Week of October 17, 1999

All of the Dale Earnhardt fans in this household were happy yesterday. A lot of people had given up on the Intimidator, so I'm glad to see him coming back so strong. For a short time there yesterday I thought Jeff Gordon was going to win three in a row. Dale, Ricky Rudd, Dale Jarrett, Ward Burton and Kenny Wallace will now have a chance at Winston's No Bull Million Dollar bonus when they head to the 2000 Daytona 500.

I had mentioned that we were trying a new promotion during the Winston 500. We put up a huge LED screen (22' x 30') and invited fans to come watch the race at Blockbuster Pavilion in Charlotte. After the race the Georgia Satellites, Molly Hatchet and Stepphenwolf perfumed. The forecast of a Hurricane Irene roaring through North Carolina made our turnout less than stellar. The fans that did brave the elements had a great time though and we made sure most of them walked away with some very nice door prizes. I hope we get to try this concept again.

I HAVE A NEW TOY in computer arsenal. My bother-in-law called the other night bragging that he got this sweet deal on UBid, so naturally I had to go for it. The UPS man today delivered an IBM Intellistation M Pro 6889 Workstation. This baby comes with a 400 MHz Intel Pentium II and a socket for a second processor, so I will be on the lookout for another processor. I am sure I will not have the patience to wait very long. It also has on-board network support for 100-baseT and a built in SCSI adapter with a link for an external SCSI adapter. It comes with the 256 megabytes of memory and three empty DIMM sockets. The drive is a little small, but I bet I can fix that easily. The machine came pre-loaded with WinNT Workstation 4.0, but with this mush Power I should probably make this my main server. The one thing missing was a joystick port, but then this machine was designed for business applications. I'm sure I will write more about this machine later. I think my brother-in-law got a better deal, though, and this will kill me.

There were plenty of long faced folks around the office today as tobacco stocks continued to plummnet on the news that the appeals court in Florida said Wednesday the people involved in the smokers class action lawsuit in Florida could have the green light to bring the industry to its knees. I guess the anti's will be happy when we are all bankrupt and thousands are out of work. I wonder if they have stopped to think that when they bankrupt the industry there will be nothing there to pay the settlement. If our product is so vicious, then big brother Uncle Sam should just make it illegal to produce or use within the borders of the United States. Afterall, we all can see the cracker job Uncle Sam is doing in keeping drugs off the streets, which, by the way, are illegal. Did I forget to mention they're probably too buys with both of their hands in the tobacco cookie jar to have the time to slap us around any more.

And from the disappointed department. I thought we had the Learning Channel on our Time-Warner cable system here in Winston-Salem. I was all prepared to dial in the VCR+ codes to tape the two-night Tobacco Wars mini-series when I found out TW doesn't carry that channel. They also do no carry ZDTV. Luckily we also have a DirectTV satellite, but now I will actually have to tell the VCR what time I want to tape, etc. I am spoiled by technology, go ahead, throw a byte at me. Here's the info from their site on the program I wanted to tape:

Tobacco Wars
Premiere — October 21st from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET and October 22nd from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET

Tobacco Wars is a comprehensive history of the cigarette, providing an in-depth, balanced, and often shocking look at the tobacco industry. The series' three one-hour episodes are organised chronologically, from the advent of the cigarette through its rise to becoming one of the most profitable consumer products the world has ever seen. Via first person accounts and insider documentation, Tobacco Wars vividly portrays what the companies really knew about the link between smoking and diseas e, explains how mankind became seduced by such a dangerous a product, provides a status report on Big Tobacco today, and looks towards the future of this most controversial of industries.

BOB THOMPSON had mentioned on his site yesterday that Encyclopaedia Britannica was making a last ditch effort to save itself by realizing the horse is out of the barn and you could no longer sell sets of enclyclopedia's for $1000 or better. Britannica didn't take advantage of the CD market soon enough and are about out of business. Their last ditch effort to save the company was to make the Encyclopedia Britannica available online for free, where I will bet you that we get bombarded with advertisements and they try to rake in a little revenue. Anyway, I tried their site and guess what. They underestimated the power of the web and their tiny server was ground to halt. The Britannica site is a simple one pager that admists they were overwhelmed.

I HEAR THERE IS a new strain of the Melissa virus floating around out there in cyber space.

The virus supposedly arrives in an email with a subject line "pictures" and a body containing the words "whats up?" It spreads via Microsoft Outlook messaging software and like other strains of Melissa, it may be able to grab your address book and foward itself to your friends. I thought mighty Microsoft patched this security hole in Outlook?

WHILE BIG BLUE is having its troubles on Wall Street it has one-upped Seagate by announcing that it plans to build a 73 gigabyte (the UltraStar 72ZX). Blue says this drive will be trageted towards the high end market (read that expensive) and will have a super fast access time of < 5 milliseconds. And I remember how happy I was just a few short years ago to get a 1 gig drive. Have times changed or what?

