. Remember the size of your tank–that’s how much a fill-up at a penny a gallon less will save you. Driving across town in stop-and-go traffic to save a penny a gallon won’t help you. Check gas prices when you’re running an errand anyway, and if there’s a good price on your brand near where you’re going anyway, fill up then.

15. Dirt and gravel roads can decrease gas mileage by 30 percent.

16. Drive at steady speeds in the city. Stoplights are usually timed very close to the speed limit, so you can catch most of the green lights by driving legally.

17. Use snow tires in the winter; the increased traction improves gas mileage. But in the off months, the deeper tread hurts gas mileage.

18. When you buy tires, radials can improve gas mileage by about 3 percent.

19. Don’t use 4-wheel-drive unless necessary.

And that’s all I’ve got.

An evening with my one true love

Dave Farquhar General ,

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America
has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a
blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.
This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all
that once was good, and that could be again.”
–James Earl Jones, in “Field of Dreams”

After the last couple of days, with a Monday that had too much happening for my little brain to handle, and a Tuesday fighting with a laptop that was convinced I’d just invented wireless long-distance DSL (not to mention trying to deal with the sudden flood of pictures from my past), I needed to get away. I needed to spend some time with the love of my life.
I can’t help it. I’m a romantic fool. When I want to escape, I try, somehow, some way, to a broadcast of my beloved Kansas City Royals. At the very least, I turn on ESPN’s gamecast on the Web and follow the game, and usually they break my heart yet again.

I was going to say it’s my own damn fault, but maybe it’s not. I can’t help what I am. I’m Scottish. Clan Farquharson. Our motto: “Fide et Fortitudine.” That’s Gaelic for “Fidelity with fortitude.” Today we might say, “Loyalty with guts.” That’s why I’m a Royals fan in St. Louis. Or at least that sounds good.

In my younger days, I’d go out and play myself. I never was all that good, but I poured every last drop of my heart and soul into playing the game, and I’ve got enough of both that I didn’t spend too much time on the bench. My coaches always knew I’d give 200 percent if I had it, or, more likely, I’d die trying.

And I miss my younger days, the days when I was naive enough to think that baseball was life, the days when my biggest concern was whether I’d be playing left field or second base the next game. Well, the days when I could play honest-to-goodness baseball are long gone. But when I got wind of a softball team being organized at work, I signed up.

Our first practice was yesterday. I’ve played in exactly two softball games since 1996. By 1996, by skills had deterriorated to the point that I was strictly a second-string catcher. I could still hit, but I was a contact hitter with limited speed, and in the field I had limited range and my glove skills were shot. And my greatest skill as a catcher, by far, was talking up the pitcher and getting on the opposing team’s nerves.

Well, I’m probably in worse shape now than I was then, but, betting that my peers have deterriorated more than I have over the past five years (a fairly safe bet, seeing as I’ve pretty much always laid off the beer), I’m attempting a comeback anyway.

Practice went well. In a three-inning practice game, I went two for two with a pair of singles. The first was a close play at first, or should have been, but the first baseman didn’t handle the throw. I ran to second, but the second baseman fumbled, and by the time the shortstop managed to get to the ball, I was rounding third. What the heck, I thought, and I kept on going. The shortstop fired to the plate, the catcher took the throw cleanly, turned, and just managed to nick my lower right leg with the tag a half-step from the plate. Some people thought I was safe, but he got me.

My second hit was a looping single to right. I rounded first, trying to draw a throw, but I couldn’t get the right fielder to bite. The next play was a grounder to short. The shortstop threw to second for the force–I never had much of a chance. The second baseman was a female. Mac user. In my younger days, I’d have flattened the second baseman, just for being the second baseman and in my way. I didn’t this time. It was an intrasquad game, after all. And I guess I’ve mellowed out with age.

