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Sunday, November 7, 1999 Monday, November 8, 1999 I have returned from a week of brand marketing meetings and a test for the Winston Thunder Theater. I am happy to report this test was very successful. It proves once again that we have to take our attractions to the crowds. We are not in a position to build a crowd at a new satellite event. While the test at Blockbuster Pavilion a few weeks ago did not meet our expectations, the one is South Florida was very successful. At this test we took our theater to an event being being produced by someone else versus trying to create an event ourselves. I will have to admit that having the country music act Brooks and Dunn as headliners to this festival did not hurt. It was a very well organized race festival to celebrate the arrival of Winston Cup racing in South Florida. The one thing I found odd was the number of rebel flags I saw at this concert/event. I saw more rebel flags in one day than you might see in a year's worth of attending races. To say the least, I was surprised at the number of red necks who came out of the woodwork down in the southern tip of the United States. Much of South Florida is the same as I remember when we lived there some 15 years ago and we put a very important date on our agenda during this trip. Friday night was our pilgrimage to Joe's Stone Crab restaurant in Miami Beach and then the obligatory drive through South Beach. We departed Ft. Lauderdale about five PM in hopes of getting to Joe's about six, which should limit our wait to about an hour. Our timing was perfect. We arrived at six, put our name on the list and retreated to the bar for a couple of cocktails and some appetizers. Our name was called in just less than an hour and I must report the wait was once again worth it. When we departed the restaurant about eight, the wait must have been somewhere between two and three hours. The bar and waiting area were packed. On this trip I was with a couple of business associates who had never experienced Joe's or eaten Stone Crab Claws. I insisted they leave the ordering to me and so it was a round of jumbo claws for the four of us, broiled tomatoes, hash browns and a small creamed spinach, topped off with Key Lime Pie, homemade cheesecake and homemade apple pie. Needless to say we were stuffed when we left the restaurant. And then it was on to South Beach. Since it was the first trip to Miami Beach for these fellows there was no way we were going to depart Miami without a cruise through South Beach so we could gawk at the sights. You are always amazed at what you see in this area of Miami. And just think, the first time I was there in 1988 it was little more than a run-down ghetto. Amazing what happens when the yuppies and money pour in. I HAD A RESPONSE FROM IBM for a beta level driver for the IBM IntelliStation Pro. Your 6889-30U should have a Intergraph Intense 3D Pro 3400 video adapter installed, which you can verify under Display properties on NT 4.0. The W2K driver for the Intergraph Intense Wildcat 4000 video driver at the following link should work fine. Please let me know if you have any problems? http://www.pc.ibm.com/qtechinfo/MIGR-477KUH.html? I had previously determined, but had been unable to find the driver. So I dutifully downloaded this driver, but have had no success in getting it to load, so I guess I owe the engineers at IBM a response since they asked me to let them know if I had any problems. This machine has an 8 gig SCSI drive and I have been contemplating a low level format on the drive to get rid of all the crap that comes pre-installed and loading, Windows NT 4.0. However, I don't really want to give up on the beta version of Windows 2000 Professional quite yet, so I guess I will invest just a little more time. HAVE I MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY there is a new service release (2b) for Microsoft Office 97? You'll to have installed Service Release 1 before adding the latest patch. YOU MIGHT BE EXPECTING ME TO SAY something here about the judge's ruling last week that Microsoft is a monopoly. Don't hold your breath. Not to sound like a Libertarian (yes, Bob, I actually said the word), but I can think of nothing our government has made better by its interference. Just look at the confusion surrounding the phone system here in the USA today. There are some things that are just better off as a monopoly. The phone and power companies are but just a couple. To the men who wear the black robes, gentlemen, you should allow the free enterprise system in which this great country was formed operate at its best. To Microsoft: Hey Bill and boys, don't act like such bullies and you won't be getting this kind of grief. And to Microsoft's competition: Get off your butts and build a better product and quit whining. Don't look to big brother to do your work for you. Let the man (or in this politically correct USA) or woman who builds the better mousetrap win. Capitalism at its best. HEY, AL GORE, HERE'S a page you might want to read. Tim Berners-Lee, who really did create the World Wide Web recently said