by Keith Fenske
September 2004 to December 2005
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by Keith Fenske September 2004 to December 2005 |
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This archive file contains the following stories that first appeared in "Bloggo - The Non Blog" between September 2004 and December 2005:
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 © 2004, 2005 by Keith Fenske with all rights reserved.
The new laptop has an Intel Pentium processor at 120 MHz with 16 MB of memory, an 800 MB hard disk drive, and runs Windows 95B. Four times faster, four times more memory, etc. Compared to last year's tower, 20 times slower, 32 times less memory, 150 times less disk space. Still runs Microsoft Office 2000 and that's the point. Old computers don't need to be replaced just because they are old. This laptop is mobile and has the same major software as my tower, so it can do a job for me even if it isn't brand spanking new. The color display helps too. The price was free, obtained in salvage, while setting up a system and network for someone else. Once we found the modular (removable) CD-ROM drive and floppy disk drive, there was enough hardware to install Windows 95B.
Cleaning up the old laptop to give away to a tinkering friend was amusing because I'd forgotten how to use Windows 3.1. Windows 95 through XP have the same essential user interface; Windows 3.1 was entirely different. I couldn't uninstall some software ... until I remembered that we didn't uninstall software back then. We deleted the program's directory (now called a "folder") with File Manager and the program's icon from Program Manager. Then we hunted down *.INI files in the \WINDOWS folder. It was a DOS way of doing things with separate files and folders for each application. Sure, stray files were left behind, but it was better than erasing the hard drive and reinstalling everything else!
Windows 95 doesn't have the concept of a "My Documents" folder so I created one and told the major applications to look there for the user's files. (Right click on an icon or Start menu shortcut, left click on Properties, left click on the Shortcut tab, and type a folder name in the "Start in" box.) Other than that, you can mostly pretend that you are running Windows 98.
"Computer engineering is the subject of what we can do with computers. Computer science is the subject of what we should do." (Keith Fenske, September 2004)
Tuesday, September 7th. I watched the first episode of the "Jeremiah" television show, starring Luke Perry. A wanderer in a post-apocalyptic world. How many times have we seen this same decaying vision of the near future?
Approximate life of an expensive electric shaver with rechargeable batteries: 2 to 3 years. Approximate life of a similar electric shaver with only a power cord: ten years. No batteries for me!
Thursday, September 9th. Light snow overnight: a couple centimeters or less than an inch. For crying out loud, it's only the second week of September! I'm not ready for winter. Sure, I rotated the tires on my car. Sure, I put 5W30 synthetic oil in the car's engine because it was due for an oil change. This snowfall will melt quickly. The next too. The next after the next? Winter comes eventually, whether we are ready or not.
I wish I could say equally great things about the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail program but it shares some of the same design flaws that bother me in the e-mail part of regular Mozilla. It doesn't handle plain text as plain text; it always wants to improve it somehow. I posted a note on the discussion board for Mozilla developers last year, explaining that I needed to see the exact text that I was sending or receiving. I'm not the only one who has said this. However, my concerns were dismissed by the developers on the basis that improvements were good and we should all be happy. As near as I can tell, the developers also live in a world of broadband (high-speed) internet. The news group reader part of Thunderbird won't display a news message until it has downloaded the entire message. On a dial-up modem in a binary news group (which has large files attached to messages), this wastes time because you can't see the message text before deciding if you want to download the attachment.
Sunday, September 12th. Sunny and 14.9 degrees Celsius (58.8 Fahrenheit) today, according to The Weather Network, my favorite internet site for Edmonton weather. The long-term forecast for the following week is not so good: showers with low temperatures near freezing. Those lovely garden tomatoes will have to be covered!
Edmonton may have some of the dumbest drivers. When I returned from overseas, I wondered if I was more critical in my absence, or if drivers really had become worse. There are more vehicles on the road and more drivers who make less effort to obey the rules of the road. The general feeling is like driving through a yellow light. The light has been yellow for a long time and you really should stop. Then you realize that there is another car behind you. If you had stopped, they wouldn't have....
Monday, September 27th. At the suggestion of Jorn L., I turned my personal notes about Networking in Homes or Small Offices into a section on my PC support web page.
Do you know who the worst poker player is? It's the person with so much money in the pot that they can't walk away.
Friday, October 15th. Can't renew my driver's license because the government's computers are down. Went out to the church camp for a lovely walk in the autumn leaves on a sunny day.
Saturday, October 16th. I ran Windows Update on a Windows 2000 computer today with a real firewall (ZoneAlarm) and found that Microsoft is playing a new game. There were three small items listed as "Security Update for Windows 2000" with sizes around 340 KB. After I downloaded them and started the installation, ZoneAlarm popped up and said that "Windows Service Pack Setup" was trying to access the internet. You wouldn't know this on Windows XP if you were using the Microsoft firewall because it doesn't block outgoing requests! The updates connected to web sites owned by Microsoft and/or MSN Hotmail (such as 64.4.20.29), and downloaded nearly 3 MB for item KB840987 dated 2004/10/12, when the initial quoted size was 337 KB. The items affected are KB840987, KB841356, and KB841533. It seems that Microsoft has begun using small starter applications to do a bigger but unspecified download later.
Sunday, October 17th. Over 10 cm (4 inches) of wet snow in the past two days. Yuck. Winter weather. Oh, yuck, yuck, mukluk.
Cleaning up the computer took more than a day. The tower had mismatched memory and several incorrect settings in the hardware BIOS. Memory was a mixture of three different SDRAM modules (16 MB PC66 + 32 MB PC66 + 128 MB PC133 on a PC100 motherboard). The slower 16 MB and 32 MB modules were removed; only the 128 MB PC133 module was retained. A generic USB 2.0 card had been installed because the built-in USB 1.1 plugs didn't work. The USB 1.1 plugs didn't work because USB support was turned off in the hardware BIOS. The disk drive had to be securely erased, as a condition from the donating company. A secure erase overwrites the entire drive several times, making it impossible for anyone to retrieve old files. This takes a long time on a 20 GB drive: overnight in this case. The CD-ROM drive could read CD-ROM and CD-R discs, but couldn't read CD-RW discs, and was replaced with a newer drive from a pile of four that had been salvaged from other computers. (The other three salvaged drives also couldn't read CD-RW discs and were dismantled and recycled.) Then I reinstalled Windows 98 SE. Fortunately, most of the companies that made the various pieces of hardware were still in business, so I could download new drivers and manuals for everything except the generic USB 2.0 card (which was so generic, it didn't have a brand name, and I just reused the old setup files from OrangeWare). The video card often failed to initialize when first powered up and was later replaced with another old card that I had on a shelf. Fixing this computer cleaned out my collection of ancient spare parts!