In pre-game BP, I ws trying to be a doubles and triples hitter, but once we actually had players on the field, I remembered that in softball, you don’t really want to do that. Unless you’re an honest power hitter (I’m not, at least not at the beginning of the season, and my wrists are still extremely weak so I may never hit for much power again), you just want to put the ball in play and force the other team to make mistakes. I think the game’s more fun that way anyway. I love being scrappy and disruptive.

In the field, I made two putouts. I played an inning at second, an inning in right, and an inning in right center. Nothing happened at second. In right, I got a sharp fly ball with no one on. I don’t even remember the last time I played right field, but I made the grab. That throw to second was harder to make than I remembered it being. In right-center, I pulled in a lazy fly ball from someone I expected to have more power than that. There was a runner on first, but she pretty much stayed put. I probably wasn’t a threat to throw her out anyway, but I don’t think anyone else knew that. When you make the catches, people tend to assume you have a good arm too, until you prove otherwise.

I’m not the slowest player on the team by a longshot, which is good. I’ve never been all that good defensively, but I think I know why now. I was talking to a coach last year, and he pointed out that fielding is a totally different mentality. You’ve gotta relax out there, then when the ball comes your direction, run to it, watch it, and grab it with two hands. I always used to tense up in the field, and I’m betting that was the problem. After trying to leg out that infield homer (actually it would have been a single and a three-base error), I was too tired to tense up, and I actually made all the plays.

Yeah, I’ll be sore in the morning, and probably the next morning too. But that’s good. I need a reminder of how much fun I had last night, trying to score on my own infield single.

Confound it, I shoulda slid.

More Like This: Baseball Softball Personal

Speeding up the Computer

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

MAILBAG:
From: “Andre Vospette”
Subject: What can I do in my Windows folder to speed up my computer

Dear Dave: I’ve read your column ever since you published your book. I’m visiting my father-in-law in Wyoming, and his Presario 400 mhz is acting like a 486 –and not a fast one, either. I’ve done everything I feel confident doing, but the big step I want to take is rearranging the applet/applications in the Windows directory. I left my copy of your book at home, so I can’t remember which programs I can move to a c:windowsbackup folder. Can you help me out here? If I pull this off I’ll reach rockstar status in my in-laws’ eyes.

Sincerely,

Andre Vospette BJ 91, University of Missouri (photojournalism sequence)
~~~~~

Hi Andre,

What you can move depends a bit. Certainly move *.txt, *.bak, *.old, *.grp, *.—, *.log, *.001, *.002, –that kind of stuff into a backups folder. I also move all the BMP and WAV files elsewhere. There are some programs you can move into C:WindowsCommand, like ping, telnet, tracert, welcome, ftp, route, arp… Don’t get too aggressive there; I’ve heard of rare occasions where moving all the files I listed can cause problems. Clearing that dead wood out should make a huge difference. Be sure to defrag later.

I hope that helps. And thanks for writing, it’s always good to hear from another Mizzou grad, especially a journalism grad.

~~~~~~~~~~

I feel this sudden urge to prove I really exist…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

Do one thing every day that scares you.
Sing.
Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts.
Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.
–Mary Schmich, “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen”

I want to prove I really exist, and I’m trying to figure out how I can do it. What are the tell-tale signs of a hoax? Lack of pictures and a claim of hating to have your picture taken. Well, I hate having my picture taken. Gatermann’s got an album full of pictures of me holding my hands in front of my face. He collects ’em or something. I know of four pictures of me floating around on the Web, total, and two of them were scans off newsprint.

Another sign: Lots of people claiming to have talked to me via e-mail or even over the phone, but not in person. Dan Bowman and I have talked a lot, and I consider him a close friend. Other Daynoters or Webloggers? Tom Syroid and I used to talk on the phone. But that’s it. I’ve had conversations over e-mail with Doc Jim, and with JHR, and with Matt Beland, and with Brian Bilbrey. But who’s seen me in person? Well, Steve DeLassus and Tom Gatermann, both of whom I claim to have known for more than 10 years, but I could have fabricated them too.

Debilitating problem? Well, carpal tunnel syndrome is very small potatoes compared to leukemia, but it is a death sentence for a writer. I disappeared for about six months over it.

