christmas

Merry Christmas

Dave Farquhar General

I’m outta here for a bit.
I worked today–did a server upgrade with no one around. Fun. Not.

Then I came home to wrap presents. I’d hidden the presents I bought. I hid them so well it took me half an hour to find them.

And now there’s a few inches of snow on the ground. It’s really pretty. Until you have to drive in it. Sometime after we elected the Redneck from Rolla to be our governor, we forgot how to plow our roads.

So I’m off on a great adventure. See you in a couple days. And Merry and Blessed Christmas to all of you.

Santa Claus reportedly considering Linux

Dave Farquhar General ,

BBSpot: “IIS couldn’t keep up when Slashdot posted a link to that web-interface I made for turning Rudolph’s new LED nose on and off. That was the last straw,” [Santa] Claus continued. “I’m entrusting the entire holiday of Christmas to a company that can’t even make a reliable web server?”
The story mentions lots of other reasons for Santa to switch from Windows. I guess that means Santa doesn’t believe that controversial IDC report from last month or whenever it was. Thanks to Karl Koenig for this link.

Straight talk on cheap laptops

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

I’ve been getting lots of traffic ever since we started talking about the Sotec 3120x laptop here last week. It looks like an era of inexpensive laptops is about to arrive, because the Sotec isn’t your only choice.
Sam’s Club sells a variant of the 3120x for about the same price as Wal-Mart, but it comes with a 30GB drive in place of the 20.

Steve DeLassus tells me a number of places have been hawking Toshiba Satellite 1115-S103 laptops in the sub-$1000 price range after coupons and rebates and other marketing gyrations. Suggested retail price on it is $1099. Street price should be $1049 or lower, as that’s Toshiba’s price if you buy direct. Toshiba’s offering a $200 mail-in rebate. So at the very worst, you can get a Satellite 1115-S103 for $849 if you buy it direct from Toshiba.

And then I did some checking on a hunch. Dell’s offering its Inspiron 2650C for $899 ($849 through 12/11). HP is offering its Compaq Presario 905us notebook with an Athlon XP 1400, 256 MB RAM, DVD, 14.1″ LCD for $999 with a $100 rebate. The HP Pavilion ze4101 has a faster processor but less memory, for the same price. There are some variants on the HPs and Compaqs out there–you might not find in stores exactly what HP’s selling direct, but you’ll find something awfully close.

The Toshiba and Dell offer a bigger screen (14.1 inches), DVD drives, 256 MB RAM (the Dell has 128), and the other expected gizmos like modem and networking, along with a seemingly faster 1.5 GHz Celeron processor.

Which brings up a point.

The 1.5 GHz Celeron is based on the P4 architecture. Remember, at 1.5 GHz, the P4 is a dog. The Celeron is a castrated P4. The P4-based Celeron doesn’t start to give decent speeds until it hits 2 GHz. Even though the Celeron 1.5 has a 300 MHz advantage over the older P3-based Celeron 1.2, the “slower” Celeron will actually be faster. And less expensive.

The HP/Compaq models offer truly faster AMD Athlon XP CPUs and ATI Radeon mobility video chipsets.

I know people are going to ask me which one to buy. So let’s agonize together.

Durability: Toshiba, Dell, HP and Compaq all had decent service records in the past and there are lots of places that will work on them. Sotec is more of an unknown in the United States at this point.

Dell has traditionally had the best reputation, but their laptops didn’t fare well this year in PC World’s service and reliability roundup. HP and Toshiba were the best of this bunch. Now that HP and Compaq are the same company, the Compaq should fare well too.

Frankly, I’d buy an extended warranty with any of them, and count on it breaking at least once. That’s par for the course with a laptop, especially if you use it for what it’s intended, which is carrying it around a lot.

Performance: The 1.5 GHz Celeron in the Toshiba and Dell models is a notoriously bad performer. The 1.2 GHz Celeron in the Sotec is a good performer but the integrated video will hurt. The HPQ models use AMD Athlon XP CPUs and ATI Radeon Mobility video chipsets. Performance on the latest 3D games will disappoint (but LCD screens in general are bad for 3D gaming). But for light gaming and everything else someone might want to do, the HP and Compaq models will be great.

Input: The Sotec offers a slightly reduced keyboard with an at-times quirky layout. The others offer full-sized keyboards. All use touchpads; they’ll be decent but you’ll probably want to pick up a USB mouse with any of them to use at least part of the time. Touch-typists will prefer anyone but Sotec. Hunt-and-peck types probably won’t care much one way or the other.

Portability: The Sotec weighs 4.4 pounds. The others weigh in at 6.5 or 6.9 pounds. None are hogs, but some people will really like the svelte Sotec. The Sotec has a longer battery life. Advantage: Sotec.

