Missouri

The best week of my life revisited

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , , ,

Well, I got word this week that my first video of significant length landed on the desk of the founder of Adventures in Missions. And he liked it.
It made its St. Louis debut the Sunday before last. I think it did its job. The subject was my church’s June mission trip to Belle Glade, and a number of the people who were there cried.

“God, send us some signs or something,” prayed the 15-year-old son of Christian author Tim Wesemann, about 30 seconds into the video.

Sign? You got it. A kid named Matthew set off an alarm in room 229 in the church where we spent our first night. So, for what seemed like an eternity, the PA system bellowed, “2-2-9.” And it beeped a lot too.

The minute he prayed and asked for forgiveness, it stopped. Things like that happened a lot that week.

That afternoon, someone looked up Matthew 22:9.

That became our theme. Which reminds me: We need to make t-shirts.

About halfway through, the words, “Wednesday, June 19, 2002: A night to remember” flashed up, simple white letters on a black screen. One of the girls turned back to me. “You got that on tape!?” I nodded. I shot at least three hours of tape that night. She reached back and squeezed my hand.

Let me tell you something about Wednesday night. I don’t know everything that was going through everyone’s minds that night, but by Wednesday, most of our kids (28 in all, I think) had been to the gates of hell and back. They were seeing the desperate situation the people in Belle Glade were living in, and although we’re middle-class white guys and gals from south suburban St. Louis, we live in luxury compared to any of them. We live in nice houses, drive nice cars, and get to eat pretty much anything we want, whenever we want. We don’t have to worry about any of our basic needs.

In Belle Glade, “affordable housing” often means four concrete walls, a concrete floor and roof, some kind of bed, and a 110-volt outlet to plug a hotplate into. A sink is a luxury. A lot of “discount” stores selling low-quality food abound. The food is affordable but not worth the prices they’re forced to pay for it. Blaxploitation at its finest. It’s pretty sickening.

And on Tuesday, there was an incident. One of the kids from our downtown VBS, an eight-year-old, got into a fight with a 13-year-old. The eight-year-old was everyone’s favorite. His was probably the saddest story we’d heard down there. But there was something else about him too. I had limited contact with him (I worked the other VBS) but I can attest to it. He drove me nuts most of the time. But I liked him.

Well, the angel they’d seen that morning flashed his other side. At one point, he had a big rock that he was ready to throw at the 13-year-old–a big-enough rock that if he beaned him with it with enough velocity, it’d do some permanent damage. And the fire in his eyes suggested he was more than willing–if not able–to do just that.

Being an adult, I’ve seen people who have such polar extremes. Not everyone in their early teens has yet–and let’s face it, Oakville, Missouri is pretty sheltered. Seeing two people willing to fight, perhaps to the death, over something that warranted at most a minor scuffle represented a major loss of innocence, especially for the girls.

And the adults from the neighborhood wanted to just let the two kids fight it out and call the police when it ended. One of our adults intervened, broke up the fight, and seperated the two, and a group of people talked to each of them. We didn’t have any more problems of that sort with those two for the rest of the week.

On Wednesday, a couple of teenagers hopped onto the roof where we were holding our other VBS. They threw off a soccer ball and football that had been thrown up there. One of them also picked up a five-pound iron weight, attached to a belt–a crude gang weapon–that was up there. A number of kids were playing in front of the building. He pitched the weight off the top of the roof. He probably wasn’t thinking. And he probably didn’t care, to be honest. The weight came down off the 12-foot roof (he’d probably pitched it up a bit higher, so it may have fallen 18, even 20 feet) and hit a little girl on the head. It bounced off, like a rubber ball. She wasn’t hurt at all. She was scared because she didn’t know what happened, and because our kids were terrified–you know how kids are, they get scared when adults think there’s supposed to be something terribly wrong–but completely unharmed.

Those were just the major events of Tuesday and Wednesday. Enough other things happened both days to fill a book each.

