by Keith Fenske
February to November 2003
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by Keith Fenske February to November 2003 |
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This archive file contains the following stories that first appeared in "Bloggo - The Non Blog" between February and November 2003:
The presentation here differs from the original because this file makes less use of cascading style sheets: font sizes and spacing are relative to the defaults chosen by your browser. The contents are copyright © 2003 by Keith Fenske with all rights reserved.
Just remember that when you're rich and famous, true friends will still insult you.
When someone gives you advice, don't argue. Listen. Maybe you don't need the advice, and maybe it isn't what you should do, but you aren't going to hear anything new if you're busy making old excuses.
After everything was set up right, we did it all over again from scratch (by erasing the hard drives), and made careful backups of each step. We burned so many CD-R discs that we just labelled and bagged them in zipper freezer bags from the grocery store! The server is now safely behind a firewall, with a dynamic IP address known only to the company's main web server, and access is by user name and password. I can't tell you what it does because that information is a secret shared by several hundred people. People who pay this company for its products and services. If that's you, then you'll get your access soon. If not, then you won't. Even my access ends once the server is locked down.
It's been several years since the city last plowed residential streets. Last Sunday, the graders came to my neighborhood. The windrow wasn't too big (only about three feet or one meter high). For the first day or so, it stays fairly soft and easy to shovel. My neighbors and I were all out in front of our houses moving the snow from the windrow onto our front lawns so that we had somewhere to park our cars. The city can't do this because front yards are private property, and they can't put the snow on the sidewalks because of bylaws about who is responsible for cleaning sidewalks adjoining private property. They aren't going to truck it away because that costs too much money. So we all go out and work away at the windrows until either we finish or we get tired. By the next day, the piles of snow are frozen as hard as rock so there is some urgency to finishing the job on the first day.
I wanted enough space to park my car. I didn't think I could do this, since I was just getting over the flu. Fortunately, one of my neighbors has a driveway and doesn't park his car on the street. He kindly came over to help me. Together we made enough space for one car. Over the next few days, I enlarged the space until now I am almost finished. Today is really slow because the temperature is too cold (around minus 26 degrees last night). To break up the windrow, first you chop off pieces with a spade or other sharp shovel. Then you use a regular scoop shovel to carry chunks away and throw them on top of a snowbank on the lawn. I joke that by the time I finish, the snow will melt (springtime) or we will get so much more snow that the graders will come again!
Also in the past week was another sort of windrow. One of the Korean students who had been here in 1997 to learn English showed up in town unannounced and I refused to meet with them. In the past, they demanded too much of my attention and assistance with very little in return. Once back in Korea, they chose not to acknowledge my cards, letters, or e-mail messages. I tried to explain why I didn't want to see them, but they argued with my words without listening to what I was saying. Some windrows are best left untouched.
The spammer in question is one of the smaller e-mail greeting card companies that went bad sometime in January. They started by sending out weekly unsolicited newsletters promoting their products to anyone who had ever sent an e-mail card using their site, or whose e-mail address had been given as a recipient (my poor luck). The newsletters claimed that these people had somehow "subscribed" to the newsletter. Within two weeks, they were sending unrelated product announcements and had apparently sold their address list to other spam sites, in particular, art sites that send out daily announcements!
Why would a spammer promote anti-spam software when this would obviously hurt their own business? Perhaps because they are looking for something else. The sudden appearance of a newsletter, delivered too often to be positive, and thereby annoying the very people it is supposedly trying to attract. The decreasing quality of each newsletter. The repeated suggestions to click on an "unsubscribe" button, which is coded to send a message to a different IP address, an address in a range that I associate with spammers because it is registered to a reseller who does not provide information about who is using the address. The increasing number of unrelated product announcements, obviously from the same spammer because the e-mail headers are similar, such as this week's change to omit the sending date and time (a trick used by spammers to make their messages show up at the top of your mailbox, because your e-mail program assigns the current date and time to undated messages, in effect marking them as the "most recent" messages received). The unnecessary duplicate copies of the same message, such as the four copies of one message received yesterday at regular intervals.
These are not the actions of a legitimate mass marketer who wants to keep his or her customers happy. A legitimate site would send one or two unsolicited messages and ask you to click on a "subscribe" button if you want to continue receiving the messages. No response from you would automatically remove your e-mail address from their address list. As I have warned before, an "unsubscribe" button often just tells spammers that their messages are being received by a real person, and makes your e-mail address more valuable to them. They are trying to frustrate you into confirming your existence.
The anti-spam software promoted in their latest message was from an unknown company and probably doesn't work. It may in fact be an attempt to intrude further into your computer. Downloading and installing software from unknown sources is stupid because it leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of problems including adware (advertising software), spyware, viruses, and general mayhem from malicious programs.
The speed with which spammers can pick up e-mail addresses was demonstrated a few weeks ago by a friend in the Middle East who made the mistake of forwarding a forwarded message to everyone on his address list (and not using a "bcc" or "blind carbon copy" list). The forwarded message contained hundreds of e-mail addresses. I received this message on a Friday; by Monday, I was getting spam specifically targeted at university academics in the Middle East region: conference announcements (in the United Arab Emirates), Nigerian banking scams (operating out of Israel), etc.
Check dish. No food. Stare through fence, perhaps a shadow moved. Shadows like cats late at night. Listen to street noise, could be at the community hall. Tree branch touches window. Spiders on trees. Seen it before. Cause for concern.
