DOAB Week of January 8, 2001

I started today on my way to work, thinking about Tom Syroid's post of yesterday.

Tom's a smart feller, and he's been around the block a few times. Further, I think he knows a hell of a lot more about computers than I do - and he's got far more in-roads to Microsoft than I could hope to have.

On the one hand, Microsoft has shown, many a time, why they are not to be trusted. They're seriously twisted and when it comes to revealing flaws, accepting responsibility, and hitting delivery dates. On the other hand, I'm fairly certain that there are very few commercial enterprises that produce things as complex as Microsoft does - given the breadth of their product line, I'm pretty sure that few companies (including the giants like SAP and the rest) can match this.

But do we trust like we used to? I'm not talking about the trust of a child. I'm talking about trust in general.

Some of us lost that ability to trust in the late 1960s - the Viet Nam war was in everyone's home, and the government still tried to mislead us with their version of the truth. For others, it was Nixon's behavior.

For some of us, it's the prevalence of lawyers. It's easy to learn not to trust when you can sue instead.

But do we really trust any more? Or is it something that's left to the dustbins of history?

In one sense we have to trust. We have to trust in the other drivers every time we go out on the roads. We have to trust that the other people we work with do the jobs they're supposed to. We have to trust a number of people every day.

I'd like to trust companies, people, and products again. But I just don't think it's gonna happen.

Yes, before you ask; today's experience at work had direct bearing on that thing above.

Microsoft SQL Server has this neat feature called "replication". It allows you to carry in your device (laptop or Pocket PC or whatever) a copy of the data you need; there's also a copy on the server. You can make changes to your data. The server's users can make changes to the data there. When you come back and connect up to your server, your changes get sent to the server, and the server's changes get sent to you. That last sentence is what "replication" actually does.

For example, you've got a simple little database. Name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. You're using the client, and you find out that your friend (or customer, or whatever) is getting married, and his last name is becoming hyphenated. As is his e-mail address. Your friend already called your office, and left a message that he's moving to a new address. Your assistant updated the database with his new home address.

You go to synchronize your databases, and, in theory, your name and e-mail changes are sent up to the server. The server's copy of the address is sent down to you. No conflicts. In theory.

Ah, conflicts, grasshopper. We could write a few volumes on conflicts. And in fact Microsoft has, I'm sure. The entire printed books-on-line set for SQL server is "12 volumes" according to Books On-Line (BOL). But there are lots of little gadgets in the system to allow you to arbitrate the conflicts. One thing you can do is set priorities - the machine with the higher priority (larger number) wins.

So, what ends up happening? Well, there's a bit of a problem there. Now, in our application, which is significantly more complex than the above, we're checking each of those fields to make sure we don't conflict. But there's a small problem.

According to SQL Support, whom I spoke with today, Microsoft does indeed check for column-level conflicts. But when there is a conflict, the entire record is replaced with the winning one.

In other words, though you're expecting your fields to intermingle, it wipes out the data on the client.

So that was how a majority of my day went. I guess I should point out that She Who Must Be Obeyed was very fortunate today - her supervisor recognized her for sticking out those long nights last fall and working, very hard, on a project at work, and she received a recognition award at work. Nice little cash payout. Well, it'll show up in her next paycheck, which is nice. So on a personal level things were nice. On a professional level, well, put not your trust in Kings or software moguls, I guess.

And just for the heck of it, I surfed over to Apple. No news yet, so I figured I'd check out the usual Mac Rumor mills...

Looks like Apple Insider's got a fairly complete scoop - my experience was that AI was about 50% correct in what they reported. I got the feeling the site was edited by some twisted child struggling through puberty, and fixated on Mac rumors, rather than ... well, other things. Though I will freely admit to wanting the G4 Powerbook at 500 Mhz. I lust after few things in this world, but that's one of them. My old G3 powerbook (at 500 mhz, with 128 megs RAM and a 16 gig HD) was certainly sweet. I especially loved the DVD drive. But then there is this over at MacInTouch, which is typically fairly balanced.

It's been a surreal day. I wouldn't have believed this link, and in fact I think I told my wife that this, certainly, is a sign of the coming apocalypse. For those of you afraid to hop to the link, it's a story about Microsoft, WebTV, and La-Z-Boy (a triumvirate made in hell, certainly), combining, to, you guessed it, produce 80% of the Geek Couch Potato's life. I haven't stopped laughing hysterically yet, but I checked, and yes, it's on the La-Z-Boy web site as well.

And there's a picture (courtesy of, or stolen from, the La-Z-Boy web site). Nice recliner, with a fold-out keyboard, beverage holders, remote holders, surge protectors, and even DSL. Good grief. Can I get one? Just leave off the WebTV Crap and toss in one of these, man. Get me something for a potty break, and I'd never leave. Or at least, not much.

I was preparing a whole long, well thought out piece on something or other, but that link just punted it away like Charlie Brown never could. A combination recliner/keyboard to connect to your WebTV... It's a sign, I'm telling you, a clear, unmistakable sign of the end of the world.

It was either that link, or this one. I'm guessing the "cuddly" part of the Koala look works for them, too, if this is correct. Sheesh. And they look so cute. Whoda thunk?

You just can't really recover from a slap like that. I'm telling you, that's the weirdest thing I've seen all day. No, wait, all year. Uh, all century so far? How about the Millennium? All right, how about the last as well?

At least things are improving at Syroid Manor - Good news is, we can hope, contagious. Tom's a smart fellow - he deserves a good, stable employer.

And JHR and I have been discussing, or perhaps slandering, Microsoft and Linux - he's posted the major quotes between us over on his site today, and I find myself wincing only a little.

Microsoft was one a phenomenal company. Their products were huge improvements. I remember wanting Excel in THE WORST way, because I thought it was a huge improvement in operation and function over 123 and Quattro Pro. I was dreading the move from WordPerfect to Word, as Word is, at best, a brain-damaged and poor stupid cousin. Access? Blah. PowerPoint? Well, if I gotta do something for a presentation, it just doesn't suck. Outlook? Well, I think it's significant that you can mouse with one hand and hold your nose with another.