End long digression. Wednesday night was a crescendo. Georgia-based worship leader Joey Nicholson was singing songs and leading us in worship, and his song selections seemed especially poignant that night. Emotions were running high and our kids were exhausted. Our kids were crying, hugging each other, encouraging each other… The total opposite of the all-too-common cold and impersonal church service. At some point, one of the boys in my subgroup–Matthew, he of 2-2-9 and a source of a lot of gray hair for me, prior to that day–walked up to the stage and knelt down to pray. And he stayed there. The rest of the kids stayed pretty much where they were, singing, crying, hugging, consoling, for about two songs. He was still up there alone, praying and it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to budge. Our pastor tried to inconspicuously walk up there. Well, that didn’t exactly work. He walked up, put his hand on his shoulder, and knelt down next to him, talking to him and praying with him. The next thing I knew, all 28 of our kids were up there with them. By the time I knew what was going on, I was one of about five adults still standing. We didn’t waste much time joining them. I ran my handheld camera as I walked up and knelt down, but then I turned it off. What was going on up there was between each of us and God. I wasn’t going to invade that.

We were up there for about an hour, praying for each other.

It was a Lutheran altar call, I guess. No decisions for Christ there–Lutherans believe that’s pointless, because it’s God who empowers us to come to Him–but there were plenty of people talking to God about what their present life looked like and asking God what He wanted them to be doing with it, instead of what they were currently doing with it.

With all due respect to Promise Keepers, 10 PK rallies can’t match the intensity of those few hours that night for the 43-or-so people who were there. Yeah, it was that significant.

That was the self-indulgent memories portion. My gift to those who went, pure and simple. The remaining 19 minutes were about the various ministries we participated in while in Belle Glade. I’ll make no bones about it–it was a propaganda piece. The group that organized our trip had been talking about pulling out of Belle Glade, making our trip the last one there. After seeing so many lives transformed, I wanted to convince them not to do that.

They’ve told us their plans to pull out are history. Mission #1 accomplished.

There were 38 of us who went on the trip, but according to LCMS records, our congregation has 1380 members. Obviously it’s not realistic to send 1,380 people, but a congregation our size can send more than 38. I wanted to make the people who didn’t go jealous, so they’d want to go next year.

Time will tell if that works. Right now it looks like it will.

And I had a fourth objective too. There are lots of churches in Belle Glade. Most of the churches we came in contact with weren’t doing much outreach. I don’t know why that is, and I’m not going to speculate. But here’s what happened: 38 white guys and gals from St. Louis came in for a week. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing. But every ministry we touched caught fire. By the end of the week, every time a group of us walked down the street, someone stopped them. “Where are you from?” And when we’d answer, “St. Louis,” the people would say, “We’ve heard about you.” Then they’d tell us what we’d been doing. Then they’d thank us.

So the question in my mind was, if 38 St. Louisans can come down and spend a week and lots of great things happen, what can the churches that are down there do the other 51 weeks out of the year?

To my knowledge, the video’s been shown at two different churches, one in Belle Glade and one in Wellington, an affluent community a half hour away.

I hope they’re insanely jealous too.

Not that any of that was going through my mind as I watched. No. I was noticing how the audio needed to be normalized, and how a few of the shots desperately needed either to have been shot on a tripod or a healthy dose of post-production image stabilization, and how awful the lighting was and how nice it would have been to be able to do some post-production color correction.

Powerful? Sure. Worthy of winning a Telly? No way.

But the media director at church just told me to win a Telly. She didn’t tell me when. So there’s always next year.

But if we go back next year and I make a video about it and we win a Telly, I’ll betcha the Telly still isn’t the highlight of my year.

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

The immoral, despicable “journalism” at the Church of the Nativity

Dave Farquhar Writing , , , , , ,

Charlie asked what I, as a trained and sometimes-practicing journalist, think of Caroyln Cole’s work at the Church of the Nativity.
Well, the story linked here hits on precisely why I’m not a full-time journalist slogging words for some magazine full-time and climbing the ladder towards editorship. What usually passes for journalism today can at best be considered advocacy; in the case of what Cole sometimes practices, it’s better described as fraud.
Read more

My Klez adventures

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire , , , , , , ,

Today should have been a happy day. After all, the Kansas City Royals finally wised up and sent the worst manager of its history, Tony Muser, packing. And there was much rejoicing. It was all over the front page of the Kansas City Star. In other news, Boeing 747s are having a difficult time avoiding pigs, and Royals utilityman Donnie Sadler is hitting .265.
Unfortunately, a serious development in my life quickly jarred me back into the real world. An e-mail message arrived. I had Klez! I guess I shouldn’t have double-clicked on that attachment titled “Hot young 32-year-olds dressed like middle-school cheerleaders want you!” at work. But since everything on the Internet is true, and since the kid who mows my friend’s cousin’s neighbor’s lawn says his uncle told him e-mail travels over the Internet, I thought I’d better check it out. Opening that unexpected attachment from a complete stranger seemed like a good idea at the time.

