1980s

Darrell Porter is still worthy of respect

Dave Farquhar Baseball

The Jackson County medical examiner announced Monday that Darrell Porter died of side effects from the recreational use of cocaine.
I should have recognized the tell-tale signs. I didn’t. I didn’t want to.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think any less of Darrell Porter now that it’s public knowledge that he had a lapse more than 22 years after he was released from rehab. He was one of my heroes because of the way he played baseball, the way he conducted himself off the field, and the way he confronted his problems head-on and never backed down. Recent events only serve to prove Darrell Porter was a human being after all.

Darrell Porter left home late last Monday afternoon with an odd story. He wanted to go get a newspaper and go to a park and read it. He went to a park 30 minutes away from home–a place he liked to go to fish.

He told his wife he was going to get a newspaper. Whitey Herzog said it looked like he wanted to go fishing. But why would Darrell Porter lie about going fishing?

I don’t know anything about the psychology behind that kind of behavior. What I do know is my dad used to exhibit the same kind of behavior. He’d disappear for hours at a time, and often the story wasn’t straight. He’d tell Mom one thing and tell me another. Sometimes he really was doing what he said he was doing. Sometimes he was drinking.

My dad was an alcoholic. He gained his ultimate victory over his addiction Nov. 6, 1994. That was the day he died.

Likewise, Darrell Porter gained the ultimate victory over his addiction Aug. 5, 2002.

His own words are telling. “God humbled me. I fear Him and I know He loves me, and I’m trying to get where He wants me. I wouldn’t say I’ve overcome anything yet, but I’m on the right track.”

Those words are vague enough to give room to hide in–words that reluctantly admit something less than total victory. But he was right. He was on the right track. In the late 1970s, his drug habit exhibited itself in fits of rage and paranoia, fits that often hurt others, not only emotionally but sometimes physically.

In 2002, it manifested itself as something of a double life–a moment of weakness, isolated from family and home and other people. Irresponsible? Yes. He shouldn’t have been operating a motor vehicle on cocaine. But he knew enough to go off somewhere to indulge his desire where he couldn’t harm anyone but himself.

Why not reach out for help again? Wouldn’t that have made him look even stronger? Those are easy questions for me to ask. I’m not living what he lived. But the hardest words for any human being to utter are, “I’m sorry.” I think the second hardest to utter are, “Help me.” It was easier to count the costs, figure out how to minimize the possible damage, indulge the moment of weakness, and when it was over, it was over. Go back to daily life. Yes, there was guilt to live with. But at least it was the guilt of harming himself, rather than the double guilt of harming himself and harming his family.

Do I think this was a regular occurrence? Frankly it’s none of my business. And I’ll never know. The case is closed. There will be no investigation into how Darrell Porter got his cocaine, or how frequently he used it, or what else he might have used.

Do I think any less of God, seeing that Darrell Porter was a strong and outspoken Christian and yet lived with and ultimately died from this struggle? No. God forgives us and He strengthens us, as we can see from Darrell Porter’s actions. In his moment of weakness in 2002, he still showed more strength than in 1979. There were no brawls. No one else was hurt. Is God capable of completely curing us from our addictions? Yes. Does He always? No. Why? I don’t know.

I don’t believe Darrell Porter was a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is something Christians are frequently accused of, and sometimes rightly so. But our problems don’t all completely go away when we convert. Sometimes they get worse. Let’s face it: Darrell Porter was a big target. If I’m the devil and my goal is to thwart God and His people, who am I going to pay more attention to? A hard-drinking, pill-popping, cocaine-sniffing catcher who’s batting .208? No. I’ve already got him where I want him. What about a community pillar who spends most of his time talking to people about addiction and overcoming it and the role God should play in your life, whether you’re addicted or not? That second guy is going to get a whole lot more of my time and resources. Of course the temptation never went away. He lived with it every single day. And I think that as time rolled on, further and futher from 1980, the intensity probably only grew worse. Cocaine has zero appeal to me, but I’m sure at times it meant the world to him. And whether that lapse happened once in his lifetime or once every couple of weeks, it doesn’t make much difference in my mind.

What’s important isn’t that Darrell Porter relapsed at least once. What’s important was that he faced his problem and he got it under control. Not perfect control. But control nonetheless.

There are too many stories about people who shook their addictions and somehow turned into Superman and never touched the stuff again. Those kinds of stories are encouraging when you’re first trying to overcome. But when you slip and fall, eventually you get tired of hearing about it. Somehow, since that person reached a goal that you can’t, it makes you less of a person in your own mind.

In his book Snap Me Perfect, Darrell Porter recounted a lapse he had in the early 1980s–probably 1981 or 1982–with beer. He picked himself back up again and tried to carry on.

That’s why I looked up to him for 22 years. And that’s why that won’t change now.

The pundits are wrong about Apple’s defection

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Remember the days when knowing something about computers was a prerequisite for writing about them?
ZDNet’s David Coursey continues to astound me. Yesterday he wondered aloud what Apple could do to keep OS X from running on standard PCs if Apple were to ditch the PowerPC line for an x86-based CPU, or to keep Windows from running on Apple Macs if they became x86-based.

