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Sunday, July 16, 2000
Suzy and the kids arrived back in Winston-Salem
safely early last night. In fact, I was down in the computer
room/office and did not even know they were back. The phone
rang and I picked it up to answer, only to hear Katie also
answering, to which I said something like, "Katie is that
you? Where are you?"
Suzy was beat when she arrived back here after a 9
hour plus drive. When I spoke with her on Friday evening she
mentioned that her car had a dead battery. I assumed there
must have been a door left slightly ajar which would have drained
the battery. She felt confident that no door had been left
open. I cautiously left the subject alone at that
point. Wise move, I thought.
She said last night that she drove straight
through, only stopping at drive-thru restaurants for lunch, afraid
to cut the engine off on the car with the fear she wouldn't be
able to get it started again and would be stuck somewhere in South
Carolina on a Saturday with no help.
When she had gone to start her car on Saturday AM
in Florida, the battery was once again dead. She said her
brother had put eight cups of water in the battery, cleaned the
terminals and then gave her another jump. I asked if she
meant cups, as in full size and not the little kitchen drink size,
which she assures me was correct. The battery must have been bone
dry. Therefore, she was afraid to kill the engine. She said
she never realized how much a benefit those hour-long lunch stops
had been in the past.
I have tons of 3.5 inch floppies with photos
I have taken with my Sony Mavica digital camera, so I spent a good
deal of time yesterday deciding to copy these files over to the
hard drive of Wilma and then made a CD so I could have the photos
all in one place. I should just throw the original floppies
away, but I know myself better than that. I suspect I'll
stick them in a box somewhere, just in case something might happen
to the hard disk or the several CDs I will have burnt.
My plan now is when we want to share some photos
with family or friends, I can just make them a CD and include some
kind of photo viewer and/or slideshow software on the CD.
Now I just need to find said software that I could distribute
freely.
I grabbed several viewers off the internet
yesterday, but so far I have only found shareware versions which
expire in about 30 days. If you have any good
suggestions, I'm all ears.
And speaking of downloading. It must have been
my lucky day or I was hitting sites that reside on the
internet backbone. I was accomplishing downloads in the
range of 80 KB per second with RoadRunner. Not that was
cool. However, I notice things have slowed down considerably
tonight.
I hope you weren't counting on having your
groceries delivered by WebVan. Looks
like that idea is not catching on too swiftly and the company's
bottom line isn't going to be what they'd hoped. We
don't have this service here in Winston-Salem, but one of grocery
chains has a unique service. You can log on to Lowe's
Grocery Store's web site and submit your shopping list and
they'll do the running around the store for you. Then, all
you have to do is pull up in front of the store and the bag
boy will load your groceries up for you and you've never set foot
inside the store. So much for impulse shopping
We might have to get used to a new internet
naming structure in the near future. It seems that the
group that decides on top-level domain names has agreed to expand
its horizons beyond .com. .org. net, etc. Probably is
going to take a while to get all this implemented and integrated
into the vast network of DNS servers around the world. I wouldn't
look for any changes too quick. Heck, their announcement
sounded more like something Alan Greenspan might say...had some
words that they were changing, but there was nothing concrete.
Alan Anderson [alana@abac.com]
shared some thoughts on dodging my day in court (jury duty).
After more than thirty years dealing
with and in the court system I believe I am qualified to make
the following recommendations. Should you choose to follow them
I can almost guarantee that you will not be placed on any jury,
civil or criminal.
Follow the advice of you prior
poster and take reading material, but books (plural), any copy
of the writings of John Locke as long as his name is printed in
large bold type on the cover so that the defense lawyer can see
it, and then at least two computer related technical manuals
with large blazing graphics on the covers.
You are now the most dread of
potential jurors. Intelligent, conservative, and able to master
multi-syllable words. No defense lawyer worth his retainer will
allow you on a jury.
I've got the conservative bit under
control. Now I hope I can just live up to your
expectations and cover the intelligence bit. I think I
would go crazy if I got selected to a case than spanned two
years like the Miami Engle case. Don't know of any high
profile cases coming up around here, but you can believe I am
going to start paying closer attention.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Monday, July
17, 2000
Looks like Microsoft is trying to grab another
piece of the market.
