RCA

Baseball Mogul 2002 offers a glimpse of the future…

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

I have seen the future, and it crashes a lot. I’ve been playing Baseball Mogul 2002 like a fiend, and I love it. I love statistical baseball and I love financial simulations, so for people like me, this game might as well be heroin.
My big annoyance is that it crashes a lot. It seems to get through the first season just fine, but I haven’t gotten through a second season yet without a crash. That’s annoying. Playing games in a month’s batches seems to make it worse. I suggest you play week by week, saving at the end of each week.

I started off with the Kansas City Royals, of course, and pretty soon I realized what dire straits the team is in if the game doesn’t change. Without a bunch of trades for can’t-miss prospects, it’s virtually impossible to lift the team over the .500 mark, and with free spenders like Cleveland and Chicago in the division, third place is about as well as you’ll do. An out-of-this-world manager like the late (and very sorely missed) Dick Howser could probably improve matters a ton, but Baseball Mogul’s manegerial model is a bit clunky. You can change how your manager manages, but it’s with a bunch of sliders. There’s no way to model, say, a Dick Howser based on the tendencies he used in the dugout and save it. That’s a feature Earl Weaver baseball had way back in the early ’90s and I can’t believe modern sims don’t copy it.

After two seasons with the Royals, I got frustrated. I needed something easier, but not necessarily too easy. So I took on the Curse of the Bambino and took the helm of the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920 for an astronomical $100,000. (Ruth was already a superstar and guided the Bosox to three World Championships, but with him gone, the Sox have been heartbreakers ever since, appearing in four Series and losing each in Game 7. The Yankees have just been scum.)

But how to take on the high-revenue, free-spending Yankees? The Bosox were a challenge unto themselves. Nomar Garciaparra, the greatest shortstop alive today, was injured at the beginning of the 2001 season, of course. MVP candidate Manny Ramirez’ presence in the lineup helped soften it, but I had a cripple playing first base (Brian Daubach was nowhere to be found, not that he has enough punch to really justify holding down that position). So I traded for Toronto’s Brad Fullmer, to get some protection for Ramirez. And Boston limped its way to the playoffs. It wasn’t exactly pretty. The Boston bats racked up tons of runs. Pedro Martinez was masterful, of course, but behind him I had four No. 4 starters: Frank Castillo, Bret Saberhagen (I was glad to see him come off the shelf, but he was the epitome of clutch pitcher, one of those guys who’d give up 9 runs if you didn’t have to win, but when the pennant was on the line, he’d pitch a shutout), David Cone (another ex-Royal, dumped unceremoniously for salary years ago, like Sabes), and Hideo Nomo. Fortunately the Bosox had a solid bullpen. We beat Cleveland in the first round of the playoffs, in five. Pedro had to pitch twice. Sabes won the other game. Of course we faced the Yankees in the ALCS. Boston won in 6, again behind Pedro and Sabes. It would have been poetic justice to have Cone face them in the series and win, but I had to go by the numbers rather than entirely by emotions. That brought us to Larry Walker’s and Mike Hampton’s Colorado for the World Series. Pedro won Game 1. Sabes won Game 2, of course. Castillo lost Game 3. Pedro pitched Game 4 on short rest and lost. I didn’t want to pitch 37-year-old Sabes on such short rest, so I pitched Cone instead. He lost. Sabes came back for Game 6 and won. A shutout, of course. Pedro came back strong and won Game 7.

The curse was lifted. Pedro, with a 19-6 regular season record and a 5-1 record in the postseason, took home the Cy Young award and an All-Star appearance. Manny Ramirez also brought in an All-Star appearance, but most importantly, the team brought in the World Championship.