"Arooo! Arooo!" Sound of a guard dog in alarm. Sound of Maggie running. Defend the territory. Defend the people. Bark, snarl, lunge, bite. Teeth close on nothing. Not this time. Next time. Be ready.
"Arooo! Arooo!" Alarms repeats. People wake. People look. Nothing to see. Too late. Too dark. People go back to bed. Don't seem happy. Must be something dangerous nearby.
Quiet for a while. Scratch the collar. Jingle the tags. Take a nap. Get up and patrol once more. Protect the people. Do the job. Be the dog of the house. Until morning, after breakfast, and a well-deserved rest.
"What you choose to criticize in others says a great deal about the faults you find in yourself." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, March 2003)
Alternate wording (December 2004): "The faults you find in others often say more about the faults you find in yourself."
Any spam that you receive (junk e-mail) has to come from somewhere. The e-mail message headers trace back from computer to computer, eventually showing the first computer where the message originated. Bold spammers make no attempt to hide this information -- the named sender of the message is correct -- perhaps because they believe that they are offering a legitimate service that people want. However, most big-time spammers operate on behalf of clients, so the return address (if any) belongs to the client; only the originating IP address identifies the spammer. Finding information on big-time spammers from their IP addresses is nearly impossible, because those addresses are purchased from resellers who don't release public records about who is using which address. (Please see my previous article for more information on big-time spammers.)
Small-time spammers are closer to hit-and-run accidents: they have a list of e-mail addresses and they send out as many spam messages as they can until their internet connection gets terminated. Obviously, the harder it is to trace a message back to them, the longer they can stay in business. The best is if the message headers don't trace back to the real spammer. Previously, I noted that this could be done by abusing an "open relay" (that is, a computer that forwards messages blindly). It can also be done by pushing messages through a wireless network intended to provide free internet access to a local community, or to the customers of a particular establishment such as Starbucks Coffee.
Today's spam came from IP address 61.175.209.62 which is registered to Wenzhou Hailuo Community Broadband Access Network in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. The return e-mail address was in the "hello.com" domain (Pasadena, California), and is probably fake. The contact e-mail address inside the message for anyone wanting to buy a genuine Rolex watch for only $65 dollars is in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Quite the international collection of addresses!
The e-mail headers show only a single link between the sending computer and my e-mail service provider. That means someone on the Wenzhou network ran an application that connected directly to my ISP's mail server without using the Wenzhou SMTP server. (The program may be called "QuickSender 1.05".) There is no identification of the sender, only the network IP address.
Imagine walking into an internet cafe with an open wireless network. You have a laptop computer with a wireless Ethernet card. You have a list of e-mail addresses and a message to send. Your computer connects to the network by requesting an IP address. The wireless network only provides internet access, not a mail server, but you don't need an outgoing mail server since your spam application has a built-in SMTP engine (like those annoying Klez viruses). You send thousands of e-mail messages in a few minutes, disconnect, and then walk away. Other than an increase in network traffic, the owners of the wireless network have no idea what you did ... but their IP address is stamped as the source of every e-mail message!
The same can be done with hundreds of incorrectly configured wireless networks in homes and offices, where network installers often don't activate the security features. Which internet services you can access depends upon which TCP/IP ports are enabled on the server(s).
Today I have a different car, a plain 4-door sedan. Mechanically it is in good condition and has been well maintained, but 15 years shows an increasing amount of rust. Every year for over 20 years now, my insurance rates have stayed the same or increased. What little discount I get for age has more than been eaten up by a general rise in insurance premiums affecting everyone.
I'm not a bad driver. I don't have any speeding tickets.* I've never been "at fault" in a traffic accident. According to my insurance company, I have one of the highest ratings for safety. My car is one of the lowest insurance risks. Still 78% of my insurance premium is for "third-party liability" to pay for damages in case I cause an accident. Only 9% is collision coverage for my car, and 5% for fire, theft, or vandalism. The other 8% is for miscellaneous accident benefits.
I guess the best that can be said is that my rates would be much worse if I had a bad driving record. Or if I were young. Or if I had a new car. Somehow this feels like extortion where you pay a hoodlum for *not* breaking your legs. Maybe I'm just disappointed that an old promise was never kept.
(* My one and only speeding ticket was years ago. I was stopped for doing 60 km/h in a 50 km/h zone. I was turning right from one major road at 60 km/h to another major road at 60 km/h. I didn't realize that there was a small stretch of about one block where the speed limit was 50 km/h for no apparent reason. The sign was in a position that you couldn't see while turning -- because you were busy looking left for traffic. A few months later, after I had paid the ticket, the city engineers raised the speed limit to 60 km/h. In other words, the police and the city knew full well that the old speed limit was wrong, and the police were using this to collect cash before the change was made. The same thing happened to someone else I know about a week later in a different place.)
There is nothing more boring than writers talking about writing, or bloggers writing about blogging.
I was in a merge lane turning right onto a major 4-lane road. There was no traffic on the road because of a red light. I was the first car to make the turn and I wanted to be in the far left-hand lane. My signal light was on and I had already completed two of the three lane changes when a car that had been behind me and to the right (also from the same merge lane) decided to pass me on the left as I was making the last lane change. I saw movement in my rearview mirror and didn't finish the lane change. There was no accident because I was the one who backed off and let the other car go by.
The rest of the road was empty and the driver had two clear lanes on the right. By passing me on the left while I was changing lanes, the driver chose to put himself (herself?) in a race situation where he (she?) could easily lose. All it would have taken to force his (her?) car off the road would have been for me to complete the lane change, which I could have legally done. Maybe the other driver was seeking the thrill of conflict: a chance to validate their skill at the wheel.