But today? There's an incredible amount of hubris at Microsoft. There's a lot of technology out there, and it's impressive, but there is a huge gap between "usable" and "functional" and "it doesn't suck."

Linux is closing on Microsoft. Getting straight answers out of Microsoft is sometimes like trying to remove teeth from a shark. When the shark's hungry, you're bleeding, and... well, he's a shark, right?

We've been pursuing an answer on a piece of Microsoft technology for a couple of weeks now. Regarding yesterday's discussion on replication and so forth, I asked the fellow at Microsoft "will this be fixed?" Now, in the original response, Microsoft claimed "it's by design". Which means nothing will happen until a week after we get things straightened out and build our own, in which case there will be a fix for it.

I want Linux to succeed in the worst way. I want some competition to make Microsoft run scared for a while. I want Microsoft back the way they were, moving this stuff forward, instead of blocking progress. I spent two freaking days looking for information on Microsoft's web site, only to fumble across the news that yes, Microsoft's Small Business Server is a junior, brain-damaged sibling to Microsoft's Back Office. Good grief.

And before the Mac-ites start the rumbling, yes, I have lust, deep in my heart, for the new G4. If you're looking to buy me a Christmas present, well, there you go.

We had our first load of weekly swimming lessons tonight - the eldest hopped into the deep pool, did OK, but then ended up in the Guppies anyway. That's cool with me - I can't swim for ... well, you know. Happened when I was a kid. Goofing off at Big Fish Lake, my younger sister had flipped off an inner tube we were playing with on the lake, and I decided, in typical brave big brother fashion, to show her how it was done. So then I did a back-flip off the same inner tube.

Six feet of water isn't much, but you can drown in three inches if you're face down. And I was ... I'm not sure what I was. I don't think they had to suck and pump me, but I know there was pounding involved. So it goes.

But before I tail off (apologies for the late post - I'm getting almost Syroidian in my posting times lately), here's one my friend Dan B. will groan at. Needed a ride to the impound, right. I'm thinking he got a ride back to jail. Foolish mortal.

Bob W is right - Bob T is right - Dr. K is right - so is JHR - so what do we do? Linux deserves some abuse, rather than rewards, for producing a product (admittedly, it's only the kernel) a year late. Apple? Let's not even go there - the OS X that those folks are waiting for is now something over three years late, if you go by the old originally promised Rhapsody ship date. Microsoft? Well, if you can't quote chapter and verse on the product or OS delays, I'm sure one of the other passengers on this roller-coaster ride can.

I would like to get in on one side or the other of the issue, but I'm still stuck straddling the fence. Today, I was creating a database in SQL Server. It's actually pretty easy and mindless once you know what you're doing. Thus the last five weeks were me learning what I was doing. But as I'm banging away on the keyboard, the phone rings. Microsoft developer support, just checking to make sure I know they're closing out a call I placed, just making sure I knew it was being closed. This was after talking to the support tech yesterday morning, getting an e-mail from both him and his boss, and now a phone call. Wow. That was impressive.

On the other side, though, I did some more documentation of a memory leak I'd found yesterday. I don't precisely know that you can call it a memory leak, but what happens is if you're running SQL Server on your machine, the SQLServ.exe program collects more and more memory. On my test machine, I did one replication to a server, looked at my Task Manager, and SQLServ.exe was over 55Megs of RAM. I stopped the services AND the agent, restarted (no reboot, mind you) and the SQLServ.exe came back using 16 Megs of RAM.

Very unusual. So I checked another server we have. It hadn't been rebooted in well over 100 days (Like Bob W, I've never found NT or 2000 to be particularly unstable. In fact, they're far more stable than 95, 98, or the MacOS). The SQLServ.exe was using over 140 Megs of RAM, and this machine had less than 4k Free. Stopped and started the service, and it settled back to about 22 Megs of RAM, big open acreage of free RAM.

Stranger and stranger, I thought. I checked out the big hawg in the computer room. And, believe it or not, it was running Windows 2000, no service pack. Half a gig of RAM, and this thing was at 7K free... The SQLServ.EXE was using close to 350 Megs of memory. Stopped, started, it settled down nicely at the 27 Meg range, more free RAM.

Why is it that Microsoft can write wonderful applications, but cannot clean up after themselves? I started to think it was a caching issue... But wouldn't a normal cache be a set size, to allow fast indexing of the contents? Wouldn't a normal cache contain only the most-used stuff? Wouldn't it be somehow limited in time, and shrink if not used? Perhaps it's a very good thing I don't design software - I don't know anything about what's going on here, apparently.

Microsoft does a pretty good job with a lot of things, but I think they're dropping off a wee bit. Oh hell, a lot bit. But when you look at the alternatives, they're in worse shape. Before you yell at me for slighting Apple, let's be honest - Apple's got some good products, but very little reliability. As in, you can invest a ton of money in Apple's hardware, with no guarantee that it won't be a fad-design product. Or worse, something like an iMac which is great in principle, but when you put it into a work environment, it has many problems. Like survivability. They tend to fall apart. Or worse, they develop various flaky problems which drive you nuts. And before you hop up and down about your fancy OS 9 or even OS X, stop it. Spare me. OS 9 is a bandaid on top of a patch on top of a half-way decent version of a slapdash job. And OS X? Mac Multi-tasking - oh, this will be fun. By this time next year I'll bet half the Mac apps will really work with OS X - the other half? Well, hopefully they'll be trying to work on Carbon apps. Good bloody Luck.

If you want a real eye-opener, head over to this report on MacInTouch. The folks at MacInTouch are very blunt and honest about their feedback about Apple. But this report - wow.

And Linux? Look at what Dan Seto's going through trying to get fonts to work with Linux. Now Tom Syroid had a cosmic experience with Mandrake last week. Brian Bilbrey had a pretty good run with fonts and such last week. But each of them is working with different versions and different flavors of Linux.

Do I want Linux to work? In the worst way. Do I want it here at home? Hell yes. Will it work for me? Hell, no. I've got three computers, two of which are up and running right now.