The evidence that I had the Klez virus pointed back to a really old e-mail account I had, back in my days at the University of Missouri. So this must not have been the result of me opening the last “Hot young 32-year-olds dressed like middle-school cheerleaders want you!” e-mail I got. It must have been the result of a “Hot young 32-year-olds dressed like middle-school cheerleaders want you!” e-mail I got sometime in 1997 or 1998.

That’s really scary. Klez had the ability to trigger itself FIVE YEARS before it even existed, yet lie dormant until such a time as it did exist. Very powerful stuff. Very scary stuff. This is even bigger than the firing of Tony Muser. I think I should leak this discovery to The Register. Or maybe The Inquirer.

Then I looked at the headers more closely, and I noticed that even though it referred to that really old account, it also had a reference to my new Verizon account.

Then I realized I don’t have a Verizon account. So there’s only one possible explanation. Klez signed me up for a Verizon account! The nerve of it! And I’ll bet it’s using that e-mail account, and possibly also the cell phone that goes with it, to make marriage proposals to one of my ex-girlfriends. Probably the closet homo sapien. I’ll be in even more serious trouble after it realizes that all of my ex-girlfriends are closet homo sapiens and it proposes to all of them. This is bad. Really bad. I don’t think I’ll be able to blame this on Tony Muser.

I sure hope those cheerleaders know my new address in St. Louis. After all that scary Klez stuff, I could use some cheering up. They haven’t shown up yet, but that message never said when they’d show up.

When I went to lunch on that wonderful Tuesday, there was a TV in the lunchroom. There are always TVs in the lunchroom when important, newsworthy events of national impact occur. It was there so we could watch the latest developments of the Tony Muser firing as they unfolded on CNN.

I don’t think my coworkers believed me when I said that. So instead we talked about what I had learned about Klez. They were all really excited to hear about it. One of them asked if it had really neat graphics. I said sometimes. Another one asked if it would run on something as ancient as a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with GeForce4 Ti4400 video. I said it probably would. They all wanted copies.

When I got back from lunch, there was something else waiting for me in my e-mail: an invitation to a meeting to standardize our virus delivery to one or two tools and formats. I thought this was a great idea, because when we limit our clients’ abilities by forcing them to use limited tools–tools that were designed for another purpose entirely, of course–of our own choosing rather than their choosing, they are always much more productive and they thank us for it. Ideally, these tools should cost a lot of money and should require expensive outside consultants to set them up, so that these outside consultants can later go to the clients directly and do what consultants always do, which is this: Tell people what they already know. In this case, what they already know is how this overpriced, clueless consultant can do the job much better without our involvement. Next thing we know, we’re out of the picture, the clients are happy, the consultants are happy, and I’m happy because there’s not as much work for me to do, and if this kind of thing happens often enough, I’ll find myself without a job and then I’ll have something in common with my longtime hero, Tony Muser.

So of course I was falling all over myself to attend this meeting.

I asked the person who invited me if his new laptop has a DVD drive. He said it did. I told him I’d bring a copy of Office Space to the meeting. He said he didn’t have the drive configured to work in Linux yet because he hadn’t yet had the need to watch a movie on his work laptop.

Obviously, he needs to go to this meeting even more than I do, if he’s too busy doing real work to waste time watching DVDs really loudly on his work laptop and disturbing the rest of us in the office. It’s all due to the lingering effects of the decisions Tony Muser made during his tenure as Kansas City Royals manager, of course.

I’m sure a few scenes from Office Space will help us to prove our point. And, besides, if you read User Friendly, you know it’s fun to violate the DMCA.

Tony Muser will have a lot more time to do that kind of thing from now on.