We are taking bets on how long the kids will have the computer before they break something. The hardware I can't do much to protect against. The most likely damage is to the loading tray on the CD-ROM drive, the floppy disk drive, the keyboard, and the mouse. For the software, I made a complete image of the system with Norton Ghost. Then if they trash anything, we can restore the system from an image file in about 20 minutes.
(And the winner is ... the CD drive, after three months.)
Tuesday, October 19th. I spent half an hour stuck inside an elevator today. I had stopped by a client's office to drop off a couple discs, expecting to be out in a few minutes. The other two people in the elevator had an even more pressing concern: their rental truck came due while we were waiting. I'm not particularly claustrophobic; however, sitting in a small space for an indeterminate amount of time was unnerving.
"She has great plans for important things that she must do. She asks for help. However, nothing happens unless you do everything for her." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, October 2004)
"He can organize everyone except himself." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, October 2004)
Monday, October 25th. I got my new driver's license today. Nobody will recognize me: I'm smiling. It's a good picture.
"It's not the problems you have which say who you are; it's what you do about them that speaks of your character." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, November 2004)
I use photo notes for three reasons. One is to label pictures. A second is to print information sheets that I file away with the negatives. (Otherwise, an old box of negatives becomes useless.) The third is for searching on my computer. I'm not going to dig through thousands of envelopes and dozens of boxes looking for one particular negative; I use a computer to find keywords in text files so that I know where to start. Given someone's name or a unique word, the computer can search 1200 pages of text in a few seconds.
The conversion to Microsoft Word format is prodded by the increasing distance between today's software and older word processors that I once used. Some like Microsoft Write 3.1 haven't been supported since 1995. MS Word is currently the most widespread in the world. That makes it the safest choice for documents of the near future. Even though MS Word may cease to exist at some point, whatever replaces it will open files from MS Word. Starting with Word 97 and improving in Word 2000, document files now have a common format for all languages, including Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This is important to me because I prefer to save names and addresses in their original script, along with the closest English translation for my own personal use, of course!
Sunday, November 14th. Microsoft's on-line encyclopedia called MSN Encarta is promoting Petiracco and me as a defining standard for a very Japanese form of clothing. The Encarta page for "yukata" (Japanese summer kimono) has web links for additional information. These links must have been obtained by an automated search. How else can you explain Petiracco in his snowflake yukata as #2 and Keith in his hotel yukata as #4? I never knew that my Japan journal would travel so far. (Thanks to Monaliza, the designer of Petiracco's yukata, for pointing this out.)
"She makes assumptions and then proceeds as if those assumptions were true. Often no one else knows where she is going." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, November 2004)
"The real benefit of hindsight is the future." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, November 2004)
Monday, December 6th. The weather has turned colder. From highs last week near +10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit), we are now seeing lows near -30C (-22F). Somehow we made it through November without a really cold snap, by only a few days' grace into December.
Before ending the counters, I recorded some statistics for the past
year (2004). Six pages had counters; four of those were related to
my work overseas. I was curious as to whether anyone was reading
the work experience stories. There were no counters on my computer
support pages. In order of observed popularity, the pages are:
| home page (We-Almost-Got-It-Right-This-Time Industries) | 19.1 per day | |
| Bloggo - The Non Blog | 13.3 | |
| Floating Papers on the Sea of Japan (English) | 13.3 | |
| Nihon Kai No Fudoshi (Japanese translation) | 5.4 | |
| A Teaching Machine in Korea (combined English and Korean) | 1.9 | |
| Chinese Attack of the Network-Eating Rodents (English only) | 1.7 |
References to the home page are mostly me. My web site is the default home page in all my browsers (yes, I have three browsers), and is loaded every time I start the browsers. The "Bloggo" references are about half me and half others. There are several computer-related stories buried in the Bloggo pages, since they are not important enough to have their own pages. The China, Japan, and Korea counts are almost entirely from other people. I finished those pages years ago and rarely look at them again. Similarly, my family and friends already know the stories. References to the overseas pages are most likely random hits from search engines like Google.
I have the VHS video tape for "Toy Story" in full-screen format. I wanted the DVD in wide-screen format. It's not sold in stores, hasn't been for almost two years, and won't be until Disney chooses to re-release it as part of their multi-year merchandising cycle. That leaves the internet, today's equivalent of mail order. I bought the DVD through eBay from Albert F. who had obviously purchased popular Disney titles while they were still in common release, saved them for a year or two, and is now reselling them at twice the price. A smart business plan and a price that I am happy to pay. Delivery was quick, and the package was in perfect condition, the same as if I had bought it here in a store!
The satisfaction of any on-line purchase depends upon the integrity of the seller -- and the buyer -- and doing sufficient product research before making a purchase.
Petiracco was right. There was a space alien in my stomach, something that shouldn't have been there and was much too big. A plush toy knew this months before my own doctors.
I went in for surgery on Friday. Within half an hour, I was in the surgical ward getting an epidural (local anesthetic in lower spine). The surgery went well. I woke up in the recovery ward with some confusion and three more tubes in my body: the usual saline IV drips, a nasal breather for extra oxygen, and everyone's favorite ... a catheter to empty my bladder until I could do that again myself. On a man, the catheter goes through a particularly sensitive region (yes, inside the penis), past the sphincter muscle, and into the bladder. Guys will just cringe at the thought!