Really, it’s pretty hard to prove I’m not a hoax. I can link to my old writings from college that are online, circa 1996, (I published under “Dave Farquhar” in those days) and of course there’s that O’Reilly book and those Computer Shopper UK articles. Those will establish a consistency of writing style. My relatives that I mention don’t Weblog, and their writing styles are pretty distinct from mine–both my mom and sister are pretty good writers but I’ve got a lot of quirks they don’t. And neither have made many appearances on these pages.

I’m going to hold back a lot of personal details, because someone I hadn’t spoken to in about 10 months freaked me out back in January and, after reading my weblogs in their entirety, recited to me virtually every detail of my life based on what I’d written and a few educated guesses. Some of the details were wrong, but not enough of them were.

But if anyone really wants to check, I was born in Kansas City, Mo. I lived a lot of places, but most notably in Farmington, Mo., from 1983 to 1988, and in Fenton, Mo., from 1988 to 1993 (and I continued to call Fenton my home through 1996 when I was in college). I graduated from Lutheran High School South, St. Louis, in 1993. I graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, with a degree in journalism (no minor) in 1997. I was employed by the University of Missouri in 1997 and 1998, so I’m even listed in the 1998 issue of the Official Manual of the State of Missouri. All of this should be pretty easily verifiable.

Or you can just take me at my word. It comes down to honesty, and futility. Why would anyone hoax a 20-something systems administrator? And why would they publish a book and a bunch of magazine articles under my name? It would be pointless. A pile of computer tips isn’t a compelling enough story to fake.

So what is compelling? A struggle. This past weekend’s struggle with a system upgrade showed I was human and don’t really care if people think I’m a computer genius or not. I guess that’s kind of compelling, because most of us can’t get our computers working quite right. Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen endeared himself to thousands when he admitted in a magazine interview that his home PC crashes a lot and he never did get his printer working right. But an underdog is better. Noah Grey is a whole lot more compelling than me, because we’ve all felt a little shy sometimes, so his agoraphobia is something we can somewhat relate to. He can reach out to the world and we can share a little in his struggle and root for him. And Kaycee Nicole Swenson, well, she was just too good to be true–a 19-year-old who was wise and mature well beyond her years, a great writer, insightful, broken-hearted, sincere… Every male over 35 wanted her to be his daughter. As for the males under 35, she’d have made a great kid sister. But I suspect a good percentage of them would have wanted to date her, or someone just like her.

I don’t remember if this was exactly how she put it, but an old classmate once observed that the Internet allows us to safely pick our friends from a pool of millions, and usually we can find people who at least seem to be a whole lot more interesting (or better matches for us) than the people we can meet face-to-face, and we can quickly and painlessly get new ones and dispose of them on a whim. She wrote those words in 1997, but aren’t they a perfect description of Kaycee and the rest of the Weblogging phenomenon?

Steve DeLassus raised an interesting point this afternoon. He asked why a 19-year-old dying of leukemia or complications from leukemia would weblog at all. Wouldn’t she have better things to do? That’s an honest question, but I know if something like that were happening to me, I’d weblog. It’s cathartic, for one thing. When I was struggling with depression, I wrote about it in my newspaper column. I found it a whole lot easier to just pour my heart and soul into my word processor than to talk to someone about what I was feeling. I needed to get it out of my system, but you never know how people are going to react. When you can detach yourself from the words, it doesn’t matter. Some will scoff, but you won’t know. Some will totally understand, and you won’t know. Others will totally get it, and they’ll reach out to you, and then it’s all totally worth it. You know there’s something to them, because they had to make an effort to find your words, probably, and then they had to make an effort to communicate with you. You find special people that way.

Yeah, it’s kinda selfish. But it’s safe, and when you’re vulnerable, you need safe.