One's an old 486/66, running Windows 95. It's a dump tank, not much more. One's a Pentium III/550 Mhz, which is my main machine. It's got Photoshop, PhotoDraw, FileMaker Pro, Visual Basic, Microsoft Office 2000 Pro, SQL Server, and the software for my digital camera, in addition to a bunch of old batch files, programs I've written, and other stuff. It's also got a bunch of kids software on it that's going to move to another CPU sitting here under the desk. It's got a USB CD Burner, a USB Joystick, 250 Meg Zip Drive, plus an old Parallel Port tape drive. All of this stuff is held together by Windows 98 SE.

Would Linux give me all of that? No. Not yet. Maybe soon, but not yet. And I'll be waiting. When it does, whoo hoo. But until then, give me what works, without compiles, includes, breathing through one nostril, and making sacrifice to some fellow who's dressed like a penguin.

After yesterday's Throne of the Gods (or Chair of the Damned, I'm not quite sure which one fits better. I know my butt would), I've had a tough time holding on to reality today. First Al, then Ken, remark on my comments on the chair and the accessory. Before you folks get all het up about the new Powerbook Titanium, Apple's a bit, and more than a bit, late with that one. Yes, it's sweet, it's cool, it's a real rocket, but it's about time they produce a $3000+ laptop that doesn't end up with keyboard marks on the screen because the case is just too damned flimsy to handle what's inside. I want a new Powerbook, but this is the first (since perhaps the iBook) that's actually made to stand up to abuse, instead of being "able to be portable". Sheesh. Though it's nice to know when you hear Leno's monologue, I can say "I told you so." Good grief.

First off, I'm finally able to put my finger on why the heck the "Phil" character on "Ed" bothers me. He reminds me of Steve Jobs. Ewwww.

Last night we had the apparently World Famous Tater Tot Hot Dish. Now the orignal recipe is;

One Pound Ground Beef
One Can Campbells Creamy Onion Soup
One Can Campbells Cream of Chicken Soup
Cheese (preferably yellow)
One pound bag Ore-Ida Tater Tots

Pre-heat the Oven to 350^o Brown and drain the ground beef. Stir in cans of soup. Spoon mixture into 9x12 pan. Cover entire surface with cheese. Cover surface of cheese with tater tots, arranged in a single layer. If you do it right, you'll have exactly four tater tots left. Put in oven and cook for 30 minutes. Yum..

She Who Must Be Obeyed has "de-fatted" the above recipe by using different soups, shredded cheese, and fewer tots. Ach well.

Today I took the leftovers for lunch, and one of my co-workers (who originally hails from down under) had heard of this. Claimed it was world-famous. Scary. The only recipe I found for it came from a friend's mom's cookbook.

So, to proceed with this whole scary thing, tonight I decided to take some leftover french bread we had and buttered (oh, all right, margarined) it, slapped a piece of low-fat sandwich pepperoni on it, a little low-fat cheese, pop it in a 350 oven for about 10 minutes, and wow, the fellow can do things with food! I mean good things, though, not ... well, we'll just leave that alone.

This fellow concerns me, because I'm not entirely sure he can uphold the laws he disagrees with. While I admire his integrity, I think he'd be better of admitting he doesn't believe he can do the job. But hey, it's not my place to decide that, it's the members of the Senate. Though I'd like a panda at our zoo. And this, it's just too stupid for words.

And tomorrow, I'm probably going to tee off on the Honorable Dick Day again </Sarcasm>. Tonight, I was sitting in the middle lane of 35W. It took me 30 minutes to travel the same route that used to take ten or fifteen. And on 35W, we have a third lane, the furthest left, which is for the carpools - two people or more - during the hours of 6 - 9 am and 3 - 6 pm. While I sat there in the middle lane, I watched 92 cars pass me while I traveled about five miles. Of those 92 cars passing me in the car pool lane, six of them had obvious passengers. Even assuming half of them were carrying kids (a very high percentage, to be honest), that's still forty cars in five miles that were cheating. Do you think Dick's gonna do anything about it? Me neither. But I'll complain anyway.

I'm off to process cat feces and other fun things this evening. Hope yours is better.

Tonight, we were on our way to the usual pre-payday ritual; grocery shopping. We usually stop some place for dinner, because we've learned that if we go shopping on empty stomachs, we buy junk, not good stuff. And we usually hit some non-fast-food or semi-fast-food place so the kids can get vegetables (one of the drawbacks of parenthood - apparently potatoes, cut into strips, and cooked under some form of high-temperature method using a great deal of vegetable and other oils. I'm told by SWMBO that this is called "french fries" and she is much opposed to them - silly me, I thought they were another major food group). Fortunately, She believes that lettuce on a sandwich from Subway can count. Allah be praised.

But tonight for some strange reason we were looking for something different. We stopped at a place called "Sultan Palace" - very important part - Get on to County road 42 going west, and follow it through Burnsville, and down the hill to Savage. Follow Country Road 42 to right across from McDonalds - there's Sultan Palace.

We'd been past the place before, and in fact had been there when it was "Q Burger" and later "Dan Patch Grill" (Dan Patch apparently being a champion trotter horse from Savage - quite a long time ago, I guess). We missed the "Dan Patch Pizza" phase, but now it's Sultan Palace. And they're very good.

I'm no good judge of Greek and Mediterranian food. But I do know what I like. And this stuff was wonderful. I had the Gyros, and they did it just right - too much lamb to roll up in the pita bread, onions so strong they clear your sinuses just sniffing them. Very, very good.

But this fellow's new in this country. Him, and his brother, threw everything they had into this business. He had one waitress on, and he was running back and forth from the kitchen. Every single visitor to the restaurant got a visit from him. He checked to see what the diners thought, how they liked the food, and chatted with them.

It occurred to me that this fellow is a bit of a dinosaur. He wasn't part of a franchise. He was living, and dying, by his grandmother's recipes, which he brought from Kuwait, to try to make a living here in Minnesota.

This fellow's out there. No franchising organization to support him, no collection of manuals on a shelf telling him everything from how the wait staff should dress to the temperature of the fryers. Just two guys trying to make it work.

And if you look at the business climate in the world these days, there's a very wide gap. There's the small folks. There's the huge folks. And the middle ground? It's pretty barren.