Your body knows that something horrible has happened. The epidural was extremely effective at blocking the pain. There is a great deal of discomfort, and you have no strength, but you aren't clenched up in a ball of agony. The nurses were good at helping us get better. Within three days, the epidural was gone. It's taped to your back -- your whole back! -- and any hair you once had there is now much shorter. I kept waiting for the pain. I knew what my stomach looked like. I knew that I had a long incision (24 cm) from below my ribcage to my pubic area. I didn't know how many surgical staples were holding me together (37, it turns out). I could easily imagine my stomach exploding in raw, searing pain. It didn't. The only pain came from movement and from coughs or sneezes.
I had more trouble peeing by myself. As you eat and drink, as the IV bags drip saline and medicine into your blood (sometimes at rates that approach "pumping"!), that water comes out of your body as urine. Without a catheter, your body has to do the emptying. We are so conditioned to keeping our sphincter muscles closed that that becomes our normal reaction. I couldn't open up. After several failed trips to the washroom, the nurse went to get another catheter kit. We knew that I had over 600 mL of fluid in my bladder, as measured by a small ultrasound device. If much more collected, then I would have been in danger of hurting myself. I made one last trip to the bathroom and told myself that if I didn't perform now, the catheter would go back in and I wouldn't be allowed to go home for an extra day until we went through this all over again. I produced 100 mL of urine. Not much, but enough to show that I could do this myself. Over the next few hours, I was able to empty my bladder, and the second catheter kit went back into storage for the next lucky contestant. Once you can pee by yourself, and pass gas, it's safe to go home. Until then, no chance.
The nursing staff asks you to rate your level of pain, on an arbitrary personal scale from 1 (least pain) to 10 (most pain). On my third day, I realized that I had less pain after surgery and without the epidural or other painkillers, than before I went into surgery! The news kept getting better. I was visited at different times by several members of the surgical team. They all said that the mass in my abdomen was relatively easy to remove. It was large but well-contained and attached to very little else. A pathologist's report will confirm this, but the mass is a benign cyst, possibly formed around some old trauma to the body. That means no cancer and little chance of anything similar happening again. The mass was the size of an elongated grapefruit (19 x 14 x 11 cm) and weighed 1.5 kg.
Years ago, I was at a concert, standing with three pregnant women. A small child noticed that Mommy was pregnant, Auntie was pregnant, and Mommy's Friend was pregnant. Pointing at my stomach, the child innocently asked, "Baby?" Mommy explained that despite Uncle Keith's appearance, men don't have babies. We now know that my "beer belly" was not from drinking beer, from eating too much junk food, or from sitting in front of a computer for a living. There was another reason why I looked five months' pregnant.
A big "thank you" to my surgeon (who is a busy doctor and probably wishes to remain anonymous on this web page), his staff and colleagues, and surgical recovery Unit 41 in the Grey Nuns Hospital. I tried to count the number of people that I came into direct contact with, but lost track after a couple dozen. Maybe I will donate my copy of the illustrated children's book "The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts" by Shinta Cho, for the amusement of everyone at Unit 41.
How do I feel today, now that I'm home again? Better, much better. I am recovering quickly. My thoughts and dreams are strange, partly as a result of the medicine and partly because the body is trying to adjust. Last night, I kept wondering why the CD/DVD drive wasn't working in my stomach, because I knew that I had just replaced it.... Thank you for your "get well" cards and hedgehogs.
Saturday, December 25th (Christmas Day). Having your stomach sliced open is a humbling experience. It makes you realize how dependent we are on other people -- and how lucky we are to have them around us.
I think back to the great things we were going to do with computers if only they had enough speed or memory or disk space. Now we have that capacity and sometimes I can't be bothered turning the computer on! Computers have become so commonplace.
Twenty-five years ago, we didn't have enough hard disk space to keep all of our text files on-line. We had to keep inactive files on magnetic tapes or other off-line storage. If only we had more disk space, we could have had all our files all the time. Those files were small by today's standards, several kilobytes per page. Ten years ago, people started collecting digital photos as JPEG images at several hundred kilobytes each, and again, if we only had more disk space, we could have all our photos all the time. Five years ago, people started collecting music on-line, in particular, MP3 files at several megabytes each. Today, some collect entire videos at several gigabytes each. The point being, no matter what storage capacity we have at the moment, there is always something bigger that we want.
Monday, December 27th (Boxing "Week"). I'm having one of those days where I just want to delete this entire web site and be done with it. Much of the writing seems old and dated. The computer advice is simplistic or excessive, the two extremes of uselessness, and many of the links are broken. I don't have time to update every price, paragraph, and link. I have no desire to edit history. This site feels like a burden of 433 files weighing 6.5 megabytes.
Removing the counters was the last step towards encapsulating this web site and moving it into an archive folder on some other server. The site has always had a very simple structure: all files in one folder, no subfolders, no scripts, etc. The counters were the only outside references. The text will remain available to those that need it, but without my attention. It's been five years in four countries, more than enough time to close one chapter and open another.
Monday, January 3rd. Randy suggested that I provide more details about my operation, such as how an epidural or surgical staples are inserted and removed. Whoa! Thinking about that makes *me* queasy and I'm the one who had the operation!
For every good thing about the internet, there seems to be a bigger bad thing. E-mail comes with spam. Web sites come with porn and spyware. Simply being connected to the internet leaves you open to hacker attacks. Now our most reliable tools, the internet search engines, are struggling from misinformation.
Type my name into your favorite search engine (such as Google) and look carefully at the results. Half the pages or more are fake. They aren't me, or any of the other people named Keith Fenske. They aren't published by a Keith Fenske, by anyone associated with a Keith Fenske, or having a legitimate reason for linking to pages about a Keith Fenske. They are bogus collections of random keywords intended to confuse search engines and misdirect the people who rely on search engines for finding their results.
When I first reported on this in February 2004, there were only a few fake web sites using my name. They were fairly easy to recognize from their nonsensical titles and content. Now it's not so easy. The pages have similar styles, indicating that they are being assembled by automated software, but search engines can't differentiate between these fakes and real sites. The fake pages have thousands of internet domains registered to different people in different locations. There are so many names and addresses that some may be "spoofed" or stolen from real people who don't know that their identity is being abused. There is no easy filter that will eliminate the fake web sites from the real sites.