I’ve given zero enlightenment into the whole Kaycee Nicole hoax. I know a lot of people are hurting. I never got attached to her, because I only read her a couple of times a month. Over the weekend, I went back to Week 1 and started reading from there, to see what I missed. I guess I figured catching the reruns was better than missing it entirely. And I started to understand her appeal a bit more. And now I understand the hurt. It’s not nice to play with people’s hearts.

And some people will probably put up their walls and vow never to be hurt that way again. It’d be hard not to blame them.

But I hope they don’t. Because the only thing worse than the feeling after someone played with your heart is the feeling of being alone.

More Like This: Personal Weblogs

Christianity that annoys me

Dave Farquhar General ,

Something’s really bugging me. Keep in mind that yesterday was Sunday. I’m gonna talk about Christians who annoy me. So if there are no Christians who annoy you, go play in the forums or scroll down and read about my motherboard upgrade misadventures or something.
Anyone left? Darn. I guess I’ll just talk to myself then.

I really should protect confidences here, so I’m gonna make up some names. I like Gordon, Stewart, and Andy.

OK, so I had a conversation the other day. Actually it was more like a debate. Gordon was talking about how great Benny Hinn is. Now, Benny Hinn is a televangelist known largely for faith healings. I’ve repressed most of what else I know about him–I know I had to know him for a religious studies class I took in college. Gordon could tell I wasn’t intimately familiar with Benny Hinn, so he stepped down to my level and explained to me what Benny Hinn has taught him.

Gordon won’t like the way I put this at all, but essentially he believes that Christians are better than everyone else, and that the rules that apply to the rest of the world don’t apply to Christians. If you’re sick, you go to God and ask him to heal you. OK, so far so good. But Gordon argues that God has to heal you. If God doesn’t heal you, then that means you don’t have enough faith.

He talked about having prayed for someone who died recently, and how he and the others who prayed for this person would now have to deal with that.

I was getting really annoyed, but I kept my mouth shut. Stewart and Andy jumped in. One of them brought up the Apostle Paul. It’s hard to imagine anyone with greater faith than Paul. Or, for that matter, anyone who had a greater impact on Christianity before or since. I would argue that Paul did more for Christianity than anyone other than Jesus Christ himself. Jesus founded it, then Paul ran with it.

Paul wrote, of course, of having a “thorn in the flesh,” which God refused to remove. God’s answer was, “My grace is sufficient for you.” Gordon jumped all over that. “That thorn was a messenger of Satan, sent to harrass and torment Paul. It wasn’t physical.”

So we looked it up. Indeed, most of our translations said “messenger,” which implies spoken harrassment. But the original Greek word used is “angelos.” It doesn’t take a linguistics genius to figure out what that word means. An angel from Satan, of course, is a demon, and when the New Testament speaks of driving out demons, frequently they manifested themselves in physical ailments. And the words “thorn in the flesh” sure sound physical. Gordon said that Benny Hinn went back to the original Hebrew and Aramaic and assures us that this wasn’t a physical ailment.

I pointed out to Gordon that the New Testament was originally written in Greek. Now, since this is a second source, maybe Benny Hinn knows that the New Testament was written in Greek and it was Gordon’s mistake. But I certainly won’t rule out the possibility that Benny Hinn doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and if Gordon can’t keep Biblical languages straight I know he’s no great Biblical scholar. (For the record, the Old Testament is written in Hebrew, with a few short quotations in Aramaic in later books, while the New Testament was written in Greek.)

We argued a bit about the thorn in the flesh and what that could mean. Paul’s eyesight was notoriously bad. He closed out his letter to the Galatians by observing how large he had to write when he wrote himself (Paul’s letters were often transcribed). We know from 2 Corinthians 10 that Paul was much more highly regarded as a writer than as a speaker. Some deduce from that letter that it went beyond that, and that Paul may have had a speech impediment. And isn’t it suspicious that Paul kept a doctor with him so much of the time? (St. Luke, author of the Gospel of Luke and probably also the author of Acts, was one of Paul’s most frequent companions. He was a doctor by trade.)

Galatians 4:13-15 refers to an illness, described as “revolting,” involving his eyes.