In the past, those of us who made custom CDs used
third party software and stayed far away from the Windows Media
Player. Maybe we used the media player to sample a CD or
check out an AVI file, but for the most part when it came to
burning CDs we started with Adaptec's Easy CD Creator and then
maybe moved on to other products. I am currently testing NERO
for burning CDs and have been pleased to date.
However, Microsoft is attempting to once again be
our all-in-one supplier when they release at 3 AM tomorrow (my
local time and actually midnight on the US West Coast) version 7
of the Windows media player, which will support the creation of
custom CDs. Media Player will also include a built-in media guide,
CD copying, a radio tuner, and support for play on portable
devices. If you are using Windows
98 or 2000 you can download the new media player when the
calendar turns to July 18 in Redmond, Washington.
I wanted to extract some audio files from some
of my personal CD collection, so I went looking for a new
extraction program. I had been using CD Copy, but I had
trouble making it talk to the CD Database via my WinGate
server. Figured I needed an updated utility, so I went in
search of a new program. Easy
CD-DA Extractor caught my eye, so I grabbed it and played with
it for a while. It a very nice interface, jumped right on my
proxy server and hit the music database without even
thinking.
I attempted a couple of digital audio extractions
last night and was very pleased. However, I am running this
program on Wilma and I think she has bigger problems. The
program has locked up on me several times tonight, but I am not
ready to blame the software. In each instance when she locked on
up and I was able to reboot I came right back to the music I
wanted to extract and zip, no problem.
I have mentioned that Wilma will lock sometimes
and it then takes two or three trips to safe mode before I can get
her going again. As much as I hate to think of doing so, I
think she really needs to be taken down to bare metal and have
everything reinstalled. I am procrastinating and I know
things will only get worse. One of these days I get so
frustrated that I will take out my stress via fdisk.
I have some concerns about Microsoft's new
software for rent thinking. It's my understanding that
you might no longer be able to have copies of the software in your
library, but would access the software over the web. Bad
thinking here, Bill.
If you have tried to install Internet Explorer
recently I think you might concur with me. If you need to
reinstall the program or just need to make some changes you have
to go to the internet and you are at the mercy of the net.
Sometimes your download can be rather rapid, but for the most part
when you are hitting a sight connected with Microsoft the
connection is intermittent at best.
I didn't like it when I had my Microsoft office
suite installed on my LAN, so what makes anyone think that
grabbing your software over the internet would be a thing of
joy?
Say you need to type a letter. The first
thing you might encounter is that your ISP is down and there is
now NO way you can prepare this letter. But let's be
positive, your ISP is never down, so that's not a
worry. But now lets say your connection to the web is via
modem, telephone modem. Do you have any idea how long it
might take Word to load over a 56k connection?
Microsoft should get real and realize that the
world is not connected to the net via a t-3. Heck, most of
us connected through a POTS modem. I am lucky, I currently
enjoy some decent connections with my cable modem, but I
constantly remind myself that a high speed connection is only as
good as the slowest link on the net.
Microsoft software in inherently buggy, in fact
in some cases I think we should say we are all just beta
testers as the software is constantly on the mend via service
packs. Word is Microsoft is ready to fix some of the known
bugs in Windows 2000 when it releases the service pack for beta
testing to a select group in the near future. Then, Windows
2000 users will rush to the Microsoft website to download the latest
fix.
At the same time Microsoft is planning to give its
latest version of Windows to some developers so some new software
can be written for the 64 bit version of Windows. The new
software will be based on Intel's next-generation Itanium chips
and is their next hope to divert some users away from Sun
workstations and other Unix systems.
Word is beginning to filter out of Japan on
some of the new top level domain names we can expect to see in
the near future. Some of the domains will be .shop, .tel
and .news and it's likely that we'll see the .shop
domain in time for the holiday season as applications for these
names will be accepted as early as next month.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Tuesday, July
18, 2000
In my quest for a simple photo viewer and
slideshow program Bob Thompson
came through once again. He suggested that I check out IfranView,
which he said was freeware and freely distributable. I
downloaded it last night and it's just what the doctor
ordered. It's small, install simply and I can distribute it
with a CD of photos that I may chose to give someone.