Expandability/extras: The Toshiba, HP and Compaq models offer TV-out, which isn’t something everybody needs, but when you want it, you want it. It allows you to use a big-screen TV for presentations in a pinch. You can connect up a TV to the laptop and do digital slideshows for a bigger audience than can crowd around a laptop screen, which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing. And when hooked up to a TV, it can serve as an emergency DVD player.

The Toshiba offers two PCMCIA slots. Everyone else offers one. HP and Compaq memory maxes out at 1024 MB, while memory on the Toshiba and Dell max out at 512 MB to the Sotec’s 384 MB. HP, Compaq, and Sotec are all using shared video memory, so they’ll steal a little system memory to give to the video chip. Toshiba and Dell aren’t doing this. All have built-in USB 1.1 and networking; none offer built-in Firewire.

HP offers the fastest CPU of the bunch, and CPU upgrades in laptops are always questionable.

Advantage: HP.

Serviceability: The Sotec’s DVD/CD-RW drive and hard drive are bolted in, rather than being plug-in modules. It’ll be a lot harder to fix yourself if need be. On most other companys’ models (I don’t know about any of these for certain), the drives slide out easily for replacement. Replacement CD/DVD drives are a pain to track down after the fact for any laptop more than a year or two old, but the big name brands will almost certainly be easier. If you buy an extended warranty, fixing it is someone else’s problem, at least for a couple of years. Advantage: Everyone but Sotec.

Overall winner: Hard to say. The Sotec is designed to be a subnotebook; the others are entry-level full notebooks. If portability and versatility are important to you, get the Sotec. It’s the only one of the bunch that’ll burn CDs for you at this price point. Keep in mind that the Sotec’s combo DVD/CD-RW drive will wear out quickly if you use it to watch a lot of movies, and that replacing it won’t be terribly easy, as it’s not a slide-in module like costlier notebooks use. If you intend to watch a lot of movies on the Sotec, make sure you buy an extended warranty on it.

The Sotec has a couple of question marks, but it also has an awful lot going for it.

The HP and Compaq models have the best combination of serviceability, expandability, speed, and reliability. I don’t think I’d mess with the Toshiba or Dell unless their prices dropped considerably. Between Compaq and HP, HP gives you the faster CPU, while Compaq gives you the bigger hard drive and more memory. It’s easier to add memory and replace the hard drive than it is to upgrade a laptop CPU; I’d get the HP and add memory to it pretty quickly and plan on replacing its hard drive with a large 5400 RPM model in a couple of years. With its best-of-class CPU and video and upgraded someday with a faster hard drive, the HP ought to be a good performer for many years. If the Sotec’s question marks scare you, the HP offers a compelling alternative.

Future outlook: When a system reaches a magical price point (notables were the $899 all-in-one Compaq Presarios in 1996, the $399 eMachine in 1998, the $199 Microtel Linux PCs from Wal-Mart this year, and this year’s sub-$900 laptops) it’s extremely tempting to run out and buy one. Especially the Sotec, which offers not only a great price, but almost every possible extra.

But remember what happened in the past. Compaq invaded Packard Bell’s territory in 1996 and released an underpowered but reliable and capable PC for $899, complete. Almost immediately, everybody was selling PCs for under $1,000. Then along came eMachines, deciding that even $499 wasn’t cheap enough and offering a unit, again underpowered, for $399. Few matched eMachines’ price point, but most companies were soon offering something for $499.

Laptops aren’t going to bottom out at $849. There’s no point in putting a smaller screen or hard drive in that Sotec. But if Wal-Mart decides it wants a bottom-feeder laptop, it could have Sotec substitute a VIA C3 chip for the Celeron (the Celeron’s being phased out anyway, and Wal-Mart already sells C3-based machines and their sales have proven you don’t have to have Intel Inside in order for people to buy them), and replace the combo DVD/CD-RW drive for a straight DVD drive or even a straight CD-ROM drive. A Sotec 3120x variant with an 800 MHz C3 and a plain old CD-ROM drive could probably sell for $749 or even $699. If Wal-Mart decides to thumb its nose at Microsoft and offer a Linux-based variant, it could chop another $100 off the price. (The big question there is whether it’s possible to support the Sotec’s modem under Linux.)

How soon will it happen? Hard to say. But think about it. Wal-Mart undercut everybody. Everybody reacted quickly. Dell wants to own the laptop market, because it’s part of the PC market. Wal-Mart wants to own every market. They’ll both strike back. HP and Toshiba won’t throw in the towel right away either, because they’re both big in retail laptops.

Right now the Sotecs are selling like crazy. Wal-Mart and Office Depot can’t keep them in stock. They won’t lower prices any further unless Dell and HPQ and Toshiba react again and seriously cut into sales. That’ll depend on whether they’re satisfied with their current sales figures. With 14 shopping days until Christmas (and realistically, the clock running out on shipping something to arrive before Christmas), I don’t expect pricing or inventory conditions to change much in the next two weeks.