I’d link to the editorial but it’s really not worth the minimal effort it would take.

First, there’s the question of whether it’s even necessary for Apple to migrate. Charlie pointed out that Apple remains profitable. It has 5% of the market, but that’s beside the point. They’re making money. People use Apple Macs for a variety of reasons, and those reasons seem to vary, but speed rarely seems to be the clinching factor. A decade ago, the fastest Mac money could buy was an Amiga with Mac emulation hardware–an Amiga clocked at the same speed would run Mac OS and related software about 10% faster than the real thing. And in 1993, Intel pulled ahead of Motorola in the speed race. Intel had 486s running as fast as 66 MHz, while Motorola’s 68040 topped out at 40 MHz. Apple jumped to the PowerPC line, whose clock rate pretty much kept up with the Pentium line until the last couple of years. While the PowerPCs would occasionally beat an x86 at some benchmark or another, the speed was more a point of advocacy than anything else. When a Mac user quoted one benchmark only to be countered by another benchmark that made the PowerPC look bad, the Mac user just shrugged and moved on to some other advocacy point.

Now that the megahertz gap has become the gigahertz gap, the Mac doesn’t look especially good on paper next to an equivalently priced PC. Apple could close the gigahertz gap and shave a hundred bucks or two off the price of the Mac by leaving Motorola at the altar and shacking up with Intel or AMD. And that’s why every pundit seems to expect the change to happen.

But Steve Jobs won’t do anything unless he thinks it’ll get him something. And Apple offers a highly styled, high-priced, anti-establishment machine. Hippie computers, yuppie price. Well, that was especially true of the now-defunct Flower Power and Blue Dalmation iMacs.

But if Apple puts Intel Inside, some of that anti-establishment lustre goes away. That’s not enough to make or break the deal.

But breaking compatibility with the few million G3- and G4-based Macs already out there might be. The software vendors aren’t going to appreciate the change. Now Apple’s been jerking the software vendors around for years, but a computer is worthless without software. Foisting an instruction set change on them isn’t something Apple can do lightly. And Steve Jobs knows that.

I’m not saying a change won’t happen. But it’s not the sure deal most pundits seem to think it is. More likely, Apple is just pulling a Dell. You know the Dell maneuver. Dell is the only PC vendor that uses Intel CPUs exclusively. But Dell holds routine talks with AMD and shows the guest book signatures to Intel occasionally. Being the last dance partner gives Dell leverage in negotiating with Intel.

I think Apple’s doing the same thing. Apple’s in a stronger negotiating position with Motorola if Steve Jobs can casually mention he’s been playing around with Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs in the labs and really likes what he sees.

But eventually Motorola might decide the CPU business isn’t profitable enough to be worth messing with, or it might decide that it’s a lot easier and more profitable to market the PowerPC as a set of brains for things like printers and routers. Or Apple might decide the gigahertz gap is getting too wide and defect. I’d put the odds of a divorce somewhere below 50 percent. I think I’ll see an AMD CPU in a Mac before I’ll see it in a Dell, but I don’t think either event will happen next year.

But what if it does? Will Apple have to go to AMD and have them design a custom, slightly incompatible CPU as David Coursey hypothesizes?

Worm sweat. Remember the early 1980s, when there were dozens of machines that had Intel CPUs and even ran MS-DOS, yet were, at best, only slightly IBM compatible? OK, David Coursey doesn’t, so I can’t hold it against you if you don’t. But trust me. They existed, and they infuriated a lot of people. There were subtle differences that kept IBM-compatible software from running unmodified. Sometimes the end user could work around those differences, but more often than not, they couldn’t.

All Apple has to do is continue designing their motherboards the way they always have. The Mac ROM bears very little resemblance to the standard PC BIOS. The Mac’s boot block and partition table are all different. If Mac OS X continues to look for those things, it’ll never boot on a standard PC, even if the CPU is the same.

The same differences that keep Mac OS X off of Dells will also keep Windows off Macs. Windows could be modified to compensate for those differences, and there’s a precedent for that–Windows NT 4.0 originally ran on Intel, MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha CPUs. I used to know someone who swore he ran the PowerPC versions of Windows NT 3.51 and even Windows NT 4.0 natively on a PowerPC-based Mac. NT 3.51 would install on a Mac of comparable vintage, he said. And while NT 4.0 wouldn’t, he said you could upgrade from 3.51 to 4.0 and it would work.

I’m not sure I believe either claim, but you can search Usenet on Google and find plenty of people who ran the PowerPC version of NT on IBM and Motorola workstations. And guess what? Even though those workstations had PowerPC CPUs, they didn’t have a prayer of running Mac OS, for lack of a Mac ROM.

Windows 2000 and XP were exclusively x86-based (although there were beta versions of 2000 for the Alpha), but adjusting to accomodate an x86-based Mac would be much easier than adjusting to another CPU architecture. Would Microsoft go to the trouble just to get at the remaining 5% of the market? Probably. But it’s not guaranteed. And Apple could turn it into a game of leapfrog by modifying its ROM with every machine release. It already does that anyway.

The problem’s a whole lot easier than Coursey thinks.

