Old Ex Cathedra

It happens to all of us. Something we truly think is a great idea is finally revealed to us as “not so hot”.

I have an internationally-produced boiled egg cooker made by a well known manufacturer. It has the obvious “off” position and two others:

Ok, ladies and gentlemen, which one COOKS the eggs, and which one only WARMS the eggs? I just know down here in Murka (the part of the world where W’s favorite people, the Murkin people live), we look at things like this and say “do what”? I also don’t care much for “hard warmed eggs”.

For the longest time I have been an advocate of well-known icons, like we see on road signs, restrooms, and so on. But when you get down into laundry labels, egg cookers, household chemicals, and other things that can cause damage or ruin something, your own, well-understood language sure seems better. An urban legend I heard years ago is that the old “skull and crossbones” was removed from poisons because some kids thought they were food for pirates!?

Is this just another unexpected side-effect from globalization that will eventually lead to trouble? Are we all going to end up like many oriental cultures where we read pictures instead of words? Whose culture are these pictures going to be based on?

BTW: Since the manual is too easy to lose in the kitchen drawer, I solved the problem once and for all: I took a Sharpie marker and wrote on the darn thing which was which. In plain by-God Murkin English!

Patrick, our older son, passed his old TiVo off to us. He got one of the fancy versions that has a DVD burner in it, so we got the hand-me-down.

I was all set to install it two Saturdays ago, but the gophers done me in. Actually my next door neighbor had some stump grinders come by on Saturday afternoon, and they tore up the cable, so I just decided I’d take a nice nap. The cable people arrived within a couple of hours (thank you, Charter!), but by then I was enjoying my nap too much.

Well, this past week Robert and Patrick between them decided they’d had enough of my delays (I call it “getting properly prepared”), so they patted me on the head and took over. Last night, with pretty near zero help from me, they got the TiVo running and connected to our LAN. The channels are all set up; the TiVo remote is controlling appliances all over the house: the TV (on/off), the cable box (channel), and the stereo (volume/mute); Patrick even had Robert reprogram the skip-to-end button so it skips ahead 30 seconds instead. So we’re rockin’.

We still haven’t got the program guide all downloaded. Perhaps there’s some network problems at TiVo, or they don’t think we can be trusted to come up with $12.99 a month. Anyway, even the way it is, it’s great.

Robert called the TiVo service department, and they say our TiVo hasn’t downloaded enough software yet, but eventually it will. Call back tomorrow if we still don’t see the program guide. Okey dokey.

A while back I complained about Computer Associates’ EZ Antivirus and the difficulties I’ve had installing it. I’ve kept my grumbling about how it fails to play nicely with ZoneAlarm to myself, but that doesn’t mean I was thrilled with Zone Labs either.

Well, within the space of a week, I got emails advising me to upgrade ZoneAlarm Pro and EZ Antivirus to the latest revs, and mirabile dictu!, they both work just as they should. No more popups about viruses that EZ Antivirus discovers before ZoneAlarm has time to wrap them up in little titanium shells. Everything just works. Thanks CA and Zone Labs.

Saturday morning I come down and I start downloading pr0n and w4rez (well, actually music, but I’m trying to keep up my image as a living-on-the-edge kind of guy) and I notice that things are sloooooooow. Running about 300Kbps, which if I had dial-up would be miraculous, but I’ve got Charter’s gold plan which regularly goes well over 1Mbps here and usually maxes out the news pipe from Easynews.

So Saturday night, after it doesn’t get better by itself, I call Charter and find out that there are supposedly two cable modems on my line, which there aren’t. And after shuttling me to another office, they promise to take the second mysterious modem off, and that should solve my problems.

So this morning I call up Charter again and this time the guy allegedly takes off the second modem himself (yup, that’s right, they didn’t do it over the weekend when they said they would), and he puts me through a series of calisthenics which do no good, and he eventually gives up and promises to have one of our local people call me at 6PM tonight and set up an appointment to come over and check it out.

