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Sunday, September 12, 1999
The girls (Katie and Suzy) have returned safely from their Girl Scout camping experience at Laurel Ridge. The first thing they always seem to do when returning home is to make good use of the facilities. A fresh warm shower seems like a welcome respit for the returning campers. Motel 6 would be "roughing it" enough for me.
While the girls were away Andrew and I volunteered to accompany Bob Thompson to pick up Barbara's car while she's on a bus trip to Canada. They didn't want to leave her car sitting in a parking lot for over a week. It was during this trip that Bob mentioned that John Mikol was coming over to assist with some electrical repairs and since we haven't seen John is quite a while I asked if he minded if we stopped by for a little while. Andrew played with the dogs and got bored while the computer geeks chatted endlessly.
Bob was enlisting John's help to get a generator ready in the event of a power failure. Bob's elderly handicapped mother lives with them and a few days without power would be quite the hardship for her. Did I mention that it would also mean Bob would be without email or the internet? We'll not discuss that hardship! In the process of testing his work John got a good 220 v jolt. I wonder if his arm is still numb?
One of the things the computer geeks discussed yesterday afternoon was video capture. Bob has developed an interest in this area and was wondering how to capture video real-time. He is under the impression that he wouldn't have enough machine to capture video and compress in mpeg real-time. I know there must be a way because this is basically the process our AV department uses when they edit video on their AVID system. They edit, then save to a hard drive and then output to video tape. So I went snooping on the net. ADS Technologies offers the PYRO Digital Video card, which I think will accomplish what Bob is thinking about. It seems to be fairly inexpensive. The only limit may be the length of the video you can manipulate. If you want to go with the same kind of editing technology the pros use, then I would also check out AVID.
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Congratulations to Tony Stewart and Joe Gibbs on Tony's first Winston Cup victory. I think anyone who follows Winston Cup racing knew that Tony would grace the winner's circle this year. He joins some mighty fine company of drivers who have won a Winston Cup race in their rookie year...namely Dale Earnhardt and Davey Allison.
Monday, September 13, 1999
If you've been pondering adding RAM to your system you may have waited a little too long. It appears memory prices, especially those for SDRAM have taken a leap in prices. I'll bet it's a supply and demand issue. Pricewatch is a good place to watch prices.
I had an interesting experience with my home network over the weekend. My interest in Linux has been re-kindled (why, I do not know), so I wiped out my previous installation and started from scratch. I found out that once you have fsdisk'ed a drive to a non-dos partition that you can not wipe it out with fdisk. At least I couldn't. Fdisk kept reporting that it could not delete a partition with logical drives and it also reported there were no logical drives. An endless loop. Therefore, my decision to do a clean install of Linux.
With the decision to reinstall Linux I wanted to make some network numbering changes to my home network. When I made these changes my network connection failed on these machines and finally I had to go into network on the control panel, remove the entry for the network card and TCP/IP and then allow Windows to find the new hardware (the old network card) and rebuild the network with my static private IP addresses. I was then able to assign the IP number to Wilma that I wanted.
And here's one for "another funny thing happened." I was using the network dialog box on Barney to make sure I was using the correct IP numbers and noticed that Barney had what I thought was an incorrect sub-net mask. Barney had been working on the network just fine with the subnet mask of 255.255.225.224. Maybe that's ok, but since I don't know that much about subnet masks I thought it should be 255.255.255.224, just like all of the other machines (I hope) on the Tucker network. And I'll bet you guessed it by now. When I made this change and rebooted, the network failed. I was starting to get a little nervous, but took the route of removing the entries for the Ethernet card and IP addressing and rebuilt them and after a couple more Windows forced reboots all was right with the world. I guess I had missed that 225 because it looked so much like 255 (You can insert comments about my eyesight or lack thereof at this point) or maybe it didn't matter all that much. I'll have to ask my network guru at some point (Bob and John are you listening?).
Tuesday, March 14, 1995
City government never ceases to amaze me. They city of Winston-Salem has hired a construction company to come into our neighborhood to scrape the grass away that has been creeping into the street. Then they come along and plant new grass. It's not like the grass was growing out into the street. Wonder how much money this week long effort is wasting?
I now am the proud owner of the bifocals and have been getting used to them fairly easily. That was until I came to the computer. When I am typing the screen looks great, but then when I glance down at the keyboard, it's out of focus. I guess I will have to learn the right way to move my head to make these things work. I'll give you another report in a week or so, which is the time my optometrist says it should take for a new bifocal owner to get used to the concept. I went for the progressive bifocal lens, which is supposed to make things better. We'll see.