The fake sites appear as supposed search results on particular subjects, including text extracted from the searched pages, mixed with advertising and links to the sponsor's products. The listed search results are often wildly out of context; their only purpose is to provide words that will be indexed by real search engines and thereby redirect unsuspecting users to the fake sites. The content of the fake sites can be much worse than advertising. It may be for a product that you don't want or are offended to see, such as pornography. It may attempt to download malicious software (spyware) onto your computer with or without your permission, which is very common on porn sites and crack/warez sites with bootleg software and/or stolen serial numbers. (People who are doing things they shouldn't tend to be easier victims for other wrongdoing.) It may alter your browser settings, adding bookmarks or changing your home page. All the bad things you ever thought possible about web pages can happen if you click on the wrong link in the search results from your favorite (and trusted) search engine!
The number of these fake web sites is drowning out legitimate web sites, in the same way that spam almost choked e-mail for many users. I don't mind when a university in Germany uses one of my Java games (Life) as a programming example, without asking permission, because they are using the game as-is including my copyright notice that appears when you first run the game. I knew this would happen when I put the source code on my web site, and I accept the consequence. I don't mind my photo notes being referenced with due credit on other photography-related web sites. I do mind when my name appears on a site whose content I object to, with quotations of my words and links back to me. When I went to Japan, I registered my Japan journal with a web site (Diarist.Net) for diaries about living and working in other countries. Their Japan page lists basic biographical information such as my name and the words "Sex: male". As a result of that three-letter word "sex" and the word "Japan", my name was extracted by the fakers and now appears on several bogus web sites targeted at perverts looking for sex in Japan! (I asked Diarist.Net to remove the word "Sex:" from their script that generates biographical text, but their e-mail addresses aren't working.)
There is very little that I can do about this. The number of fake web sites is enormous, as are the number of fake web pages that they generate daily. I have reported this problem to Google as a general inquiry, but there was no reply. I'm sure that they are well aware of the trouble. I can't take action against the fake web sites, because their quotations of my text are barely legal under the "fair use" provisions of the copyright act. One at a time, you could probably force them to "cease and desist". You would have to find the real owners of each web site and prosecute them under the laws of the country where they registered the domain, which is unlikely to be the country where they live. That would be an awful lot of work to stop one instance of a problem that is popping up all over the place.
The only complete solution would be to delete my web page. No web site equals no text that can be stolen by fakes. However, that's about as counter-productive as not having e-mail to avoid the problem of spam.
Wednesday, February 16th. I replaced my old 17" TV-style computer monitor with a new 15" flat-panel LCD monitor. The display size is the same and boy do I have a lot of desk space now! Prices are cheap after Christmas, because flat-panel manufacturers made too many on the assumption that people would rush to replace their old tube-type televisions. Not where I come from, sunshine: we don't replace anything until it dies, or it no longer does the job.
Saturday, February 19th. The local computer pinball champ (who still hasn't finished her web page, harrumph) tested Microsoft's free version of the "Space Cadet" pinball game on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP. The same fast computer was used for all four. Which version played the best, that is, was the most responsive? Windows 98! And Windows 98 doesn't even come with the Pinball game; we copied it off Windows ME. There is obviously something to be said for older systems that have less overhead.
Tuesday, February 22nd. It looks like most high-end processors shipped by AMD and Intel will be dual 32-bit/64-bit cores by the end of this year. The next version of Windows ("Longhorn") will be targeted more for 64-bit versions than for 32-bit versions. Current 32-bit applications will become the new "legacy" code and 16-bit applications will be dead. We will all be upgrading to 64-bit hardware and replacing our software in about two years. It will be hard to stay behind, in the same way that Windows 95 quickly killed Windows 3.1. This will put another box in my basement for obsolete 32-bit software, to go alongside the 16-bit MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 box.
We are contacting you to inform you of a technical error that occurred when you signed up for your PayPal account in November 2004. Due to a system issue, the country currently displayed on your account profile is incorrectly listed as U.S.Only after you delete your old account do you find out that you can't register the same credit card number on more than one account, and the old account is considered another account even if the new account has the same e-mail address. Here is the error message you get:We would like to rectify this situation, but are in need of your assistance. We request that you close your current PayPal account, and then open a new PayPal account using the correct country designation.
Please complete this process within the next 10 days. If you do not complete this request, we will have to limit access to your PayPal account, and then close your existing account, in order to meet regulatory requirements.
Before you can add this credit card to another account, you must contact the PayPal Credit Card Team at cardproblems [at] paypal [dot] com. A customer service representative will respond to your request shortly. If you would rather add a different credit card to your PayPal account, you may do so at any time. Thank you for your cooperation.Since a large number of accounts are involved, it is not surprising that PayPal has yet to reply. A further complication is that new credit cards, once registered, must be activated by re-entering a 4-digit security code that appears on your next monthly credit card statement. You can't pay for eBay purchases for several weeks ... even if you have bids outstanding, and previously had a flawless eBay/PayPal account.
Remember that users didn't cause this problem. It was not possible to register a new account in the correct country. PayPal is asking users for their assistance in correcting a PayPal mistake, while being unprepared to offer PayPal assistance in doing so.
Update (Thursday, March 3rd). PayPal replied and the problem is now being resolved. I suppose that three days is not such a long time. Their e-mail message begins as follows:
Thank you for contacting PayPal. We apologize for the delay in responding to your service request.My old credit card has been transferred to my new account. I had to confirm the credit card by phone (PayPal calls the registered home number). I will now add a bank account number and re-enter two coded amounts that PayPal deposits to the account in 2 or 3 days. This is better than waiting for a monthly credit card statement, because I can print a list of transactions with an automated teller machine (ATM) at any branch of my bank.I am sorry for the inconvenience that it has been causing you. You should have an initial sending limit of about 1000 CAD before you have to complete the verification process. If you have any questions in regards to sending a payment through your new PayPal account, please reply to this email. Thank you for your cooperation.