Not too bright. Stupid as a matter of fact. And to do this in a small silver car with a vanity license plate that's easy to read and to remember? Doesn't say much for the driver's recognition of consequences.
An aggressive driver may get away with rash actions on the assumption that other traffic will stay in its ordinary path. However, there is no margin for error. If anything unexpected happens, they lose -- or someone else loses. For a really bad accident, put two of these drivers on the same road.
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His next job will be to see Edmonton from the top of a sky crane, but it won't be me who takes those pictures! Randy, an associate of 2-Bear's from New York, has volunteered to go the distance, or in this case, the height.
I think if we all wrote down the bad driving we've seen (or, in some cases, done), other people would have difficulty believing that the stories are true. Would you believe that I once saw a man reading a book and looking up from his steering wheel every few seconds to see what was on the road in front of him? Would you believe that I saw a dump truck stop and start backing up through a crosswalk, while children were in that crosswalk going to school and the children had a green pedestrian light? (The dump truck drove into the intersection late on a yellow light, changed his mind, and was backing up on a red light to park along the side of the street. No, it wasn't a construction zone.) The children were too young to realize that the dump truck had changed direction and was now a danger to them. Fortunately, none of them were injured, which was a minor miracle since the driver couldn't see them, and didn't have another person behind the truck "spotting" or giving directions.
I can't give you any magic answers for dealing with bad driving. As has been said many times, common sense ain't so common anymore. Many drivers do not appear to understand that their vehicles weigh several thousand pounds (over 1,000 kg even for small cars) or how much damage all that metal can do when it hits something. I do think that the police should be more visible in enforcing minor traffic laws, while at the same time I realize that stopping motorists and writing tickets is time-consuming (especially when officers must later appear in court if the ticket is challenged), but I think that it is important to be seen enforcing the laws. If people do not believe that they may be punished for poor driving, then the driving laws become irrelevant. They are replaced by an attitude that getting caught is the only crime and anything you get away with is okay. I may not like all the traffic laws, and I may find them inconvenient at times, but we are fortunate to live in a place where the traffic laws generally make sense. There are reasons for the way our laws are written, and those reasons are based on allowing a large number of vehicles of various sizes and shapes to -- for the most part -- safely interact on a contentious system of shared roads.
(As an aside, many people assume that once they find something on the internet, that the information they read is accurate. To judge how inaccurate web pages can be, do a simple search on Google or any other search engine for the "common sense ain't so common" phrase. I found attributions to at least four different people. You won't find this phrase in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, but even a moderate amount of reflection -- that is, common sense -- should tell you that such an often quoted phrase is more likely to have come from a humorist like Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) or Will Rogers (1879-1935), rather than a football coach. As with many things historical, more than one person may become famous for quoting the same phrase, while others may change a word or add a word such as "anymore" to the end, but the true author can be unknown if they never repeated the phrase in a public sense, or if the phrase is based on an unpublished colloquial saying. Do a little more research and you will find that the phrase derives from the French philosopher/writer Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, 1694-1778), who said, "Common sense is not so common." Voltaire was neither unpublished nor a football coach.)
This may be one of the hottest weeks of the summer. Temperatures are over 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) in a city where most houses don't have air conditioning. Why should they? With evenings below 15 degrees (59 Fahrenheit), you can open the windows at night to cool off the house, and close the windows and curtains in the day to keep the cold air in.
Getting more heat on a hot day is why I went to the mechanic.
My car is 15 years old: a 1988 Toyota Camry. It's an "LE" model, as compared to the cheaper "deluxe" model. The LE model has rear seats that fold down, the reason my friend bought an LE so many years ago (before selling it to me). The LE also has power windows, power door locks, power mirrors, and a push-button control panel for the heater and vents -- something we didn't want. The power mirrors failed, and were repaired. A power window switch failed, and wasn't replaced. The hot-cold heater control never worked properly even when the car was new. Two winters of unreliable heat, where turning a corner or stopping the car gave brief bursts of hot air, made me determined to fix this problem while it wasn't snowing. That and a broken nylon clip preventing one of the fold-down seats from folding down.
The hot-cold heater control on the LE model is actually a variable resistor, which sends a signal to an electronic amplifier, which switches one of two servo motors, which pull cables attached to valves or flaps. The hot-cold heater control on the deluxe model is a lever that directly pulls a single cable attached to a valve in the engine compartment. The LE heater control has failed on many cars. (Sorry, I can't give you an exact percentage.) Used parts are equally likely to fail. New parts are expensive (over $700) because there is only one supplier: Toyota. Too bad the cheaper and simpler heater control from the deluxe model doesn't fit on the LE model!
My mechanic tried repairing the push-button heater controls. When that didn't work, we went the manual route: a $15 cable with a push-pull knob on the dash. A big "C" lets you know it was meant for a choke on a truck or farm equipment, but I don't mind. It's nicely lined up with the other accessories right next to the fog light switch. Finally, after all these years, I have a knob from a '57 Chevy ... and reliable heat. Push the knob for cold air; pull the knob for hot air. Push for cold; pull for hot. Works every time.
The next day (Friday), I had plenty of time to consider the difference between being sore and hurting. No matter how carefully they do the procedure, no matter how skilled the doctor and respiratory technologist are, it still consists of shoving a rubber hose into a tender area of the body. There will be some bruising. That hurts. The body is unhappy with what happened and starts trying to mend itself. That's sore. You lie there feeling like your lungs have been dried out and chilled to ice (imagine a bad case of acid reflux, i.e., heartburn). Then you cough and that really hurts: sudden, sharp pain throughout the chest. You truly wish to never cough again.