The 2002 season was where things went nuts. The big-market teams started looking like Rotisserie Leagues thanks to free agency. I went and grabbed Anaheim’s Troy Glaus to play third base and Cleveland’s Kenny Lofton to play left field and bat leadoff. Then I grabbed Minnesota’s Eric Milton to give Pedro a legitimate #2 starter behind him. A couple of weeks into the season I noticed Houston’s Billy Wagner was still unsigned, so I nabbed him to give closer Derek Lowe some help in the bullpen. We rolled through to a 109-53 record, obliterating Oakland and New York in the playoffs. This time there wasn’t even any danger of Pedro’s arm falling off. (He went 27-1 in the regular season with a sparkling 1.53 ERA.)

Then I ran into the free-spending Braves. The Braves’ pitching staff was mostly unchanged from the real 2001 roster. (It was already an All-Star team.) But the lineup… Rafael Furcal, ss. Andruw Jones, cf. Chipper Jones, 3b. Barry Bonds, lf. Sammy Sosa, rf. Tony Clark, 1b. Quilvio Veras, 2b. Paul Bako, c. With the exception of the bottom three, they had arguably the best player in the league at each position. (The other three would be the second- or third-best player on a lot of teams.) Oh yeah. They also had superstar Moises Alou riding the bench. I took a look at Atlanta’s finances. Yep, they were bankrupting the team, deficit spending in hopes of pulling in a World Series. It came down to Game 7, Greg Maddux vs. Pedro Martinez, a showdown of the two greatest pitchers playing today (and arguably the two greatest pitchers alive). Maddux beat Martinez 2-1 in a heartbreaker. (Hey, you try shutting out that lineup!)

After facing that, I felt a little less guilty about running a Rotisserie-style team out of Boston. I’d passed on signing Kerry Wood as a free agent the season before for just that reason. No longer. Atlanta, unable to afford Maddux and Glavine for the next season, let both of them walk. I signed Maddux to a four-year deal, which pretty much guaranteed he’d get his 300th win in a Boston uniform. And between the two of them, I could pretty much count on getting at least three wins in a 7-game postseason. Throw in another clutch performance by Sabes (re-signed for purely emotional reasons–I was either going to get Sabes another World Series ring to go with the one he got with the Royals in ’85 and my fictional Bosox in 2001 or I was going to ship both Sabes and Cone back home to Kansas City, to finish their careers where they both belonged all along. But Cone retired so I opted to go for another ring.) and I’m pretty sure I’d be able to lift the Curse of the Bambino again.

The game even fabricates newspaper accounts of the season’s big games. The picture is almost always the same, and you can usually tell the story was computer-generated rather than written by an intelligent human being, but it adds an element of drama to it.

I also noticed the injury model is fairly realistic. Keeping Pedro Martinez healthy for a full season is virtually impossible, both in this game and in real life. But there are players who will tough themselves through their injuries. Mike Sweeney suffers about one serious injury per year, an injury that would knock most players out of action for a couple of weeks, maybe a month. In Baseball Mogul, Sweeney sits. In real life, Sween tapes himself up and keeps going until he either gets better or the injury hampers his play so severely that even he realizes the Royals are better off with his backup playing. That doesn’t happen often.

The other glaring drawback is that you can’t watch the games. I’d love to watch the All-Star game and at least the World Series.

So. We’ve got a baseball simulation that crashes a lot, doesn’t let you watch the key games (or any of them, for that matter), where injuries are all or nothing, and the managerial model is more crude than I’d like.

Those are serious shortcomings. But the rest of the game is so fabulous that I can mostly overlook them.

Now, the question is, who pitches Opening Day 2003? Martinez or Maddux?

Who is GenX?

