Steve's Current Notes
Week of  November 19, 2000

I have spent some of the coldest days known to man at a race track in Atlanta and this year's final Winston Cup weekend was no exception.

We know it's going to be cold when we head to Atlanta, so I always pack appropriate.  This year I included insulated underwear, winter gloves and polar fleece jacks and ski parkas in my packing and for the most part I stayed warm.  I need to add some warm wool socks to my cold weather gear.  My feet were the only thing that didn't enjoy warmth over the weekend.

And the other weather element that plagues us at Atlanta seems to be rain.  This race had endured more than its share of bad weather.  This time around we endured rain, sleet and snow.

Yep, the race was rained out yesterday.  They're hoping to get it going this morning and you can follow the race on NASCAR's site, including real-time scoring information.

I remember another rainy day a couple of years ago there for the final Winston Cup race when we used the lights and the race wasn't completed until after midnight...and at that was a shortened version.

I made it back home yesterday, but some of my associates at still there, hoping the race will be completed today

As we were making our final approach into the Greensboro airport yesterday afternoon the captain comes over the public address system with a weather update.  You can imagine the chatter on the plane when he announced limited visibility and light snow.  As we neared the ground, I looked out the window and the snow falling was anything but light.

It continued to snow heavy throughout the afternoon, but wouldn't stick to the streets or to the ground in our neighborhood, thankfully.

It's too early to be getting snow here In North Carolina.  I think the National Weather Service said it's been something like 30 years since we've gotten snow this early in November.  I hope this is not an indication of what we're in for this winter.

If you follow some of the other DayNoters I have mentioned on this site, you might want to know that Bob Thompson has set up a message board for the DayNotes gang here.  In an effort to reduce spam, he's requiring us to register, but the process is painless.  The community of members in this message board is growing fast.  So far, more than 100 followers of these daily meanderings have tossed their hat into the ring and the message board is less than a week old.

Do you want to use your digital video camera to make your own videos?  I haven't dipped my toes into this arena yet, but the prospect of it has intrigued me in the past, I must admit.

You'll need some video editing software and our friends at TechTV are recommending ABC TV (nothing to do with the network) and the free ABC Video Roll editing software.   They're also promoting some other video and sound utilities that seem interesting.  Looks like maybe I will have something to play with over the holidays, which will be here sooner that you think.

If you need some help planning that Thanksgiving feast for later this week you can check out Home and Garden's Thanksgiving page where there's help on everything from decorating to planning the feast.

There appears to be another nasty Outlook email virus worn spreading it way around the internet.

Symantec has a posting on its AntiVirus Reseach site that outlines the damage this bug will do to your system, including rendering it useless.

Supposedly, it attaches itself to Inbox messages that contain a single attachment. From there it utilizes the existing email subject line and body and attaches itself as NAVIDAD.EXE. 

They have a fix for the damages Navidad might do to you system.  You can also download the lasted virus signatures here.

Thank you Mr. Clinton.

Internet Explorer has long since buzzed by Netscape as the internet browser of choice, but that doesn't mean Netscape has been burning the midnight oil wanting to keep up, but have they accomplished their mission?  Enter Netscape 6.  The geeks at C|Net took the new browser for a spin and decided it has some nice features, but still suffers from some speed and stability problems.  Click here to visit the Netscape 6 homepage.

Is the introduction of the Pentium 4 Intel's hope for staying ahead of AMD?  Some analysts think so, and they're usually right.  And the writers at C|Net jump in with this opinion

The net's going to get more confusing in about a year.  That's about the time the new domain names will be hitting the web.  Currently we can come close to guessing the url for a website we might be interesting in surfing through.  We could usually guess it was a dot com or dot net address. But now we'll have to figure it among .biz, .aero, .name, .coop .info .pro and .museum.  My head is already spinning.

The Cable Modem Help newsletter helped to remind me of a feature in the NT operating system that I had forgotten about or never really retained.  Netstat will give you a quick look at what's going on inside your machine, at least connection-wise.  It quickly lists the different ports in use and what's going on with these ports.

It would be useful in spotting an IP address hitting your machine that seemed foreign.

Use the netstat ? command switch for a list of command line options.

Thanks for fellow DayNoter Dan Bowman [DanBowman@worldnet.att.net] for his comments on yet another redesign of these notes pages.

I like the new look...