Now it might be that our local conservatives, who all think I’m some kind of commie for saying that our beloved President is a miserable failure, got together and sicced Ashcroft on me and they started wiretapping me Friday night, but what I really suspect is going on is that the guy I talked to today (Rod) only thought he switched off that second modem. I think the second modem is a symptom, not a cause. I think what happened is that somebody switched me off of my gold service line by mistake Friday night and connected me to a line that was already being used by somebody.

We’ll see if this is right, and how long it takes Charter to figure it out.

Update: 6:00 has come and gone. So has 7:00. Not a word from Charter, and it’s still slow as molasses.

Update:I went on Charter’s chat support and Donald M laid his hands upon my connection (which excited me in a rather disturbing way) and healed my Internet. My Internet is whole. Send your love offerings, as usual, to Rev. Bob, who knows exactly what to do with them (it’s a rather special ministry of the Rev’s, involving fallen ladies).

My laptop had been telling me eTrust EZ Antivirus had expired and I had n days, n-1 days, n-2 days… left. I’d been putting it off because I had such an awful time last time, and it looked like I was about to have a repeat of the experience when they asked me for my login and password. No, not the license key or the registration number, that’s two different pieces of data (which I didn’t have on the laptop either).

Fortunately, I’d stashed the email I’d gotten the year before with that information on it, and miraculously it had escaped the destruction from two consecutive hard drive crashes (Die, Promise! You bastards!). So I print that off and trundle it upstairs and click on the “renew” button. That takes me to a series of screens that happily accept my login and password.

I then make the correct choice of the three items they’re offering me (it’s the one marked “expired”, not the trial or the third choice that I don’t know what the heck it is). I had some trouble with that the first time, so I manage to figure it out this time, and I get to the place where they’re going to ask me for my credit card and, when I click “Continue” it puts me right back four pages ago, and I’m in a loop.

Well, I finally catch on. The eTrust website works on MSIE only. It doesn’t say this anywhere, but that’s how it turns out. Fortunately it works on MSIE 5.5 (which I’ve deliberately not upgraded on my laptop so I can see what my web pages look like in the older version). It takes my money and sends me an email with a license key and registration number. I enter the license key into the eTrust license manager, and I’m good to go. I have no idea what the registration number is for, but I’m keeping it, just in case.

EZ Antivirus is a terrific anti-virus program. Several friends who I’ve recommended it to have written back to say it found and fixed viruses that stumped Norton and McAfee. It’s a lot less obtrusive than either Norton or McAfee (McAfee kept shrieking in horror that some program was writing to an executable — yeah, morons, it’s Microsoft Visual C++, that’s what it does). And it’s cheap at US$9.95 for a license renewal (it’s US$24.95 for the first year). But they’d sell a lot more of them if they didn’t make getting it about as easy as buying a house.

I’m way too stupid to own a computer.

This afternoon when I came down, I rebooted this box as usual. It started to reboot and then put me in the BIOS setup screen. Uh oh. I proceeded to go through the menus looking for something that was obviously out of order. Nothin’. OK, save and exit. The screen went dark, it polled the devices, and back to the BIOS setup screen again. After 10 minutes or so of variations on this theme, I put a bootable CD in the drive. It still booted to the BIOS screen. Dang.

Finally, as I was staring into space, I looked at the prompt at the very bottom of the boot screen that appeared briefly before jumping into the BIOS: “Press DEL to enter setup” and looked down at my keyboard. A cookie crumb – not my cookie crumb, I’ll have you know – had fallen into the little space around the DEL key, which was obviously, visibly down. Two shakes, and apart from my anti-virus program telling me it had expired (which led to the discovery that I had set the date two years into the future) I was back in business.

The only consolation is that I couldn’t find where Kelly had rearranged the phone book to, so the guys at the computer store didn’t find out.

The saga of my desktop box continues: it stopped thinking it was sick and started thinking it was dead, so back it went to NACA. Wayne took the Promise RAID controller off, and so far that seems to have done the trick. Even without RAID it’s still a screamer.