But remember, this is Christmas boom time. People always cut prices after Christmas to spur sales. Chipmakers cut their prices too, meaning these laptops will be cheaper to make a month from now.

So if you’ve been wanting a laptop for a while and the sudden appearance of $849 laptops got you thinking but you’re willing to wait a while longer, this is a good time to wait.

Got tech skills? Here’s a Christmas idea

Dave Farquhar Hardware

One of my coworkers ran out of ideas for Christmas presents for his sisters one year.
So instead of buying them jewelry they probably wouldn’t want, or clothes that wouldn’t fit or they just wouldn’t like so they’d have to take them back, he bought a bunch of computer parts. Then he upgraded their systems. The next year, he did the same thing. And again the next. Within a couple of years, they had really nice systems. And the systems stayed nice, since most people can stay really happy with a computer that gets $100 worth of hardware upgrades every year.

This year, he got married. And his wife didn’t like that idea. They needed to buy something, well, gift-y for his family. So she made her intentions known.

His sisters wasn’t very happy with the idea. It turns out they like it when he upgrades their computers for them.

So there’s an idea to float. Not everyone will love it, but probably a lot of people will. And you can get a lot of nice upgrades for not a lot of money, especially if you know where to shop. Some hints: It’s hard to beat Newegg.com for new stuff. And it’s hard to beat Compgeeks.com for closeout stuff. And let’s face it, unless someone’s ripping DVD movies, there’s little noticeable difference between a 12X DVD-ROM on closeout and a 16X DVD-ROM from a retail joint. And while an enthusiast will look down on a 20X or 24X CD-RW drive, they cost half as much (or less) than the current state-of-the-art, they’re more than half as fast, and to someone used to dubbing from CD to cassette, burning a 74-minute music CD in less than 10 minutes seems really fast.

For me, the magic number is somewhere around $100. For you it might be more like $50. Even if it is $50, there’s a fair bit you can do. You’ll never run out of ideas.

CD-RW drives. I recently paid $30something for a Yamaha 20/10/40 drive. With Nero software. I love it. CD-RW drives are commodities now; look for a drive with some kind of buffer underrun protection and Nero software. Other than that, buy on price.

DVD drives. A bare DVD drive can cost as little as $30. I believe you can even get by without buying a drive with bundled decoder software–n.player ought to do the job for them. I need to build up a bare Windows box, pop in my DVD drive, and try n.player out to know for sure. If you want to be safe, you can get a decent drive with WinDVD bundled for $40.

Memory. Memory’s cheap. It doesn’t seem like anybody ever has enough. No-brainer.

Video card. My sister doesn’t need a fire-breathing video card and yours probably doesn’t either. But a lot of systems have really underpowered cards, way worse than the $25 specials you’ll find on Newegg. If you get one with TV-outs, you gain the option to take the PC into the living room to show slideshows on the TV’s bigger screen, or watch movies on DVD.

Motherboard. A motherboard swap can be hairier, but if the computer already has lots of cool gadgets, that would make a nice upgrade. You could grab something like a Shuttle AK32L that can take a cheap Duron CPU and works with either SDRAM or DDR memory. That would allow you to re-use the existing memory, and slide in under the $100 mark. Then next year’s upgrade could be DDR memory and a really fast Athlon XP CPU, which will be dirt cheap by then.

Scanners. Everyone wants a scanner, and it’s easy to find a decent scanner for $50. Look for color depth over resolution–what’s the point in having a scanner with higher resolution than your printer? Besides, a lot of scans will be e-mailed. The resolution of your monitor is 75 dpi. High color depth gives you better color accuracy, and thus, better scans.

Digital cameras. Cheap sub-megapixel, fixed-focus digital cameras–the Polaroids of the early aughts–start in the $50 price range too. They’re no good for serious shots, but they’re fun, and for family snapshots you’ll be e-mailing around, they’re fine.

And if you’re really careful, you can get a decent digital camera–one with more than a megapixel of resolution and a zoom–for a little over $100. Next year for $100-$125, you may be able to get a 3-megapixel digital camera.

DVD burners. They’re way too expensive now, but at some point DVD burners will hit the $100 mark. Work on stuff lower on this list. Within two years, the confusion over formats will most likely have worked itself out, and pricing should be along the lines of what CD-RW drives cost now. Remember, two years ago a $50 CD-RW was unimaginable. Today it makes you yawn.

Hard drives. There’s always the potential hard drive upgrade. Today, $100 buys what was an unbelievable amount of disk space a year ago. Next year, $100 will buy what’s an unbelievable amount of disk space today. Keep your relatives on a three-year upgrade cycle on their hard drives to minimize the probability of data loss, and to keep the computer running briskly. Mark my words: Changing hard drives will soon become the computerized equivalent of an oil change.

I told you you wouldn’t run out of ideas. You’ll have to repeat some steps earlier in the cycle long before you complete it.