St. Louis just lost more than a great catcher

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , ,

Darrell Porter went out to get a newspaper, and he never came home.
That night, it rained in St. Louis. It was as if the earth was weeping. As it should. Now a catcher has gone home to play baseball with late Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile. But when this world lost Darrell Porter, it lost more than a former MVP and three-time All-Star. It lost one of the finest examples of a human being who ever played the game. Porter overcame drug and alcohol addiction in 1980. Today, people hold your hand when you’re famous and addicted. In 1980, they just looked down on you.

Darrell Porter didn’t let that stop him. In spring training in 1980, former Dodgers pitcher and recovered alcoholic Don Newcombe paid the team a visit. He asked 10 questions, and said if you answered yes to three of them, you might have a problem with drugs or alcohol. Porter answered yes to all 10 questions. So he checked himself into a rehab center. He cleaned up. He started going to church and got right with God. And he dedicated his life to trying to keep others from making the same mistakes he made. He figured he became famous for a reason, and he ought to use his fame and name recognition for something.

So he quietly went out helping people. In 1984, he wrote a book. We’re not talking a tell-all book like Jose Canseco plans to write. Don’t get me wrong, Porter told all. But he told about the person he knew best: himself. With brutal honesty. It’s been years since I read it, but I remember him talking frankly about getting together with his buddies and snorting cocaine through rolled-up $100 bills and drinking like tomorrow would never come. He talked about checking into rehab in 1980, and he talked about lapsing once, stopping at a gas station on the way home one day, and buying a beer. He left the empty bottle in his car. Part of him wanted his wife to find it. She did.

He was candid about what drugs and alcohol did to his career. In 1979, he had the finest year a Royals catcher ever had, batting .291 with 20 home runs and driving in 112. Those aren’t just good numbers for a catcher, those are good numbers for Johnny Bench. But that was the end of the road. He peaked at age 27. He played another 8 years, but his career numbers were much more pedestrian. For the rest of his career, he was an average defensive catcher and an average hitter who could occasionally pop one out of the park. His old self only surfaced when the game was on the line. He often told people his drug and alcohol abuse destroyed his career. That’s a bit harsh–he played for 16 years, eight on drugs and eight off–but it’s easy to see that something kept him from being everything he could be.

Porter spoke to one of the Christian groups on campus at the University of Missouri while I was a student there. I’d thought about going, because Porter had been one of my heroes growing up. For some reason I didn’t, and I don’t remember the reason. It might have been that I had a test, or a story deadline. Or it might have been something stupid. Like a story deadline.

That was what Porter’s life after baseball was like. He quietly volunteered his time wherever he was needed. He didn’t go looking for more fame.

A fan recounted meeting Porter recently at a game on a St. Louis Post-Dispatch discussion board. He asked Porter to sign an old poster. He signed it, and then the fan asked him to write “1982 World Series MVP” under his name. The fan recalled that Porter was very flattered to be asked to write that, maybe even flattered that the fan remembered that. Porter wasn’t one to advertise his three All-Star appearances, or the two MVP awards he won in 1982.

Since Porter didn’t go running around, looking for chances to make appearances and introducing himself as “Darrell Porter, three-time All-Star catcher for the Kansas City Royals and 1982 National League Championship Series and 1982 World Series MVP for the St. Louis Cardinals,” not a lot of people remember him. But the people who do remember him will miss him.

Porter showed up at the Royals’ spring training this year, some 22 years after he left the team and 15 years after he retired from baseball. He wanted to learn broadcasting. Broadcasters Denny Matthews and Ryan Lefebvre spent some time with him and he impressed them. He worked hard, bought his own equipment, brought it with him, and learned as much as he could from the professionals. If he was going to go into broadcasting, it was going to be because he was a good sportscaster, not because he was Darrell Porter, three-time All-Star catcher for the Kansas City Royals and 1982 National League Championship Series MVP and 1982 World Series MVP for the St. Louis Cardinals. Matthews and Lefebvre wanted to put him on the air this year.

Nobody knows exactly what happened. Porter told his wife he was going to get a newspaper and go to a park to read it. That I understand. If you’re interested in broadcasting, you keep up on the news. I use the Internet to do that, but if you’re a 50-year-old retired baseball player, you might not want to use the Internet. Besides, it’s hard to get Internet access in a park. Why would someone go to a park to read a newspaper in 97-degree heat? Remember, Darrell Porter was a catcher, and he spent most of his career on Astroturf. At Royals Stadium and Busch Stadium in the early 1980s, it could reach 110 degrees or more on the playing surface in the summer. Porter was bearing that heat with all that padding.

And once a baseball player, always a baseball player. He probably just wanted to be outside, away from telephones, away from everything else. If you’re not a baseball player, you don’t understand. I understand.

What I don’t understand is which park he chose to visit. He lived in Lee’s Summit, but he drove to a park half an hour away. Maybe he just couldn’t make up his mind. I remember driving around for half an hour one night back in March looking for someplace to run sprints. But I ended up at a park about five miles from home. I guess it sort of makes sense. But only sort of.

Porter got to the park, but he ran his car off the road. There was a tree stump alongside that wasn’t visible in the grass, and his car got stuck. At 5:26 pm, someone drove past, saw the car on the side of the road, and saw a man lying next to it. The driver alerted police. Police arrived soon afterward and found Darrell Porter, dead. The coroner speculates he was trying to free his car and was overcome by the heat.

