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Sunday, August 6, 2000
When the sun peeks over the horizon in the
morning, summer will be over for the kids in the Tucker household.
Interestingly, Katie and Andrew are looking
forward to this day. Andrew is spending the weekend at the
lake with the neighbors at their lake house on Baden Lake about an
hour from here. Katie spent the weekend here with us.
We made a trip to the pool yesterday afternoon and then to the
mall so she could get the special Adidias shoes that she had
conned me into buying for her. After the shoe purchase the
two of us enjoyed a father-daughter dinner at Ruby Tuesday and
then ice cream from the Dairy Queen kiosk at the mall. And
she thanked me more than once for purchasing these
"special" shoes. Made the trip well worth it.
On more than one occasion yesterday Katie
exclaimed, "just two more days until school. I think I
am going to have a good year," although she was protesting
the amount they were charging ($3.50) for a gym locker.
"It's just a basket with a lock. How much could that
cost?" were her words and she's one not normally concerned
with price or cost. Maybe, just maybe.
I usually drop Katie off at her school on my way
to work while Andrew catches the bus near our house. This accomplishes
a couple of things. One, she doesn't have to get up around five
a.m. to catch a bus that appears at six and two, it insures that I
get to the office early, the best time of the day, when there are
no phones or interruptions. You know, you can get more done
in 30 minutes prior to eight o'clock than you can in two hours
after eight. Katie also mentioned that she was looking
forward to "our special time together." This comes
from one who is about to turn 13 and I know this feeling won't
last forever, so I am going to enjoy it while it does last.
Katie is well into her school day when Andrew's bus arrives, but
then she beats him home in the afternoon by at least an hour.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Monday, August
7, 2000
I took the day off this past Friday and it was
much like being back at the beach. We decided to go to the
pool in the afternoon and it was overcast with just intermittent
sunshine. The kids were playing in the water and I decided
to start a new book, selecting Daniel Silva's The
Mark of the Assassin. We were back at the pool again
on Saturday afternoon with the same cloudy weather and finally for
our return trip on Sunday, the sun had burned through the
clouds and it was summertime hot and I finished Silva's page
turner. I think I will be adding him to my acceptable list
of authors, which is growing. I've also updated
my page of recent books that I've read, more as an aid to me
than anything else. Helps me to remember which books and
authors I have read.
For the better part of a year Bob and Barbara Thompson have been working on a new computer book -- PC Hardware in a Nutshell -- and he's mentioned recently he's shipped the book off the publisher O'Reilly and Associates. He's been pouring over the galley proofs for the past week as mentioned
on his daynotes page
and naturally, the next step is publishing. He's also been working on a website for this book.
Amazon.com is offering the first glimpse of the book, posting a shot of the cover on their
site. The book is available for pre-order at Amazon and if you're in to tinkering with your PC, then this may be a nutshell book you want to consider adding to your library. I know that Bob has spent a lot of time and energy working on this book, researching, building test systems,
writing his findings and then condensing his writing to fit the nutshell format. He's the kind of guy that will insist on the information he presents being factual and that's not such an easy task in an
environment that's changing hourly. By the time you test today's latest advancement,
tomorrow's is already on the market. Other hardware books put out a lot of information and I'm not sure all of it is the right stuff. I believe Bob's book will rise above those entries and will become
dog-eared in your library because of its extensive use.
O'Reilly is know for placing animals on the covers of their nutshell books. Bob and Barbara didn't rate an animal, well at least not a four-legged one.
Theirs came from the sea, a seashell, which I guess is appropriate
since vast amounts of information will be contained within the
shell of this book. Bob and Barbara enjoy the company of their Border Collies and to me that would have been the appropriate cover decoration. I guess the Border Collie must have been used a long time ago by O'Reilly.
BellSouth was set to announce today a plan to
help ease some of the congestion on the information
highway. BellSouth is planning on stepping up its presence as an internet service
provider and going one step further by building a new internet access point with hopes of grabbing most of the international traffic for its
new service. BellSouth plans to install this new
access point on fiber optic lines somewhere near Miami, which is
where it hopes to grab this international traffic, while hopefully
aleviating some of the internet congestion in the
Southeast.