Picking out a camcorder

Dave Farquhar Video , , , , , , , , , ,

I had someone ask me for some advice in picking out a camcorder yesterday. I know I’ve talked a little bit about that before, but this field is always changing, so it doesn’t hurt to revisit it.
I’m going to link to a bunch of stuff on Amazon here. Amazon’s not the only place to buy this stuff, of course, but their selection is good, and I have an affiliation with them. If someone clicks on one of these links and ends up buying something, I get a kickback. But my primary motivation is informational.

Second things second: I know they’re cheap, but think twice about analog camcorders. A Quasar VHS-C camcorder will run you $200. You get a nice 20X optical zoom and a few digital effects, and it’s nice to be able to play your tapes in your VCR, but those are the only benefits you get. The image resolution is a lot lower than with a digital camcorder, and it’s a lot less convenient to dump video from an analog camcorder into a computer for editing. Since any computer you buy new today will have at least some editing capability (current versions of Mac OS and Windows include at least rudimentary video editors, so all you’d need to add to a PC is a $25 Firewire card if it doesn’t have built-in Firewire), you’ll probably want to be able to take advantage of it. If you don’t have Windows XP or ME, you can pick up a $65 Pinnacle Studio DV, which will give you the Firewire ports, rudimentary editing software, and most importantly, slick capture and titling software. The capture software is especially nice; it’ll detect scene changes for you and catalog them. Even if you do have editing software, you might want this. It saves me a lot of time.

Digital8 cameras are getting hard to find. Their chief selling point, besides price, was the ability to use analog Hi8 tapes, which was nice if you were upgrading. If you have some Hi8 tapes and want to continue to use them and want an easy way to move them to a computer for editing, look for a Digital8 camera. But there’s a good possibility you’ll have to buy online. And the resolution isn’t as high as MiniDV–Digital8’s selling points in the past were price and backward compatibility. The price advantage is evaporating, leaving just backward compatibility as a selling point. MiniDV is the future.

Panasonic has a digital 4-in-1 device that does video, still, voice, and MP3 duties. I don’t recommend it. The image quality is substandard, its fixed focus will make it even worse, and you can’t mount it on a tripod. Its list price is $450 and I saw it at Amazon for $340, but it’s a toy. Given a choice between it and a $250 analog camcorder, I’d go analog every time.

MiniDV is pretty clearly the way to go. It’s the emerging standard, as it’s become inexpensive, the tapes are compact and reliable, and the resolution and picture quality is fantastic.

You can spend as much as you want. An entry-level MiniDV camera, such as the JVC GRDVL120U, will run you about $400. For $400, you get 16X optical zoom, S-Video output for TV playback and a Firewire connection to dump your video to computer for editing, image stabilization, the choice between manual and autofocus, and the ability to take still shots and dump them to tape.

Pay no attention whatsoever to digital zoom. Using digital zoom to get much more than double your maximum optical zoom is completely worthless. There’s enough fudge factor in NTSC television that you can get away with using a little bit of digital zoom, but with this camera, once you’ve zoomed in to 32X, you’ve cut your effective resolution from that of DVD to that of VHS tape. Zoom in much more than that, and your image will look very pixelated. This particular JVC advertises 700X digital zoom, but you definitely don’t want to use it.

You can spend three times as much on a Sony DCRPC120BT. For your money you’ll get a better lens, so your image quality will be a little bit better. Whether that makes a difference will depend mostly on the television you’re displaying on. You’ll get much higher-resolution still shots, and the ability to store your stills on a memory stick. That’s a very nice feature–no need to advance and rewind your tape to find shots, and no need to interrupt your video sequences with stills. You actually get less optical zoom. You get less digital zoom too, but that’s not important. You’ll also get a microphone jack, which is very important. The microphone built into the camera will pick up some motor noise and won’t necessarily pick up what’s happening across the room. It’s very nice to have the ability to wire up a microphone to get away from the camera motor and possibly get closer to the sound source, to keep the sound from being muffled. You probably won’t buy an external mic right away. But chances are it’s something you’ll eventually want.

Personally, when I’m on a project, I’d much rather have the inexpensive JVC (or something less expensive that offers a microphone input) because the $800 more I would spend to get the Sony would let me buy a digital still camera with much better capabilities than the Sony offers. And when I’m shooting a video, having two cameras is an advantage–I can set them both up on tripods and shoot, or hand one camera off to someone else and tell them to get me some shots. Having two cameras can get me a whole lot better picture of what’s going on. But not everybody’s shooting documentaries like me. For travel, the Sony is a whole lot more convenient and more than worth the extra money. And if you’re recording your child’s birthday party, you probably just want one camera in order to avoid turning your living room into a TV studio.

So you need to figure out what you plan to do with it.