Update (Friday, March 11th). I went for a drive in the early evening and returned at night with no interior lights, no instrument lights, and no side/tail lights. I blamed the mechanic. My angry reasoning was that all of these lights share a common wiring harness to the trunk lid and that the mechanic must have damaged the wiring while fixing the trunk hinge. My quick look in the owner's manual showed that at least two circuits were involved. I was wrong. In the morning, when there was sunlight, I found one burnt-out light bulb and one blown fuse. The bulb was quite black and probably shorted as it died, causing the circuit's fuse to open. It may have done this because of the work the mechanic did -- the bulb was for the license plate attached to the trunk lip -- but the bulb was just old and the filament was probably weak and ready to break. My owner's manual was misleading about which lights were on which circuits; the problem was with only one circuit. I had an extra bulb and an extra fuse. The cost to me was only in my time, and my blaming the mechanic for something he hadn't done. Fortunately, I found and corrected the problem before I said anything to the mechanic or to the repair shop.
Friday, March 11th. I am an old, old man. Today my tallest nephew turns 18 years old. Happy birthday, Chris!
Wednesday, March 30th. Most computer products are more complicated than necessary. Unfortunately, complexity comes from end users who purchase toys in preference to good design. These are the same end users who then complain about unnecessary complexity.
Thursday, March 31st. The hot topic in PC magazines is spyware: what it is, where it comes from, how to fight it, etc. Some have comparison tests of anti-spyware programs. Results are inconsistent. The free software (Ad-Aware and Spybot) doesn't always do well. None of the articles point out the obvious: if Ad-Aware and Spybot can't solve your problem, then you're usually screwed and erasing your hard drive (and behaving better in the future) is the only real option. Saying this wouldn't sell many magazines. People want to believe that there are magical answers. Sadly, the opposite is true: it is becoming progressively more difficult to clean up after malicious software.
"The only thing he's an expert at is telling other people what to do." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, April 2005)
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Tuesday, April 12th. I went to the ATM (automated teller machine) today and found a card already in the machine, and it was asking for another transaction. Maybe someone made a deposit and then absent-mindedly walked away. I suppose I could have taken their money or trashed their account. No, I pressed the "cancel" button and handed the card to the security guard, who said this happens two or three times a day. So much for the idea that people are comfortable with technology.
Wednesday, April 13th. I love the weird and wacky things you can buy on eBay, the on-line auction site. I bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2000 Professional for US$20. That's cheap, really cheap, especially for a brand new copy in the original box and never opened, still in the shrink-wrap all the way from Korea. Yes, that's right: Korea. I bought a Korean edition of Microsoft Office. Why? I don't know. For fun, to see if it works on English Windows. It does. I can't read the menus, of course. The Korean serial number ("product key") works on English Office and vice versa. A second serial number for the "English language pack" also works, making this $20 purchase into a spare license for English Office 2000. There were 150 new Korean fonts. Previously, I had only the eight standard fonts from Microsoft. Korean fonts (like Chinese and Japanese fonts) have two names: one in English and one in Korean. My English computer shows only the English names. A Korean computer shows only the Korean names. I wanted both names side by side, so I used an old Microsoft utility (TTFDUMP.EXE) to extract font data in hexadecimal, and then I wrote a small Java utility to convert this to Unicode, something that Microsoft Word understands. Both were pasted into my reference charts for standard Microsoft Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (over 200 KB in size). Not being able to speak Korean isn't going to stop me from having the correct names in my charts.
Saturday, April 30th. I also bought a Japanese edition of Microsoft Office 2000 on eBay. It was more expensive than the Korean edition (US$21 plus shipping instead of $20.50 plus shipping), but it's the fancy developer's edition with several manuals and a pile of CDs. I'll do the same thing with it as I did with the Korean edition: extract the Japanese fonts and use the serial number ("product key") as a $21 license to run the English edition. I certainly won't be reading the manuals; I didn't learn *that* much Japanese while in Japan.
Update (Thursday, May 12th). The package arrived with two Japanese copies of Microsoft Office: one was the "Personal" edition with Bookshelf, Excel, Outlook, and Word; the other was the "Premium" edition with Access, Bookshelf, Excel, FrontPage, Outlook, PhotoDraw, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word. Both have unique serial numbers interchangeable with English editions. The only disappointment was small: the Korean edition with an English language pack had many more fonts, 148 Korean versus 14 Japanese.
"When you ask people to do things for you by saying these things are important and need to be done soon, then you do nothing or change your mind, you waste their time and efforts on something that never happens. Don't ask for help unless you are willing to follow through on what you yourself started!" (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, May 2005)
"She thinks she's giving advice, but by the time she's done talking, she's argued both sides of every coin, and stood more than a few on edge." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, May 2005)
Sunday, May 8th (Mother's Day). Why do some people tell you that their food order is "to go" when they are in their car at the drive-through window of a burger restaurant? What else are they going to do, stay? (Contributed by Monaliza B.)
Monday, May 30th. Our three lovely weeks of spring have ended. If the weather stayed like that all year round, we would be living in heaven. Yesterday and today, the air changed to hot, dry winds of summer.
At a ski resort in Korea, I was waiting for someone near the parking lot. I needed to be where I could see and be seen, without getting in the way of numerous people coming and going. There was a small hill. Well, more like an uncomfortable bump on the road. Nobody was on the hill, and I could be certain that nobody had been there recently because there was no disturbance in the piled snow. I stood on the hill and within a few minutes, people were elbowing me aside to use the hill as another walkway, people who would not have considering going in that direction if I hadn't been there.
It doesn't matter where you park your car in an empty parking lot; the next person will park right beside you, so close that you can't open your door. It's as if they need your presence to tell them where they should be.
On Friday afternoon, I went to a movie matinee at the local multiplex. There was no one in this particular theater, which probably seats over 500 people when full. I chose a good seat, in the middle, about 2/3 of the way towards the back (a comfortable viewing angle). A mother and two children came into the theater. They sat right in front of me. Yes, I understand that it is a good place to sit, but there are many good places in an empty theater, especially for children who like sitting closer to the front. I said, "Guys, it's a big empty theater. There's only one other person in the theater. You don't have to sit right in front of them." The woman glared at me like I was insane. The little boy asked what was wrong, and she said, "Move over here because he doesn't like you sitting in front of him." As if a small child is a visual obstacle. I smiled and said, "Oh, that's okay. I'll move. I'm just telling you this for next time." A few seats to the left and they were out of my view. I have never seen anyone choose to sit behind someone else in an otherwise empty theater, so they are aware of obstacles that limit their view, just not the views that they limit by being an obstacle.