...and the new links

One request: how's about a link to "Last week" for the un-faithful<g>?

Thanks for your kind words.

The first thing I decided I wanted to do was set the page width to a steady 800 pixels and then I went from there.  I also wanted to make it brighter.

I have added a button for Last Week and now I just have to remember to update the page in the directory /notes/2000/lastweek.htm.  I think I used to do this a long time ago, but it was since September that I copied the current page to last week.  This will go along with remembering to change the page tag, the "current" bookmark location and page title each week, most of which I forget to do on a regular basis.  Wish me luck.

-==-

I received this message from the George W, Bush emailer [bushnews@georgewbush.com] as the vote counting brouhaha continues in South Florida.

Three heavily Democratic counties continue to hand count ballots that were meant to be counted by machine.

As the process continues, it has become apparent why machines are used to count these ballots.

There have been reports of Bush ballots in the Gore pile, counters using ballots as fans, and chads on the floor and on the counting tables....

Click below to watch a member of the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board bend, scratch, poke and press a ballot during the manual recount...

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words....

At any rate, I wasn't too far off in my guess yesterday that it had been five or six years since that car had won a Winston Cup race.  It turns out to be more like 10.  Ken Schrader won at Dover in June, 1991.  I knew it had been a long time, but not that long.

It was a good year on the Winston Cup circuit for new winners.  There were four new victors this year, matching the same number from 1988 when Ken Schrader, Alan Kulwicki, Phil Parsons, and Lake Speed won their first race.  The first time winners this year were Dale Earnhardt Jr, Matt Kenseth, Steve Park and Jerry Nadeau.

I think I heard that Matt Kenseth was going to be named Rookie of the Year, despite having only one victory to Earnhardt, Jr.'s three.  Kennseth finished 14 in the final points tally while Earnhardt was 16th, but was the clincher must have been Kennseth's 11 top-10 finishes.  Earnhardt was in the top-10 only five times and the Rookie title rewards consistency among other things.  It's more than where you are in the Winston Cup points for this trophy.

America’s best known evangelist, The Rev. Billy Graham, has decided to step down from the head of the ministry he founded a half-century ago.    

It seems like I am frequently mentioning a computer virus spreading via Microsoft Outlook. Word is, the latest, "Romeo and Juliet" is attacking computers in Europe and America, but supposedly is not as dangerous as the romance-themed "I Love You" virus.  Romeo and Juliet, also known as W32/BleBla@mm apparently has not spread quickly and appears to be a low threat to computer users.  Let's hope the experts are right.

It was no surprise the Florida Supreme court acted in the way it did last night, but there may be some light at the end of the tunnel.  The election in Florida may, just may, be over by Nov. 27.  More than likely that will not be the case as the fighting in the Sunshine State will continue long past.  But, at least the judges set some kind of date that will give us hope this election of our President may soon be over.

I fully expect the Democrats to snatch the election away from George W. Bush by any means possible.  And I will not be a very happy camper.  It's too bad the courts are having such a strong voice in this election.

It seems my misery back in October my have helped John Paulson [jmp@ingenix.com].  I had mentioned in my notes on October 23 that my system locked up when attempting to make a music CD and I was not able to reboot.  The culprit file was identified as \systemroot\system32\drivers\mxlw2k.sys.  My system was locked up tight and I had no choice but the rebuild the system from scratch at that point.  John provides a nice workaround.

I just had the same problem here at my work on an employee's machine. I went looking on the internet for the problem anywhere for results. Your page and your problem you posted was all I could find. The only thing is that I did find the fix to the problem and I think I will be writing up something to Music Match or Microsoft.

When I read what you wished you would have done, I wanted to tell you that it would not have done anything because I ran chkdsk /r , I did not try chkdsk /f because I fixed the problem before that. I used the Recovery console to go to the directory that had the file MxlW2k.sys and renamed the file MxlW2k.bak. That fixed the problem. Upon rebooting, the system replaced that file with another MxlW2k.sys. Since I successfully was able to log into Windows 2000 I went to the file and looked up the owner or version in the properties of the file and notice that it was owned by Music Match. It was a great discovery and I just wanted to let you know so that you don't have to go through the entire process of installing from scratch if the problem happens again.

Have a nice day and thanks for posting the problem, you actually helped me a lot in fixing this problem.