On the second day (Saturday), my chest felt like I had pulled every muscle, which was not possible, of course. I couldn't watch TV because my attention wandered.
On the third day (Sunday), the hurt is gone and only the soreness remains. Hopefully, the results of this bronchoscopy will help find out why I have been coughing since February (six months now). I've donated enough vials of blood for lab tests to keep a vampire happy, so some relief is anticipated.
I won't give the doctor's name here, or the name of the hospital, because that would serve no purpose. The doctor (a pulmonary specialist) is a great fellow and easy to talk to, but he doesn't need advertising and he doesn't have a web page. While the hospital itself doesn't have a web page, the charitable foundation for the hospital does. When I went to the foundation's web site, all I saw was a large (148 KB) background image and a "hit" counter telling the number of visitors. No information, no links, no buttons, no navigation of any kind. This seemed bizarre to me so I looked at the page's source. There is one button saying "Click Here To Enter Site" but it's a Java applet. Obviously, if your web browser doesn't support Java, or if you have Java turned off, then you will see nothing. There is no non-Java alternative for entering the site, and navigation in the rest of the site depends upon Java and JavaScript.
I have never been one to advocate designing web sites for specific browsers or features. Choosing to support, for example, only the most recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer may seem like a safe bet, since versions 5.0 and later (Windows 98 and later) have over 90% of the browser market. However, the price to be paid is in the other web users who are prevented from accessing the site. That price can be much higher than web designers realize. As a result of an ongoing lawsuit between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, Microsoft no longer distributes its version of the Java virtual machine with copies of Internet Explorer or Microsoft Windows released after approximately February 2003 (that is, Windows XP SP1a). If you want Java on a new computer, you will soon have to download the Java run-time environment from Sun Microsystems. The designers of this hospital web page will find that they designed for a dead market, instead of the "safe" 90% that they were expecting. It would have been better to design a simpler (less technically fancy) web site that was accessible to all web users, and which would remain accessible even after lawsuits between major players in the computer business.
That's me except I don't drink beer. The wild stories are, I'm afraid, not true. I did drink root beer, and sometimes still do drink "racinette" (the French word), but now I mostly drink caffeine-free Coca-Cola. Both are carbonated soft drinks and neither has a trace of caffeine. Caffeine for me means no sleep. Once upon a time, it didn't bother me. A can of Coke was a refreshing buzz of liquid sugar. Then I got old, turned thirty, really old and couldn't stand the caffeine anymore. Being buzzed was not worth baggy eyes in the morning. My beverage choices were limited to those without caffeine: no coffee, no tea, no Jolt cola (slogan: "all the sugar and twice the caffeine" with a great petrochemical aftertaste). The Coca-Cola company kindly provided caffeine-free Coca-Cola Classic (CFCCC, not an ozone-killing chlorofluorocarbon) for a while. Then they had some new flavor to sell and dropped caffeine-free Coke. I remember going into the grocery store, staring at an empty shelf, and hearing the assistant manager and the Coke representative talk about how CFC wasn't selling. Of course not, you can't sell what's not on the shelves! The new flavor and the next one died, so a few years later, Coke brought back CFC and now I'm drinking CFCs once again.
Which reminds me: my car's air conditioning died years ago because it needs a real CFC fluid (Freon R-12) that isn't produced anymore. I don't think this had anything to do with Coke dropping their version of CFC.
Back to where cans have a deposit. When you buy soft drinks (or beer or most other drinks) in Alberta, you pay a small deposit depending upon the size of the container. For 355 mL cans (12 US fluid ounces), the deposit is 5 cents. For 2-liter plastic bottles (2.1 US quarts), the deposit is 20 cents. You get your money back when you take the empty cans/bottles to a bottle depot. For a 12-pack of cans, that's 60 cents. For a garbage bag of cans, that's a lot more. The money is incentive enough for most bottles and cans to get recycled in Alberta, a much higher percentage than in provinces or states where recyclable waste is collected alongside regular municipal garbage.
I drink the beer (well, Coke). I pay the deposit. I save the cans, first in a cardboard box and then in garbage bags. I take the bags to ... where were you expecting? The bottle depot? No, I take the bags to my nephews and niece's house. I pick up the nephews and niece. I drive them to the bottle depot. They take the bags inside, help sort them, and collect the money ($28.75 split three ways today). I drive them home. They won't spend a cent on the way. "Hey," I say, "let's go to the store and buy some Slurpees." "No, thank you," they say. "Hey," I say, "let's get doughnuts at Tim Hortons for supper." "No, thank you," they say. They are very polite. When we get back to their house, they say, "Thanks for the money, Uncle Keith!" That's why we go to the bottle depot, isn't it? We're not there to save the environment; we're there for the money.
PS: Only four more shopping months until Christmas.
Some
of you may be wondering about the results of Keith's
bronchoscopy. Some of you may have forgotten to ask. Shame
on you! Is that any way to show that you care? Now listen as
I, Petiracco The Magnificent, tell and explain all.
After the bronchoscopy was over, we emptied the vacuum bag and inspected every speck of dust for spiders, mites, mushrooms, inhaled Cheezies, winds of change, spare change, and doughnuts with a hole still in the center. (You can't blow through a doughnut if there's no hole in the middle!) We found nothing, nada, which means "not a darn thing". You can tell they are the same because when you say them really fast, they sound the same. The lack of any solid physical evidence tells us that Keith's cough is not in his lungs at all. It's in his stomach. More precisely, they are in his stomach.