That would have been the end of the story, but even an empty matinee can have another family come into the theater. I think there were two adults and three children. Being somewhat mean-spirited at this point (yes, I can be mean), I hoped that they would do the same to the woman in front of me as she and her children did to me. They did something better. The children rushed to the seats in front of the woman in front of me. However, one of the adults said quite clearly, "No, I don't want to sit there in front of other people. Let's sit over here where we won't be in the way." Ah, I couldn't have asked for anything more. The woman in front of me may not have gotten the message, but I certainly felt better knowing that there are other courteous people who are not afraid to voice their preferences.
"A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."
(I thought I'd throw in this often-quoted business phrase, after dealing with a troublesome client. I wish I could credit the author, but my casual search on Google didn't turn up a proper citation. This is unusual because usually you can find *several* people claiming to be the original source!)
It is common in Asian cultures for someone to refuse to do something that they had agreed upon, until you do something more that you hadn't agreed upon. It's as if you must be willing to lose the last stage in any series of negotiations. The reasoning is: now I have what I want, and you have no power over me, so I will do as I please. Perhaps this seems a "clever" or "strong" way to do business in the short term, but doesn't fit with our Western notion that an agreement is a contract which must be fulfilled except in unusual circumstances. (Keith Fenske, June 2005, in an e-mail message)
Monday, June 27th. Another older computer killed off by Norton AntiVirus 2005. This time it was a Windows ME machine that wouldn't even start up with Norton installed. I had to restart the computer in "Safe Mode", edit the system registry to prevent Norton from running, restart normally, and uninstall Norton ... because Norton won't uninstall from Safe Mode. The same computer now runs well without Norton or with AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition from Grisoft.
Please people, hang onto your Norton AntiVirus 2001 for as long as you can subscribe and get updates on Windows 95/98/ME/2000, and NAV 2003 on Windows XP. Don't upgrade to a newer version, no matter how much Norton / Symantec may recommend this. The new versions are just too much for older computers running Windows 98/ME. And stay away from the Norton Internet Security or Norton SystemWorks packages!
The transition will be slow. The maker of your motherboard may only provide a setup CD with drivers for Windows 2000/XP, but web sites of companies that supply the individual components (video card, network controller, etc) may have software for Windows 98/ME. Video drivers tend to be fairly general and are not specific to one type of I/O card; they will work correctly whether your display controller is in an AGP slot, a PCI slot, PCI Express, or built into the motherboard. Network controllers for wired networks are standardized with automatic sensing for 10 megabits/second, 100 Mbs, and gigabit speeds. It is the components with new features that will change first.
High-definition audio provides more sound channels and better sound quality. It requires additional support built into the operating system, not just the hardware device drivers. This support exists in Windows 2000 SP4 and Windows XP SP1. It doesn't exist in older versions (98/ME), and it can't be added to older versions. If the sound controller provides legacy emulation of an older sound controller, then you can use drivers for the older sound controller with access to only those older features. If it doesn't emulate an older standard, then you obviously can't use older drivers, and previous operating systems will have no sound at all. For the average user that has a cheap pair of stereo speakers plugged into the back of the computer for making burping noises while playing games, all this high-definition audio is really of no importance.
Adding new features sometimes works this way: to gain something that only a few people care about, you lose something that many people would still like to have. I know that the floppy disk is dead, I know that there are several other choices for removable media, but do you know how many students still carry their computer homework on a floppy disk? Many. The floppy disk and the compact disc (CD) are our only standard media in the past decade, the only media that almost every computer has. I have seen just one computer in the last two years that has multi-channel speakers. Then again, I work in the business world where most computers have fully functional sound cards but no speakers, no noise, nothing to distract co-workers (headphones allowed). Dropping support for basic sound cards is meaningless in this particular world.
Dropping support of Windows 98 is less of a problem than dropping support of MS-DOS (although I still think there are some things that Windows 98 does better than Windows 2000/XP). DOS goes back to the beginning of PC computers, so far back that we've been running essentially the same version of DOS for over ten years (MS-DOS 6.2 or later). Almost all computers are serviced with DOS-based utilities! Yes, you can set up Windows by booting off the installation CD-ROM, but when your computer stops working properly and there is suspicion of a hardware error, then you start up the system in MS-DOS and run a DOS-based utility to check the motherboard, the memory, the hard disk drive, etc. The best utility for making an image of a working system (Norton Ghost 2003 or earlier) runs in MS-DOS. You can't make a perfect copy of a working system if you are running that system to make a copy of itself, no matter what the sellers of some software products may say.
Two weeks ago, while setting up a new computer, my copy of Norton Ghost 2003 wouldn't run. The shop's copy of an older version did run. There was something about the disk controllers on the new motherboard (ASUS P5GD1) that confused Ghost. It could have been the serial ATA controller (say good-bye to parallel ATA or "EIDE" disk drives), it could have been the weird Intel RAID controller (why put an obsolete parallel ATA RAID controller on a brand-new motherboard?), or the fact that the standard IDE (parallel ATA) ports had been reduced to just one for a CD/DVD drive. Something was wrong with the emulation of older standards and changing options in the hardware BIOS didn't help. This made the motherboard unacceptable. It was replaced with an older model from the same company (ASUS P4P800 SE) that has no such problems, has much better support for hardware drivers, and in fact was successfully set up to dual boot both Windows 98 SE and Windows XP SP2. While talking to another shop, I found they also had a problem with the same motherboard not recognizing some disk drives.
In a few months, there may be no choice. What was old may simply stop working. Or the manufacturers may face a backlash and revert to more standardized components, with features that are more compatible while still providing faster speeds. I am expecting the PC marketplace to be somewhat confused for the next two years, and personally will avoid buying new computers for myself until the situation settles down.
First, don't buy anything at an auction that you can buy retail for a similar price. Auctions are no substitute for smart shopping. Retail purchases have much better consumer protection in terms of warranty and returns.