Dinner with an old friend

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Whew. I’m glad that’s over. Well, I’m not so sure it’s over. But that was a little too weird for me.
I had dinner last night with a former colleague I hadn’t seen in a while. Too long, really. When I first met him, I was an ignoramus with some ambition. I knew where I wanted to go, but I had no idea how to get there. He took me under his wing and showed me the road. And for a time, we traveled that road together.

I continued down the road after we parted ways, and I still haven’t arrived at that destination, but I’m not sure we ever do. No matter what we accomplish, it’s never enough. We never know enough, see enough, or have enough. The destination always moves. Not that that’s always a bad thing.

We reflected on that, and he shared some wisdom. I’m frustrated. He helped me sort some of that out. Not everyone wants to go along for the ride, it seems. So things change, and sometimes we’re disappointed.

Just as importantly, he brought his new girlfriend along. I was glad to meet her. She’s a nice girl, down to earth, and doesn’t take herself too seriously. She can take a lot of good-natured ribbing, and she’s not afraid to dish it out either. She came across as being more than just pleasant to be around–she was fun to be around.

At one point in the conversation, he started talking about “his girlfriend” as if she wasn’t there, describing her, saying what he liked about her. I could tell part of her enjoyed hearing it, but part of her was embarrassed. I was impressed. I’ve done that in the past. The last girl I did that to was too full of herself to be embarrassed. (The embrace I got afterward was pretty cool. Too bad it was worth about as much as the advice that was dished out in these pages yesterday.)

I just smiled knowingly as he went on and on about her. He was doing good. “Stop it,” she said. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“You know her?” he asked.

Bzzt. Wrong answer, Jack.

She let him get by with it. The cool ones always do.

She left the table for a minute and he told me a few things. Things he didn’t want her to know, at least not yet. I’ve forgotten what they were, which is just as well. He mentioned some potential red flags that never rose. Good signs all. I gave him my observations, for what they were worth, based on living for three years with about 30 guys, most of whom had girlfriends, and from other friends’ relationships. He didn’t have anything to learn from my personal experience.

I looked over my shoulder a few times as I was talking. It would have been awkward if she’d returned in the middle of a sentence, potentially. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I had one last thing to say, and I finished it as she was sitting back down at the table:

“…and you can see it in their choices of where they go to school, or where they start their careers,” I said.

She sat back down. She didn’t demand to know what we’d been talking about when we were gone. She didn’t ask what that was about. Nothing.

I was severely impressed.

We shifted gears in the conversation a couple of times. She has a brother who’s going to be starting at the University of Missouri, majoring in journalism, soon. I told her I’d answer any questions he had. I told her about a few of my misadventures in my four years there. I had more than a few. The head of my sequence still remembers me, to this day, and not because I was one of his most brilliant students (I got an A in his class, by the skin of my teeth). We tangled bitterly. If duels had been legal, I would have challenged him to one. I never backed down. I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me, no matter who he was. And he was somebody–ultimately, the decision whether I got into the program and could continue my major rested with him. He backed down. He won a battle, definitely. But I won the war.

He’s one of two professors who teach that class. When her brother asks which professor to take, I’ll be torn.

She asked if he could call me. I said certainly. Actually she asked me for my phone number.

“I see,” my friend said. “I take you out to dinner with one of my friends, and the next thing I know, you’re getting his phone number.”

She had trouble finding a pen. “And now you’re going to ask me for my pen so you can write down his phone number,” he said.

She found her pen. I told her my number. I look forward to talking about journalism with her brother.

I don’t know what the future holds for them, and two hours does not a final impression make, but I know most guys settle for a whole lot worse.

Linkfest Friday…

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

Let’s start things off with some links. Web development’s been on my mind the last few days. There’s a whole other world I’ve been wanting to explore for a couple of years, and I’ve finally collected the information that’ll let me do it.
Redirecting virus attacks — Your neighbor’s got Nimda? Here’s how to get his IIS server to quit harassing your Apache server. (Suggests redirecting to a bogus address; I’m inclined to redirect either to 127.0.0.1 or www.microsoft.com, personally.)

DJG’s help setting up MySQL. Apache, MySQL and PHP are a fabulous combination, but bootstrapping it can be a painful process. People talk about writing a sendmail.cf file as their loss of innocence, but I’ve written one of those and I’ve tried to set up the LAMP quartet. The sendmail.cf file was easier because there’s a whole lot more written about it.