I was able
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We should do an ultrasound now to see how big the baby aliens are so far. Then I'll go buy the popcorn.
Today we can safely ignore Windows 3.1 and Windows 95/95A as being pieces of history. Any computer still running Windows 3.1 is unlikely to change and won't need upgrades. Any computer which ran Windows 95/95A has been or should be upgraded to the more stable 95B. Windows 95C is just 95B with a forced install of what is now an old version of Internet Explorer. Upgrading beyond 95B/95C is not practical for some older computers. (If you have a $20,000 piece of laboratory equipment controlled by a Windows 95B computer, are you going to spend another $20,000 for new equipment just so that you can update the version of Windows?) Windows 98 and 98SE (second edition) are fortunately the same in appearance. Windows ME is an awkward bridge between Windows 98 and the later versions based on Windows NT (that is, Windows 2000 and Windows XP).
I generally ignore Windows NT 3.5 and 4.0 when writing computer documentation because they were sold for servers and workstations, and those people don't need my help. Most of my advice is for consumer retail versions. That leaves me with five versions of concern: 95B/95C, 98/98SE, ME, 2000, and XP. There are plenty of XP and 98SE machines available for testing. Windows 2000 Professional (the workstation version) differs little from Windows 2000 Server, so I can get most of the information I need from servers. I have 95B running on an old Intel 486/100 PC. The version I didn't have easy access to was Windows ME.
I only know a few people running Windows Millennium Edition (which I write as Windows ME but which Microsoft writes as Windows Me in defiance of the normal rules for constructing acronyms). I don't want to make a special trip each time I need to compose a few lines of documentation. The solution is to have Windows ME on a computer here.
A typical PC can have up to four bootable disk partitions on the main hard drive, so having two or three operating systems installed is not a problem. The exact number depends upon how well the different systems share the partitions, and on limits in the hardware BIOS for accessing boot blocks. I installed Windows ME on a hidden primary partition. While it's running, it can't see my normal working copy of Windows. While my regular Windows is running, it can't see the Windows ME partition. The two are protected from each other. To share files back and forth, there is a third "extended" partition that both can see.
Having an additional copy of Windows also allows me to test several major free applications without worrying about what they might do to my working copy of Windows:
Spybot has to be one of the greatest pieces of free software: very effective and easy to use. The only time I have seen Spybot fail is when a piece of spyware was also infected with a virus. Running a complete anti-virus scan solved that and allowed Spybot to finish its job. Mozilla 1.x is the base of Netscape 7.x and I prefer Mozilla over Netscape because I don't like the pop-up advertisements on Netscape's web site. Mozilla is definitely a work in progress and there are still a few quirks. The one I noticed most recently was that printing is sensitive to the display resolution: output on the printer closely matches the screen at 1024x768 resolution, but at 800x600 resolution, the size of the text on the printer is too big.
Newage Computer is building my new system as we speak. Like the original system, it's a basic business model, nothing fancy, with some added memory and disk space. I will be running Windows 2000 Professional as the main operating system. I don't like Windows XP because stability seems to have been sacrificed for gosh-wow multi-media features. The new computer will cost slightly more than buying one of the mass-market models such as Dell or HP. I don't care. I'm getting exactly what I want, and if anything goes wrong, I have someone here who will help me -- not at the end of a 1-800 telephone number.
Gone will be a few games. Sorry, kids. The 4- to 7-year-old designation for appropriate age of the players should also apply to how long I have to keep them running. MS-DOS has died and it's getting really, really hard to find hardware that still runs MS-DOS games well. My box in the basement for ancient software is hungry and needs to be fed.
Not including upgrades that I made to the original computer (at a total cost more than that of the original machine!), here are the specifications of the original PC and today's PC:
| April 1994 | October 2003 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| processor (CPU) | Intel 80486SX at 33 MHz | Intel Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz | over 100 times faster (*) | |||
| memory (RAM) | 4 MB | 512 MB | 128 times more memory | |||
| hard disk drive (HDD) | 212 MB | 120 GB | over 500 times more capacity | |||
| CD drive | extra (2x speed CD-ROM) | CD-RW included (52x speed) | ||||
| modem | extra | included | ||||
| network card | extra | included on motherboard | ||||
| sound card | extra | included on motherboard | ||||
| operating system | Windows 3.1 | Windows 2000 Pro | ||||
| price (before taxes) | Cdn$1398 | Cdn$1360 | $38 cheaper! | |||
The size of the Windows operating system has grown to support newer devices and features. The original computer came with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on eight high-density 3.5" floppy disks, or about 11 megabytes (MB) of installation files. Windows 2000 Professional has a CD-ROM with 297 MB of installation files in the main \I386 tree alone.
I was sitting there late at night, watching the network activity lights, wondering why there was so much traffic. I called up the network display and found that almost all of the traffic was outgoing. Huh? I'm doing nothing and my computer's busy?
It's been a long couple of days installing the software on this new machine. The hard disk is huge, more than any one operating system needs, so I divided the drive into four partitions (three bootable primary partitions and one shared extended partition). Formatting it took hours. For fun, I tried installing Windows 95B on the first partition. It choked. I wasn't surprised: the software is too old and the hardware is too new, too big, too much of everything. Amusingly enough, the MS-DOS portion of Windows 95B worked but the Windows IOS.VXD virtual device driver couldn't handle the speed.