What's in a name? Ask Microsoft and
Coca-Cola. MS
is closing in on Coke as the most valuable brand name.
In fact Microsoft is just a few bucks shy of Coke (they're each
worth more than $70 billion with a "b") and it wouldn't
be much of a surprise for MS to be No. 1 a year from now.
This news comes on the heels of the announcement
of more
security vulnerability for Microsoft. The error has been
categorized as maybe the most dangerous programming error yet for
Windows 95, 98, 2000 and NT systems. The newly discovered
flaw would allow a hacker to get into a Microsoft Access file
through these programs using ActiveX controls.
President Clinton now has two hot pieces of
legislation he vowing to veto. He already said he's
going to veto the repeal of the estate tax, so today the senate
handed him another opportunity when it passed the marriage tax
penalty bill. He has also threatened to veto this
bill. He says both are physically irresponsible on the
Republications part, which means it might take away money the
Democrats would have otherwise thrown away on social
programs. Thanks, Mr. Clinton for tossing us Republications
a couple of softballs for the upcoming campaign season.
I originally started playing around with
computers somewhere around 1990, which is when I first met Bob
Thompson. I put up a BBS system on the GT Power Network
about that time and Bob and I met as I was discussing modems with
him on a local BBS. It so happens that we live near each
other and met one evening to discuss US Robotics modems at the
local library, where his wife Barbara was the Librarian.
I was playing around on the Mamma search site
today and, believe it or not, found
a photo of myself from the old GT days. Our local GT
network was 064 and my node was 009 (064/009). We connected
with each other during the night and exchanged email and
newsgroups (much like the internet news groups of today). A
gathering of sysops from the GT Power Network was held here in
Winston-Salem in the summer of 1992 and this photo that I found
had to have come from that meeting. Needless to say I have
changed quite a bit from that time. The huge glasses are
gone and the beard is no longer black, given way to a mostly salt
and pepper color with high emphasis on salt. I hesitated
before linking to this photo, but decided, what the hell, everyone
needs a good laugh. I know I had one at my own expense.
I wonder if the GT Power Network is still in existence?
Something for my next search playtime.
I dropped my web provider a note the other day,
alerting them I was having some trouble publishing with FrontPage
2000 now that I was running through a WinGate proxy server.
The response I received wasn't very satisfactory and demonstrates
once again how Microsoft downgraded FP 2000 from its predecessor.
The note from Pair.com:
FrontPage won't publish through any
proxy. Your only choices are to save your FrontPage files and
use FTP, or to get rid of WinGate.
You can try contacting Microsoft
support, but I am pretty sure this is a known issue that they
have just never bothered to fix.
http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/frontpage
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Wednesday, July
19, 2000
I wonder if this means our mailboxes will soon be
relieved of the flood of spam we all receive. THe
US House of Represenative overwhelmingly (427-1) passed an
anti-spam bill today, making it illegal for companies to send
us email aft4er we've told them we want off the list. How
about never putting us on the mailing list in the first
place. Now that would clear up some bandwidth usage.
Hopefully I will be able to keep this
information away from the kids as we head off to Holden Beach
at the end of this week. The Myrtle
Beach (SC) Sun Times and the Wilmington
(NC) Morning Star have reported a couple of shark attacks
along the North Carolina coast, including one in Holden
Beach. It was the first shark sighting in Holden Beach in 40
years.
We don't plan on doing any surfing and aren't
planning to go out 100 feet, so please stay away Mr. Shark.
I noticed last year people surf fishing were catching sand sharks
about one foot in length, which made me think, "if they are
baby sharks here, then the parents must be close by."
The only fish we saw were some dolphins playing out in the water
at about 150-200 feet.
Microsoft has to scramble once again to fix
yet another security hole in Outlook and Outlook
Express. This time Outlook is open to attacks on
auto-pilot.
A note from Robert Bruce Thompson
[thompson@ttgnet.com], who
also uses FrontPage 2000 and WinGate regarding the difficulty in
publishing:
There's
actually a workaround according to Microsoft, but I've never
been able to get it to work.
Do
what I do. Install FP on your Wingate machine and publish from
there.
Actually
I have had some success publishing from Rubble, which is a
WinGate client machine. Sometimes I have to publish 2 or 3
times, but so far it has eventually gone through. Now that
I've said this watch it blow up on me!