As far as accessories go, you absolutely want a tripod. Again, you can spend as much as you want. Amazon offers a Vivitar kit for about $40 that includes a bag and a tripod. With image stabilization, you can run around shooting birthday parties and vacation scenes and have a reasonably good-looking image that won’t give you the shakes. But if you’re recording Christmas morning, then set the camcorder up across the room, then go over and open presents with your family. I know, I hate being on camera, and you might too. But I wish I had some home video footage of my Dad. I remember his laugh and I remember how he loved to joke around, but I can’t show that to anyone.

If you just want to set the camcorder up at a fixed angle and run across the room, a cheap tripod will do the job nicely. If you’re going to be standing behind the camera and panning the scene, buck up for a fluid-head tripod. You’ll be able to move the camera much more smoothly. My Bogen tripod wasn’t cheap, but I wouldn’t be without it now that I have it. I think some people with arthritis have steadier hands than I do, but even I can do good-looking pans and zooms with that tripod.

Sometimes people ask me about brands. I learned on JVC equipment, so I’m partial to it. But it’s hard to go wrong with any of what I call the Big Four: JVC, Panasonic,
Sony, or Canon. Professionals use all four brands with excellent results. Sure, every professional has a preference. But the differences among the Big Four will be pretty slight. I’m less comfortable with offerings from companies like Sharp and Samsung. They haven’t been in the business as long, and they’re consumer electronics companies. The other companies sell to professionals. Some of that expertise will inevitably filter down into their consumer products as well. And the difference in price and features between a Sharp or a Samsung and a JVC, Panasonic, Canon or Sony isn’t very much, so a top-tier offering is a better bet for the money.

Where does faith come from?

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , , ,

Following closely on the heels of the question of how to pray, people often ask me where faith comes from, and where they can get more of it.
The best response to that question, usually, is, “Why do you want more faith?” Read more

Upgrading a P2-300

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

Case study: Revitalizing a PII-300
It took me three and a half hours one night to squeeze another year or two of useful life out of a PII-300.

A fellow member of the Board of Directors at my church approached me one night. “Would you reinstall the OS on my computer?” he asked. He had a PII-300, not a barn burner by any modern measure, but not a slouch of a computer either. But as a performer it had been very much an underachiever of late. I had walked him through reinstalling the operating system over the phone back around Christmas and it had solved some problems, but not everything. It appeared his computer needed a clean start.

When I looked at it, I agreed. It wasn’t particularly stable and it definitely wasn’t fast. He had a Castlewood Orb drive to facilitate quick backups, so I had him copy his data directories (named Documents and My Documents), along with his AOL directory, over to the Orb. I also spotted a directory called Drv. As an afterthought, I grabbed that one too.

I proceeded to boot off a CD-ROM-enabled boot floppy. Tepidly, I typed the magic words format c: at the command prompt. Quickly I noticed a problem: the words “Saving current bad sector map” on the screen. As the drive formatted, Rick asked the magic question. “What do you think of partitioning?”

Dirty secret #1: Any time you see bad sectors, you should absolutely FDISK the drive. Bad clusters can be caused by physical problems on the disk, but they can also be caused by corruption of the FAT. No disk utility that I’ve ever seen (not Scandisk, not Disk Doctor, not even SpinRite) fixes that. The only way to fix that (verified by a technicians I talked to at Gibson Research, the makers of SpinRite) is to fdisk and format the drive.

Dirty secret #2: FAT16 is much faster than FAT32. Since Rick wasn’t opposed to partitioning the drive, I created a 2GB FAT16 partition. You do this by answering No when fdisk asks if you want to enable large disk support. This partition holds the operating system.

I exited FDISK, ran it again, and this time answered Y when it asked the cryptic large-disk question. I created a partition that spanned the rest of the drive. Then I rebooted, typed format c: then format d:, and watched for bad clusters. There were none. Excellent.

End result: I had a 2-gig FAT16 C drive and a 6-gig FAT32 D drive.

Dirty secret #3: Never, ever, ever, ever, ever (unless someone’s holding a gun to your head) install Windows as an upgrade. You have a Windows 95 CD and a Windows 98 upgrade CD? So what. Install Windows 98 on the bare drive. Setup will find no Windows installation present and ask for your Windows 95 CD. You insert your Win95 CD, it investigates it to make sure it’s not a blank CD with win.com on it somewhere, then asks for your Win98 CD back. End result: a clean install. Even if you install Win95 immediately followed by Win98, you get extra garbage you don’t need. And it takes twice as long.

Windows took about 30 minutes to install. I tackled his applications. When I installed MS Office, I did a complete install with one exception. I drilled down into Office Tools, found Find Fast, and unchecked it. Find Fast is a resource hog and doesn’t do anything useful.

I installed Office to drive D.