Dave Farquhar Christianity ,

Bible Study last night. My buddy Sean and I led the discussion, using “Too much [whatever], not enough God” as our topic. We prepared like mad dogs–I’ll bet we each put more than five hours into preparation for this thing–and yet I still looked every bit as disorganized as I do when I prepare an hour beforehand. So it goes. I think when I speak in front of a group I’m always going to look a bit disorganized and a bit eccentric and it’s probably just part of me. People seem to like it anyway. One of our regulars brought a couple of friends, and one of the friends came up to me afterwards and asked if I was on the radio, because I seemed to have the voice and charisma for it. That was odd. I’ve never been complimented on my voice before. And the charisma is easily explained. There wasn’t anyone there tonight I was trying to impress. (Which ought to teach me something, but I’m digressing.)
At one point, the subject of Generation X came up. I think it was because the other friend (the one who didn’t compliment me on my voice) talked about how he never plans anything in advance. It just happens and that’s how he likes it. Of course I’m exactly the same way–Sean and I made up two thirds of the sadly defunct Bastions of Decisiveness, and believe me, it was a sarcastic nickname–and one of the girls piped up, “You…. I know you! You’re a GenXer! I read a book about you!” Of course she was laughing as she said it.

And that’s a hot topic for me. Churches fret over how to reach GenX and what they have to do differently. As far as I can tell, churches didn’t operate too differently when I was young from how they operated when my parents were young. And there was a point in their lives when they didn’t have much to do with any church. But they came back, as much for the sake of my sister and me as anything else. They may not have always liked the church, but they trusted the institution for whatever reason.

Now we GenXers are growing up and having kids of our own. Some of us are coming back. Most of us aren’t. And on average, we’re waiting longer to have kids, so there are buckets of us out there who have nothing to do with a church and don’t really care to. Meanwhile, churches’ ranks are dwindling as their members age, and our generation is a large, mostly untapped resource.

What gives? I think one of my ex-girlfriends put it very well. We were talking about gifts and abilities, and I told her sincerity was all I’ve got. She rolled her eyes, as she often did with me, and said, “Sincerity is everything.” I’ve forgotten a lot of things she said to me, but I’ll probably carry that to my grave. In fact, I was talking to someone else a couple of weeks ago and I said that sincerity is usually more important than good intentions.

What else about GenX? I don’t think we like hypocrisy all that much. Bill Clinton didn’t alienate my generation at all. He was as old as some of our parents, but as a demographic group, we dug him. You can say a lot of things about Bill Clinton, and I certainly have because I can’t stand the sorry excuse for a man, but you can’t say he was a hypocrite. But our generation has great disdain for people like Jimmy Swaggart, who said not to do one thing and then did it.

I think the biggest difference between GenX and the previous generation is that the previous generation accepted that hypocrisy exists and you can’t get away from it, and that sincerity is nice but you won’t always find it. GenX isn’t tolerant of that. If you’re insincere, talk to the hand. If you’re a hypocrite, don’t let the door hit your backside on the way out.

And, yes, I’ll say it. It’s easier to find insincerity and hypocrisy in a church than almost anywhere else.

So… I help organize this group of GenXers who meet on Friday nights to read the Bible, of all things. That’s prime party time. But, consistently, 15-20 people come. Most churches don’t have 15-20 GenXers in the sanctuary on Sundays. What’s the secret?

Here’s the secret. There’s no bull with me. I am what I am. At one point tonight it looked like I got choked up and someone commented, asked if I needed Kleenex. Actually I wasn’t choked up. I just lost my place. But I don’t try to hide anything. I’ve got an expressive face, so I’m easy to read. They’ve never seen me get choked up at the beginning like that, but it wouldn’t be out of character. You want sincerity? I’ve got it and so do the other people who lead.

As for hypocrisy, we’ve all been around the block, some of us more times than others, but we don’t try to hide it. And when I say, “Here’s how to overcome this problem,” I’m generally not talking from experience. When I talk about the problem itself, I usually am. But I look to see what God says about solving a particular problem, because when it comes to life’s problems, I sure haven’t solved very many, and I’m not afraid to talk about those failures. Neither are the others who lead.

OK. So we’ve taken care of the sincerity and hypocrisy. That’s not enough to bring people back. What is?

I think it was Mark Twain who said God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. We listen. At least I listen. I listen to the questions people ask and the prayer requests they give. You can tell what’s bothering a person based on those things. And what’s bothering one person is usually bothering more than one. You can tell that from looking at those things. If you see a pattern, you go for it. Go find what God has to say about it. The Bible’s not a short book. Name any life experience, and chances are the Bible’s got something to say about it.