He left behind a wife and three kids: a 20-year-old daughter and two teenaged sons. They’re going to have a hard time dealing with this. Their dad was just 50. He was supposed to have 25 years left in him. Now he’s gone, and no one knows why, and although they might not want to admit it, they’re at the ages when they probably need him most. I was 19 when my dad died at 51.

There are a few people out there like Darrell Porter. Genuinely nice people, real people, honest, down-to-earth people. People who want more than anything else just to make a difference, who come in and take charge of a bad situation and leave it a better place when they move on. You have to look for those kinds of people, but they’re out there.

It’s a shame to lose people like that, especially at such a cruelly young age. You can never have too many of those.

Darrell, I’m sorry I didn’t hit that home run for you tonight. I was trying too hard. I’m sure you understand. But I’m going to pay you the highest compliment I know, and when I say this, I mean it, with everything I’ve got.

We’ll miss you.

The craziest thing I’ve read in a long time

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

I thought the craziest story I’d read this year was a UFO enthusiast’s account of his hunt for a wrecked 1960s vintage spyplane so top-secret you’ve probably never heard of it.
Then I found a link to the story of a teenager who had plans to build a nuclear reactor in his backyard. (Click the printer-friendly link at the bottom of the first page if you want to read it.)

I lived such a sheltered life… Read more

Palladium and You

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk on the Web lately about Palladium. If you don’t have strong feelings about it, it’s probably because you’re not a bleeding-edge computing enthusiast. That’s OK. You’ll hear about it in time.
Basically, Palladium is Microsoft’s initiative to reinvent the PC and make it more secure. There’s a big uproar about it because it reeks of ulterior motives. Some fear Palladium means you will surrender all rights to your PC and cede them to Redmond.

I’m not totally convinced this is a bad thing. Read more

Leave Mike Piazza Alone

Dave Farquhar Baseball , ,

Rumor has it baseball’s most eligible bachelor is gay.
Mike Piazza says he’s not.

That should be the end of it.

Now, if some player came out and said he was gay, he wouldn’t be the first gay baseball player. He probably wouldn’t be the most prominent either. I’ve been told from a reliable source that a baseball superstar who retired in the 1980s and is now in the Hall of Fame is gay. The same source cited another player, not of the same caliber but who played during the same time period, as gay. He’s dropped hints in interviews, but never come out and said he is.

Don’t bother asking me who these players are. I have no reason to out them. I also don’t have three sources, which is the semi-unwritten rule that separates gossip from fact.

We’ve come a long, long way since 1984, when a magazine published an article titled “Reggie Jackson speaks out about his sex life,” and Mike Royko pointed out the absurdity. He’d never thought about Reggie Jackson’s sex life, so he went around asking other people if they’d ever thought of it. One guy asked if he wore his uniform and fielder’s mitt. A woman said no, then asked if he wanted to ask her about Ryne Sandberg. And Royko eventually came to the conclusion that Reggie Jackson’s personal life was Reggie Jackson’s business, and if anyone else cared, well, that was just pathetic.

Brendan Lemon, editor of Out magazine, sparked Piazza rumor by claiming last summer that he was having an affair with a pro baseball player who played on the east coast. He knew when he wrote it that people would think of Piazza, because everyone thinks anyone with his looks and his money ought to be married by now, and if he’s not, it must be because he’s gay.

Has it ever occurred to anybody that maybe Piazza just doesn’t want to be married?

Rumors about my sexuality have followed me my entire life. Well, since puberty. It came to a head in seventh grade. The playground talk that year was at least as bad as anything on South Park and frankly, it bordered on sexual harassment. I was in a combined 7th and 8th grade class, and there was one 8th grader who was as bad as the rest of ’em all put together, but collectively, to these guys, a girl was a collection of pleasure-bearing receptacles. That’s it. Well, that and a pretty decoration to be seen around, hopefully.

I didn’t participate in that. Yeah, I thought about sex as much as the next guy… probably. But someone, somewhere along the way, taught me to keep those thoughts to myself. But since I didn’t hit on or at least gawk at every reasonably attractive female carbon-based being that walked upright and was capable of verbal communication, I didn’t talk about what I wanted to do to them in bed, and since I didn’t boast of having a huge collection of Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler magazines at home, there was only one logical conclusion: Dave’s gay.

(And you thought I was going to say I was the nicest guy in my class. You’re so silly.)

One day the talk turned to one of the prettiest girls in the class. She was a year older than me, blonde, and the object of that biggest loudmouth’s every desire. Actually I think he would have died happy if she’d ever said more than two words to him. Rumor was that she had a thing for me. I’ve never really given any thought to the idea of whether she did or not. Looking back now, maybe she started the rumor just to make the jerk mad, because he hated me more than Roger Clemens hates Mike Piazza. Who knows. But I didn’t give any thought to it. I wasn’t interested. Why? Lots of reasons.

“You’re missing out on a chance of a lifetime,” one of the 8th graders said.

“A chance of a lifetime would be to buy IBM,” I said. (Scout’s honor. That was how I thought in those days. It didn’t make me popular.)