I read a story this morning in the local paper about another local company, WWWrrr.com, which was working to bring the World Wide Web (the WWW part) to the classroom (the RRR part). They went out of business, leaving 120 employees unpaid for the time they worked this year. There are two other local companies on the hook for sums between $40,000 and $900,000 for work done, and there's not much to be done about it.

It's the small companies that we really need to support. They're the ones doing the neat stuff, trying hard, working extra hours, and giving the better service. The big companies that remember what that's like, such as Dell, parts of Microsoft, and others, well, they'll continue to do fine.

But check out the little local guys. You might like them. We're going to head back to Sultan Palace again soon - this time for the lunch menu. Yum.

Tonight's going to be short and sweet - I hope. This is the start of about ten days of "where you going?" for us. Tonight, Groceries. Tomorrow, finish groceries, shoes for the kids. Saturday we're going to see a very large Dinosaur at the Science Museum before the free tickets run out, then Sunday's another trip for Her to the Women's Expo. Monday night's Girl Scouts (and my kids eating MY cooking), Tuesday's my workout training session (and the eldest's swimming lessons), and I think Her planning meeting for the Eldest's school valentines party), Wednesday's Her workout training session, Thursday is Girl Scouts (and closing in on the cookie sale kickoff), and I think Friday is open - right now.

But before I go, I've been doing some thinking about Apple again. Yes, Steve Jobs did his usual thing with smoke, mirrors, and a lot of hot air, and the Macites are panting and raving for it. A laptop with a titanium case - jolly good show, that - there were more than a few times I was afraid of snapping my Powerbook in half. Now you don't need to worry about snapping. Permanent bending, perhaps. I suspect it would take someone sitting on it just right.

Al Hawkins, who is a big Mac fan (don't know about the sandwich, but there are times when I envy him his iBook), posted a fairly normal pro-Mac piece on his site today. Well and good. He likes Macs, and that's great. Macintosh computers do a good job for certain people, and they have their uses.

You've got to remember that these are no longer sports cars. They're no longer powerboats or go carts - they're not toys or anything to get emotionally involved with, though we do. They're freaking TOOLS, people. The screwdrivers and hammers and saws and all the rest of the next century. They're just tools. Some people work better with screwdrivers. Others do better work with table saws. Some are better off with paint brushes.

One of his points, though, had me gritting my teeth. He points out Retrospect as a wonderful tool.

He's half right. Retrospect is a good tool, when it runs. Unfortunately, the OS it runs on quite often sends it right into the bag with little to no warning. Over the course of three years, I ran Retrospect on three different computers - a 7200/120, a different 7200/120, and a 4400/200. All of these machines had clean OSes installed repeatedly. And all of them hung. Some more than others, some more often than others. Some would hang only occasionally - like in the middle of a start-of-cycle backup, wasting an entire weekend. Or like at the end of a backup cycle, eating and destroying an entire tapeset.

Backup needs to be beyond seemless. Backup needs to be more than bulletproof. If you haven't got a good, stable, reliable backup method, you haven't got squat. I like Retrospect a lot, and suspect that, running on Windows, it's a pretty good product. On a Mac OS, which lacks the tools for monitoring it's health and stability (NT's got plenty of tools for you to watch it cannibalize itself), you just come in in the morning and get a surprise. So it goes.

I hear tell that the Vikings are headed to New York to play the Giants. I've watched perhaps fifteen minutes of football all season. Every time I turn on a Vikes game, or even part of a game, they sucked. Big, sloppy rocks. I'd love to see the Vikes in another Superbowl. I'd love to see them make it - but I do not want them there if they're going to suck, again. It's been 24 years since I sat on my uncle's couch, shaking my head, and saying "well, we'll be better next year." I don't want my kids to grow up like that. It's painful enough. Between four Super-dooper-bowl losses, a baseball team that actually did well for a while before the biggest talent they had went to run the Cubs, a Hockey team that was stolen right out from under our noses, and a basketball team that seemed more destined for the island of misfit toys than professional sports, I don't want my kids suffering like I did.

I think Pro Sports ought to be re-vamped. Let's do it this way. For every dollar that you want me, as a taxpayer, to pony up for your overpaid athletes so they can play in a new stadium, I get that many dollars of ownership in your team. For every dollar you pony up for a new stadium, you can buy fifty cents of my dollar back.

So, let's say you've got a pro sports franchise worth, say, $280 million on the open market. You want a new open-air baseball stadium, forgetting for the most part that we quite often have snow on the ground in April, and we can quite easily have snow on the ground in October. And you're demanding a $400 million stadium. Fine. If you want the taxpayers of this state to pay for it, you'd best be putting up at least half of the cost of that stadium, or I'll own your team before it's done.

Let's put it another way. You, as a boss, have to invest in some desks for your employees. Are you going to shell out the big bucks on the guy who's always complaining he hates his job and is often caught surfing the job boards at work? Heck no. You'll buy the best desk for the fellow who's usually working late into the night and always does good work.

Why should we pay out a couple hundred million for a stadium for a team that could up and leave in a few years, having gotten a better offer elsewhere? If you want my money, come across with something for me. Keeping a sub-par team that annually releases it's biggest name because he's too expensive, well, been there, done that, threw back the baseball, Pohlad. I remember the old Calvin Griffith days, when his biggest thrill was finding a player who was willing to sign for Calvin's minimum. I think the joke went something like minimum salary on any other team in the league was a raise for the Twins player traded away.

But there's a couple of pieces missing there - first of all Calvin was, from all accounts I've heard, a very nice fellow. Secondly, Calvin had only one business to make money in - Baseball. Yup. That's right. No internet companies, no banks, no major family fortunes to fall back on. His money was made with the Twins. Which does go a long way to explaining why it was so tight here for so long.

But Baseball especially needs to clean house. Get a real commissioner, not a fellow who's also an owner. Get a real salary cap in place so that these contracts don't sound like the budgets of third-world countries. Get REASONABLE about what's going on there. After all, this is a GAME, not the end of the world or anything.

All right - would someone come whack me over the head and get rid of this bad attitude? And I started today off so well, too - I went to Apple's iCard web site and sent both Kaycee and Debbie iCards - they're having tough times of it, and could use all the support you can give. I'll quit my bitching and go back to praying in a few more paragraphs, I promise.