No one ever comes and feels like they wasted their time. Sometimes they have other reasons for not coming back, but that’s never it. We have deep and challenging discussions. But they’re not academic. It’s stuff that we’ll spend the next couple of weeks applying to our lives.

So here’s the secret formula. Check hypocrisy and insincerity at the door. Listen. Care. Then go where that leads. Interestingly enough, it usually leads to relevance.

So much for me ever writing a book about ministering to my lost generation–it’s not a subject long and complex enough to be worthy of a book. But if the sales of my last book are any indication, that’s probably just as well.

Some downtime yesterday…

Dave Farquhar General ,

Late last night at some point my router decided to quit forwarding port 80. I reset it and all was well. My apologies for the outage.
I made the mistake of downloading the demo version of Baseball Mogul last night and I played it for several hours. The good news is, according to Baseball Mogul, the Royals are one star pitcher and a star catcher away from contention. The bad news is it’s hard to come by those two things, and when you’re the size of the Royals, it’s hard to afford them. Usually you find yourself overpaying for second-rate players you think you can afford.

The thing that keeps me from slapping down my 30 bucks and paying for it is the time factor. I know I’ll play it like crazy. I like this game’s approach because you’re the GM, rather than an arcade-style game like most baseball sims, or the field manager like most statistical sims. As much as I love on-field baseball strategy, I love wheeling and dealing and watching finances even more.

Speaking of slapping down money, there are a bunch of sales out there starting today. I posted more details in the forums, but after rebates, there are plenty of hard drives to be had in the $50-$60 range for the next few days, and if you need a $20 CD-ROM drive, CompUSA is your friend.

Why am I afraid of heights?

Dave Farquhar General ,

Well, our last photo shoot in the warehouse district didn’t go so well. Gatermann got some great shots, but the negatives ended up really hot and the processing lab didn’t know what to do with them, so the result was a bunch of washed-out pictures. The dark areas like the building and my black t-shirt ended up fine, but lighter areas, like, oh, my face, totally washed out.
So Tom Gatermann and I headed back out yesterday afternoon, with our buddy Tim Coleman tagging along. Tim provided comic relief; mostly at our expense. They found me a summer home–what looked like an abandoned ticket booth that was missing a door–and a couple of cars. One was an early eighties-something Oldsmobile with no tires. There was also a later-eighties GM car of some sort, smaller and front wheel-drive, also without tires. And there was an old Dodge van that had to have dated back to the late 70s. It had–honest–a Reagan ’84 bumper sticker on the back. On the other side it had a Bush ’88 bumper sticker. Tim noticed it first. I had to take a picture.

The warehouse district just seems to be the place to ditch a car that doesn’t run anymore and you don’t want to pay to tow away. Trust me–when you do, it doesn’t take long for people to start pillaging parts from it. You ditch your car, then the vultures swoop in and take anything usable from them. Strange system.

We ended up back at the old Cotton Belt Route Freight Depot. We explored that until about 8, then went off to get some dinner. Tim had told us about the place he was house-sitting. It’s an apartment on the 29th floor of The Gentry’s Landing, a high-rise downtown. It’s a corner apartment, with a great view of downtown and the Mississippi River. Open up the windows, and you can see it all. So after dinner we headed back there to check out how awful it is to be Tim these days. The view was every bit as spectacular as he said, and the windows were huge. I felt my fear of heights kick in when I stepped too close.

Out of curiosity, I looked the place up when I got home. Their apartment probably costs right around double what mine runs. Then again, it’s a whole lot bigger too.

Tom and I marveled at the view (Tom from right up against the window, me from the middle of the room), and then Tim said we ought to see it from the roof. So we headed up to the 29th floor, then took a flight of steps up onto the open roof. I proceeded–slowly–behind them. At one point Tim turned around. “We lost Dave. Oh,” then he looked my direction. I had trouble keeping up with them, and it wasn’t the soreness from the softball games. I hate heights. It’s weird, because I love airplanes, but get me high up in a building, or, worse yet, on the roof, and I go nuts.