Short version: Use Debian. Forget all the other distributions, because they’ll install the pieces, but rarely do they put the conduits in place for the three pieces to talk. It’s much easier to just download and compile the source. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, use Debian and save some heartache. If you’re stuck with the distro you have, download ApacheToolbox and use it. You’ll probably have to configure your C/C++ compiler and development libraries. That’s not as bad as it sounds, but I’m biased. I’ve compiled entire distributions by hand–to the point that I’ve taken Linux From Scratch, decided I didn’t like some of the components they used because they were too bloated for me, and replaced them with slimmer alternatives. (The result mostly worked. Mostly.) You’ve gotta be a bit of a gearhead to take that approach.

Debian’s easier. Let’s follow that. Use this command sequence:

apt-get install apache
apt-get install php4-mysql
apt-get install mysql-server

Next, edit /etc/apache/httpd.conf. There’s a commented-out line in there that loads the php4 module. Uncomment that. Just search for php. It’ll be the third or fourth instance. Also, search for index.html. To that line, add the argument index.php. If you make index.php the first argument, access to PHP pages will be slightly faster. Pull out any filetypes you’re not using–if you’ll never make an index page called anything but index.html or index.php, pull the others and Apache will perform better.

Got that? Apache’s configured. Yes, the php installation could make those changes for you. It doesn’t. I’m not sure why. But trust me, this is a whole lot less painful than it is under Red Hat.

But you’re not ready to go just yet. If you try to go now, MySQL will just deny everything. Read this to get you the rest of the way.

Once you’ve got that in place, there are literally thousands of PHP and PHP/MySQL apps and applets out there. If you can imagine it, you can build it. If HTML is a 2D world, PHP and MySQL are the third and fourth dimension.

Am I going to be playing in that world? You’d better believe it. How soon? It depends on how quickly I can get my content whipped into shape for importing.

This is the holy grail. My first editing job was doing markup for the Digital Missourian, which the faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism believe was the first electronic newspaper (it came into being in 1986 or so). By the time I was working there in the late summer of 1995, it had been on the ‘Net for several years. About eight of us sat in a room that was originally a big storage closet, hunched in front of 486s, pulling stories off the copydesk, adding HTML markup, and FTPing them to a big Unix cluster on the MU campus. We ran a programmable word processor called DeScribe, and we worked out some macros to help speed along the markup.

No big operation works that way anymore. There aren’t enough college students in the world. You feed your content to a database, be it Oracle or IBM DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL or PostgresSQL. Rather than coding in straight HTML, you use a scripting language–be it PHP or ASP–that queries the database, pulls the content, applies a template, and generates the HTML on the fly. The story goes from the copy editor’s desk to the Web with no human intervention.

There are distinct advantages to this approach even for a small-time operation like me. Putting the content in a database gives you much more versatility. Some people want overdesigned Web sites. Some want something middle-ground, like this one. Others want black text on a gray background like we had in 1994. You can offer selectable formats to them. You can offer printer-friendly pages. You can even generate PDFs on the fly if you want–something some sites are doing now in an effort to gain revenue. If you have content from various sources, you can slice and dice and combine it in any imaginable way.

I can’t wait.

Priorities (Or: How to spend Valentine’s night on the couch)

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire , , ,

It’s that special time of year, when a man’s thoughts turn to…
Computers. Or other gadgets. Just like they always do. Men don’t need a Hallmark holiday to think about what they really want.

Steve DeLassus called me up the other night. He wanted to talk about tape drives and CD-RWs. He wanted to know if it was safe to buy an ATAPI CD-RW drive, or if he should buy SCSI. He knew about my terrible experiences with first-generation ATAPI CD-RWs. I burned as many coasters as I did successful discs, and in those days, a coaster was an expensive mistake.

I told him where to get Plextor CD-RWs for next to nothing (Newegg.com). Steve checked yesterday morning, but they were out of them, as it turns out. So Steve looked at Hyper Microsystems and found some good prices on Plextor units. Not earth-shattering like the deal I saw at New Egg a couple of weeks ago, but good. We had initially talked about 12X units. But the 16X unit was $4 more, and the 24X unit was $20 more than that. “You can ride that train all the way up to the $179 40X burner,” I said.