Jan Swijsen [qjsw@oce.nl]
suggested I complied the photos on a web page on the CD when I
asked for reccomendations of photo viewers and slideshow software.
If you save the pictures in JPEG or
PNG format everyone with a decent (even Netscape) browser can
view them. Now add a simple page with pictures and descriptions
and your done. No need for special programs.
Hey, that way it works on Apple and
Linux ( and OS/2 and Be and Comodore64 and ...)
I'm too lazy to do all that much work. Anyway, I am
liking IfranView
that Bob Thompson suggested the other day. Thanks anyway.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Thursday, July
20, 2000
I think today is the day back in 1969 that Neil
Armstrong climbed from the limb and spoke those famous "one
step" words. For some reason i always remember where I
was that day. In this case, we had been water skiing as a
family at the Kerr Reservoir (Buggs Island Lake) in Clarksville,
Va. I also remember the day that John F. Kennedy and Martin
Luther King were shot. In both of those cases I was at home
in Farmville, Va.
And while we're talking about history, Suzy would
probably be able to tell you that today was the day of the big
flood in Johnstown, PA (1977). She and her family lived
there while her father was employed with US Steel, but weren't
there in 1977. This flash flood devastated the area, killing
80 people.
Robert Bruce Thompson [thompson@ttgnet.com]
offered some advice as to why my FrontPage 2000 publish sessions
are sometimes getting through.
You probably have FTP set to use port 21, which allows publish to kind-of work, but also means you can't use FTP from IE.
Once again you are correct sir. WinGate must have installed this way. I can't remember changing it. Also, since I have increased the time-out value of telnet my FP publishing seems to be going better. I am sure it's just a coincidence and will begin to blow up on me as soon as I attempt to publish this.
Gary M. Berg sort of wishes he was accompanying us to Holden Beach, minus a
shark attack or two.
Enjoy the beach! My wife and I have vacationed down there (driving from
Ohio) 4-5 times over the years. I'm not really and "sun & fun" type of
person, since I easily sunburn and I can't say as I really enjoy getting
hot. But my wife loves it, so I go sometimes for her.
Where are you staying - what kind of a place there are you renting?
Watch out for the sharks <G>...
In the past I was never much a beach person
either. Last year was our first trip to Holden and I loved
it. There is nothing commercial on the island with the
exception of one tiny convenience store and the pier. If you
want something to eat, you have to cross back over the mainland
and even then you don't find all of the tourist traps shops
normally associated with a beach experience. Heck, we have even
thought about spending the Thanksgiving holiday there. Well,
at least I have.
My pages will be dark during the time I am
there next week, but I am sure I will relate how relaxed I was
during this time when I share my experiences upon returning.
When we've been there we've usually
split about equally between eating at the house and eating
"out". We've had fairly good luck eating at the
Seafood Barn, the buffet place closer to the BeachMart (Seafood
Peddler?), and Betty's Waterfront Restaurant. Last time we were
there we also enjoyed a place called "Kelley's
Restaurant", run by some people from NE Penn. Looking in MS
Money, it looks like the last time we were there was in 1997.
Then there's always the excitement
(?) of traveling into Shallotte and shopping there.
Traveling to the next island to the
south shows quite a difference (Ocean Isle?) - the places there
must go for a lot more.
If you get "bored" with
the beach you can always head into the big city north of there
and look at the old Navy ship and the aquarium.
Have fun!
We did about the same thing last year
ourselves. I think we ate out three times and the rest of
the meals were prepared at the house. Last year was our
first and we learned a few things. We took enough snack food
from home to last about 6 months and then we hit the Food Lion (it
was probably in Shallotte) and overbought there as well.
Hopefully we have learned our lesson and will be conservative on
Sunday.
It looks like we hit about the same
restaurants. Our timing at Betty's was excellent and
therefore our wait was about one Bud Light's worth. It was
at Betty's that our (at the time) seven year old son, Andrew,
decreed that he was ordering Flounder. To our knowledge he
had never tried it before, but we reluctantly ordered it for
him. He ate it that night, I am sure in part to show us, and
now it's a staple of his restaurant menu. We then ate at
another seafood restaurant later in the week. It was one
that offered a buffet as well as menu service, but we ate there because
Andrew like the big Shark coming out the top of the
building. We also stopped by a deli and ice cream shop
during our stay and hit the Beachmart and Wings stores. I
usually call these either tourist traps or junk stores.