He’d bought Norton Systemworks on sale one weekend, hoping it would help his performance. It didn’t. I showed him a trick. Rather than install Systemworks directly, I explored the CD, drilled into the Norton Utilities directory, and ran Setup from there. I intentionally left out almost everything. Speed Disk and Disk Doctor are the two superstars. I also kept the Optimization Wizard. I left out most of the rest, because the other stuff doesn’t do anything useful but it sure slows down your system. When it asked about running Disk Doctor at startup, I said no. It just slows down startup and doesn’t do anything useful. I did let it replace Scandisk with Disk Doctor. That way if you get an improper shutdown, Disk Doctor can clean up the mess before Windows starts and makes a bigger mess. But Disk Doctor should run when you need it. Not all the time.

Then I drilled down into the Norton Antivirus directory and installed it. Then I did the same for Ghost. I needn’t have done that. Just copying the Ghostpe.exe file out of that directory onto a boot floppy suffices. More on Ghost later.

I installed this stuff to drive D.

Next, I installed his scanner software, Lotus SmartSuite, and his DVD decoder.

I copied the data back over from his Orb disk, noticed his modem wasn’t working, and installed the device driver I found in the Drv directory I’d copied over to the Orb as an afterthought. (I’d much rather back up too much stuff than not enough.) Then I copied his AOL directory over to drive D and installed AOL 5.0 over the top of it. It picked up all his settings.

I cleaned up c:msdos.sys and rebooted, watching the time. It booted in about 45 seconds, including POST. I was happy. Rick was very happy.

I did the other standard Windows optimizations outlined in chapter 2 of Optimizing Windows. I cleared out his root directory on C. Then I ran Norton Speed Disk. I had it do the full file reordering and directory sorting bit (also described in Optimizing Windows). Clearing out the root directory makes disk access much more efficient, but only after Speed Disk discards the now-empty directory entries. Directory sorting makes disk access more efficient by putting the important files early in the list so Windows finds them faster. The results are marvelous.

Finally, I ran Ghost. I copied the Ghost executable to a boot floppy that contained the Castlewood device driver internal.sys, then booted from it and Ghosted his drive to the Orb drive. Fifteen minutes later, he had an image of his system, so he can return back to this state any time he wants.

End result: Rick’s P2-300 with an 8-gig Quantum Bigfoot drive (a notoriously slow hard drive) and 288 MB RAM received a new lease on life. Despite its slow processor and hard drive, it performs better than a lot of consumer-level PCs available today.

That was a good investment of 3 1/2 hours.

I’m back again.

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

More video. One of my Christmas gifts was The Pretenders: The Singles. The Pretenders are one of the most underrated bands of the past 20 years, and while they get plenty of radio play, it’s limited to just a few songs from their extensive catalog. But I already had that disc, so I went to exchange it yesterday. I had trouble finding anything that really struck my fancy. I walked over to the (very small) “Inspirtational” section, which basically held anything vaguely religious that wouldn’t fit in the New Age section. I found a bunch of stuff I’d have no interest in, such as Petra (I don’t like that style of music regardless of subject matter) and Newsboys (an ex-girlfriend of mine thought they were great any time I can avoid being like her, I jump at the opportunity) but I did unearth two things that sounded interesting: Sonic Flood’s self-titled 1999 effort and Listen by Michelle Tumes. Both were used copies, and I guess that kind of stuff doesn’t sell too well at that shop (downtown Columbia, near the University of Missouri) because they were extremely eager to do an even-up two-for-one exchange despite the marked prices. So they were happy and I was happy.
I was even happier after I gave the discs a listen.

Michelle Tumes has a haunting, atmospheric sound about her, and she has either a gorgeous voice, a great producer, or both. Allmusic.com compares her to Enya, and musically I think that’s a fair comparison, but I’d place her voice somewhere between a Jewel and a Loreena McKennitt. She’d be good to listen to late at night when you want to calm down.

Sonic Flood, on the other hand, is someone to listen to when you want to get fired up. Think contemporary power pop with a little edge to it. To draw a secular parallel, the energy and guitar tone in their version of “I Want to Know You” reminds me of Third Eye Blind’s “Never Let You Down.” I could live without the spoken word interludes, as they’re not particularly profound and the second one is completely incoherent, but the musical bits are delightful.

To get a little more practice with video sequencing, I grabbed their version of “I Want to Know You” and started assembling video, using leftover clips I didn’t use in my last project. I had a bunch of clips that just–in my mind at least–seemed to fit perfectly. I grabbed a bunch of high-energy stuff that seemed compelling for the last project, but the high-energy stuff just didn’t fit a song like “Mary Did You Know,” which is a contemplative song. On the other hand, “I Want to Know You” is a celebratory gem.

This is just a mental exercise; I don’t expect to do anything with it. Legally, the Fair Use doctrine should allow in-home experiments like this. Should I decide I want to do something with it, I’ll probably look into having someone re-record the song (I can already hear someone with local connections doing a phenomenal job with it), juggle the clips to fit the re-recording, then secure permissions to the video clips I used.