We can go on and on about Paul. The most important thing is this: Here was a man who had a lot of things wrong with him, in spite of how much he prayed, and he came to accept it.

Gordon shook his head through this whole thing. “There is not one place in the entire Bible where someone asked for healing and was told no,” he said.

Well, we have one recorded instance where Paul asked for something and was turned down, and it sure looks like he was asking for healing. Gordon said that’s an invalid interpretation. That was when I piped up. “There are at least three interpretations of that verse, precisely because it’s vague enough that we can’t prove one of them over the others. This sounds to me like starting with a premise–that God has to heal–and then when you find a verse that may go against that premise, you take the interpretation you like and instantly call all the other possible interpretations invalid.”

Both Stewart and Andy shot me looks at that one. I saw Andy laugh a little.

“I’ve heard many studies on this, and you can’t disprove any of them,” Gordon said.

“Then cite them,” I said. He never did.

I alluded to Kaycee. (This was before the hoax came to light… Argh.) I told the short version–being clinically dead twice, beating leukemia, then having liver failure. With her, I’d come to expect a miracle, so I pretty much expected this one. Then she died, after so many people asked God to heal her. But let’s think about that for a minute. She’s no longer in any pain. If she wants to ask God a question, she can walk right up to Him and ask it. She’s living in the mansion Jesus promised all believers. The cares of this world are gone. Isn’t that the ultimate healing? What else do you want? (Of course God won’t heal people who don’t exist, but the principle works.)

“You are God’s son,” he said, pointing to me forcefully. “Now, if you had a son, would you want him to be sick, or hurt? Not if you were a good parent!”

Well, of course not. But consider this: We live in a fallen world. We all make mistakes (except maybe Gordon). We have to live with the consequences of those mistakes. Sometimes we make mistakes without even knowing it. I lived for 26 years without knowing that the oils we fry food in quickly become carcinogenic. Will years of eating fast food cause me to get cancer one day? Possibly.

Will God forgive me for not always eating as healthy as I should? He already has. Will He spare me from the consequences of not eating healthy? He might. But He’s under no obligation to do so. Even if I am His son.

Imagine me having this conversation with my biological parents when I was 16: “Gee, Mom and Dad, I wrecked my car. I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, but I’m OK. Now will you buy a car to replace the one I just wrecked?”

Some parents would do that. But good parents won’t let their sons and daughters off that easily. Life without consequences is life without learning.

The God Gordon believes in isn’t a very good parent. That God lets you off the hook, but conditionally. But He doesn’t spell out the conditions very well. You have to have the faith of a mustard seed. How do you measure the faith of a mustard seed?

I sure am glad Gordon doesn’t know I struggle with acne in the winter time, that I’m allergic to cats, that I have a trick elbow, that I have a history of problems with my wrists, that I’m prone to insomnia, or anything else that’s wrong with me. What would he think of me then? I’m sure Gordon already thinks I have the faith of a weakling.

For whatever reason, Gordon segued into the Gospel of Prosperity–the annoying teaching that once you become a Christian, God will make you rich, or at least protect you from financial harm. Gordon beckoned back to a recent hailstorm that caused a lot of damage in the northern St. Louis metro area. “We prayed that God would put a shield around our car, to protect it, so we wouldn’t have to pay that $500 deductible, and indeed, God protected our car. It had only very minor damage.”

Stewart piped in with a classic argument. “What if there was someone at the body shop who needed to be witnessed to? A lot of good could potentially come from that misfortune. Maybe God was trying to lead you to someone so they could go to heaven.”

“You’d carry your Bible to the body shop and watch for someone? That’s noble of you. But that’s God’s responsibility to see to it that someone talks to them,” Gordon snapped. He looked around the room. “Would you agree to $500 worth of damage to your car to get someone to heaven?” he asked me.

“If it meant someone would be in heaven who otherwise wouldn’t, I don’t care if there’s a thousand dollars’ worth of damage to my car. It’s just a car,” I said.