I MENTIONED THE OTHER day that I have a new toy. And being the gambler that I am I also used uBid to purchase a monitor to go along with this new hot rod system. I stumbled upon an IBM P70, which at 17" features a .26 dot pitch, 15.9" viewable image area and resolutions up to 1600x1200 (not that I can see that tiny). There was only one problem. UPS was not very nice to the case and it appears they dropped it on it corner and broke a piece of the bezel. I mean the packing box (which I don't have a photo of here) looks like it had been through the war. The Charlie Brown that delivered the package paid no attention to the FRAGILE arrow point up and dropped the box off in the down position and on top of that left it on our front stoop in an all-day rain storm. With nobody at home at the time I wish they had just left a call tag and I would have gladly driven to their terminal and picked up the package, where I could have filed an immediate claim when I saw the condition of the package. I have already emailed uBid. Since there may not any additional p70's laying around I have suggested that I would take a new bezel for this one. The monitor is featured in the photo on the right and, yes, you are correct, it is not sitting on top of the box it was delivered in. That box would hold nothing. I might add a photo of the box later.

The alarm clock goes blaring off at 0630 this morning...and on a Saturday. Ugh. Actually, I set my alarm last night because I had to go pick Andrew up this morning for a "lock in" at his TaeKwonDo karate school. The instructor is a young man and every once in a while he decides to stay overnight with the kids, which he limits to the first 50 to signup. Personally, I think it's a very difficult way to earn an extra grand, but when you're twenty something your priorities are quite different. Anyway, Andrew and the kids always have a great time at the Lock In and he will more than likely spend much of the day lounging around to get over the Lock in. Think I will join him.

I think I meant to mention this the other day. C|Net now has a help site. This really looks like just a small newsgroup and I suppose with browsers now that most new internet users are not using the newsgroups. I know I personally don't go to the newsgroups like I once did, in fact I very seldom read anything in the groups anymore. Maybe C|Net's reinvention of the wheel is just a way to try to keep this area alive.

Time is really getting short for Ricky Rudd. First it was the decision that he could no longer sustain his team as a driver/car owner and threw in the towel, deciding instead to drive for one of the premier car owners on the Winston Cup circuit, Robert Yates. Not a bad move Ricky. Now it looks like Ricky may complete the year without a win. He's had an incredible run. I think Ricky has won at least one Winston Cup race in each of the last 16 consecutive years. He's got four chances left, but the way he's been running this year, there doesn't appear to be much sand in the hourglass.

I said I probably wouldn't have much patience in waiting for s second processor for my new IBM IntelliStation. I was right. It's partially because I might be worried about the future availability of the Intel Pentium II 400MHz processor and partially because I think it would be cool to have a dual processor machine. I don't need it, but it will be cool. Bob Thompson suggested that I try to source a processor with the same Intel S-Spec, which would give me a machine with matching processors. I pulled the case off my machine and retrieved the S-Spec (SL2U6) and then went to Intel's site to see just how many S-Spec's there are for this processor. There are a total of 10, five each for retail boxed and OEM.

I then used pricewatch to search for the best price and how many dealers still had 400 MHz Pentium II's in stock. I think there were about eight pages of dealers with a wide range of prices. I called several and asked about buying a processor with a particular S-Spec. You would have thought I was speaking a foreign language to these telephone operators. I then went to the IBM website for help. Since this was their machine I thought maybe they offered a second processor as an upgrade. No luck. So I called IBM's tech support and they referred me out to a couple of their vendor partners -- MicroWarehoue and PC Connection. The number they gave me for MicroWarehouse was no good, so I tried PC Connection. After the sale associate put me on hold a couple of times to talk with tech support (after I explained what I was trying to accomplish) she came back and said the processor was a special order item and it would cost a mere $1340 and I could have it in 5-10 business days. I gulped and politely said no thanks. She added that most people passed when they heard "special order" I passed when I heard the price.

Therefore I have decided to roll the dice. Since there are five S-Spec's for OEM processors and mine is obviously and OEM, I have place an order for an OEM processor. I figure I have one-in-five chances of it working properly and who knows, I may get lucky and get a sister to the one I already have. If I am this lucky I should head straight to Vegas. If not, I will have a processor that I can either return, sell on an auction site or build another system. Lots of options here.

With the frustrating problems I have been having with Front Page extensions installed at my web host (my site is only about 30 megs, but FP is choking on its size) I have downloaded a copy of MacroMedia's Dreamweaver. This download has a 30 day license, so I am saving the install to a point later this year when I will have the time to check it out properly. I've heard good things about Dreamweaver, but I may be better off just having the FP extensions removed and FTP'ing my changes to the host. The downside is Dreamweaver's cost. I already have FrontPage and can make the simple extensions change. I will probably end up sticking with FP, but am keeping my options open.

The one thing that FP offers is being able to remotely update my pages by logging into the root server. I would lose this when FP extensions go, but I could always FTP the pages I want to change, etc.

From the we've come a long way department. I sometimes get very bored on those coast to coast flights. It takes about five hours to fly from either Atlanta or Charlotte to Los Angeles. Well today is the day the original coast-to-coast flights from New York to Los Angeles were instituted. Those first flights took about 36 hours and I'll bet there was no movie. However, you could probably smoke on the flight, unlike today.

Happy 74th Birthday Johnny Carson. I'll bet Ed raises a toast to you before the evening is over!