Merry and Blessed Christmas to All…

Dave Farquhar General , ,

I made it through three services last night. I ran camera at one service, which is usually a struggle because Pastor likes to run a marathon while he speaks–and last night as he was prowling about, he forgot where a step was, so he actually fell off the raised platform he speaks from. He disappeared from view, so I’m zipping around with the camera in a panic–where’d he go?–and then he popped back up, laughing.
I need to start taking a video camera to high school basketball games so I can practice keeping up with Pastor.

Brad, my partner in crime, was on lights.

The Video was smack-dab in the middle of the message. Pastor talked about journeys, spiritual and otherwise, then he wondered aloud whether Mary and Joseph knew what they were in for. Brad took the lights down, and Mary and Joseph popped up on stage, holding a doll, in front of a fake fire. My idea of using a real fire in our new building got the axe really quickly, just like all my best ideas. Instead, Brad rigged a fake fire, where he buried a bulb in a pile of logs, and somehow he made it look real. Mary and Joseph wondered aloud what all the prophecies in the book of Isaiah regarding the Messiah meant. After a couple of minutes, Joseph left, leaving just Mary and the baby onstage. Our vocalist snuck up on stage, and I hit play on the camera (it’s the only miniDV device we have at the moment), and The Video–the popular song “Mary Did You Know?” set to pictures from The Visual Bible: Matthew, plus a few classic paintings by people like Rembrandt–played. And play it did, without a hitch, except for one spot where the audio clipped because it got louder than the camera could handle. Normalize, schmormalize. Next time I will. At the first service, Larry was singing when it clipped, so no one heard. At the other two services, his timing was a little different. Pastor heard it. I heard it. I don’t know if anyone else did. But every project has a flaw somewhere. Next time, I’ll run the music through a sound editor and normalize it myself.

Larry had asked when in the service he’d be singing. “The middle of the sermon,” I said. He looked at me like I was joking. Obviously he hasn’t worked with us enough.

Then, when the song and video ended, Pastor popped back up–at the back of the church, out of camera range. “The question isn’t ‘Mary, did you know?’ anymore, but it’s, ‘Do you know?'” Then he walked around, pointing to members of the congregation, asking if they know.

Good stuff. A few people cried through the video. There were people there to answer their questions. We survived. We sat around a little while after the 11:00 service, talking about it all. This was my first Christmas Eve service at my home church in more than 10 years, and the first one I’d had any involvement in. I don’t know if this is going to become an annual thing or not. If it does, I’m glad it’s once a year.

Blast from the past. At the 11:00 service, a former parish pastor-turned author who’s a member of our congregation gave the children’s message. “I snuck one of the presents from under our tree here tonight, tee hee hee,” he said with a sly look on his face. “It says right here on top: To Tim, with love. I wonder what it is…”

And that made me remember. My dad always knew everything he was getting. I never figured out how.

Until this year, that is. I was at a Christmas party, and the hosts’ son got to open one present at the party. So he was picking up packages, shaking them, trying to decide which one to place his bet on. I asked him if he’d like me to take some packages to the hospital for an x-ray…

And then I realized why Dad always knew what he was getting. Dad put himself through Med school working as… an x-ray technician! And then, once he got out of Med school, he worked as a radiologist–reading x-rays!

Which made me wonder… Would he? Well, Dad was just like me. Or the other way around, more likely, seeing as he came around first and all. So I guess the first question to ask is, would I?

Yes.

So would my Dad?

You bet your last wooden nickel.

Another blast from the past. Next year, when I’m more bold, I’m gonna read the classic “Mary and Joe, Chicago Style” by Mike Royko. I’d link to it but unfortunately I can’t find it online anywhere anymore. The Trib seems to have taken down its Royko tribute. Nuts.

Attending my first (and maybe only) baby shower

Dave Farquhar General

9:00 PM, Saturday night. With five friends in a dark parking lot. Our cars were parked in a row, in a dark corner of a parking lot, at the bottom of a hill. We hoped we’d be difficult to see. We ducked behind the fronts of our cars, peering out over the hoods through the windshield and out the back window. Through it we could see the blue Christmas lights of the house and the faint shadows of the gifts we’d quietly placed on the front porch. We hustled back to our hiding spots, leaving one of us, Sean, behind. Among our group were Sean, Wayne, and Yours Truly. We’re all still in pretty good shape, but Sean’s the fastest runner. We would need his speed tonight. The plan was simple: Ring the bell, then run like there’s no tomorrow and get out of sight while the rest of us watched.
We watched as Sean crept up the steps. There was a light on in the living room but no sign of stirring inside. Sean rang the bell, then lept over the gifts, swooped down the steps, and hightailed it across the driveway to the side of the house. We saw the door open and saw a burly, bald-headed 6’5″ frame fill the open door. It was Jon, no question. We snickered as he looked around. Then he looked down. We saw him look around again and scratch his head. Someone giggled. “Hello?” Jon shouted. Someone else giggled. I didn’t worry so much about that. We were a good 250, 300 feet away. Maybe further. Surely he wouldn’t hear…

“I hear you!” Jon shouted. I could tell he was looking in the direction of our cars. Funny, they seemed well-hidden when I drove up.