In fact, considering that the motherboard has two UDMA-133 controllers and the Promise RAID card (boo, hiss) had to run through the PCI bus, I wonder just how much faster it was, or whether it was faster at all. I sure can’t tell any difference with the RAID controller out of there.

Since Wayne took out the RAID controller, reconfigured the discs, and reinstalled WinME (nothing was salvageable from the past couple of weeks’ work) and all he charged me for was the cables he used to hook the disk drives up to the motherboard, I was a little chubbier in the wallet than I’d planned on being, so I had him install an Asus CRW-5224 drive to replace the awful TDK CDRW-8432 I had in there, which was slow and nasty from the day I got it. Not only is it faster, it came with Nero, which I’d paid my own money for on the old burner because Roxio (in those days it was Adaptec) was so awful.

And I can’t let this go without mentioning: when I called TDK with a problem, I have never had a snottier service rep than the one I ran into there. In fact, that pretty much decided me that TDK wouldn’t be considered on anything I was doing from then on.

So, assuming this thing stays lit and it wasn’t the power supply that caused the whole thing (I’ve been keeping a close eye on the motherboard diagnostics, and the power is smooth as silk and the temperatures are low and steady), the lesson learned is, to hell with RAID.

Now a question for the propellerheads among my millions of fans: I got my 40GB drive back from IBM on warranty repair (well, probably not mine, but you know what I mean). I’m one of the lucky winners of a $140 surplus computer at work (something like a 500MHz Dell PIII), which will be my first Linux machine. If it were you, would you pitch the IBM drive or give it a shot on that box?

The good news: the Asus mobo, the DDR RAM, and the RAID-0 disk striping turned my box into a real screamer. Much better than a CPU upgrade. The bad news: I think it may be a trifle too fast. Either that, or there’s a bug in my RAID controller. I’ve been getting occasional BSOD disk errors (“Can’t write to D:”) and hangs.

Anyhow, loading the box with software and chasing down the problems has been taking all my blogging time. Consider this a placeholder for a real entry. Unless you’ve got an educated guess about why, for example, a smallish file copied from my Win98 box using NetBEUI can’t be deleted or opened without giving me a BSOD.

Since these were the symptoms before my machine gave up the ghost the last time, I’m not inclined to let it slide, and I’m getting NACA involved.

This is my first actual blog kinda thing, where you talk about stuff you’ve got as though anybody else would care:

North Alabama Computers returned my once-superbox to me. It had suffered a hard drive failure (stinking IBMs) that took out some of the caps on the motherboard. Or maybe the mobo took out the disks. Either way, since I’ve set it up as RAID0, all the data is gone, but I’d thought it through when I set it up that way, and I was prepared for that. Lots of backups, nothing really important kept on the disks.

So I’m some hundreds of bucks poorer, but now have:

• Two new 80GB drives. I had 40s, but 80s have become commodity, so why not? Western Digitals, not IBMs this time.
• A new motherboard. This one’s an A7N8X.
• PC3200 SDRAM. Can’t use the old stuff. I got my box just before DDR was available, and now you can’t hardly get a motherboard without it. Sigh. They’ve got it running dual channel, and they claim that now I’ll be able to drop in a 3GHz Athlon (I decided I had to stop spending somewhere and kept the 1.2). We’ll see.

We’ll also see how good my backups were. Already I’m realizing that if the floppy holding my PGP keys is bad, I am so screwed, because all my backups are encrypted. Keep a happy thought for me, won’t you?

Kelly has informed me that as part of the kitchen re-do that’s now necessary after we got the new refrigerator (I shoulda seen that one coming), I’ll be moving my computer desk to the other wall. So I figured out where to put my cable modem and router and Wi-Fi station on the same wall where it was, and got some tan CAT-5 cable that’ll look reasonably inconspicuous as it runs around the door, and we’ll worry about using the printer/scanner/fax as a fax (which we’ve done exactly once) some other time.

But at least I’ll have something a little easier to use than this pathetic 200MHz laptop, and that’s something.