I was reading an review of Microsoft's new
Windows ME (for Millennium Edition) and how it is supposed to
be the most radical change to Windows yet. Windows, it
seems, will be abounding its life as a dos shell, well you won't
be able to reboot to dos, but you can still run dos programs in a
window. I think you're seeing more of Windows 2000 or
Windows NT creeping into the mainstream Windows code.
However, I would think that Microsoft is going to
realize one of these days that they won't be able to count of
billions of dollars of income every couple of years just because
people (like me) have to have the latest and greatest operating
system. Eventually people are going to start saying,
"if it ain't broke, don't fix it." In fact, I
would bet that folks are already starting to think this way.
The upgrade, once again is going to be
pricey. Just remember, there was Windows 95, Windows 98 and
then Windows 98 second edition. You get the picture, every
couple of years Microsoft is going to want another $100 or so for
a tweak in the operating system. And we haven't even talked
about their plan whereby you would not have a physical copy of
software in your possession.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Tuesday, August
8, 2000
I have been thinking about trying out a new digital camera for some time now. For the past two years I have been using the Sony Mavica and like the convenience this camera offers of writing the images directly to a floppy disk in the camera. Arm yourself with a fistful of floppies and start shooting. Nothing could be simpler.
You might say I hear a "but" coming. Your are correct. Some of the things I don't
particularly care for in the Mavica are the intensity of the flash for fairly
close-up photos, the fact that you can't take a second photo until the first one has completed it's two or three second write to the disk and the bulky size of the camera.
I have taken more "red eye" pictures with the Mavica than I have with any film based camera. The flash on this unit is very strong, or as I call it, hot. If you're shooting your shots from about 10 feet, then the flash is great. Unfortunately, we I use this camera for family photo opportunities I most always find myself closer than this distance and unless I approach the subject for an angle, I end up with demon looking photos with their blazing red eyes staring back at you. I have tried placing a piece of "magic" tape over the flash and, when I can remember to do this, it helps tone down the flash quite a bit.
Two or three seconds doesn't sound like a lot of time, but when you're waiting to take your next picture, it's an eternity.
Recently, I used the Mavica to shoot pictures of Andrew posing with Muggsy Bouges at basketball camp and wanted to shoot two frames. It seemed like Muggsy had to pose with Andrew forever, waiting for me to take the second shot and I am sure the kids in line behind Andrew were encouraging me to hurry as well.
The Mavica is a fairly good size camera and I think I might use a "shirt pocket size" camera more.
Bob Thompson has mentioned his Olympus digital camera many times on
his daynotes pages and I have been impressed with the quality of the images this camera has produced. The detail of a macro shot of a motherboard he recently included on his pages was fantastic and really got me to thinking.
This is the shot that got me to thinking that I might enjoy a small digital camera better, one that writes its images to a SSFDC memory card.
For a long time I thought I would resist this kind of camera because I thought I did not want to have to bother with connecting a device to a serial port to a computer and download the images. However, I am changing my thinking now.
It seems that I would get a lot more use out of a camera that I put in my pocket and go about anywhere. And images quantity shouldn't be a problem either. I could arm myself with several memory cards (the
camera usually come with an 8 meg card, but additional cards are available in 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 meg
varieties), which would be just like carry an extra roll of film, or six. And these cameras allow you the
convenience of flipping through the pictures you have taken and deleting the ones you do not like, making room for an additional shot or two.
And I have not mentioned the possibility of using one of these memory based cameras like a film camera with a motor drive. One of the Olympus models I looked at claims to shoot in burst mode, capturing 2 frames per second.
Hmmmm.
I actually placed a bid on an Olympus d-460 on Ubid, but when the camera got close the $350 I let it go. I have seen retailers where I can buy this camera for about that same price.
This allowed me some time for research. One of the first sights I stumbled across was
imaging-resource.com. This site offers all kinds of info on digital cameras and scanners.