I'm off to bed, perhaps to adjust this bad attitude I seem to have contracted. Things are actually going good at work - I solved a nasty little problem that popped up out of nowhere today, and have been building new computers for folks, so it's getting back towards what I thought it would be - fun. Anyway, I'm off (like that's a shock to most of you). So behave yourselves, OK?

And if you can't, then don't get caught. Best advice I can give you there. It's so much cheaper when one behaves one's self. So I'm told. ;-)

Frankly, it just came on TV, and seemed appropriate. What better than AC/DC for a soundtrack while you scramble for another site host? Well, Lawrence Welk, maybe, but I was in enough pain.

Today, my site died. On the one hand, I can't complain too much. I haven't paid one penny to the folks at Spaceports, though it seems they owe me something fairly serious in terms of cash, should I get the opportunity to cash out (I wasn't doing it for the cash, to be quite honest - to tell the truth I had no idea about how to collect mine; kinda figured it would end this way anyway). By serious I mean in the $20 range. Hey, that's big money to me. SWMBO carries the checkbook, and with that new-fangled "direct deposit" crap, I just get to wave at the valueless paper as it goes through. No point in opening the envelope with the check stub - she's already got it recorded in the checkbook via the bank's web site before I get the stub. Ah, well.

One minute I was able to use my portal page from work, the next, it was gone. Just plain gone. And I don't bookmark sites any more. I've got six computers set up in my cube right now in two separate networks, and finding the one bookmark out of six machines (seven if you count my home system) is pretty unlikely. So I portal it.

But when my site went down, I shrugged and said "oh well." Figured it would be back up by the time I got home. So I finished up my work day (nothing remarkable, just the usual small successes, medium problems, and gigantic pains in the posterior thanks to that really big software house on the upper left coast there).

Got home, and no joy. Between my ISP booting me off every four minutes (Actually, it's not their fault. We've got two phone companies in the local loop, and I'm calling across area code boundaries, and perhaps not exerting the proper amount of pressure with my upper lip, left ring finger, and right little piggie who ran "whee whee whee" all the way home. As it were), and not being able to access my site, the frustration and blood pressure kept building.

So, rather than deal with it, I went Grocery shopping. Hey, the family's got to eat, right? So after that trip, we managed to get back home, get the groceries put away and by now, I thought, my server's just got to be back up, right?

Suck wind, foolish white boy. No joy there at all. "Cannot find..." Yeah, bite me.

So, I went surfing, and found another free site host. Dan Bowman graciously offered me space on his host, but given the fact that I'm a stiff-necked, stubborn, pissed-off, ornery, cranky dad, I figured I'd much rather have something I can blame and scream at rather than be mean to someone who doesn't deserve it. Besides, if I can find a free site to host this thing until Saskat's up and running with the FrontPage pieces I need to publish this site (nothing fancy, I just use FrontPage's FTP to publish - I told you I'm intensely lazy). Oy, what a pain.

So, if you can read this, ~~I've moved to Freehost.net~~. I'm still on Spaceports. We'll see how this goes, and as it stumbles along, I'll be watching the rest of the free web hosting market out there. Hey, a fellow's got to have a hobby, right?

My initial thought this evening when I sat down at this keyboard was to ask just who let the cranky bastard in here to post all over my space this week. The fellow's obviously got a serious chemical imbalance and needs a lot of help. Though I suspect Chocolate would work just as well. That, or a very long vacation sans kids. I know, never happen. I've been trying for years to decide if we're domesticating them, or they're turning us back into less-civilized people. Sort of like College Students With Income. Scary.

But then I had to put up with this crap, and it chewed up most of my evening. What there was of it aside from shopping for shoes for the Monkey Boy, King of the Mucus People, finishing up the Grocery list (it's really rather amazing that we've gone through quite as many of the iron rations (cans and such) as we have. SWMBO prefers fresh when possible, but canned veggies are better than no veggies. To which I respond "yes, one can throw the cans so much further and with a great deal more accuracy" but She Was Not Amused. I believe that since I made such comments in front of the midget infestation we have here, it will likely come to haunt me.

Never mind the fact that my lovely bride once tossed a metal pail through the glass wall of a three-season porch as a child. If metal contacts with, and breaks, glass, it will likely be my poor influence that did it. Yah, right. Listen, the only window I ever semi-intentionally broke was plastic, and I had to WORK at it, right? Of course, less than three minutes after breaking the window and getting into the house, the rest of them arrived home and I had plenty of questions to answer. Oh well. We've all got those moments, right?

Of course, we also got some bad news from a friend of ours - her grandfather passed away yesterday, and she's got to fly out west for the funeral next week. I remember losing my grandma when I was about eight. My grandfather died when I was about ten or eleven. I've lost aunts and uncles through the years, and it always hurts. It's very painful to lose someone you love; but at the same time, you do learn that life does go on. Life is to be lived; the dead are elsewhere, doing their own thing. If you believe that they are best used by feeding worms, well, can't argue there. We'll all find out soon enough. But to lose your grandfather when you're finally in your mid-thirties, well, there's going to be a long slow road to recovery there.

Well, go figure. As soon as I connect to Freehost.net to publish my new site, I go one last time to check out Spaceports. And would you believe the thing's back up?

Some times I swear we've already invented artificial intelligence, and these machines do it to us for their own twisted sense of humor. I refuse to believe that this sort of thing is accidental.

That, or my son is a far better programmer and technician than I am. While I do certainly hope that this will come true in the future, I'm a bit concerned if he's showing these abilities at the tender age of four. I can't be that bad, can I? Oh, hush up, you there in the back. You'll get your pay if you can keep the rest of the marks from running off...

Like I'm about to do as I reintroduce Mr. Head to Mr. Pillow. A relationship that certainly needs a whole lot of work, right now. Best go to it, methinks.

But before I go, remember that mini-rant I had last week regarding eFunds and Deluxe? Well, a reader wrote in to tell me that there wasn't a flat eleven shares due me. Seems that the balance of what eFunds/Deluxe owed me worked out to twenty-nine cents. And I only half-joking wrote back telling them that I expected that check, regardless of the cost of postage.