No, I didn’t see it as a chance of a lifetime. And yeah, she was really cute, but not really my type. I had a thing about girls who were taller than me. I got over it, about 10 years later. And she was blonde. I’ve always preferred dark hair and a past. So her hair was the wrong color and she wasn’t old enough to have a past. But even if she’d been the 5’1″ brunette of my dreams, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to date her, because I wasn’t about to date anyone from that town. I knew I was moving that summer, and I didn’t want to miss her.

If those former classmates get together on Friday nights and drink beer and talk about old times, they probably still think I’m gay.

In high school I was supposedly gay. The truth was, I hadn’t figured out how to talk to girls yet. By the time I was 17, I had started to figure out that you’re not supposed to talk to girls, you’re supposed to listen to them. So I dated a little as a senior. But mostly I was interested in getting out of there with as many accolades as I could so I could get into the college I wanted. One of my coworkers told me I could have girls then, or I could go to college and then get a real job and get rich and then have one of the girls really worth having. And he told me he respected my priorities.

Within a couple of months he was in prison but I took what he said to heart anyway. It sounded good. Just because he did all the wrong things didn’t mean he didn’t know what the right things were.

In college I forgot about that whole listen-to-girls thing, and the result was I had a whole lot more success getting my ramblings published than I had getting dates. There were girls I was interested in. Usually the feeling wasn’t mutual. There were girls who were interested in me. It wasn’t until after I’d graduated that I figured out what they were trying to tell me. Not that it mattered. I don’t think I would have known how to respond anyway. I knew a lot more about writing than I knew about starting relationships with girls.

I know at least once someone questioned whether I was gay during that timeframe, but that was a guy who thought The X-Files was a true story, so I didn’t let that bother me.

I’ve had a couple of post-college relationships. It’s been a while since the last of those. I don’t always understand women. I do understand guys. I understand them really well. I understand them so well that I know one thing for certain: I’ll never live with another guy for any extended length of time, unless that guy happens to be my son.

I live alone right now. A longtime friend who I don’t see very often anymore came to visit back in January, and he observed that I was content with that, but he questioned whether I was happy. He was right on both counts. But I’m picky about women. I don’t want another relationship like either of the last two. So I’m deliberately being a lot more picky this time around. And if the rumors want to fly, let them fly. I doubt they will.

So, what’s this have to do with Mike Piazza?

Well, there are a few differences between Mike Piazza and me. Mike Piazza hits a baseball a lot better than I do. I’m nowhere near as big of a crybaby about my annual salary as Mike Piazza was earlier in his career. But the biggest difference between Mike Piazza and me, as far as today’s headlines are concerned, is that gay activists don’t really have anything to gain by having me wear their badge. Yeah, I can write a little, but there are lots of gay guys who know how to write. Mike Piazza has money and notoriety and prestige.

But having walked one of the same roads Piazza walks, I have to offer up another, far less chic possibility or series of possibilities.

Maybe Mike Piazza knows a lot more about hitting a baseball than he knows about maintaining lasting, serious relationships with women.

Maybe Mike Piazza doesn’t want the distraction of a lasting, serious relationship with a woman while he’s trying to concentrate on hitting baseballs and winning a World Series and getting into the Hall of Fame. Like him or hate him, you have to admit Piazza has a lot of drive. And–gasp–some guys’ drive for success is stronger than their sex drive.

Or maybe Mike Piazza’s just being picky. All too many people marry the first person they suspect will say yes. And often, the result of that is that at some point after saying “I do,” they have to take those words back and get lawyers involved and it gets really messy. It affects every aspect of your life and turns you upside down. It would happen a whole lot less frequently if people would just be more picky.

I’ll tell you something else. None of what I’ve written about me was anybody’s business until I decided to write about it.

Likewise, none of what goes on in Mike Piazza’s relationships is anybody’s business until he decides to talk about it. And there’s every possibility that he never will.

Another entry from the Clueless Dept.

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

Someone else who needs to buy a clue. I normally don’t have a problem with John Dvorak, and frequently I actually like his stuff. He’s not as clueless as some people make him out to be. Dvorak’s not as smart as he thinks he is, but one thing I’ve noticed about his critics is that they usually aren’t as smart as they think they are either.
Dvorak’s most recent Modest Proposal is that we fire all the technology ignorami out there and then, essentially, throw away corporate standards, let end-users run anything they bloody well want, and basically make them administrators of their own machines.

I’ve got a real problem with that. Case point: One of my employer’s executives recently brought in his home PC and insisted we get it running with remote access. Only one problem with that: He has Windows XP Home. XP Home’s networking is deliberately crippled, so businesses don’t try to save money by buying it. A sleazy move, but a reality we have to live with. We got it to work somewhat, but not to his satisfaction. He’s mad, but mostly because he doesn’t have any idea what changes went on under the hood in XP and doesn’t know he’s asking the impossible. But he’s perfectly competent using Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. He’s also very comfortable ripping his CDs to MP3 format–he’s got one of the largest MP3 collections in the company. He’s competent technologically. But he has no business with admin rights on his computer.