Andy and Stewart smiled and nodded in agreement. Gordon looked shocked. “You really think that? Then your heart’s in the right place, but you don’t have to think like that.”

I don’t know what I looked like, but I sure felt disgusted. Here’s someone who professes love of God and mankind, but if God’s plan to save someone’s soul is going to cause him some inconvenience or minor hardship, then God has to change it.

No wonder so many people want to have nothing to do with Christians. Christians are supposed to love one another, but often the vocal ones love their material things more than they love people.

I didn’t cite Phillippians 4:10-12 right then and there (I cited it later in another context–Stewart and Andy caught it but I don’t think Gordon did), but St. Paul dealt with a lot of inconvenience and a great deal of financial hardship, and he learned to not only live with it, but even to not let it change his attitude. If there was a Gospel of Prosperity at the time (I think that’s a product of the United States’ wretched theology), Paul sure didn’t believe it.

I think we’ve all seen those bumper stickers that say, “If heaven is full of Christians I really don’t want to go.” I understood that after this conversation. Gordon believes God is the creator of the universe, yes, but he’s not willing to trust God’s wisdom or perspective. He certainly won’t hesitate to boss God around, and he believes that if he says the right words and believes the right thing strongly enough, God has to do what he says.

Wait a minute. Gordon thinks the creator of the universe, He Who Knoweth All Things, He Whose Name Should Not Even Be Spoken, is subject to his (note the lowercase “h” there) desires and whims. So if he’s above God, then where does that put me?

Not that I care. I know God knows all things. I know I don’t know very much. Fortunately, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it’s better to defer to someone who knows more than you know.

It’s a good thing people like Gordon are in the minority. The results of their arrogance sure makes life more difficult for the rest of us.

More Like This: Christianity

My Duron: It’s alive! It’s alive!

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Solving the boot problem. I don’t know how I managed to forget this stuff. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.
I used an external SCSI hard drive to build up this system so I could get up and running without touching my old hard drives. I’ll want to juggle my data a bit. Of course it’s a lot more elegant to keep everything on a server drive. I never said I did everything right in this project. Actually I don’t think I said I did anything right in this project.

Well, the SCSI drive wouldn’t boot, no matter what I did. I even swapped out controllers. At one point I started wondering about termination. The drive worked, it just wouldn’t boot. So I recabled everything, making sure I had a terminator block installed, and using cables and terminators that I knew worked.

Rule #1: When a system acts goofy and there’s SCSI involved, always suspect cables and termination first.

That didn’t fix the problem, so I gave up on SCSI for a while. I tried several different hard drives in my new system. I’ve got a collection of smallish drives, most of which have some old DOS installed. None would boot. I disabled boot sector virus protection in the BIOS, and then one of the drives finally booted.

Rule #2: When building a system, find the boot sector virus protection option in your BIOS and disable it. If you want that feature, re-enable it after you get your OS installed. Just about every OS diddles with the boot sector during installation, which will make your BIOS very upset. Evidently, changing hard drives midstream can make your BIOS upset as well.

So then I put another drive in, one whose contents I totally didn’t care about. It wouldn’t boot. Finally I came to my senses and ran FDISK. It immediately gave me a warning: No partitions are set active. So that’s why endless SYSing wouldn’t make that drive boot, even after disabling the boot sector virus paranoia!

Rule #3: Whenever a disk acts funny, immediately run FDISK or Partition Magic or some other disk partitioning utility and look for goofy stuff, like no active partition set.

Then I took a look at my external SCSI drive. I’d forgotten I formatted that drive as one big extended drive–it didn’t have a primary partition. That’s why it wouldn’t boot. That’s a sneaky trick for adding a drive to an existing system without throwing off other drive letters, but then of course the drive won’t boot or anything. That kind of setup is great for portable data storage, but it makes the drive unbootable.

Rule #4: See rule #3.