Windows 98SE went okay, so that became the first partition. The second partition is Windows ME. Both installed fairly cleanly, except they don't support newer hardware features such as USB 2.0 ports (leaving one unidentified "PCI Universal Serial Bus" device in the hardware list). Windows 95, 98, and 2000 make good use of monitor setup *.INF files for supported resolutions and refresh rates. Windows ME does not, and insisted on using 1024x768 maximum resolution and defaulted to 60 Hz refresh rates. Otherwise, Internet surfing was uneventful.
My trip into Windows 2000 went though installing the operating system and onto the internet to download updates from Microsoft. There are numerous updates for any version of Windows, not all of which apply or are necessary for each system. You let Windows Update connect to the Microsoft site and search your computer for suggested updates. Then you select which updates you want, and either install them now or download them for later. Saving the updates allows you to reinstall them without going back onto the internet. That was my intention. However, somewhere between here and there, my computer got noticed by a W32.Welchia.Worm virus. Without the updates, you have no defence against this virus.
Having said that, I must now admit that I did have a copy of the MS03-026
(KB823980) update
file, after having used it to fix someone else's computer. I just
didn't think I needed it so quickly on my own computer! I knew there
would be several more updates even with a new Service Pack 4 (SP4) release
of Windows 2000. I wanted to download and install them all at the
same time. I took a chance and got hit. The irony is that I
got hit by a security hole that I had the update for, not by any of the
dozen or so other security holes for which I didn't yet have updates!
Fortunately, my old copy of McAfee's free removal tool for common viruses
called "Stinger" killed the
W32/Nachi.worm virus. Later, once the updates had been applied, I
installed a full anti-virus program.
Privileges or rights are the computer system's way of protecting itself.
By limiting the rights of regular users, you also limit the damage that
they can do to the system. This is a fine theory that never seems
to work in practice. Even products from Microsoft don't follow the
rules. The first time I ran one of the applications in Office 2000,
I got several error messages because I was a regular user, not an Administrator.
After that it settled down. My photo editing software tries to modify
a registry key that it doesn't have permission for, every time it runs,
unless I set myself as an Administrator or Power User. Annoyances
such as this are why many home systems have all users running with the
Administrator privilege, completely cancelling any supposed security benefits.
The problem I was having was an annoyance. It shouldn't be happening, and it shouldn't be happening the way it was happening. When you run Windows Explorer, you have a choice of views: large icons, small icons, list, details, thumbnails. I like the "details" view for all my folders. In particular, I like the same view for all folders, so I set one folder the way I like it and tell Windows that all folders should have the same view. There are three steps. First, in the Tools menu, Folder Options item, View tab, clear the option that says "Remember each folder's view settings". Click OK. Second, arrange some major folder the way you want it. Third, go back into the Folder Options / View tab and click the "Like Current Folder" button to set all folders to have the same view. That should be that.
It wasn't. I was getting slightly incorrect views. The columns were different widths. Sometimes I could see the file attributes (archive, hidden, read-only, system) and sometimes I couldn't. Resetting the view didn't fix this. I was able to "Reset All Folders" and make them all appear as large thumbnails. However, once I changed back to "details" view, the same problem remained with the columns.
Both the "Like Current Folder" and the "Reset All Folders" buttons should
remove all information that Windows has about other folders. It doesn't.
Buried in the Windows registry, also in the CurrentVersion / Explorer tree,
are two keys called "StreamMRU" and "Streams". Every window you have
ever opened seems to have an entry in these keys. Clicking the "Like
Current Folder" or "Reset All Folders" buttons only clears part of this
information. To reset the columns in "details" view, you have to
delete these registry keys, restart the system, and then set up a sample
folder. This took me an hour and a half to find. Now all my
columns are the way I want them ... if I don't change my mind about how
they should appear, because the 34 folders that I've opened since restarting
my system have already recorded this view and will revert back even if
I later try to set another view with the "Like Current Folder" button.
Windows 2000 likes to adjust the date and time of files that it reads from CD, using the current time zone and options. I had turned off automatic adjustment for daylight saving time, because with three versions of Windows running on the same computer, I don't need three chiefs fixing the clock. Windows 2000 then subtracted one hour from the time on every file that I copied from CD. When I compared the copied files to the originals, the contents were the same, but the times were wrong -- an unwelcome change when you mirror files on two different computers.
Try this yourself by putting a data CD into your CD drive, running Windows Explorer in "details" view, and looking at the date and time for some files on the CD. Then double click on your clock (in the bottom right-hand corner) and change the time zone. Go back to Windows Explorer and press the F5 key or View menu / Refresh. The date and time will change by however much you changed the time zone.
To get the correct dates and times, I had to turn daylight saving time back on and recopy all the files. Then I was surprised to find that some times were still wrong. In the middle of copying a large number of files from CD, almost every second file had 6 hours added to the time. This I can't explain or rationalize, because it was not consistent from file to file. Some files had the correct time (no changes), while others were exactly six hours off (my daylight saving time offset from GMT). I couldn't find information about this problem on the internet, and I stopped trying because of another problem.
Windows 2000 creates short (8.3) file names differently than Windows 95/98/ME. The 8.3 names are a throwback to MS-DOS days: each short file name has up to eight upper-case letters or digits before the "dot" (period) and up to three letters or digits after the dot. (Some special characters are also allowed.) So that older MS-DOS software will still work on newer versions of Windows, the system creates secondary 8.3 file names for files with longer names. Nobody really cares how these names are created, because very few people ever see them on Windows 2000. Unfortunately, my Windows 2000 shares a common FAT32 data partition with my Windows 98 and ME. Hence, all three versions of Windows must agree on the validity of the files in the shared partition.