Steve hasn’t responded to that as I write this. Considering what I paid for my 2X burner in 1998, that $179 Plextor 40X unit is a steal.

But there’s something else to consider: The overhead in burning a disc. It takes the computer a little time to figure out the disc layout, and that speed is dependent on the host computer (and the software it’s running), not the burner. It didn’t seem like much time in the days of 2X burners, but compared to the three minutes it takes to lay down a mountain of data on the disc with a modern burner, it’s started to look significant. Secondly, it takes some time to close a disc. I haven’t taken a stopwatch to it, but the 12X unit I use in one of my offices at work seems to take about the same amount of time to close a disc as the 2X unit I use in another office. The 12X unit doesn’t burn a disc 6 times as fast as the clunky 2X unit. And the 24X unit definitely won’t be twice as fast as a 12X.

Since I don’t have all those burners and don’t have the time to make a scientific test, I went to CDRLabs.com to get some figures. Their testbed has changed over time–they keep it constant across drive generations, but the 12x unit was tested in a different system than the 40x unit, and they overclock. Storage Review’s methodology is much better. But the numbers are good enough to illustrate the point.

Results of burning 651 MB of data, along with the cost of the drive:
12x: 6:43 ($124)
16x: 5:11 ($129)
24x: 3:54 ($149)
40x: 3:26 ($175)

Even given the advantage of a faster computer and newer software, the 40x unit still can’t double the speed of the venerable 12x unit.

Why the diminishing returns? Constant Angular Velocity. Very high-speed burners use the same technique as high-speed readers, so you don’t get a constant 40x. The 40x drive starts out at 20x and steps up to 40x as it reaches the outside of the disc. The average writing speed is closer to 30x. Obviously, the less data you burn, the less the 40x drive will help you.

I also pointed out to Steve that there’s more to this than the hard dollar cost. It’s Valentine’s Day time, and there’s the wrath of the wife to deal with. There’s always a hidden cost involved, no matter what you’re buying, and sometimes it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what you’re buying.

I could quote Proverbs 31:10 and say that a wife is a treasure and therefore you should always treat her as such, and therefore you should buy the $59 refurbished 8x drive for you, a $39 dozen roses for her, and–here’s the kicker–then spend $80 filling her car with flowers the week after Valentine’s Day, when your money buys three times as much. See? I’m a thinking man.

Then again, you can go for bragging rights and find yourself singing along with Dave:

That’s okay, hey hey hey, love songs bite anyway!

(In which case, you’ll probably find yourself spending Valentine’s night on the couch. Or on the porch. I can’t say I’ve ever experienced this, but I don’t think it would be very pleasant to be stuck out on the porch wearing something skimpy in Missouri in February.)

So, to recap, for those of you taking notes: Spending $179 on a 40x CD-RW drive for you and giving a home-made Valentine’s Day card to your wife will lead to very bad things.

Burning a CD full of sappy love songs and then bragging about how it only took four minutes to burn (the 40x drive doesn’t burn audio at full speed) won’t make it any better. Sorry.

But I seem to have gotten off the subject somehow.

As far as tape drives go, I can tell you that Quantum DLT tape drives rock because that’s all we use at work. They’re built like tanks and last forever. The tapes are cheap and take a lot of punishment. They back up at a rate of about 5 MB/sec, which makes them faster than the hard drives of 10 years ago. And they work fabulously with Seagate Backup Exec, which severely reduces headaches when people want stuff restored. Considering they start at about $3995, they’d better have something going for them.

Steve’s needs are a bit more modest. An 8-gig IDE Travan drive from the likes of Seagate is cheap. The tapes run about $30, but for the quantities of data Steve will be backing up (he and I both rely on CD-Rs for backups now) and the frequency at which he’ll be doing so, a drive and tapes designed for light duty ought to do fine. When it comes to tape drives, you can buy a cheap drive that uses expensive tapes, or an expensive drive that uses cheap tapes. A lesson most people have to learn quickly is that it’s much easier to get a cheaper drive past the glare of your wife or boss and then buy the more-costly media as you need them. Media’s an OK purchase. Hardware is bad.

That’s why Zip drives have been so successful, and why Iomega is still in business.