The same goes for a lot of our users. The record I’ve found for the most spyware-related files installed on a work PC is 87. These aren’t the technical ignorami who are installing this garbage. It’s the people who know how to use their stuff, but they love shareware and freeware. Maybe some of it helps them get their work done. But these people are the first to complain when their system crashes inexplicably. And I’m expected to keep not only the corporate standard apps like M$ Office running, but I’m also expected to support RealPlayer, Webshots, Go!Zilla, Gator, WinAmp, RealJukebox, AOL, and other programs that run ripshod all over the system and frequently break one another (or the apps I’m supposed to support).

If the users were completely responsible for keeping their systems running, that would be one thing. But install all that stuff on one computer and try to keep it running. You won’t have enough time to do your job.

Dvorak argues that people like me should solely be concerned with keeping the network working. That’s fine, but what about when some Luddite decides to ditch all modern apps and bring in an IBM PS/2 running DOS 5.0 and compatible versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect and dBASE? Unless there’s already an Ethernet card in that machine, I won’t be able to network it. And the person who decides a Macintosh SE/30 running System 6.0.8 is where it’s at will have a very difficult time getting on the network and won’t be able to exchange data with anyone else either.

Those scenarios are a bit ridiculous, but I’ve had users who would have done that if they could have. And someone wanting to run XP Home absolutely is not ridiculous, nor uncommon. If my job is to network every known operating system and make those users able to work together in this anarchy, my job has just become impossible.

As much as I would love for people to use Linux in my workplace and something other than Word and Outlook, the anarchy Dvorak is proposing is completely unworkable. It’s many orders of magnitude worse than the current situation.

This is just wrong too. Yes, New Englanders, I know about heartbreak. I’m from Kansas City. At least your Red Sox have posted more than one winning record in the past 10 years.

Anyway, not only are the Royals’ glory years over, they’ve forgotten where their glory years came from. They’ve once again denied Mark Gubicza entry into their Hall of Fame. Who? In the late 1980s, Mark Gubicza was the Royals’ second-best pitcher, behind Bret Saberhagen. Injuries did him in the same as Saberhagen (only a little sooner) but he’s still among their career leaders in wins and strikeouts.

And after spending 13 seasons in a Royals’ uniform, the Royals had a chance to trade Gubicza for hard-hitting DH Chili Davis. But you don’t trade a guy who’s poured his heart and soul into the team for 13 years and stayed completely and totally loyal to it no matter how much it hurt, right? Gubicza said yes. Gubicza went to the GM and told him that if he could make the Royals a better team by trading him, to trade him.

Chili Davis hit 30 home runs for the Royals in 1997. Then he bolted for the Yankees.

Meanwhile, Gubicza blew out his arm for good and the Angels released him. He pitched two games for them.

It takes a great man to tell the team he loves that the best thing he can do for them is to get traded for someone who can help the team more. That was Mark Gubicza. They don’t make ’em like him anymore.

But even more importantly, the immortal Charley Lau was once again denied entry. Who’s he? He was a journeyman catcher who spent his entire career as a backup and whose career batting average was .255, but that was because he had about zero natural ability. He was a genius with the bat, which was how he managed to hit .255. More importantly, Lau was the Royals’ hitting coach in the early 1970s. He spotted some skinny guy who was playing third base because Paul Schaal couldn’t play third base on artificial turf and their first choice to replace him, Frank White, couldn’t play third base at all. This skinny blond fielded just fine, but he was hitting terribly. Lau asked him what he was doing over the All-Star break. The kid said he was going fishing with Buck Martinez. Lau put his foot down. He told him he was going to stay in Kansas City and learn how to hit.

“He changed my stance. I had been standing up there like Carl Yastrzemski, but the next thing I knew I looked like Joe Rudi,” the kid recalled. But he started hitting. By the end of the year, he’d pulled his average up to a very respectable .282.

Soon Lau had every player on the Royals standing at the plate like Joe Rudi, and taking the top hand off the bat after contact with the ball. And the Royals created a mini-dynasty in the American League Western Division.

What was the name of that kid, anyway?

George Brett.

If it hadn’t been for Charley Lau, George Brett would have been nothing. The Royals probably would have never won anything. And they probably wouldn’t be in Kansas City anymore either. Who puts up with 30 years of losing, besides Cubs fans?

Charley Lau belongs in their Hall of Fame. Even if nobody besides George Brett and me remembers who he was.

How to pad your resume while meeting chicks.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Padding your resume while meeting chicks. I got a phone call last night offering me just that. Seriously. I didn’t hang up or ask to be taken off the calling list because it was a friend. Not a male friend with a harebrained, sleazy scheme. It was Jeanne. So it was a female friend with a sleazy scheme.
I guess it helps to know Jeanne. She has the distinction of being the only female friend who’s ever offered to lend me a copy of Playboy. She said she bought it for the articles. One of those articles was an interview with some film hunk. Another article was an interview with Aimee Mann. But I think it was all a diabolical plot to see what it would take to get me to read a copy of Playboy in front of her.

This time, Jeanne’s plotting to get me to serve on a committee. She tells me there are virtually no males on the committee. “Sixty to one, Dave! With odds like those you can’t lose!” she said.