Second, let it go. Decide what an item is worth to you, and if the bid price goes higher, then walk away. There will be another auction. Once you tell yourself that you have to buy a certain item, you lose control over your spending. To start on eBay, don't even try to win. Just go through the motion of making bids and watching auctions to their completion.
Third, not everyone is telling the truth. Many people misrepresent what they are selling. They forget to say something or they say something that isn't true. Some sellers have no intention of doing anything other than taking your money. This is where it is important for you to know what you are bidding on. If something in the auction description doesn't read right, then walk away. If the seller has little or no history on eBay, then bid really low or not at all. Check the seller's rating and read comments posted by previous buyers. Any indication of a problem is a reason to avoid the seller.
I prefer sellers with a high positive rating (over 99%) and a long history of satisfied customers. I do bid on new sellers, at very low prices, and sometimes get pleasantly surprised. The best sellers are people that are unloading excess personal merchandise with the intention of making a few dollars. They are usually friendly to deal with, prompt in shipping, and careful.
When buying on eBay, look for auctions that show an actual photo of the item you will be buying. Generic photos or photos that are repeated on more than one auction are an indication of a volume seller or someone who has something to hide. Read the description carefully to make sure that it matches the photo and what you think the item should be. Check the payment options. Most legitimate sellers accept PayPal, which has some purchase protection (eBay link, PayPal link). Checks and money orders have no such protection.
Once the auction completes, if you are the successful bidder, then always ask for a final price with shipping to your location, even if the shipping costs are specified in the auction description. This is your last chance to judge the seller's character before you send payment. A poor response from the seller means you should consider abandoning the auction, even if you get branded as a deadbeat bidder. Better to receive poor feedback than to lose your money.
Print copies of the auction page, your invoice from the seller, and any record of payment. When a correct item is received in good condition, tell the seller by e-mail and post positive feedback on eBay. If the item doesn't arrive in a reasonable amount of time, arrives damaged, or is not correct, then attempt to resolve this with the seller by e-mail or telephone ... but be prepared to file a complaint with both eBay and PayPal. If you post negative feedback, keep it factual. Sellers post feedback on buyers too.
You can still get burned. I've had sellers advertise one product and then ship a lesser product. I've had sellers disappear after payment is made, or even before payment. I've had sellers ask me to "verify some details by telephone" when they were in fact fishing for personal credit information and never had any intention of selling the actual item. (If it can't be said in e-mail, then it's probably a bad idea.) Several of these sellers are no longer on eBay due to my complaints, or the complaints of others. There will be more. I haven't lost too much money, overall, but I have wasted money on junk: stuff that barely meets the description of the auction but which is useless for my purposes.
I have bought some good items at reasonable prices. I use eBay for software that is no longer available in stores, versions of recent software that have been replaced by newer versions (such as Microsoft Office 2000). The benefits of being able to buy legitimate copies of this software outweigh the problems caused by the occasional dishonest seller. For software that is still available retail, I watch the newspaper advertisements and buy in a regular store.
Update (Monday, August 8th). Oh, don't have too much faith in the eBay or PayPal buyer protection programs. eBay does nothing if a seller cancels their account after a purchase has been made. Heck, they won't even suspend sellers who continue to have their accounts but fail to sell items they advertise! PayPal has limitations on time, amounts, and makes no great effort to reclaim money unless they are currently holding a similar amount for the same person ... and they charge a service fee on any payouts from their buyer protection fund.
I ordered an item that was not delivered. When I complained to PayPal, the seller provided a shipping tracking number ... off an empty envelope that wasn't actually sent for another three weeks. This was apparently enough to satisfy the PayPal complaint procedure.
When the item did arrive, the software was counterfeit. I was not able to revise my complaint, and I was not able to cancel my initial complaint and post a new complaint. PayPal allows only one complaint per item, excluding the possibility of multiple problems. PayPal's complaint procedure lets a fraudulent seller use the procedure itself to prevent a successful claim!
I talked to a PayPal customer representative for about 20 minutes on the telephone, long distance at my expense. While she agreed that the procedure may sometimes be unfair, there was nothing she or her supervisor could do. When asked what would happen if I didn't cancel my first complaint (for non-delivery) before attempting to post a second complaint (for "item not as described"), she admitted that I still wouldn't get my money back because an item was delivered ... and with only one complaint per item, that means the case was closed. Looks like a massive loophole to me, one that can easily be exploited by sellers, and completely at odds with the way eBay and PayPal like to portray themselves as a safe and reliable service.
Saturday, July 30th. I'm babysitting my sister's dog for the weekend, the dog that sponsors this web page. So far, I've learned that water tastes better from a bucket outside the back door than from a clean dish in the kitchen, and that medium-sized flying insects are a danger to mankind. What would this dog do with cicadas in Japan? I think I'll call the dog "Snoozasaurus" because it's big and it sleeps a lot, waiting for the *real* people to come home.
Not following directions is like the time I was asked to do baking for someone else. I was given a recipe and told what to change. I did as I was told, but the result was unappealing, so I asked what usually happens when they make this recipe. Their answer? "I don't know. I've never made this recipe before." Huh? What's the point of having instructions if you don't follow them the first time before you start making changes?!
Tuesday, August 30th. We reached a point today where it was cheaper to buy blank DVD-R discs (4.7 GB capacity) than CD-R discs (700 MB or 0.7 GB). Both are from Maxell, both in 50-disc spindles. This situation is brought to you by government taxes. In Canada, there is a 21-cent levy on blank CD media, as compensation to music artists whose discs might be copied. There is no levy on blank DVD media. In the early days of CD-R recording, when prices were 2 or 3 dollars per blank disc, the extra 21 cents was a relatively small cost to pay. Prices for all CD and DVD media have been dropping to where the sale price of 50 CD-R ($9.99 CAD) is now less than the levy (50 x $0.21 or $10.50 CAD), a total of $20.49 before other taxes. The 50 DVD-R were $17.99 before taxes. Obviously, if you're doing music, you still need CD-R. For backing up data, it's cheaper to put a few hundred megabytes on a DVD-R, using less than 10% of its capacity, than to write the same files to CD-R.