So sure enough, earlier this week, I got a check. No, we're not talking "serious" money here... A whopping twenty-nine cent check. I guess that's what you get for owning stock in a check-printing company. ;-)

Buck Hill, what you can see of it.

Off the deck to the east.

The parking lot and other buildings.

Opposite of normal - Jack upright, sister face down.

Future rock stars - I guess I can live with that.

If you see this in the woods, run like heck.

Cloud pilots. You doubt me?

They spin the wheels to send the clouds to the far wall, and then get a thunderstorm warning. Seems appropriate with this trio.

The point of the exercise - to see Sue, the Dinosaur

I couldn't help it. After reading the first paragraph, I heard my mind add "and the direct ancestor of my wife." Gulp.

Frankly, if you're at this end of a fleshed dinosaur, it's a little too late.

First of all, apologies for the late post. I've been a busy boy today, and accomplished precious little in the list of things I needed to do for me. For the kids, though, I think we made a whole new set of memories. Which is important.

Sheesh. Just realized I hadn't moved the "Most Recent" marker since the Day Of The Chair. Some day I'm going to get that brain straightened out, but I doubt it.

Seems like Spaceports is doing better now, so I guess I'll stick it out here for a while. Though it occurred to me finally why a domain name for this site would be a good idea. When the host I'm using packs it in, I can move the domain name and the rest of the links stay up to date. I don't mean my links, but everyone who links to me. Ah, linkrot. I'm thinking some day soon there'll be a vaccine for it.

I did get a couple of Buck Hill Shots this morning, brought to you by the folks at "foggy bottom". Can't see a blasted thing. That's probably because our snow base has dropped here from about twenty-one inches right after Christmas to about six now. And if that stuff can't sink into the ground, you know where it goes...

And that brings us to today's science lesson of a sort - you know it's humid when you can hear the power lines buzzing.

Nuff about the weather.

Today was the day we went to meet Sue. But first...

Well, the PLAN was to arise about 8 am, do the various things we need to do to make ourselves presentable (SWMBO insists on makeup and such, though I think she's beautiful regardless - me, I'm thinking that sandblasting would be a good start, but only a start, mind you). We'd hit downtown by 9-ish, and go from there.

But after yesterday's debacle with Spaceports disappearing for most of the afternoon/evening, I was scrambling to find another host. Dan Bowman was encouraging me through the evening, and of course, as these things have a way of doing, the server returned at about eleven o'clock or so, my time, and so I had to unscramble what I'd done.

I still haven't gotten back into a decent schedule - four months of job hunting followed by the holidays has me still trying to figure out which end is up. My goal was to get to bed on a Friday night before 11 pm. And so, after all that scrambling, I fell into bed at 1:15 am. Now that might not be all that late for some of you, but my alarm had gone of something like nineteen hours earlier, and I was just beat.

So, when we finally rolled out of the sack at 9:30 am, I figured we were probably going to survive, but not hit most of the schedule.

After getting breakfast into us and heading out the door, we went first to get a parking spot. Now, admittedly, this probably wasn't the smartest weekend to head to Downtown St. Paul. The Sportsman's Show was in town this weekend, and the bad news meant there were a lot of clueless people wandering the skyways.

Oh, Skyways? Well, let's see. I believe they were initially invented here, but I'm not sure. I do know that between Minneapolis and St. Paul, you can most likely get to nearly everything you need, and you can get within about a block of just about everything in each downtown on the skyway system.

All a skyway really is is a connection between two buildings - it's sort of a bridge for people. We use them a lot here, primarily because we found out a long time ago that if people had to go outside to get lunch, etc., they were likely to go a lot further via their car than on foot. Thus the downtown businesses built skyways.

But there's a very small problem here. Buildings could select their own routes that the skyways would follow through their property. Some buildings let the hallways pass right through the middle of the building with no major redirection. Some would rearrange traffic to skirt the core of the building itself so that you could avoid the middle of the offices.

And some, well. You can come in on say the east side of the block, and to get out on the north side, you'll go south, east, north, east, and then back west - in other words, it's like making a left turn by turning right 270^o. We ended up walking perhaps seven miles to go from the new Minnesota Mutual building to the Children's Museum to the NCL Tower and then over to nearly the Radisson. And back again.

The amazing thing about the St. Paul Skyway system is that you can cover almost all of downtown. Except for the new Xcel Energy Center where the Minnesota Wild hockey team plays, and they also don't connect to the Science Museum.

Ann has worked in downtown St. Paul for a total of almost five years now (two different jobs separated by a sentence in Eden Prairie - a western suburb here. If you're fortunate enough to live in southern Eden Prairie, you're OK. If you're in northern Eden Prairie, you know that there are typically two ways to get anywhere in or out of the place, and one's under road construction, and the other's a narrow little street funneling about 9000 cars an hour through one poorly-timed stoplight. I'm not picking on Eden Prairie citizens, but the people who planned the place. I mean, come on, really - we're looking at a suburb that insisted that a four-lane road down the middle of the city contain stoplights to slow the traffic flow, as they didn't want a freeway there. But then they complain that people will leave that four-lane road during rush hour and speed through city streets to avoid the congestion. Well, duh!), so we knew the skyway system well. Well, she did, I just followed. But there were a lot of people looking very confused, wandering around.

We'd parked in a skyway-connected building, went over to the Children's Museum, and were promptly and nearly immediately disappointed.

The Children's Museum is a pretty neat place if you're three or four years old, or have the manners of a three or four year old. The children would run and ping-pong off just about anything in their way - adults, walls, exhibits, fixtures, other children, and the like. Why on earth the adults were also doing it I have no idea.

It took perhaps an hour and a half to go through the five levels of the Children's Museum, and that was the end of that. I doubt we'll return there any time in the near future - it's just a little too child-like for my kids. Even Jack was bored.

So, we decided to find someplace to eat. We'd discussed Mickey's Diner with the kids - Mickey's in Downtown St. Paul is in an old dining car-type layout - they've got perhaps three booths, and the rest of the seating (about 30 seats in total) are along the counter. Great food, so we've been told, so we thought to check the place out.

And some day we'll get there. Place was packed, and waiting for a couple of stools together was probably not going to wear well on the two younger members of the party. So we trekked on.