Didn’t I hear someone say that about the Red Sox earlier this year?

Let’s change the subject to something more cheerful. How about if I list my qualifications?

1. I’m a male of the species homo sapiens.
2. I’m a sucker for dogs that are smarter than my former landlords my eighth grade science teacher the creeps who dated my sister when I was in college. That’s not every dog I’ve ever seen, but it’s a sizable percentage.

Gatermann says this is the most pathetic thing Jeanne’s ever asked me to do. And yes, Gatermann was there when Jeanne conned me into reading that magazine in front of her. (Yes, I gave in. I had to know what Aimee Mann had to say about Jewel, OK? And yes, her interview was just that–an interview.)

I serve on several committees, few of which work as well as I’d like, so it’s probably a good idea for me to participate, just to see if anyone else knows how to make a committee work right. The time commitment is small, so it just makes sense. In a sick sort of way.

Or maybe you can just say I’m easily finding ways to justify padding my resume while meeting women.

Harry Connick Jr. One of my coworkers pulled out a package he’d just received from Amazon. “I ordered two Harry Connick Jr. CDs,” he said. “This is what they sent.” He whipped out two CDs. They got that much right. But the CDs he received were (drum roll) The Bee Gees and LeAnn Rhimes.

He talked about how much he likes Harry Connick Jr. and how he has two tickets to go see him in some faraway city and he’s bringing a date.

“That’s what you think those tickets are for,” I said. Then, in my best concert-announcer voice, I said, “One night only! The Bee Gees! With very special guest LeAnn Rhimes!”

He glared at me.

Speaking of annoying… I got mail from someone who claims to have invented the “compressed ramdisk” technique I’ve talked about here and in my book, said something at least mildly disparaging about Andre Moreira–one of the other Windows-in-a-ramdisk pioneers–and he says he’s patented the technique, and wants me to download a trial copy of his software and link to it off my site.

I e-mailed him and asked him to set the record straight. It sounded to me like he’s claiming to have invented the compressed ramdisk–something CP/M owners were doing way back in 1984, if not earlier–and he wants free advertising from me for his commercial product.

Now, I could be wrong about that. I was wrong about OS/2 being the next big thing, after all. But if I’ve got the story more or less right, then the answer is no.

Now how did CP/M owners do compressed ramdisks? You’d just put your must-have utilities and applications into an .LBR file, then you’d run SQ on it to compress it. Then in profile.sub–the CP/M equivalent of autoexec.bat–you copied the archive to M: (CP/M’s built-in ramdisk) and then you decompressed it. In the days when applications were smaller than 64K, you could put your OS’ crucial utilities, plus WordStar and dBASE into a ramdisk and smoke all your neighbors who were running that newfangled MS-DOS.

I rediscovered the technique on my Commodore 128 (which was capable of running CP/M) in the late 1980s and thought I was really hot stuff with my 512K ramdisk.

Anyone who thinks the compressed ramdisk was invented in 1999 or 2000 either doesn’t remember his history or is smoking crack.

SCSI! SCSI vs. IDE is a long debate, almost a religious war, and it always has been. I remember seeing SCSI/IDE debates on BBSs in the early 1990s. Few argued that IDE was better than SCSI, though some did–but when you’re using an 8 MHz bus it doesn’t really matter–but IDE generally was less expensive than SCSI. The difference wasn’t always great. I remember seeing an IDE drive sell for $10 less than the SCSI version. The controller might have cost more, but back in the days when a 40-meg drive would set you back $300, a $10 premium for SCSI was nothing. To me, that settled the argument. It didn’t for everyone.

Today, IDE is cheap. Real cheap. A 20-gig drive costs you 50 bucks. A 7200-rpm 40-gig drive is all the drive many people will ever need, and it’s 99 bucks. And for simple computers, that’s great. If it fails, so what? Buy two drives and copy your important data over. At today’s prices you can afford to do that.

SCSI isn’t cheap. It’s hard to find a controller for less than $150, whereas IDE is included free on your motherboard. And if you find a SCSI drive for less than $150, it’s a closeout special. A 20-gig SCSI drive is likely to set you back $175-$200.

Superficially, the difference is philosophy. The IDE drive is designed to be cheap. Good enough to run Word, good enough to play Quake, quiet enough to not wake the baby, cheap enough to sell them by the warehouseful.

SCSI is designed for workstations and servers, where the only things that matter are speed, reliability, speed and speed. (Kind of like spam egg spam and spam in that Monty Python skit). If it costs $1,000 and requires a wind tunnel to cool it and ear protection to use it, who cares? It’s fast! So this is where you see extreme spindle rates like 10,000 and 15,000 RPM and seek times of 4.9 or even 3.9 milliseconds and disk caches of 4, 8, or even 16 MB. It’s also not uncommon to find a 5-year warranty.

In all fairness, I put my Quantum Atlas 10K3 in a Coolermaster cooler. It’s a big bay adapter that acts like a big heatsink and has a single fan, and it also dampens the sound. The setup is no louder than some of the 5400 RPM IDE drives Quantum was manufacturing in 1996-97.

OK, so what’s the practical difference?