I stood up. We were found out. I walked around my car, through the parking lot, up towards Jon’s house. A few others followed. Sean emerged from his hiding place. Jon was standing there in his pajamas, grinning like a kid in a toy store with $1,000 to spend.

“You guys didn’t have to do this,” he said.

“We wanted to,” someone said.

“You guys are the best,” Jon said. “Bethany’s in the shower.”

A plot started to emerge. Jon’s as much of a conniver as we are. We’d hustle out of there, drive to the community center and watch the last few minutes of the Blues game. Jon would call one of us on a cell phone when Bethany was out of the shower. He’d give us a secret code. I suggested a phrase like “These pretzels are making me thirsty,” or “I’m selling these fine jackets.” He suggested, “Sorry, wrong number.” I lost. So we piled into a couple of cars, drove off to watch the game, and waited.

The reason for our mission was simple. Jon and Bethany are expecting. January was to be the month to get ready. But Jon and Bethany’s baby (they won’t let the doctor say whether it’s a boy or a girl) is getting impatient. It’s been 32 weeks and the baby’s ready to rumble. And that’s a problem. Jon and Bethany aren’t ready. They don’t have all the stuff they need, and Jon’s the first from his family to have offspring and Bethany’s the first from hers, so it’s not like there are any relatives ready to jump in with emergency hand-me-downs either. They’re the intrepid pioneers. The baby shower was going to be in January. Now we’re praying the baby waits until January. We found out about this late last week, so on Friday, we started planning an emergency shower. We ran out Saturday afternoon, fought the Christmas crowds, and bought some stuff. We went separately but kept running into each other. That was good–they had a registry, but we were able to compare notes and make sure none of us bought overlapping stuff. One bottle warmer is a good thing. Three bottle warmers are too much of a good thing.

We sat there at the community center, waiting in anticipation for the call. The Blues won 2-0. The phone never rang, but the pager went off. Jon paged us instead of calling. Recognizing the number, we piled back into our cars. We were on a mission. We zoomed back to the parking lot, parked, and took our strategic positions. We saw a figure standing through the living room window as Sean walked up to the driveway. He quickly ducked for cover. The shadow disappeared. Sean crept out from his makeshift hiding place, tiptoed up the stairs and onto the porch, rang the bell, and bolted. We waited. And waited. And waited. We knew darn well they were home, because we’d just seen someone walking around in there. Besides, their Dodge Intrepid was parked in front of the house.

Sean ducked out from his hiding spot. Still no one had answered. So he slowly crept back up the stairs, knowing full well that his cover could blow at any instant. He rang the bell again and took off like a cat. Nothing. Finally the door opened. A shadow emerged. A couple of giggles came out. A couple of shhh!s followed. I noticed this was a burly, 6-foot-five shadow. Now, Bethany’s tall and all, but she’s no six-foot-five, and I think the last word I would use to describe her would be “burly.” It was Jon.

The burly shadow beckoned. We stayed down. A second shadow emerged, ever so slowly. The burly shadow beckoned again. We came out from our hiding spots.

“I kept yelling, ‘Jon, Jon, someone’s at the door!” Bethany said, laughing.

“I was hiding in the garage, listening to the doorbell ring, saying, ‘Come on, woman, get the door!'” Jon said, laughing harder.

“It’s 9:30 at night, my hair’s wet and someone’s at the door and I don’t know who it is. No way I’m answering it,” she said.

So we gathered the gifts up from the porch and handed them to them. Jon asked us to come in for a few minutes. We said no, it’s late, it’s past Bethany’s normal bedtime now. They insisted. So we came in and gathered in their kitchen. Jon whipped out the digital camera. “These pictures won’t go outside the family or the group,” he promised. He snapped a couple of shots. Someone suggested Jon sit down with Bethany and I take camera duty. It took me a minute to figure out the camera. They started opening gifts. I shot 34 pictures. “I still don’t know what this is for,” Bethany said about some of the things. One of the members of our group who has a niece and a nephew explained some of it. The three guy visitors, Sean, Wayne, and I, just nodded like we knew something. We were, after all, The Three Wise Men Bearing Gifts. Or something. Or something bearing gifts, that is.

We were in and out of there in 30 minutes. “Fastest baby shower on record,” someone said. “That’s they way they should be,” someone else said. I’ve never heard a girl say anything good about going to a baby shower. Maybe that’s because there are no guys around to liven things up with smart-aleck and clueless commentary. Or maybe that’s because they run on too long. Regardless of which is the cause, we’ve found the cure.

“We’ll have to do this again,” someone said. Then we piled into our cars and drove off into the night.