Don’t get me wrong. It was nice. The breeze was fabulous up there, and the almost unobstructed view of St. Louis was great. From that distance, the Mississippi River is gorgeous. Turn your head and you see the Arch, I-70, the Trans World Dome… And it’s beautiful. Even I-70 is beautiful from that distance. I never knew an Interstate highway could be beautiful. I admired it all from the steps up to the main rail-enclosed platform. I looked around, all the while gripping the railing on the staircase, my hands dripping wet with cold sweat, my heart racing, and my legs tingling weirdly.

When Tom and Tim said, “Let’s go,” I didn’t argue. And somehow I moved a lot faster getting off the roof than I did getting on.

One way to defeat spammers

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Ever since Brightmail closed up their free filtering service, I’ve been thinking a lot more about spam because I’ve been getting a lot more. I know where these losers are getting my e-mail address. It’s right here on my Web page. But I need to post that so people can contact me. Fortunately, I found a trick. Look at this:
dfarq@swbell.net

That’s just an e-mail link, right? It works just like any other, right? Well, here’s the HTML code for that:

mailto:dfarq@swbell.net

See what I did? I obscured the @ sign with an ASCII code (64), along with the dot (46) and a couple of other characters like the colon. Most automated e-mail address harvesters don’t decode the HTML, so their search routines, which look for things like @ signs and dot-somethings will blow right past that.

So if you run a site, obscure your e-mail address. If you don’t remember your ASCII codes, hopefully you’ve still got QBasic on one of your machines. In QBasic, the command PRINT ASC(“A”) will give you the ASCII code for the letter A. Substitute any letter you like. Or you can remember that A is 65 and lowercase a is 97. A is 65, B is 66, and so on.

When a Web site asks you for an e-mail address, you can see if it’ll let you obscure parts of it. Unfortunately, my forums flag illegal characters, but I may be able to modify that. Some Web sites aren’t that smart.

Obviously this trick won’t work in e-mail, unless you always send your mail in HTML format, which I (along with about half the world) really wish you wouldn’t–it’s annoying. And even if you obscure the mail you send, if I copy and paste your mail to my site, it’ll go up there unobscured. So this advice is mostly for webmasters.

Anyway… On to other things.

We’ve moved, if you haven’t noticed. These pages should be at least a little bit faster. The forums will be several times faster. And the forums are goofy. I haven’t figured out exactly why, but posts are missing and user files are acting up. If you’re having problems (Steve DeLassus just told me he can’t post because it tells him his .dat file can’t be accessed), go ahead and re-register. If you want your post count raised to its previous level, just let me know. I can change that. (Hmm, I wonder if Gatermann would notice if I set his post count to a negative number…?) I’d have preferred to move everything intact, of course.

Anyway. Go play in the forums. See what breaks. If I don’t know it’s broke, I sure can’t fix it. (I may not be able to if I do know, but hey, I can give it my best shot.)

Update: It’s 5:45 in the p.m., and you’re watching… Wait. That’s something else. The forums seem to be working properly now. Lack of uniformity between Linux distributions bites me again… It wasn’t the location of the files YaBB was objecting to, nor was it permissions. It was ownership. Under Mandrake, Apache runs as a user named “apache” and thus files created by CGI scripts like YaBB are owned by “apache.” Under TurboLinux, Apache runs as user “nobody,” and thus files created by CGIs are owned by “nobody.” And when you just tar up your Web site and move it to a new box like I did, those files remain owned by their old owners. Since Linux assumes you know what you’re doing, it happily handed those files over to a non-existant user. So when YaBB came knocking, Unix security kicked in and said, “Hey, nobody, you don’t own these files,” hence those error 103s everyone was getting.