After copying over 10,000 files from several CD-RW discs using Windows 2000, I rebooted into Windows 98/ME and ran ScanDisk. Most of the short 8.3 file names were accepted, even though they weren't created by the same rules. Windows 98 and ME both rejected one file name as invalid. The long file name was "r.head", for which Windows 95/98/ME creates an alternate short file name of "R~1.HEA" (usable letters/digits from the long name, followed by a tilde, followed by a unique number, followed by up to three usable letters/digits from the extension). Windows 2000 creates an alternate short file name of "R222B~1.HEA". This was invalid according to Windows 98/ME. If I let Windows 98/ME fix this, then I lose the original long file name. If I don't let Windows 98/ME fix it, then they complain every time I run ScanDisk (or I could turn off the "check for invalid file names" option).
I fixed the problem another way: I copied files from my old computer
to my new computer using Windows 98. That gave me correct dates and
times, and the short file names generated by Windows 98 are acceptable
to Windows 2000.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowedwhere what you really want is
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-asciiThe difference? Flowed text ignores line breaks in the original message and resizes the text width to match the width of the display window. More or less. The problems are twofold:
C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Mozilla\defaults\pref\mailnews.jsfrom
pref("mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed", true);to
pref("mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed",false);solved the problem. (Note the clever deletion of the space before "true" to keep the file length exactly the same.) As with all incompatible changes to working software products, one wonders whether the person making the change understood how this would affect existing users.
Two newer versions of Mozilla have just been released: 1.4.1 (bug fixes for 1.4) and 1.5 (new features). Maybe they can send plain text as plain text. Since I've patched my old version, and new features are not high on my priority list, I won't be testing either recent release until I need to reinstall Mozilla for other reasons.
Don't worry. I have cards and I will send them. In fact, I have been sending them for two months now. As I find words, I drop cards into the mail. Most are Christmas cards, although not all have overt Christmas wording. Many say something like "Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for the New Year". I didn't pick the greetings so I can't really explain why card companies prefer to diminish the Christian nature of Christmas.
The cards stack up on my shelf. They've been that way for several years, since before I went to Japan. While overseas, it seemed more appropriate to send foreign items back home. During this time, our house received many packages of "free" Christmas cards. I put the word "free" in quotation marks because they aren't really free. They are from charities that hope you will donate more money to them if they give you cards or calendars or return address labels or stickers or whatnot. You can't really send the cards back. (They're bulk mail and will be destroyed by the post office if you try to send them back, unless you put them in a new envelope and spend even more money than the cards are worth for regular stamps at lettermail rates.) Throwing them away would be a waste. So I stack them up on my shelf as pretty, seasonal notepaper for whenever I feel like writing ... which I admit isn't that often. I mean, when was the last time you read something from me that wasn't in e-mail or on a web page?
Most of the charity cards are thinner than regular cards, which is an advantage for me. My handwriting is terrible: slow and painful to write tiny little letters. My computer printer accepts the lightweight cards and is much better at printing than I am. I type what I want to say, then format it to fit the card. It's not really impersonal. I have been accused of that before. It lets me write more with less trouble and allows me the chance to edit my words. I do use cut-and-paste when I find something was already better said in a card to someone else. I see no harm in reusing past words, so long as the words are appropriate for the person I am writing to. I don't believe in form letters, and I hate receiving them. However, sometimes there is only one good way of saying what I want to say.
The internet has also changed how I write cards. In years gone by, Christmas cards were a tradition that kept us in contact with friends and family in faraway places. Our lives change. We see less of those who once were near, and words can become awkward. Cards allowed us to restore our good wishes and to bring those friendships closer again. Can the same be said when significant events in our lives are published on web pages for all to see? A once-a-year flow of greetings has changed into a steady stream of information, depending only upon the interest of those involved. Read it if you want, don't if you don't, is the attitude of many. My cards won't repeat what has already gone by. They are a continuation of the stream. I won't finish by Christmas. I will write until I feel that I am done.
Half the point to writing a web page like this is bending the words into a form that I want. It's an exercise in composition. I'm not bound by the strictest rules of grammar, but I am bound and determined to make you see things my way. Good writing helps; clear communication even more so. I will break every rule in the book if that makes the story better.
There's the question: how do you determine when something is better? Lately I've been wondering what to do when things get worse. Not everything I write, on this web page or elsewhere, is a model of modern style. Sometimes I fall flat on my typeface, one step away from incoherent rambling. The words may be there, the idea may there, but the storyline just doesn't go in any clear direction. That may be acceptable in a huge novel of epic proportions. It's not what you would expect in a one-page article about rebuilding birdhouses for left-winged magpies.
"Scribble Forth And Best", my most recent entry on this page, was in dire need of a rewrite. I would if I could but I can't. I didn't know what was wrong. I printed a copy and looked at it for a few days. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I was trying to say too much. Too many words, too many unnecessary words. That has always been one of my writing faults: not knowing when to stop. When I reviewed stories that I had written over twenty years ago (restored last year from magnetic tape), I was sorely tempted to delete the final paragraph or two in some of the stories. I didn't. That would have been editing history, and the whole point to restoring the files from those old mag tapes was to preserve a piece of my personal history before the opportunity was lost. All the same, should the occasion come to publish the stories, I may give them the editing that they deserve!