My lovely bride decided that there was a place on the skyway we just had to visit - "...but I'm not sure if they're open today." Well, gee, honey, I think that since 99% of what we've passed in the skyway is closed (the only thing I saw that was open in terms of food within three blocks of this place she wanted us to go was a broken-open jellybean dispenser). After kicking aside a few tumbleweeds, we made our way to the Subway on the corner of I'm not sure and beats hell out of me. It's right across from the Fanny Farmer shop, and down the block from the bailbondsman. Which likely puts it somewhere in between the courthouse and the jail, I'm thinking.

And the sad thing is that's only half in jest.

But we went in there and had lunch - the Subway was conjoined with an Italian Deli; at least that was what the sign said. After we went in, I realized that this was probably the first Italian Deli I'd ever seen that had gyros.

Looks like the place got purchased, and the new owners haven't made enough yet to buy a new sign. Good food, though. Very good food.

So after we ate there, we dashed the four blocks over to the Science Museum (and yes, they seem to have some sort of bug that might pop up - which is doubly embarrassing as they're also one of the bigger IT trainers here in town) to see the point of this whole exercise. A visit to Sue.

First, some facts. This Sue isn't one of my relatives, not even close. She's about fourteen THOUSAND pounds (I'm not sure if that's with or without flesh), and is the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever found anywhere. Something like 93% of the thing was right there. And she's the largest one ever found.

I'll tell you this much - I'm fairly certain, absent scientific evidence, that cavemen and dinosaurs could not have existed at the same time. Even were our ancestors incredibly brave, I'm thinking they'd still soil themselves completely. Heck, looking at teeth, some of which were in excess of eight inches long, and I kinda figured I was safe - heck, I'd have been three or four mouthfuls for this giant.

Though I was tempted to take the fellow attempting to give me the umbrella enema and shove him right into her mouth - sharp teeth or no, the man would have been bounced right out the place on his ear. It was incredible how rude this bunch was - I think they'd been taking lessons from the folks over at the Children's Museum. That, or they'd trained them over there, and this was the Professional Ranks in rudeness. Lovely. The RBL - Rude Behavior League. Guess I'd best get that one trademarked before someone else jumps on it. Oh, never mind.

But we had a wonderful time with the rest of the place. For some reason the bunch of them decided to watch the cryogenics experiments this fellow was doing. Very entertaining - he took a number of things and dipped them in liquid nitrogen and then showed just how big a change it was. Shattered latex rubber and racquet balls like glass, and cold-welded a brass rod to a steel plate by sticking the frozen brass rod through the hole. Scary.

We did, however, watch the 3D laser show. I think, on the whole, the place would get six thumbs up and two thumbs down from the family. However, since I'm the fellow writing on this site, I can say I thought the show really sucked.

Basically, you head on into a theater, picking up a pair of fairly nice 3D glasses before you get a seat. Of course the glasses are nice, you don't get to keep them.

I should have known how cheesy this thing was going to be by looking at the number of slide projectors in the booth behind us (yes, once a geek, always a geek - I can't sit in a theater without looking at the equipment. Nosy bastard, that's me). But I was not at all prepared for special effects that made me longing for the old Viewmaster reels we had as children. I remember looking at the seven wonders of the ancient world and marveling at how they got pictures of the Calluses of Rhodes - took a few years before I learned that I was a bit off on that one. I even remember very clearly looking at the Statue of Zeus. I thought he'd be at the entrance of every zoo, and I'm still disappointed to this day. Go figure.

But the effects were really pretty poor. It was all slides but for the animation offered by the lasers, and you had to concentrate to see the "3-D effects" part.

If we hadn't gotten the tickets for free, I'd have been mightily upset. However, with the rest of the museum, we're happy enough to consider getting a membership - $75 for a year's family membership - definitely a good deal, if we go more often than once a year. As it also includes free tickets to the Omni / Imax Theater, it's worth it.

Oh, the Omni / iMax? Nothing to do with Apple, let me assure you. This one's one of those things you might not believe me on, so let me explain.

As I understand it there are basically two major large-format movie systems out there. The IMAX theater sports a screen that's about ten stories high and maybe two hundred feet wide. It's a flat screen, but it's huge.

On the other side of the coin is the Omni Theater. I've loved that concept since I first saw a deep-sea movie in the old Science Museum Omni Theater when I was in grade school.

The Science Museum's Omni Theater, though, has a dome that literally swings into place in front of the IMAX screen. If I recall rightly, there are twin eight-ton counterweights on the arms that swing this massive screen from overhead to in front of you. Once the screen's down, you're treated to a view that covers something like 170^o of your field of vision.

In other words, you need to be careful what you watch there. I remember hearing about people who'd gone to a flight movie making rainbows of their own when their inner ear failed to synchronize the movement, or lack thereof, with the overwhelming evidence brought in by the eyes. Something about being strapped to the bottom of a biplane as it loops, rolls, and soars would have me ready to ... well, let's just say ruin plenty of hairdos.

But after all that running around, we came back home, stopping at Chi-Chi's for Jack's birthday dinner out. Back on Jack's birthday, we were a bit concerned as his father was somewhat lacking in income at the time, so he didn't get his dinner out. We made up for that tonight, though I had to talk him out of the pizza kids meal and into the kid's burrito and fries and applesauce instead.

And before you complain, I do know what sorts of abominations we create over here. Heck, just seeing "Mexican Spring Rolls" on the menu had me wondering if the Teriyaki burger would be back soon at McDonalds (just kidding, I guess). But yes, we here on this side of the whatever do tend to create some pretty ghastly food combos when left to our own devices. Though, given the chance, I'll stick with burgers just about every single time.

Well, I think the 21 oz margarita is finally wearing off (despite my size, I've let my professional drinking status lapse, and so such a large drink for someone of my rank amateur status is pretty well enough. My nose didn't go numb, but I didn't care if Jack ate applesauce with his fingers. Yes, he considers even cottage cheese to be finger food. I don't know either. Didn't come from my jeans, or genes, man. He's a complete one-off original, that kid. I know of no child who can attain top speed running with his head swiveling every which way he can to see everything, and still run full-tilt into an outstretched arm.