IDE is faithful and dumb. You give it requests, it handles them in the order received. SCSI is smart. You send a bunch of read and write requests, and SCSI will figure out the optimal order to execute them in. That’s why you can defrag a SCSI drive while running other things without interrupting the defrag process very much. (Out of order execution is also one of the main things that makes modern CPUs faster than the 486.)

And if you’re running multiple devices, only one IDE device can talk at a time. SCSI devices can talk until you run out of bandwidth. So 160 MB/sec and 320 MB/sec SCSI is actually useful, unlike 133 MB/sec IDE, which is only useful until your drive’s onboard cache empties. Who cares whether a 2-meg cache empties in 0.0303 seconds or 0.01503 seconds?

There’s another advantage to SCSI with multiple devices. With IDE devices, you get two devices per channel, one interrupt per channel. With SCSI, you can do 7 devices per channel and interrupt. Some cards may give you 14. I know a lot of us are awfully crowded for interrupts, so being able to string a ton of devices off a single channel is very appealing. IRQ conflicts are rare these days but they’re not unheard of. SCSI giving you in one interrupt what IDE gives you in four is very nice in a crowded system.

The 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s: More alike than different

Dave Farquhar Society , ,

Optimism. In an effort to answer a different question, I found myself mapping out the significant news headlines for the last 40 years, and suddenly I understood something.
The 1960s were a decade of activism, international crisis, assasination, racial tension, and political scandal.

The 1970s were a decade of international crisis, massacre, racial tension, and political scandal.

The 1980s were a decade of international crisis, assasination, racial tension, and political scandal.

The 1990s were a decade of international crisis, massacre, racial tension, and political scandal.

I’m 26, part of a generation that’s notorious for being cynical. I wasn’t around in the 60s; the oldest of my peer group watched helplessly; unable to do anything about it or even understand what was happening in a lot of cases. The first of my peer group started turning 20 in the 80s. It wasn’t until the 90s that we were really old enough to have any real power, to make any real change. Few of us showed any interest, and some people wondered why.

I’d never really thought about it before, but we can look back at the last 40 years, see people trying to make changes, and note that for all the rhetoric that was being thrown around in the 60s, if anything, things are worse today than they were in the post-war era.

So that’s why we’re cynical and apathetic. Although, after this week, apparently an awful lot of us are going down to the recruiting office and asking if we can sign up to go kick some butt…

Revisiting my childhood

Dave Farquhar Human Interest , ,

Yesterday morning I needed my checkbook. I pulled it out of my desk drawer and set it on my chair for safekeeping. Then something else crossed my mind for a minute, distracting me. Then I remembered I needed my checkbook. I turned back to my open desk drawer, dug around for it, and got frustrated. Where else could my checkbook be?
I proceeded to do an archaelogical dig through that desk drawer. Beneath the mending kit I’d torn my apartment apart looking for a few months ago and a big unopened box of staples, I found a St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports section dated Sept. 18, 1988. Yeah, I know.

I also found my Swatch.

Swatch watch
Swatch is still around. The 1980s Swatch watches we wore were more garish than this one. I would have liked this one in the ’80s but it wouldn’t have made me cool.

Yeah, a Swatch. Remember those? Bright-colored plastic Swiss-made watches. I remembered their slogan: The New Wave in Swiss Watches. Well, my Swatch certainly looks New Wave. With its bright red plastic band and black body, with doses of blue and yellow tossed in, it could have come straight off the cover of a pop album of the time.

I’d forgotten I ever even had one of the things. But of course I had one. Everyone did. I told my buddy Sean about my find after church. “Oh yeah! I used to wear three of ’em at once!” He raised his arm and drew an imaginery line with his other hand, grinning. He was cooler than me in the ’80s, I see. Then another GenXer piped in, talking about her Swatches, while a couple of bemused Millennials tried to figure out what we were talking about. Next thing we knew, we were talking about Atari and Smurfs and everything else imaginable. I think they thought we were weird.

Just between you and me, I don’t think I blame them. It seems silly now the big deal we made about these things. It wasn’t enough to just have the watch, after all. No, you had to outfit it with guards and other stuff. We told our parents it was to keep the watch from getting scratched. But secretly, we all knew the idea was to make sure your Swatch didn’t look anything at all like anyone else’s.

The original Swatch Guard was this molded rubber thing, brightly-colored of course, that blocked your view of the time. This was a brilliant maneuver on the part of the company, because you’d shove the guard out of the way so you could read the time, and before long, it would snap and you were off to the store to pay another $3.50 or whatever for another molded rubber band. Then there was the Guard Too (at least that’s what mine says on it), which covered the outside rim and actually did afford some protection. A lot of people would outfit their Swatch with a Guard Too, then they’d buy several of the original guards, in different colors of course, and twist them together. The additional bright colors made you visible from another mile or so away and definitely made you look cooler, but then you never knew what time it was.

I seem to recall other companies realized they could mold rubber bands just as easily, undercut the price of the real thing, and still turn a nifty profit. Knowing myself, I’ll bet my guard was a cheap third-party imitation.

I also noticed it doesn’t work anymore. The battery probably died well over a decade ago. Not that it matters much. Swatches were never about knowing what time it was anyway.

Then I turned around and saw my checkbook lying on the chair.