Thursday, March 11, 1999
One of the computers in our network at home had been in the kitchen for the past several years. How it got there is another story, but it sat in the kitchen right beside the table and I was glued to this thing every night when I got home from work. I originally talked my wife into placing it there so it would be easier for her, but I wound up using it more than she did. This all happened when we had our second child and needed the "computer room" for a bedroom and the computer stuff was moved to the basement. This would make it easier for all concerned.
The links are now fixed. Thanks Bob.
This machine was our main Windows NT 4.0 server and some time late last fall the hard drive died in this system. I was going to make the strategic decision that we no longer needed a system in the kitchen (it was never used for receipts or anything like that, mostly surfing and emailing) and was going to move this system to the basement along with our other computers. Before I could buy a new hard drive for this Pentium system I ended up building a new system that also resided in the basement computer room.
So finally today, I put the kitchen system back together. I had an old 635 meg hard drive that I had taken out of a system when I installed an 8 gig Seagate drive, so I popped this drive in the he system and installed a fresh version of NT. Got everything working, except I didn't bother with the sound card. We now have another terminal beside the kitchen table. Email and Internet Explorer working just fine.
In the past this had been my main workstation as well as the server for the network, so I put the smaller drive in the machine today so it would only hold the operating system, Word and Excel, which would force me to continue to do most of my computing work in the basement computer room. My wife really wanted this machine back because as a volunteer at the kids' school and our church she is really involved and types a lot of documents. She does most of this when the kids are in bed for the night and didn't like going three floors down because she couldn't hear the kids if one of them needed her. Can't argue with that logic.
So we now have a computer back in the kitchen, where I am sure some of friends had missed seeing it. Bob Thompson and his wife Barbara come over frequently on the weekends and I am sure Bob will be happy to see the machine back. It's his telnet and FreeCell terminal. I sent Bob an email to share the good news and we both acknowledged that we were sure this would make Suzy happy. Bob is very knowledgeable and has really helped me a lot with all of my dumb computer questions. Thanks for all of the advice over the years.
Bob is a writer of computer technical books and is really knowledgeable on networking issues. Here are some of the books he's written:
Bob is also working on a couple of computer hardware books which are due out later this year.
Here is a link to a couple of Bob's books at Amazon.Com:
For sometime now I have wanted to bring up a Linux box, so after I moved the Pentium 90 back to its place in the kitchen and it would now be serving as a backup domain controller, I would be free to try my hand at installing a copy Red Hat Linux 5.1. As cocky as ever, I popped the boot floppy and CD into the Digital Starion and charged ahead. I soon found out that I didn't know enough about Unix to even dream about making this installation happen, so I backed out and quickly decided I Linux would have to wait. You can read a little about my limited Unix experience here if you would like.
Friday, March 12, 1999
It looks like the links to Bob's books at Amazon.Com is broken, so I must have messed something up there. I have emailed Bob and asked him if there were any tricks to linking to his books at Amazon in order to make the links live. They were good last night but don't seem to work this AM. I am sure he will have the answer and set me straight.
I noticed the folks at Atlanta Motor Speedway have said publicly they have quite a few tickets for the Cracker Barrel 400 left for sale. This race's attendance has never compared to the fall NAPA 500, which happens to be the last event of the season for the Winston Cup tour. In the spring the Atlanta race always seems to be fighting weather. I can remember when it snowed the race out in 1993. It's most always cold there and more times than not recently it's also rained. Not a good combination. And if this isn't enough, it's usually on the first weekend of the NCAA basketball playoffs, which probably also hurts their attendance.
It looks like the folks in Atlanta might have to deal with the possibility of rain showers again this race. However, the thing I have learned is not to cancel your racing plans because of a weather forecast. NASCAR will do everything they can to get the race run as scheduled, even if it means dodging rain showers. Don't forget, Atlanta also has lights. I remember last November when we were there until after midnight, but they got the race run.
The President of the Atlanta track is a good friend of mine. We went to high school together in Farmville, VA, worked on the weekly newspaper together there and he and his dad took me to my first NASCAR Winston Cup race. Something must have bitten me because I have been on the "inside" of the sport on a full-time basis since 1977. I have worked for NASCAR in their Daytona Beach, FL headquarters office, the STP corporation and have been at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company's Sports Marketing Enterprises since 1988. I managed the NASCAR Winston Cup Series program at RJR in 1993-94 and am now responsible for our promotional activities at the events. Enough of a bio on me.
People often ask me how I became involved in the sport and it's truly one of those "being in the right place at the right time" deal. I try to expand on this in more detail later.
It looks like NASCAR Winston Cup racing is headed for the Big Apple for more than just the end of the season awards ceremony. International Speedway Corporation, the folks who own Daytona, Darlington, Talladega, Watkins Glen, Phoenix and a piece of Homestead, California, Michigan, etc., announced a joint venture with Donald Trump to build a superspeedway in the New York metro area. This announcement came from the Business Wire and was made in New York City today.
Saturday, March 13, 1999
I didn't get much time to work on the web page today because I had to make a trip to Atlanta with one of our brand marketing assistants. She wanted to make a change to one of our exhibits that I felt would not work, but of course she had to see it for herself. So I made the arrangements for the test with our promotional supplier, SPEVCO and we flew down on Saturday AM. We ran the test after the exhibit closed and things worked out just as I had explained they would. Experience wins again! So she'll be headed back to the drawing board to try to determine another way to accomplish her goal. I made some suggestions before our trip and it looks like we are headed back towards my original suggestions. Never once did I say I told you so. I was proud of myself.
When I returned home Andrew (my six year old son) and I worked a little on one of his web pages. As a first grader at Vienna Elementary School, he is studying the solar system so he wanted a "space"page on the solar system. So, we made a simple page that included photos of the planets. I was amazed at how much he knew about the solar system, like be able to name the planets in order from the sun. I don't think I could do that. Sound like a proud father, don't I? I don't remember studying these kinds of things in the first grade almost 40 years ago. Heck they better know how to write and do some simple math by the time they head to kindergarten these days.