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.

It’s just about upgrade time.

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Well, I’ve got a new FIC AZ-11 board and Duron-750 CPU waiting for me to do something with it. The AZ-11 is $65 (up $5 from when I bought it) at www.gpscomputersvcs.com; the Duron-750 retail is $50 (down $5 from when I bit) but the OEM chip is 33 lousy bucks. I think the retail kit is a good deal, since you get a longer warranty and you know you have an AMD-approved fan. Shipping was $10.50. Nice deal.
Over at Directron.com, you get a good selection of cases and power supplies. And you can get a Diamond Stealth S540 video card for $28 (my forum readers already knew that–hint hint). So, let’s see. Figure $200 for a case, power supply, motherboard, CPU, fan, and video card. All you need is memory, hard drive, floppy drive, and incidentals like an OS, keyboard and mouse and maybe a NIC. So you can have a perfectly respectable system for around $400, but it’ll scale nicely too if you want more. I know my P2-350 at work tends to hover at around 60% CPU usage, so a Duron-750 is way more than necessary for much of what I do, but it’s nice to have some CPU power in reserve.

First impressions of the AZ-11: It’s obviously a modified microATX design. There’s a placeholder for onboard video, which the KT133 chipset lacks (but the KM133, usually used on microATX boards, has). The leftmost 1.5″ of the board is mostly unfinished. Chop that off and it looks like a standard microATX board. It’s not the ideal board, but at $65 you’re getting FIC respectability at a PC Chips price. What do you want for 65 bucks?

With the Gigabyte GA-7DX now selling in the $150 range and Crucial PC2100 memory selling at PC133 prices, DDR makes sense if you’re building an entirely new system. If you want to upgrade something old on the cheap, an AZ-11 and a low-end Duron is a mighty big step up for $125-$150. It wasn’t that long ago that a 4-meg stick of memory cost that much.

And on another note (the CPU): What they say about the fans is true. Be very careful clipping on the fan, and once you get it on, leave it alone. It’s a really tight fit, so I can see why the hardware sites warn against crushing the CPU core. Frankly I’d be afraid to take the fan off the chip.

I’m also a little concerned about the known VIA KT133 problems. There are reports of data corruption on high-speed IDE drives, and apparently use of an SB Live! card makes them worse. And of course I’m going to keep my SB Live! in my fastest system in case I want to do voice recognition.

I just read today that the newest VIA 4-in-1 driver fixes that problem. But I’m thinking seriously about avoiding the problem by putting a SCSI controller and drive on the system. I wonder how many of the infamous IBM 75GXP problems may not have been caused by this. I know the KT133, SB Live!, and IBM 75GXP were an extremely compelling and popular hardware combination because it gave you so much bang for the buck.

Even if I don’t use a SCSI drive and controller, I’ll probably put a Promise Ultra66 in there since it’s known to be a stable, mature, and robust solution and I’ll have plenty of PCI slots available for it.

A small favor…

Dave Farquhar General

For those of you who are praying people, I have a favor to ask. My good friend Jennifer e-mailed me tonight and asked me to pray for her sister, Erin, who is pregnant with her first child and having complications. I don’t know very many details and I wouldn’t understand them if I did. They’re doing a c-section in the morning, but they’ve got her on monitors all night. Please join me in praying for the safety of both of them, and for reassurance and sanity for her husband, Duane, and their extended family.

Kaycee has passed on…

Dave Farquhar General

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

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

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

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

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

School’s out, school’s out!

Dave Farquhar General

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

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

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

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

Classes are for appeasing middle management.

Dave Farquhar General

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

Hello from the land of great barbecue

Dave Farquhar General , ,

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

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

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