I think if Steve wants to spend Valentine’s night on the porch, he needs to buy a DLT drive, then take out a cash advance to make his first minimum payment.

Then he can gloat about how much money he’s saving on tapes.

St. Louis secrets

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , , , ,

St. Louis secrets. I have no idea how many of you live in St. Louis or travel to St. Louis or have ever been here. I’m a St. Louis transplant, being a native of Kansas City. Toasted ravioli was odd. I learned to like it pretty quickly (for the unitiated, it’s ravioli that’s been battered and then deep-fried. In these health-conscious days, sometimes you can get it baked instead.)
St. Louis-style pizza, on the other hand… I tolerated it. But real pizza was from New York or Chicago. To get good pizza in St. Louis, you had to go to one of the places that specialized in one of the foreign styles. When I was in college, to get a decent pizza, my dad and I would go to Shakespeare’s, a little hole in the wall (well, now it’s a big hole in the wall) at 9th and Elm streets in Columbia, just on the edge of the MU campus. I remember once, my sophomore year, sitting there with my dad, and he looked off, whimsically in the distance. “I’m gonna miss this place.”

There wasn’t anything remotely like it in St. Louis. Ironically, their sausage and pepperoni was delivered fresh every day from St. Louis. St. Louis knows how to make this stuff–the Italian population here is huge, and the Italian restaurants in St. Louis are to die for–but Imo’s, the most famous place to get St. Louis-style pizza? Forget it. I’d rather stop at the grocery store and get a frozen pizza. Seriously. If you bake it on a baking stone, you’ll get a crisp crust that’s almost as thin, and bettter in every other way. The other big local chains are comparable.

So if you’re ever in St. Louis, skip Imo’s. Skip Cecil Whittaker’s and Elicia’s too. They’re better, but I have a hard time thinking they’re anything special.

I found out this weekend the place to go. It’s called Fortel’s Pizza Den. There are four or five locations, and they don’t advertise a whole lot. Gatermann and I paid it a visit at about 8:30 Saturday night. There were only a couple of emtpy tables when we got there, and when we left an hour later, people were still coming in about as fast as they were leaving. That tells you something. The toppings were extremely fresh, not to mention plentiful, and there was something special about the sauce. I’m not good enough at identifying spices to know what they did with it, but it’s absolutely a cut above anything the national chains like Domino’s and Papa John’s use. St. Louis knows how to make a red sauce, which you’ll know if you visit any of the Italian restaurants here. You wouldn’t know that from Imo’s or Cecil’s. You’ll know it from Fortel’s though.

So if you’re visiting a friend or relative in St. Louis and they want to show you Imo’s, show them Fortel’s instead.

I figured that to get a decent pizza joint in St. Louis, I’d have to open it myself. I’m glad I won’t have to do that now–the thought of owning a restaurant never really appealed to me. And now I don’t have to drive two hours to Shakespeare’s in Columbia to get a first-class pizza either.

Speaking of Italian restaurants, I recommend Zia’s on The Hill. There are pricier restaurants out there, but I’ve never found one that was better. Get a salad, and get their Italian dressing on it. Trust me, you’ll love it. Another hint: They sell it in grocery stores. You can stop at Schnucks or Dierbergs (the two biggest grocery chains here, both run by families who don’t know how to use apostrophes) and buy a case of it to take back with you. You’ll want to.

The Dierberg family is Lutheran. There are lots of Lutherans in St. Louis.

And if you want a goofy souvenir, stop in at Dirt Cheap Beer. There are dozens of convenient locations all around St. Louis. Pick up a six-pack of their house brand. It’ll set you back about $1.75. I won’t ruin your fun by describing the label on it. No, it’s not any classier than the word BEER in solid black block letters on a white can. But it’s a lot funnier. I’ve never been brave enough to drink any of it. One of my rules is to avoid all beer that costs less than Pepsi.

For frozen custard, there’s Ted Drewes on Chippewa. I think 3/4 of the appeal is the atmosphere and nostalgia. But it’s good. The place is always crowded, so I’m not the only one who likes it. Ted Drewes is Lutheran. He doesn’t know how to use apostrophes either. Maybe the Dierberg family taught him.