I feel this sudden urge to prove I really exist…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Like This: Personal Weblogs

Christianity that annoys me

Dave Farquhar General ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Like This: Christianity

04/13/2001

Dave Farquhar General ,

Dave’s utility. I spent some time yesterday writing a short utility to assist in creating multiboot systems. It’s not ready yet, but I’ll let the world know when it is. The source code is about 6K in length so it won’t be a monster, but I expect the executable to bloat up to 50-60K. It’s written in QuickBasic, since the Microsoft Basics of old were my best language for a long time, and still the language I remember best. But I seem to be missing some pieces of QuickBasic, so I may have to rewrite it.

It’s simple enough that I probably could even write the thing in assembler, but I’m not that much of a glutton for self punishment. 🙂

I used to really enjoy writing short, useful utilities. These days I’m in that mood maybe once a year.

Daynotes.com. I don’t know what’s going on there, if it’s technical difficulties or something else. I am going to assume it’s either technical difficulties or an oversight. What I do know is that the Apache welcome page that shows up when you go there isn’t what most people are expecting. Bob Walder has set up a portal at www.bobwalder.com/daynotes that you can use in the interim.

Outta here. Today’s Good Friday, so I have the day off. I need to work on an article for Computer Shopper UK.

Partition table recovery. I thought I’d posted this stuff here before, but I can’t find it. So here goes. If you blitz your partition table, here’s what you want to get it back.

MBRWORK: http://www.webdev.net/orca/mbrwork.htm (easier to use)

TestDisk: http://www.esiea.fr/public_html/Christophe.GRENIER/ (more complete)

01/17/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

Mailbag:

Commodore; Relocating My Docs Folder

Bottom fishing. I was over at my church’s sister congregation Monday night, looking over their computer situation. They just got a grant to build a lab, so they asked me to come assess what they have and tell them how to most wisely spend the money they got.

If I were buying all new, I’d be torn. I like the idea of the Compaq iPAQ. It’s $499, it’s all integrated, it’s powerful enough (once you up the memory), comes with Windows 2000, and someone else built it. I can just get seven of them, plug them into a hub, set one up properly, clone it to the rest, and be done with it. It’s a business-class machine from a proven maker.

On the other hand, Compaq Presarios start at $399 and include all the software they need. I’d have to get NICs for them, but that’s $40. Memory’s another $60. So for the cost of the iPAQ, I get similar hardware plus Win98, Word, and Works. But it’s consumer-grade hardware and I’m not impressed with Presarios. I’d really rather have iPAQs with Windows 2000 and StarOffice, frankly. I think they’re better machines. (And there’s probably money to buy the software we need.)

But what about what they have? It’s truly a mixed bag. Mostly a mixed bag of junk. There’s an XT in their room, along with one of the first Compaq 386s. The Compaq is junk. I’m trying to find an appropriate word for the XT. There are a whole bunch of LPX form-factor 386SXs, some Dell and Compaq, others Packard Bell. Junk. There are three Compaq Proliant servers, 486-based, decked out with SCSI drives. Rugged and reliable, I could turn one of them into a Linux gateway, and put Samba on another for use for file serving and authentication. I thought I saw a Compaq Deskpro 486/33. Reliable, but not very useful these days. And there are three ATs: one a 386 and two Pentium-75s, one of which works. The other gives beep codes, so probably either the memory or video’s shot. All in all, 90% of it’s useless, and none of it’s even worthy of being called a museum piece.

Normally I’d say junk it all, maybe keep one of the Proliants and the working Pentium-75. But in light of those $29 Soyo BAT Celeron motherboards… Do the math. The board’s $29. A Celeron is $50. A 128-meg stick is $60. I can probably salvage the video cards, except for the one in the 386. So add a video card, say, $35. Of course I can salvage everything else I need from that big stack of obsolete stuff. So for about $150 each after shipping, I can have two Celerons. For another $180, I could have a third.

Sounds good on paper, but a new Presario costs $399, has more than $220 worth of software, and is covered under warranty. Compaq’s not my favorite computer company, but I don’t really want to be their computer company.