Saturday, September 3rd. I attended a wake for a fence today. So young, so soon to be gone. The neighbor wanted a new fence, at his expense, so the only thing to do was invite a few friends and toast the old one good-bye.
"You fix things by using the right tool for the right job. You break things by using the wrong tool." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, September 2005)
Have I told you how much I like software that does its job and doesn't hit you over the head until it hurts? I bought a retail package today. To install the software, you need a serial number (printed on the CD envelope). Then you need to register the software (provide your name, address, etc) and you need to activate it (let the company check your serial number again with their on-line web site and record details of your hardware). And you must agree that the company can serve their advertisements on your computer whenever they want, using your internet connection and your web browser. All this for a PDF printer driver? No, thank you. I wiped that software from my computer (by restoring an old system image), tossed the software CD and instruction booklet back into the box, and threw it on a shelf, where it will remain until someone actually wants it. I'm not going to mention the name of this product or its publisher, because they don't even deserve negative advertising. I paid, dammit, so don't bug me!
This desire to protect software from illegal copying is a failure when dealing with people like myself. I buy legitimate copies of all my programs. In fact, I usually have more copies on hand than I actually use. However, given a choice, I buy software that doesn't harass me. Years ago, when I wanted a good photo editing program, I tried a shareware copy of "Paint Shop Pro" and liked it. There were a few problems, which I reported to the company, and to which I received an intelligent and helpful reply. So I bought the full version and have been using successively newer versions ever since. This company formerly known as "Jasc" had a good attitude and a good product at a reasonable price. I support that. Most people I know do so too.
Yes, there are people that steal software. There are people that pirate software. I've seen illegitimate copies of Microsoft Office 2000 (CD, jewel case, and product key), Microsoft Windows XP (the entire OEM package), and Norton AntiVirus 2003 (CD only) that are so good that they would pass inspection except by the most critical viewer. I have an intense dislike all things counterfeit, and I understand a company's need to protect their products from illegal duplication. All the same, I don't like being treated as a criminal until I prove I'm innocent.
Today, a client had a "small" problem: a former employee put a password on some important Microsoft Word documents before they walked out the door. The legality of this is not my concern. I was asked to recover the files. They were encrypted with a fairly strong cipher. On the advice of a Macintosh colleague, I downloaded a 30-day trial version of password-breaking software from ElcomSoft in Moscow, Russia. In less than two minutes, it found the password, after trying something like 300,000 combinations a second. The password turned out to be three lower-case initials (letters), although not something we would have guessed. I was sold on the software. Now, I haven't done a comparison of other similar software, but I am definitely sold on a company that lets me use a fully-functional version of their product without cost, for a few days, and then lets me decide if I want to pay for my own serial number.
They didn't hit me over the head. They wooed me ... and I like it, baby.
"You go places by putting one foot in front of the other, not by arguing over the color of your shoes." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, September 2005)
"One sign of a micro manager: when the boss goes on holidays, employees get more work done." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, September 2005)
Tuesday, September 27th. I found a problem on a new computer with how the motherboard was handling floppy disk drives. I sent a detailed bug report to the company, and gave instructions on how to reproduce the problem. I received back a useless reply that didn’t even address the original problem. This is another example of how stupid help desks are when dealing with genuine product defects, as compared to people’s inability to use those products.
I was uncovering our tomatoes, lifting layers of blankets that we use in hope that tomatoes will ripen better on the plants at this chilly time of year, when I heard a scrabbling sound that I usually associate with magpies on eaves troughs, and a banging sound that I don't. I couldn't see any birds as I hung up the blankets to dry. Walking around my house, the sound was more from my neighbor's house than from ours. A long drain spout, down from the roof and into a sewer connection, was the source of the sound. I knocked on their door, well actually, rang the doorbell, and told my neighbor that I had a weird one for him: a bird or squirrel was trapped in his drain pipe. I mentioned the squirrel because even though they aren't common around here, I couldn't imagine a bird being so clumsy as to fall down a pipe. I showed him where it was, it was silent at the time, and as he was in a hurry to go elsewhere, we left it there.
Later, I heard the sound again, and knowing that whatever animal it was (bird or rodent), it would eventually bash itself to death. There was a gap between the side of the drain spout and the larger sewer connection, and I could see something light colored and moving in there. The drain spout only protruded about two inches into the sewer pipe, so I unscrewed one bracket holding the drain to the wall, lifted up the spout, and out popped a squirrel. At least, I think it was a squirrel. It was in more of a hurry than my neighbor, running on all fours towards my birch tree. I re-attached the drain spout and left a note on my neighbor's door. Since none of them had heard the noise or seen the squirrel, they might not even believe that this happened.
"Every medium to large office seems to have a "psycho": a person whose behavior shouldn't be tolerated but is." (Petiracco The Management Guru, alias Keith Fenske, October 2005)
"Some days you can walk through walls; other days, you walk into those walls." (Petiracco, alias Keith Fenske, November 2005)
If we all go in through the "out" door, then we'll be okay. (Keith Fenske, December 2005)
Cats think they're invisible. "I'm a great hunter stalking through tall jungle grass," they say. What their owners are shouting is, "Hey, Fluffy! We just mowed the lawn, so don't get grass stains on your paws, okay?" (Keith Fenske, December 2005)
Christmas Day (Sunday, December 25th). Our dear Maggie Muddyfoots arrived
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Boxing Day (Monday, December 26th). I find secondary roads (rural highways) to be scary at night at this time of year. Lately, there is no snow. The roads are all one color: a wet, dirty brown with temperatures just above freezing. Lane markings are missing or difficult to see. Vehicles come up behind you with their high beams on (bright lights), like a trio of pick-up trucks that passed me at 120 km/h in a 100 zone. It's one thing to drive quickly when you can see; it's another when you have to guess, hope, or assume. Eighty to 90 would have been a safer speed. Coming towards you are clueless drivers in SUVs with their auxiliary driving (fog) lights on, which may be decorative in the city, but which have bulbs as bright as headlights and spray light in all directions, including into the faces of the drivers coming towards them (that is, me). I was "night blind" for a couple seconds and had to assume that the road was straight in front of me.
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