he wasn't too happy with the direction the web is taking and is working on a new infrastructure for the WWW. Mr. Berners-Lee was also recently named as one of the 100 most influential people of the century by Time Magazine. Here is a transcript of the Time Magazine Chat. Tuesday, November 9, 1999 This is the time of year that I love to hate. The leaves on the hardwood trees here in Piedmont, North Carolina are beautiful as they turn from their dormant green of summer into the spectrum of color that indicates fall. The only problem is, shortly after the leaves turn these beautiful colors, they fall from the trees and you have to rake them up. We are fortunate that in the summer we have these majestic trees surrounding our home to provide some shade from summer's oppressive heat. We are unlucky in the fall that we have these majestic trees surrounding our house which produce what seems like never ending piles of leaves that need to be raked and/or blown to curb for pickup. I have tackled this project in many ways. I have waited until all of the leaves have fallen sometime after Thanksgiving so I would have to rake/blow them only once. I have blown the leaves to the curb at intervals during the season on other occasions. My mind tells me that I should choose the first method, thus not having to put forth extra effort and blow/rake the leaves only once. The problem with this tactic is that inevitably we will get a couple of rain showers and the leaves become soaked, start to decompose and thus become a real pain in the neck to move. Andrew and I started on this project yesterday. He suggested that he rake the "whole" yard if I would give him $2.00. I gladly accepted, knowing this raking wouldn't last long. I decided to join him with the leaf blower and we made two nice piles of leaves by the curb. And just in time. We got some our leaves to the curb in time for one of the early leaf pickups by the city on Monday. Timing is everything. It seems young Mr. Andrew wants to upgrade his bicycle and didn't think much of the suggestion that a bicycle might be something good to put on his Christmas list. Patience, it appears, will not be his strong suit. He is promoting a bike with two sets of pegs. One for the front and one for the rear, easier to bust his little butt I assume. However, a seven year old never thinks this way. He says this new bike will cost $100. He has no conception as to how long it will take to amass this fortune $1 or $2 at a time, but I like his spirit. I am sure Santa will be checking this bike out. I HAVE MADE MY DECISION. I am blowing away the installation of Windows 2000 Professional and dropping back to Windows NT Workstation 4.0, which is proving not to be as simple as you would think. I performed a low level format on the SCSI drive, set the IntelliStation to boot from the CD and flopped in the WinNT Workstation CD IBM provided. The first thing I noticed is the blue screen reported only one system processor. This machine has two 400 MHz Pentium II processors. The next thing that happened was on the CD stopped in the setup finding only the IDE CD-ROM. I then attempted to specify the Adaptec AIC-7895 SCSI controller and the obnoxious setup CD told me to insert setup disk No. 3 into the CD-ROM. Naturally, I just pressed enter and of course it did not find the SCSI controller. I tried this a couple of time with no luck, but fortunately I had a set of installation diskettes for WinNT Workstation 4.0, so I chose to go this route. But all is not right in mudville. The installation purred around just fine through diskettes one and two, but by the third diskette I ran into the same problem. Selected the AIC 78xx and the obnoxious installation came back and said that I did not have this device installed. I guess I now have several choices. I can search the IBM site for instructions on how to put this machine back the way it came or I can start to run Windows 2000 Professional in plain vanilla VGA mode until there is some support for the video card. I HAVE MADE A DECISION. For the time being at least I am going to install Windows 2000 Professional. I am confident that somehow I'll come up with the correct driver for the Intergraph Intense 3D 3400 video adapter or with the help of the web figure out some workaround. BTW, the web includes you nice folks who read these ramblings from time-to-time, especially the Day Notes gang. Windows 2000 Professional is installing as I write this note. IN THE IMMORTAL WORDS OF YOGI BERRA, this sounds like DejaVu All Over Again. It's a lesson straight out of the tobacco industry. If you don't get 'em on the Federal level, then go after 'em from the states. In looking over PC World's online edition last night it appears the states are going to give Microsoft a whack, "all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if need be, even if it takes years..." Wednesday, November 10, 1999 I didn't have any time to mess with the IBM IntelliStation yesterday, but include a suggestion from Bob Thompson [thompson@ttgnet.com] here that I will check out and report soon, I hope.
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