I have mentioned several times that I have been playing around with Linux. I have decided that I really don't have the time devote to learning the Linux operating system at this point and went to fdisk the hard drive in the old Linux machine. At first I couldn't fdisk the partitions away, but then used the Windows NT Workstation installer thinking it would wipe anything away when I told the install that I wanted partition as NTFS partitions. It wiped out the partitions, but when NT Workstation went to install it stopped with a frozen screen. I noticed two letters (LI) on the screen which told me theLinux LILO loader was still trying to load. I formatted and fdisked several more times to no avail. I then dropped my friend Bob Thompson a message with the above info and he replied immediately with the following:
From Bob Thompson [thompson@ttgnet.com]
Boot with a DOS (or Win9X) floppy that has fdisk on it. At the A:> prompt, type:fdisk /mbr
That should get read of the boot record which is what is trying to load LILO.
If all else fails, download the "low level format" utility from the hard disk maker’s web page. That’ll overwrite every accessible byte on the drive with binary zeros, which will kill anything.
Thanks.
I knew I could count on ya.
Had forgotten about that one. Don’t remember the last time (if ever) that I used it, although I think I have used it in the past.
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If you were monitoring the local talking heads you would think Winston Salem is on the Atlantic Ocean coast. They seem to have the public convinced the impending Hurricane Floyd is going to blown Winston Salem down. It's almost as bad as when a snow storm is forecast. Now, I don't want to take this storm lightly because it is one hell of a storm. I told Suzy last night that I had never seen a storm on the Weather Channel's radar screens with so many colors. This storm looks like it has many of the characteristics of Hurrican Hugo (1989), which came ashore around Charleston, SC and then headed inland and gave us quite the wallop. Here is a Hurricane Tracking map from 1989, courtesy of the National Hurricane Center.
You can follow Floyd on the following sites:
CNN's Weather site
The Weather Channel
The National Hurricane Center in Miami
Wednesday, September 15, 1999
How many times can you say the sky is falling. Looks like the newscasters and weather forecasters have worked everyone on our area of North Carolina into such a frenzy with all this talk of the impending rush of Floyd that the world in North Carolina is grinding to a halt. The local school systems have been canceling classes for tomorrow quicker than you can say arithmetic. All of this on the threat that Floyd was going hit in Charleston and follow a similar as Hugo up through the Carolinas. It now look to me like Floyd might strike somewhere around Wilmington, NC or maybe even better just skirt the coast of North Carolina. The forecasters are projecting a North Carolina landfall tonight.
I am not trying to might light of the might of this hurricane, especially as it sets its sights on an area of our coast that has not yet recovered from the punch of Hurricane Dennis. However, I predict tomorrow here will just be a windy and rainy day and not the tropical storm stuff they have been predicting all week. Let's hope I am correct and the kids have a day to make up in school for no reason. Better to be safe than sorry when those little ones are potentially at risk.
Microsoft's problems continues as news comes that it's Internet Explorer has a big security hole. C|Net is posting some help to help you plug this security leak. The security hole could let an attacker take controls of your computer. The leak is in IE 5.0's Import Export Favorites feature, which, when used might let a devious Web site operator run programs on the computer of someone who visits that Web site.
Winston-Salem was spared from the big storm last night. The gloom and doom talking heads on television had everyone convinced that Floyd was going to drastically change our landscape. Fortunately for us the storm hugged the Atlantic coast and the weather here was less intrusive than a summertime rain shower. The same can't be said for our friends on the North Carolina coast who were still recovering from Hurricane Dennis when they got another whallop yesterday. Wilmington, as an example, got hammered. The rainfall totals have been reported all over the ruler. If you took an average of all of the reports, Wilmington, North Carolina was drenched with more than a foot of rain. There were lots of television pictures today of cars and homes being flooded. Hopefully Gert will head out to sea and spare our coast.
I had originally been scheduled to fly to New Hampshire today, but decided yesterday to postpone the trip until Friday. My family seemed to be nervous that we would lose power or suffer some other damage from the storm and I would be stuck in New England and unable to help. I think they must remember a big ice storm several years back when I was in sunny Southern California and they were left here shivering in below zero temperatures for four consecutive days. That was in the days before we had gas hot water and fire logs. I think they could survive better today.