Rule #5: Usually when you do something goofy to a seldom-used component, you have a perfectly good reason for doing it but you’ll forget what you did and why by the time you need to use it again. Write yourself notes and put them on oddly-configured hardware so you don’t rip your hair out the next time you try to use it.

Oh yeah, one more thing: This Duron-750 with 256 MB and an ancient SCSI hard drive (I think it’s a 4500 RPM model) running Windows 2000 really smokes. It boots in about a minute and everything’s silky smooth. Literally the only thing that keeps me from ordering a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive for it this second is noise.

Building my Duron

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

I broke my own rule last night. Twice. You should never take down a working system to build its replacement. Get the replacement system working, then take down the system to be upgraded. If you’re cannibalizing parts from the old system, get the new one going as much as you can before you start stealing parts from the old.
Well, I never got around to ordering more cases and video cards, and I had this really fast board and CPU sitting here doing nothing while a decrepit K6-2 that’s needed reinstalling for two and a half years (another thing I never got around to) sat around taking up space. So I took down the K6-2, only to find it had PC66 SDRAM in it. I vaguely remember how that came about. So I took down my Celeron-400, which I thought had PC133 SDRAM in it. I was half right. It had a 128 MB Crucial PC100 stick and a 128 MB Crucial PC133 stick. Decisions, decisions. I put the PC66 SDRAM in the Celeron (it wasn’t happy about that–it took me 15 minutes to get those DIMMs to seat properly) and took both 128s and put them in the new PC.

I re-assembled the Celeron and hoped for the best. It powered right up and booted. It’s not as nice of a system now, with 128 megs instead of 256, but the speed doesn’t matter due to the Celeron’s 66 MHz bus.

So I tore down the K6-2, lifted out the old motherboard, dropped in the new FIC AZ-11 freshly configured with a Duron-750 and 256 MB of SDRAM set to run at 100 MHz (if I’d had two PC133 sticks I could have clocked it at 133 MHz and still set the FSB to 100 MHz–this AZ11 BIOS is very nice). I reinstalled my PCI SCSI, network, and sound cards and my STB Velocity 128 video card–yeah, it’s ancient but I love that card, and it’s still fabulous for a lot of tasks–and connected up all the front panel LEDs and switches. While I had the system open I decided to pull the CD-RW so I could put it in an external enclosure. Since I didn’t have the faceplate anymore for my PCP&C midtower, I scrounged around for something to put in that bay. A 12X NEC SCSI CD-ROM? Marginally useful. What else have I got? Hey, is that a 5.25″ 1.2MB floppy drive I spy? Why not? I haven’t had a 5.25″ drive in a production system in about seven years. And hey, I like retro. So I installed that drive.

I plugged the system into my KVM switch, crossed my fingers, applied power, and got nothing. So I ripped the system back apart and double-checked everything. It looked good to me. But wait… Why do I have two leads marked “Power Switch?” My manual for my case is long gone, so I went to PCP&C’s web site. That brown/white lead is reserved for future use. OK, ignore it. Hook everything up, still dead. So I crack out the manual, since the silkscreen on the board obviously is either not enough or wrong. Oh. The speaker and power connect one way, and the others, including power, connect perpendicular to that. How odd. I reconnected the leads, powered up, and everything sounded normal. Nice.

I connected up an external SCSI hard drive, because I didn’t want to touch any of the old drives until the system was up and running. I made a DOS boot disk with my SCSI drivers on it (since this SCSI card can’t boot off a SCSI CD), but I didn’t get too far getting a modern OS installed. The SCSI drive kept acting weird and refusing to boot.

Instead of really troubleshooting it, I opened up my drawer of 5.25″ floppies and started playing around. I found my old DOS 3.2 floppy. I went into the BIOS, swapped the floppy drives, threw in DOS 3.2, and… to my amazement, that disk still worked. My fire-breathing dragon booted into MS-DOS 3.2. So then I tried my Commodore-branded MS-DOS 3.3. That worked too. It was funny seeing Commodore copyrights all over the place…

I’ll have to see if I can get things working right later this weekend.