For the best deli sandwich in the world, there’s Amighetti’s on The Hill. For the second-best deli sandwich in the world, there’s Mom’s Deli on Chippewa. They’re both amazing. (I’m still mad about the Amighetti’s franchise in Crestwood, near where I work, closing. The sandwiches were to die for, and the girl who always worked the counter was really cute, too.) They know how to use apostrophes both places. Must be because they’re not Lutheran.

There’s another place I haven’t checked out yet, but I’ve been ordered to do so at some point. Up in north St. Louis, there’s a joint called Crown Candy. It’s a candy store (they make their own) with an authentic old-fashioned soda fountain. They serve food too, so you can get acceptable lunch fare on your pilgrimage. The milkshakes are supposed to be out of this world.

But if you want good barbecue in Missouri, you still have to go to Kansas City. And if you want good beer from Missouri, skip Anheuser-Busch’s products, which are as smooth as a gravel road. Get a Boulevard. That’s brewed in Kansas City, of course. (You can take Dave out of Kansas City, but you’ll never take the Kansas City out of Dave.)

If you want to chase rainbows…

Dave Farquhar General ,

It was a Sunday, in the spring of 1998. I was 23 years old. I was driving on I-435 outside of Olathe, Kan., on my way to I-70, returning from a seminar that changed my life. But I wasn’t thinking too much about that at the moment. I’m plenty familiar with I-435 north of I-70 on the Missouri side, but I’d never driven the southern portion of I-435 before. I hate driving on Interstate highways during a storm, and the rain was coming down in buckets. I hate driving in unfamiliar areas when I’m low on fuel. My orange gas indicator was lit and my car had dinged at me a time or two: “Feed me, you dingaling!” it was saying.
Finally, I found a sign that indicated a service station. It was a couple of miles off the highway, but I took it. Better to take something you know than to take chances when you’re low on fuel. The road twisted and turned, and I didn’t know if the gas station would be on the left or right. Finally I found the station, on the left. I pulled in, swiped my credit card, fueled up, and found out once again that my 12-gallon tank actually held more than 12 gallons. Meanwhile, the storm continued to relentlessly pound the earth. I got back into my car and realized I didn’t completely remember which direction I’d come from. I took a chance on my hazy short-term memory and turned right, out of the station, praying that I’d run back into I-435 because I had no idea where the unfamiliar road would lead if I’d turned the wrong direction.

Finding I-435, I continued on my journey. The road twisted more than I liked, and when I continued onto I-470, conditions didn’t really change. But as I approached I-70, the storm lightened a little. I saw a rainbow, then another, then another. Three rainbows. No matter how the road twisted and turned–which seemed like a lot at the time, even though I had a new set of Michelins and I’d already had one opportunity to find out just how good they were–those rainbows stayed directly in front of me. The storm picked back up and the rainbows faded. The storm relented some more.

It was a good metaphor for my life at the time. I was attending a church that was simultaneously admonishing me to use my talents for the glory of God and telling me that serving God in its ministries was a right that had to be earned. My ex-girlfriend was sending mixed signals at a rate of a million a minute any time she came around, which was often. Meanwhile I fought an internal battle. I wanted her back like the desert soil wants rain, yet I knew more and more with each passing day she wasn’t good for me. On top of all that, some of her friends and acquaintances seemed to be eyeing me up, making me wonder if they weren’t trying to figure out what was wrong with me that would make her leave, and whether they were wondering if I’d be good enough for them. Some of them had just ended relationships themselves, while others hadn’t had one in a long time. I wasn’t especially interested in finding out–I was gripped by a mortal fear that they’d do the same thing she did in the end. And if that wasn’t enough, my career was falling apart. I had computers breaking left and right, no budget to replace them outright, and heavily-used spare parts that were more than three years old. For lack of anything else to use, I was routinely deploying three-year-old systems to do things they were never designed to do. Things weren’t working well and I was taking the heat.

I considered all of this, looked out at the storm, and at the rainbows beyond. A thought came to mind. “If you want to chase rainbows, you’ll have to weather a few storms.”

I didn’t catch all the rainbows, but I caught some of them. And the storms are different today. Some of them are smaller and others aren’t. But the things that got me through those old storms haven’t changed.

And some of today’s rainbows are cooler than the rainbows were then.