If we encounter rain we may have to go
discovering. If the weather is nice it will hard to get us
off the Holden Beach island. I have heard that Ocean Isle is
nice. In fact, one of the guys who works for me is going to
be there with his family the week after we're in Holden.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Friday, July
21, 2000
I remember my hometown of Farmville, VA as this sleepy little
know where everyone felt safe. We didn't lock our houses or cars
and for the most part left the keys in the car. The biggest crimes
then were a few break-ins and maybe the town drunk getting locked
up for his weekend rest. Yes, we had our own version of Otis
Campbell. His name was Bill Clair and Bill spent many a night in
the town jail, trying to regain his senses.
As times have changed, so has Farmville. While it's still a
fairly small burg, our little town has the same problems of the
bigger cities as far as crime. Nothing brings that to light more
than some news from earlier this month, where an ex-husband
is alleged to have killed his ex-wife and her daughter.
The Tucker family is headed to Holden Beach for our second
annual family beach outing, where we have rented an oceanfront
home for the week. Last year (our 1st annual) was a truly relaxing
week. However, if the weatherman is correct with his early
predictions, 2000 could prove to be a challenging week. Looks like
we're in for a forecast of scattered thunderstorms, which, of they
happen at all, hopefully will come later in the day when we've had
our fill of the beach.
IF it rains in Holden Beach, there is nothing to do but curl up
with a good book. Need to make a note to make sure the kids have
something with them to entertain themselves.
And believe it or not, I'm not even taking a
computer with me. We'll return to this site on or about August
1.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Saturday, July
22,
2000
|
We're
Headed out of town again!
Once
again the pages will be silent for about a week.
We'll be returning sometime around August 1. |
We're busy packing for our beach trip today,
hoping to have learned from last year's trip when we took way too
much junk with us.
Actually, we've just begun thinking about what to
take. No actual packing has taken place yet. However,
I have begun staging a few items in the garage like beach
umbrellas, beach chairs, citronella candle buckets, battery
operated drill, cases of soft drinks, cooler, etc.
You are probably asking if the battery operated
drill was a typo? Nope. When I was in Daytona earlier
this year and taking my morning walk/trot/run on the beach I
noticed the concessionaires drilling into the ground to install
their rental umbrellas for the day. Naturally, I had to
investigate and found they were using a landscape auger along with
their battery operated drill. Remembering how difficult it
is to install a beck umbrella into the sand and keep it straight
and steady, this concept intrigued me.
While I was in town (Daytona Beach) I made a stop
at Home Depot to see if I could find one of these auger bits, but
saw nothing like what I had seen the beach concessionaires
using. The closest thing was in the electrical department
where they had nail-biter bits used to wiring your house with
romex, but these were only about an inch in diameter. I even
checked in the tool bin area and was even dispatched to lawn and
garden where the closest match was a auger like thing that you
might use in accompany with a guy wire to secure something, but
nothing like I had seen on the beach.
This didn't stop me. The next morning I
stopped as a concessionaire was installing his umbrellas for the
day and asked where one might purchase such a device. I was
hoping he wasn't going to say some machine shop had made them for
the local vendors. Instead, he directed me a a local True
Value (or was it Ace?) hardware store where they had several
variations of the landscape auger. I chose the 24 inch
version. I now can't wait to see how this will work on the
beaches of North Carolina.
And speaking of the beach. From a quick
glance at the Weather Channel it looks
like we might be in for some choppy weather. Occasional thunderstorms
to go along with shark sightings/attacks and the rip tide should
prove for an interesting week.
It appears that Microsoft is continuing to have
security problems with its email clients. In fact, three new
holes have been discovered, one of which could give an attacker
control of your computer. There
is a patch available.
If you like to send
electronic greeting cards, here a site that offers you all
kinds of options. It even suggests special occasions that
you might want to send a card for, like ugly truck contest
day. You can check out the selection at BlueMountain
Arts.
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