John M. Paulson
PC/Lan Analyst, MCSE
Ingenix

I am sorry you had to go through this, but am grateful that I may have helped you some.  At least you didn't have to rebuild the system.

And many thanks for sending the workaround.  I hope Microsoft see clear to add you suggestion to their knowledgebase.

Today we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the United States.

Thanksgiving is a tradition that goes back to the beginning of the New World when the Pilgrims decided to celebrate a bountiful harvest.  After deciding they had enough food packed away for the winter, the Pilgrims wanted to celebrate.

At the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims celebrated with the American Indians, who they had finally made friends with after a rocky start.

A tradition was born.  And continues today.

The idea of a national Thanksgiving came during the American Revolution, when such an idea was suggested to the Continental Congress in the 1770's

New York state made it an annual tradition in the early 1800s and many other states (colonies) had followed suit by the middle of the 19th century.  Thanksgiving became a national holiday here in American when President Abraham Lincoln appointed a national day of Thanksgiving in 1863, right in the height of the Civil War.   We celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November.

A new word has been added to our Thanksgiving vocabulary -- turcucken.

I had never heard of such a thing until Labor Day weekend when Suzy and I traveled to Columbus, Ohio to attend the wedding of a business associate.  O of the highlights of rehearsal dinner was the main course, turcucken.

Michael, being from the Cajun Country of Baton Rogue, decided the dinner would have a New Orleans theme and spent the weekend explaining this dinner delicacy anyone who would listen.  "You take a turkey and stuff it with a duck and then stuff the duck with a chicken," was his explanation throughout the weekend.  We all awaited the carving of the turducken with great anticipation.  And I must report  it was quite tasty...and that I went back for seconds, which is nothing unusual in itself.

And then this Thanksgiving season it seems the news of turducken is spreading.  I even heard the local all news radio station talking about turducken yesterday morning.  I started to call in and share that I had actually eaten the bird or is it birds?

You can read more about the turducken here.

Anyone who knows me very well knows that I am not the best at reading instruction manuals or running computer backups.

However, I decided I was going to run a full backup of my system yesterday.  I don't know what had gotten into me.  Anyway, twice during this backup my NT file server machine locked up, so I eventually said the hell with it and killed the backup.  I didn't think anything about it until I went to access my mail last night and nothing was there.

I then went to the directory where I store my outlook files and you can imagine how my heart sank when I saw my .pst file was EMPTY, as in zero (0) K.  I then went in search of the found files (the ones that NT builds when it's recovering after an abrupt halt) and nothing was there.

It was now time for some head scratching.  I was getting seriously depressed.

I found an old copy of my .pst file in the directory, but it was more than a year old.  I save too many messages in my saved mail folder for that to have been of much use.

Next it was rummaging through old backup tapes.  I found a full backup from July for this machine, but when I looked at the tape the file I was looking for was not on the tape.  This had to mean that I was using Outlook when then backup reached this file and therefore it was skipped.  Another bummer.

Then I happened to remember that I had dropped my data directory onto a CD-r about a month ago.  I originally did this for Suzy so she wouldn't lose any of her files, but now it appears it was more for my benefit.

Anyway, I dug up the CD and there was the file I needed. I copied it over the exchange data directory and I was almost back -- to within a month and I can live with that. I was still having some troubles with the mailbox, but a run of NT's inbox repair utility seems to have fixed that problem.

I was sharing my troubles with Bob Thompson (which I always do when I'm in major trouble) and he suggested that I might want to consider doing as he does and run a batch file that xcopy's my data directory off to another machine.  With his heIp have built this batch file and will hope to remember to run it frequently as a safety net.  My main data store is on a machine named fred and I am going to copy its data directory to rubble on a frequent basis from this point forward.

Here's the batch file I named freddatabackup.bat in my root directory on rubbe:

This batch file performs an xcopy and will then reset the archive flag so the next time it's run, hopefully only files that have changed will be copied.  Thanks for your suggestion, Bob and for the help with the batch file.

To add insult to injury I have been experiencing intermittent losses of connectivity with Time-Warner's RoadRunner service over the past couple of days.  Since yesterday afternoon, actually.

The problem is either with their head-end equipment or my modem may be taking a crap.  I logged a trouble call with customer service yesterday, but of course, they're planning on taking a long holiday weekend.  Just as well, we're headed to Virginia to spend a couple of days with my mother