Their digital camera review page
is broken into three categories, cameras under 1 megapixel and under, Cameras 1.1 to 1.8 megapixels and Cameras 1.9 megapixels and above. Their home page also offers a
Tips and FAQ
section and an opportunity to subscribe to a digital photography newsletter. And of course there is a buying
guide. They've got to make some money somehow
In addition to reviews of the various digital cameras, imaging resource also offers a digital camera
feature matrix
image comparisons
and manufacturer
listing.
I think I am going to use the resources of imaging-resource to compare the
Olympus D-460
and the Fuji FinePix
1400. The Fuji has only a USB interface and no video out that would allow you to send your images to a television. The D-460 has a video out, a serial interface and no USB. The USB connection provides for much faster transfers, but I am not currently running any USB on any of my equipment. I know I need to begin using USB, but I have been very slow to migrate. I have mentioned before that I am not happy with the Windows 98 install on Wilma and therefore, I leaning towards stripping this machine down to bare metal and installing Windows 2000 Professional on this machine, which would, among other things, bring me into the USB world. The one drawback to this upgrade is this is a machine that Andrew uses to play some games and I am not sure how 2000 and its underlying Windows NT
structure will handle the games. More tradeoffs, I suppose.
I may have armed myself with more information that I actually need!
While I was in the research mode I also checked out Digital Photography
Review, which at first seemed interesting in that it offered reviews of the cameras and in fact, quickly threw up a page of photos of the different digital cameras. Its shortcoming
was that it was not listing all models for a particular make and therefore I questioned it accuracy. As an example I clicked on Olympus and the latest model it featured was the D-450. The D-460, which is the one I would be interested in and a replacement for the D-450 was not listed on their page.
There is even a model D-490 out now. However, there was a banner at the bottom of the page offering the camera with a free NiMH battery and charger
kit for the D-460. The Fuji MX-1400 was listed.
One nice feature of this site was the ability to do a side-by-side comparison, but then again, it's not of much use if one of the cameras you are trying to compare is not in their database. For my test, I used the Fuji FinePix 1400 and the Olympus D-450. This
comparison was very useful in pointing out some features on the Olympus that the Fuji did not have and which I would consider important in making my purchase decision.
Another good site is the Digital Camera Resource Page. When you click on
reviews and info, it brings up a nice table with various camera models and key features listed. It also includes a quick link to
C|Net shopper for quick pricing. This list included the Olympus D-460 and the newer D-490 as well as Fuji's FinePix 1400.
Some of the hotels I have been staying in recently on business travel have offered a connection to a high speed internet connection. So far, I have resisted this temptation,
wondering if the cost for such a convenience was worth it. The hotels usually have a
patchcord laying there with instructions, which suggest you plug the network connection into the NIC on your notebook and Windows will automatically find the connection. This of course assumes you are using Windows 95, 98 or 2000. If you happen to running
Linux on your laptop I am sure the installation is a bit more difficult as is everything with Linux compared to Windows.
If you connect to the hotel's
high speed service, I wonder what this does to your network settings when you take your machine back to your normal network. Maybe is just adds another TCP/IP stack or maybe it really screws your machine up in some way. I guess I should take the
guinea pig test one of these days.
USA Today has a special story
on its website today delving into the question on the future of technology.
I didn't even realize there were submarines back during the time of the Civil War, but a story in the Charlotte Observer's online edition details a moving experience as the
submarine H.L. Hunley
was lifted from its watery grave off the coast of Charleston, SC. . The wreckage was pulled from about 30 feet of water about four miles off the coast and among those in
attendance for the historic moment Clive Cussler, whose is credited with finding the Hunley during an expedition in 1995.
If you're continually concerned about the
information cookies on your system are spewing forth or are
tired of waiting for a web pages to load while it fills the screen
with banner ads, then you might want to consider AdSubtract.
AdSubtract works in the background striping your screen of
web ads and cookies. It makes web pages download faster and
appear less cluttered An added benefit is also the enhanced
security it provides by crumbling the cookies. And here's
the best part. The standard
edition is free for personal use.