Well, off to bed with me, now. It's Saturday, so that means tomorrow is likely the last Vikes game of the season. I promise you my prayer tonight and tomorrow will be "Please, God, do it to us now before we get to the big game. If we're going to get to the big game, please don't let us screw it up again." Four Superbowls in something like eight years when I was a kid, and we lost every single one. I think the Buffalo Bills finally beat our record - Lord knows we don't want it back.

So please, whoever's applying nose to the grindstone where ever you are keeping things going, just don't make fools out of us again, eh?

I hate that when I do that. I write the above post, and then (as befitting my status as dial-in webuser, rather than a full-time citizen of the internet), I find myself out flopping around on various sites, and find something like this that really gets me juiced.

I'll be blunt and far more honest than you want me to be. I'm unlikely to pirate books off the internet for two, and only two, reasons - I read in the bathroom, and I'm cheap. Cheap means I'm not going to be buying a book reader for that room - I want the feel of paper. No, you wit - not for later use ("I'm in the smallest room in your house; I have your review in front of me. Soon, it will be behind me, then beneath me" - don't remember who, but I thought it was pretty good). But for me, I want a book I can pick up and read in bright sunlight. In less-good conditions. I don't want to have to carry a stash of batteries. I want the freaking PAPER.

That said, I'll freely admit that the Baen Free Library idea is something that really excites me. Oh, I'd seen the link, I think, on Mr. Bilbery's site earlier this week, and decided I'd wait until I had time (chuckle, snort).

Let me put it in other terms. I go to the library. I borrow books from the Library. Sometimes it's for mindless reading. Sometimes it's because the covers look interesting, or I know a little about one of the authors or something.

Back when I was younger, with far more disposable income, and books were much cheaper, I'd pick one up on the same basis. Nowadays, I can't afford to blow quite so much on the books I want - I have to watch what goes in and out (you remember that "Daynotes on a BUDGET" is the title of this pile, don't you? Yes, I'm a cheap bastard). But when I run across someone who's work I like, I follow them. That's how I found Bill Foestchen.

I'd read book one and three of his Civil War series, and then couldn't find book two. I gave it a few months, went back, looked, and read again. And those books were still pretty good. So I bought ALL EIGHT of them. Yes, the series ran to eight books.

Harry Turtledove's another one. I'd received a copy of "Guns of the South" for a gift some time ago. Years before that, I received another book he'd done - "Agent of Byzantium" - pretty good stuff. I started reading some of Turtledove's other stuff, and that was it. I have to get his stuff now, because I've been sucked in.

It was the same way with Katherine Kurtz and the old Deyrini Chronicles (though I don't know that I'll ever find out what's next for King Kelson and Morgan, but we all suffer in our own ways). Another great one is David Eddings. Terry Brooks wrote a lot of good stuff in his first Shannara book - I still remember wanting to go to bed and I promised myself I'd just finish the chapter. I put the book down a few minutes later. About two hundred and forty or so. I read that damned thing from about six one evening until two the next morning. Regretted it only a very little.

I can understand why some people complain about piracy. Software, music, books, and the rest - stealing's wrong, doesn't matter how you slice it. You, there - yes, you, the fellow sneaking around with all of the stolen software, MP3s, and pirated copies of books you're trading with your friends. Yes, you - In a purely self-interested way, if you're taking the product of someone else's labor without paying for it, why should they put themselves out to make more? Stealing closes off the pipeline. Sure, you'll find someone else that you like who you might be able to steal from. But when they drop out, and others look at that field, and say "well, these fellows couldn't make it, what chance would I have?" and there's one less producer. Pretty soon there's ten less. Then, it becomes a vicious downward spiral, and no one makes it.

Yes, there are thousands of other reasons, but I don't believe in clogging your head with the other noise. Let's face it - you're not at all interested in the moral, legal, or any other reason not to do this - you won't get caught, and the moral stuff's just crap, right? But if you don't buy it, and other people don't either, it's not going to get made. Which means this author/artist/whatever will go out and become a city sanitation worker, or do some sort of job in an office somewhere, not doing what they love, and most definitely not entertaining you with new stories, plays, or music.

Well, I had a whole bunch of stuff typed here, then I went to do laundry. Seems that short chimp-like individuals who should have been napping have learned to use tools. I can't wait until Monkey Boy discovers fire. Good thing we don't keep matches in the house, and the only lighters we have are the long-form fireplace things we A) keep on top of the seven foot headboard, and B) have all sorts of safety features like flame size, on/off switch, and require more than a small hand to start.

Oh well. Laundry day, and, of course, as predicted, the last Vikes game of the season.

I guess I'm fairly stupid when it comes to professional sports. I guess if I was a used car dealer and I'd hired a pretty good salesman who does OK, maybe even better than average, but year after year after year he fails to be in the top performers, despite giving him plenty of sales tools, training, plenty of assistance and lots and lots of time, I'd think that after all that, I'd just tell him "Denny, it's time to go."

Red McCombs bought this team about three years ago. He signed a couple of very good players. He made some pretty good decisions. But when the team fails, again and again and again to even MAKE it to the Superbowl, let alone win it, wouldn't that indicate some sort of change was required?

Put it another way - Two former coaches from Denny Green's "system" were in the playoffs - Brian Billick was the former offensive coordinator, and Tony Dungee came from Tampa Bay. Dungee actually started as a quarterback at the University of Minnesota when I was a kid. He was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers who turned him into a defensive back, and he went on from there.

But Dungee's a very smart fellow. Brian Billick is obviously a smart fellow. Red McCombs? Bit of a fool, I think. And Green is pretty obviously an idiot. How anyone can take the talent he's had in the last three or four years and manage to squander it is something that I just don't understand. Hell, I could have gotten that team into the Superbowl. But I'll go out on a limb and predict that McCombs will come out with a statement in a few days saying he's got complete faith in Green, and feels that Green's on track to win a championship within the millennium. We hope.

Oh, well. What do I know. Off to set up for next week (some big changes coming, I hope), and get to bed early.

And next week? We'll discuss Referential Integrity. I know, I have to understand it first.

Daynotes on a budget

The weekly Diary of a PC Geek

Updated: Sunday, January 14, 2001 10:22 PM -0600