Those $29 Soyo boards are good enough for me. That’s why I ordered two. So I’ll get one final tour of duty out of my souped-up IBM PC/AT, which has done time as a 286 of course, a 386DX-40, a Pentium-75, and a Cyrix 6×86-166. Sick thought: If I end up putting a Celeron-500 in it (I haven’t decided what CPU it gets yet), that AT could be my fastest computer again.

But what makes sense for me often doesn’t make sense elsewhere. And I guess that’s why I write books and magazine articles–sometimes I can figure out when and why that is.

A disk tool that could save your bacon someday. You find all kinds of cool stuff in online forums, let me tell you. I probably find one or two gems a week, but for me, that’s worth it. MBRWORK allows you to play around with partitions, and can even allow you to restore deleted partitions. It’ll also remove those disk overlay programs for you, which is great–the only sure way I could ever get rid of them was to low-level format the drive, which takes forever and is destructive, of course. You can find it at www.terabyteunlimited.com . You can find some brief documentation and screenshots online at www.webdev.net/orca/mbrwork.htm . Download this and keep it in a safe place.

I don’t think do-it-yourself data recovery is something anyone wants to get good at, but it’s usually better than paying someone to do it.

Mailbag:

Commodore; Relocating My Docs Folder

01/02/2001

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

Mailbag:

IE shortcut; Optimizing WinME; Partition; 10/100 NIC; Mobos

Trimming down Windows 2000. Someone else observed last week that, among other things, Windows’ included games are now critical system components. That’s messed up. Fortunately, it’s fixable.

Open the file C:WinntInfsysoc.inf in your favorite text editor, after making a backup copy of course. Search for the string “HIDE,” (without quotes, but including the comma). Delete all references to this string. Save the file. Reboot. Now open Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, and go down to Windows System Components. You can now cleanly uninstall the Windows components that may not be useful to you, such as the Space Cadet Pinball game, or the Accessibility Options. I’m in the habit of just banging on the shift key several times to turn off my screen blanker. Why shift? Because it won’t send weird keystrokes to whatver application I left running in the foreground. Unfortunately, hitting shift five times usually pops up the Accessibility options, much to my annoyance. So I was very glad to finally be able to uninstall that feature.

And a bargain NIC. This week only, Circuit City is selling the D-Link DFE-530TX+ 10/100 NIC for $14.99 with a $9.99 mail-in rebate. While I prefer the DEC Tulip chipset for inexpensive 10/100 NICs, the Realtek chipset in this D-Link works with Linux and Windows, and that’s an absolute giveaway price. I mean, come on, most of us spend that much every week on soda.

I’ve got a D-Link laying around as a spare, but I had a Circuit City gift card with about $7 left on it, so I picked one up. Besides, I needed a stereo miniplug-to-dual-RCA cable, so suddenly I had two semi-compelling reasons to go to the shark-infested cave. It’s good to have some spare parts, and the D-Links have much better compatibility than the NDC card with the obscure Macronix 98715 chipset I still have in at least one of my systems.

I’ve seen some ludicrous claims that D-Link gives you 3Com and Intel quality at a Linksys price. I don’t buy it for a minute. But for a small home-based network, why pay $40-$60 for a NIC if you don’t have to?

And somehow I managed to avoid the sharks as well. I guess I just didn’t have Pentium 4 tattooed across my forehead.

Amazon now seems to be selling Optimizing Windows at its full retail price of $24.95. Obviously sales are slower now than when it was selling at (sometimes deeply) discounted prices, but still much better than November levels. If you’ve bought it, my heartfelt thanks go out to you. If you’ve posted a review, another thank you.

If you’ve read it and like it and feel like writing a review, either at Amazon or another online bookseller such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Bookpool or Fatbrain, please feel free to do so. I appreciate it greatly. And if you have comments or questions on the book, feel free to e-mail me.

If you’re wanting to do a price compare on Optimizing Windows, visit www2.bestbookbuys.com/cgi-bin/bbb.cgi?ISBN=1565926773.

Mailbag:

IE shortcut; Optimizing WinME; Partition; 10/100 NIC; Mobos