Jonathan Hassell [hassell@hasselltech.net]
points out that the upgrade cost for Windows ME is steadily falling:
In your Monday post, you mention
WinME will be yet another expensive upgrade. Actually, Microsoft
has discounted the list price from the customary $89.95 to $59.
Now if it's worth that, don't even
get me started <g>
Glad to hear you had a good time at
the beach.
See, the price is dropping already. I
think I had read where the upgrade price was going to be
somewhere around $110.
I am not going to get you started, but I
believe that Microsoft's upgrade cost should actually be the
price we would be paying for a complete install package.
The upgrages should be somewhere around $20, but then that would
be contrary to reason they i$$ue upgrade$, wouldn't it?
Jan Swijsen [qjsw@oce.nl]
compares some of my "if it ain't broke" thinking to
Microsoft.
> "if it ain't broke,
don't fix it." In fact, I would bet that folks are
already starting to think this way.
Well at Microsoft the are thinking
that as well. "If it ain't broke user won't want fixes so
we must make sure it is."
Touché
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Wednesday, August
9, 2000
It must be nearing the end of the summertime
driving season. Gas prices have started to trickle down here
in Winston-Salem, albeit they're not coming down as fast as they
skyrocketed. Unleaded regular gas is now selling for around
$1.39 per gallon.
I'm headed off to Watkins Glen for another NASCAR
Winston Cup race tomorrow, so my next post will not be until at
least Monday, August 14.
Had a couple of comments on my digital camera
posting yesterday.
First, Robert Bruce (Bob) Thompson [thompson@ttgnet.com]
suggested I wait for the new Olympus camera, scheduled to begin
shipping on August 15.
You might want to think seriously about the D-490Z. It's just been announced, and the list price is $499. That means you should be able to get one for $350 or thereabouts once they start to ship in volume. It has 1600X1200 resolution (versus 1280X960 on the older D-4XXZ models), and several very nice new features. I'm
attaching the press release about it below.
For batteries, visit http://www.thomasdistributing.com/. They're the best source I've found for NiMH batteries and accessories, and they have very good prices.
You had mentioned something about the D-490 on your pages,
but I didn't find much about it on the web. Looks like the camera worth
waiting for.
Mike Strock [MikeS@webforia.com]
offers these comments on the digtal camera posting as well as some
experience with the high speed hotel hookups.
Steve - Love the site,
enjoy the diary section. Got to your site through Jerry
Pournelle's site, which when he was on vacation was giving RBT's
page,and I've found a few others that way as well (Syroid, Matt
Beland, etc).
Anyway, a couple
comments:
o Digital Cameras -
Personally, I don't own a digital camera. Have used the Mavica (a
friend had one I borrowed), and I like it alot. Was only able to
get 14 pictures on a floppy, but I could live with that. The price
was right too.
But, I'm looking for a
digital camera now. I've got a fairly high end SLR that I've had
for ages (Contax) with a lot of lenses. I've kinda decided to look
at film scanners in addition to looking at digital cameras. The
reason? I can use the camera I am used to, and have physical
pictures as well as the digital
capability. Nikon makes a couple good ones. They are fairly pricey
(<$800), but it may be something to look into from your
perspective as well I don't know.
o Hotel internet hookups
- At least in the hotels that the folks who I work with have
stayed at, no changes are necessary if you are running on a
machine configured for DHCP. You just plug it in (with
Win95/98/NT/2000), release and renew the IP address (not necessary
in 2000 as it does it automatically) and away you go. I'm thinking
that if you were running the DHCP client with Linux that the
process would be similar but I can't verify that at this time.
Anyway, thanks for the
site. Very enjoyable reading.
Thanks for your very kind words about this site. It's a
lot of work, more than I sometimes have time for and here lately I haven't done
much to the site except try to get some kind of blathering posted here. I
am glad you enjoy reading my ramblings. Makes all the work worthwhile when
folks like yourself take the time to say howdy.