"Scribble Forth And Best" had no such historical protection. Less than a week old, it was in danger of going into the trash unless I could find a way to salvage it. The second paragraph was the most out of place. Who cares about "in years gone by" until after the mood of the present is understood? A few phrases from the second paragraph were reworked into the final paragraph. The rest became nothing. The "Delete" key is very powerful in the land of the word processor. The story is better; the repetition reduced.
I can relax. Crisis averted.
I don't do my banking over the telephone. I won't use the internet either. Why should I? My bank branch is within walking distance of my house. I know the people at the branch and they know me. All my banking can be done in person, or with an ATM (automatic teller machine). I don't need someone calling me trying to promote their latest product.
These calls are generated from personal information that I am required to give the bank because of the nature of my accounts. The information is supposed to be confidential, available only to my bank and its "associated companies" for the purpose of maintaining my investments. As the banking laws in Canada have become less restricted, banks have re-interpreted this permission to include any and all promotions sponsored by the bank.
A few months ago, I received an envelope from my bank with a letter on the bank's stationery offering to register my credit cards as a precaution against loss or theft. The content of the package was misleading in several ways, the most important being that the service was not being offered by the bank itself, but by a totally separate and unrelated company for an annual fee. By sending the offer through the bank, the bank was technically not releasing my personal information to an outside company -- unless I chose to reply using the pre-addressed business envelope with that company's address printed on the front. In other words, any reply would go directly to the outside company and the bank would have no further involvement. This was made clear by the fine print whereby the bank expressly disclaimed any liability for the service. They may make it look like a service of the bank, and they may promote it in that way, but they refuse to bear any responsibility for what happens! An arrangement approved by lawyers but morally bankrupt.
There is little that my local branch can do. These actions are beyond their control. All the same, they are the ones who must face the displeasure of their customers. I tried calling the bank's main Canada-wide telephone number, and talked to someone whose job it was to dismiss customer concerns. They didn't even know where the promotional calls were coming from, even when I gave them the originating telephone number, because the bank has too many "associated" companies! Then they lectured me on how it was safe to answer questions over the telephone because my call display showed that this was a toll-free number and that I could call this number and confirm the identity of the person calling, and that I could hang up at any time. What? I'm supposed to call back a number that I don't want, and disclose personal information over the telephone, simply because it's a free call? The call display didn't even identify the bank; it said, "TOLL FREE CALL". With security advice like that, people could make millions in telephone fraud.
As Canadian banks expand into more business sectors (such as insurance), the goal becomes to generate more and more profit for the shareholders of the bank. At some point, service to the customer becomes so secondary that investments and promotions are structured to derive maximum benefit to the shareholders. The investment advice given to customers is tainted by what is best for the banks, not by what is best for the customers. The banks are, in effect, in a conflict of interest situation (if you pardon the pun).
Promotional offers are the visible part of this, by making use of the same mass-marketing techniques as questionable bulk mail and telephone solicitors. Banks shouldn't be calling their customers with "opportunities". Banks shouldn't be sending advertising envelopes whose contents are misleading or confusing. This may seem like a small problem to you; however, if English isn't your first language, then the clever wording employed by "barely legal" offers is lost on the reader or listener. One person I know received an offer for life insurance from their bank, followed a few days later by a genuine renewal of their insurance policy from the same bank, and it took me several minutes to determine which was legitimate and which was garbage.
I'm willing to hang up the phone, but I'm not sure what the banks are hoping to achieve. In their desire to become bigger and more competitive (which I take to mean, more profitable), they seem to have lost sight of the fact that their money is derived from their customers' money. They can't grow at the expense of their customers. It's almost a reversal of the old saying, in effect, producing long-term pain for short-term gain.
Older houses don't have as much insulation as they should. This is reflected in your heating bill in winter. When these houses were built, the cost of natural gas wasn't so high. A certain amount of air leakage was normal and accepted. In fact, houses were designed assuming that the heat lost would take with it some of the excess humidity, and thereby prevent moisture damage to the structure.
Today, the price of natural gas has become a major expense. Home owners do what they can to reduce their costs. The process is gradual, done when the opportunity arises. New windows have a tighter seal and better double or triple glazing. Outside doors are solid, not hollow. Furnaces are more efficient, with heat exchangers and electronic filters.
Some things can't be changed. What's inside the walls stays in the walls because opening up a wall costs far more than any long-term energy savings. New houses may have 6" (six inch) studs with R-28 fiberglass insulation. Old houses have 4" studs. New houses may have R-40 insulation in the attic. Our house had six inches of wood chips, with an estimated insulation value of R-8 or R-10.
Adding more insulation to the ceiling is a two-person job. Somebody has to go up in the attic, crawl and creep over the joists, while pushing sheets (batts) of fiberglass insulation that are eight inches thick (for R-28), four feet long, and 16" or 24" wide. Hint: a small garden rake with a long handle is a great tool. Warning: one mistake and your foot drops through the ceiling! The second person has to cut open bags of insulation on the main floor and pass the sheets up, one at a time. The bags are too big to fit through the small access doorway in the ceiling.
Fiberglass insulation is light, loosely connected, and scratchy. Not all of those fibers make it upstairs. Some fall down on the person below. I was the man on the bottom, wearing a hat, glasses, breathing mask, long-sleeved sweatshirt, work pants, and shoes. I still felt the prickles of rain from fiberglass pink. When the job is done, you can shower and wash your clothes. But until then, oooh, does that itch!
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This portion of "Bloggo - The Non Blog" is copyright © 2003 by Keith Fenske. All rights reserved. | |