I surmised that even if I was able to take off from the Greensboro airport this morning that I may have been stuck at my connecting point in Philadelphia. It proved to be a wise decision. A group from SME left this morning and were stuck in Philly. They ended up renting a car and driving to Loudon, New Hampshire.
My trip has been rescheduled for early Friday morning and I am banking that the storm will be passing ahead of us and will have cleared New Hampshire by the time our connecting flight is scheduled to depart Philadelphia and I will be able to get to Loudon with no problems. It's probably going to be raining all day there anyway.
We did lose our power for about one hour last night. I was sitting at my computer in the basement and my backUPS starting yelling, the lights flickered a couple of times and I was then left in the dark. I then literally felt my way upstairs to secure a flashlight. I didn't know how long the power would be out, so I went back downstairs and started fumbling around to get the generator going. I was thinking that maybe the little amount of wind that was blowing through had knocked a tree across a power line and it would be while before power was restored. We couldn't live without the modern conveniences of the 1990's, now could we?. So I threw the main power disconnect, threw the switch that is attached the special generator disconnect and then plugged the generator into the it's disconnect box, fired 'er up and presto we had energy. I then made sure I threw all of the power sucking devices off, like the air conditioning systems.
Since we had lights, I turned on the TV in the kitchen for the kids, but there was no cable service. This one of those TV's with a built in processor that you have to tell whether it's receiving its signal from cable or through the air. I reset the menu to air and reprogrammed the channels, connected a small piece of 300 ohm cable to the TV for an antenna and we then had the local channels. We could watch the never ending coverage of Hurricane Floyd and how it was going to destroy Winston-Salem. I think they were actually disappointed that nothing catastrophic was happening.
Katie and I then sat down for a game of gin rummy with real paperboard cards. Amazing. She won, but not by much, I say proudly. I raced out to an early lead, but then a couple of Gin's by her and I was done.
It had been about an hour since the power had been out and I finally decided to call Duke Power's 1-800-POWERON number to make sure they knew we were not making them any money. I had assumed they had been well advised that our grid was out.
After my call to Duke Power I walked to the front door and looked outside to see street lights burning. I was relieved that our outage was not long-lived and I then began to reverse the generator process. The first thing I noticed was the cable channel's TV guide feed was overlaying the air feed on the same channel. This told me the cable service was operational once again. I guess the piece of 300 ohm cable I had laying across the cable channel's RG-6 was picking up the cable's signal. So I killed the generator and threw the appropriate switches to the off position and pushed the main disconnect back to ON and we once again we running on Duke Power. Major inconvenience averted.
The local school system bought into the media hype and cancelled school for today yesterday afternoon. I'll bet you guessed that today was a beautiful day here in Winston-Salem. A mild day with temperatures in the mid 70s and a light breeze.
Realizing that hindsight is always 20/20, I wondered while the school officials didn't take the same approach as they do for a winter storm and wait until early this morning to make the school cancellation decision. If they waited until this morning the kids would have happily gone off to school today. Maybe they thought that no one would have power today and wouldn't be able to hear the cancellation announcement. Or maybe they were so SURE that we were going to have a mjor storm that it was a "no-brainer" decision. This is the same school system that a few years ago cancelled school one day on the previous day's forecast. Yes, it was a beautiful 40 degree day with NO snow. Murphy's law I suppose. I understand they disconnected all of the computers at Katie's school and put the machines into plastic bags!
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If you want to register an internet domain name I see Network Solutions is going to be changing the way they do business. In the past you could register your intended domain and Network Solutions would give you the domain and then send you a bill for a two year subscription, currently running about $35 per year. Now they want their money in advance. However, if you register domain names frequently they are developing a program that will continue to allow billing. A frequent domain registering program I suppose. Wonder if they will also award points good towards a free..... . Network Solutions is also getting into the web mail business along with a host of other free email providers. I haven't looked to see if you can POP your mail or if it's available only on the web. The good thing about using BellSouth's as an ISP is that you can view your mail on their web site or POP it using your favorite email program. BellSouth also offers free web-based email services for non subscribers, which is available only from the web page. If you are thinking about switching your ISP service to BellSouth you could always use my as a referred. When they ask for my email address use wakeolda@bellsouth.net instead of the address listed on this site. If I get any spiffs I post the result here.
The 8th annual PC Computing SuperGuide is available at PC Computing's web site . This guide covers everything from setup secrets to ways to ensure you are operating securely to tips on making sure you are ready for the dreaded y2K. Wonder if there really is help there to make my Win95 stop crashing every time you look at it cross-eyed?
Email Steve Tucker