Actually you can get almost 30 images on a single floppy with
the Sony Mavica if you use the setting that produced 640x480 images. I am
currently using a higher resolution, which has limited me to 12-14 images per
disk, but will allow you to make a color print on photo paper at 8x10.
You might be able to piggy back on my digital camera
research, which I will keep posted on these pages. Bob Thompson suggested
that I might want to wait for the new Olympus D-490, which after reading
the press release he passed along seems to be a better idea. The
Olympus D-4xx series seems to be the best best for our money. The new
D-490 will offer resolutions up to 1200x1600. I think I'll run out and
shoot a mural!
I guess I'll have to try one of these hotel hookups one of
these days. I use a static IP on my notebook when I have it connected to
my home network, but that will be easy enough to change. Thanks for the
insight.
Naturally, I had to check out your sight, Webforia.
Didn't have much time to wander around, but it looks like a good site. I
am sure it keeps you busy.
Being the good Republican that I am, I couldn't
resist the temptation to forward a letter to the President of the
United States that found its way into my mailbox.
Dear Mr. President...
I recently saw a bumper sticker
that said, "Thank me, I voted for Clinton-Gore." So, I
sat down and reflected on that and I am sending my "Thank
you" for what you have done, specifically:
1. Thank you for introducing us
to Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Dolly Kyle
Browning, Kathleen Willey, and, of course, Juanita Broaddrick, who
told NBC that you raped her. Are there any others that we should
know about?
2. Thank you for teaching my
8-year-old about oral sex. I had really planned to wait
until he was about 10 or so to discuss it with him, but now he
knows more about it than I did as a senior in college. The cigar
thing was also neat for the kids.
3. Thank you for showing us
that sexual harassment in the work place (especially the White
House) and on the job is OK, and all you have to know is what the
meaning of "IS" is. It really is great to know that
certain sexual acts are not sex and one person may have sex while
the other one involved does NOT have sex. Monica said frequently
while you were on the phone, she would work at one end, and you at
the other. What productivity!
4. Thank you for reintroducing
the concept of impeachment to a new generation and demonstrating
that the ridiculous plot of the movie "Wag The Dog"
could be plausible after all. The people of the Sudan, Afghanistan
and Serbia are all running to rent the video, now that you made
them part of the story.
5. Thanks for making Jimmy
Carter look competent, Gerald Ford look graceful, Richard Nixon
look honest, Lyndon Johnson look truthful, and John Kennedy look
moral.
6. Thank you for the 72 House
and Senate witnesses who have pleaded the 5th Amendment and 17
witnesses who have fled the country to avoid testifying about
Democrat campaign fund raising.
7. Thank you for the 19
charges, 8 convictions, and 4 imprisonments from the Whitewater
"mess" and the 55 criminal charges and 32 criminal
convictions (so far) in the other "Clinton" scandals.
8. Thanks for remembering the
families of many deceased people who once were your friends, who
served you and died so young and suddenly: Vince Foster, Jerry
Parks, Ron Brown, Admiral Boorda, Les Aspin, Barbara Alice Wiese,
Mary Mahoney, Jim McDougal et al.
9. Thanks also for reducing our
military by half, "gutting" much of our foreign policy,
and for providing no real missile defense system for the American
people. Thank you for sharing with our Chinese friends all of our
nuclear weapon designs, the supercomputer technology to build such
weapons, the ballistic missile technology so they can have more
accurate missiles, and the encryption technology so they can keep
it all secret too.
10. You are amazing visiting
all those countries! Thank you for flying all over the world on
"vacations" carefully disguised as necessary trips. It's
wonderful, too, how you have surpassed every other president in
the size of your entourage on these trips: 75 jumbo jets, 2000
guests to China alone. Your Africa entourage also was remarkable
and it was nice of you to bring Betty Currie. She needed a break
from testifying before the grand jury.
Please give my regards to
Hillary, when/if you see her. Tell her I'm working on a
"Thank You" letter for her.
Looking forward to January
2001,
Average Joe
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[Friday] [Saturday]
Thursday,
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[Friday] [Saturday]
Friday,
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[Friday] [Saturday]
Saturday,
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