The Daily Diversion Archive For December, 2000

12/15/00

I see we have a new president.

Naturally, he wasn't my first choice, but I guess life will go on. Since this is my soap box and since I'm here to spout my drivel, I will now proceed to spout...

I just have a couple of things to say to our new president. Since you are a Republican, could you do something about bringing those NRA nuts back to reality? If I see another "Charlton Heston is my president" bumper sticker, I'm going to start shooting. No better reason to bring charges of treason, if you ask me. No worse advertisement for the NRA, either. Say, folks, why not sign up and pay your dues for a group of gun nuts led by a demagogue who are starting to play around with seditious slogans. Be the first one on your block to adopt the stars and bars as YOUR flag! Be the first one on your block to do some contract killing for old Charlie. God would want it that way, don't you know...

Moses wouldn't lie, would he?

Speaking of Charlton Heston and those loons with that particularly offensive bumper sticker: I didn't elect that jackass to be MY president and I wouldn't trust him to bring my groceries in from the car. He's an ACTOR. His profession is to MAKE-BELIEVE.

There must be some other way to express your affiliation with the NRA other than with statements like that. It's divisive, it does nothing for our national unity and it's not very clever.

While you're at it, Mr. Bush, could you lighten up on the killing people thing? I can't believe you still have faith in your "justice" system in Texas. There's more than a reasonable doubt that justice is not being served to the poor, the black and the slow (God help you if you're all three...). Until you can guarantee with your life that no innocent person has been sentenced to death, then just pull the plug on the killing machine, OK?

Another thing you could do for America is to appoint a couple of Democrats to your cabinet. What's the harm? Throw us a bone, huh? Remember, the other guy won the popular vote and we still don't like you. Don't believe what Trent Lott tells you. You're not building a 1,000 year Reich here. You're on shaky ground and you need to build coalitions, not alienate the majority of the population. Mr. Lott has done a lot of good things in his career as a politician, but he's just not going to get that making peace thing any time soon. Give him a cushy position somewhere out of the way where he can't do any harm. It would be very presidential of you.

Speaking of Presidential, here's one that'll knock the socks off the flag-waving, fulminating, goin' and grabbin' the gun wing of the party: Normalize relations with Cuba AND Vietnam. Watch the price of coke and smack go right through the floor. Kick a huge quantity of ass in the "war" on drugs.

Finally, put this "drug war" thing to bed. The only people these idiotic laws benefit are lawyers. This country has put thousands of non-violent drug offenders in jail for patently ridiculous lengths of time. George W. Bush, free these people so they and their loved ones can get on with their lives.

Thanks for listening, Mr. Bush. I wish you all the best for the next four years.

In other news, my old pal Sam called me the other day. Hello!!! I stayed home from work to rehabilitate from a freak ball-throwing accident I had with my dog. The dog really wasn't involved, it was just a rather serious fight between the muscles in my neck and my skeleton.

News flash: If you trap your muscle tissue between two bones in your body, it hurts like all hell.

Anyway, I'm sitting at home trying not to move my head and she calls me up. What luck. We talked for quite some time and caught up on stuff. It turns out that I hadn't talked to her in about three years. She's thinking of coming back to the area and to her I say, "What are you waiting for?"

In more, other news, I rode the bus today and was reminded just how much I loathe the experience. We were getting the T-bird fixed and since the Calais blew up, it's our only car that's in drivable shape. Anyway, I dropped the car off at the repair shop and caught the bus into work. No problems. Fast and comfortable was the ride and I wondered why I hated riding the bus so much.

The drive to my loathe was recharged this afternoon. It's not that the bus didn't show up on time. That's just not going to happen downtown in rush hour. There's just too many buses. No, timeliness wasn't a problem. The problem was the other passengers on the bus. On the bus there were the usual studentia, commuting professionals and average Joes and Janes. Unfortunately, the presence of creepies made itself well known the instant I boarded the bus. I was greeted after dropping my dollar coin (love them!) and two quarters with the smell of unwashed ass. It was around 0 degrees Fahrenheit today and for someone to smell like ass in this cold is quite a feat. I couldn't localize the funkass responsible for the malodorous air in the front of the bus, so I moved to the rear. It was busy, so I had to stand.

The weather today was rather nasty and the streets were pretty greasy. The driver of this particular hell seemed to believe that a steady foot on the throttle was a bad idea. The brakes on this bus seemed to have only two settings as well: off and through the floorboards. I have pretty good balance, but I'll probably have a bruise on my hip from hitting the railing on the back stairwell. Nice job Sparky, you fail.

Once I settled into a recently vacated seat, the other smells and sounds of the bus started creeping in. The rather unkempt person ahead of me smelled of booze, and I could listen to the walkman of the person sitting just behind me as if it was on my ears. Does rap music need to be played loud enough to kill your and everyone else's' ears? I marvel on the intrusiveness of rap music. I hear it in my car although I'm not playing it there. I hear it in my home office even though I'm not playing it there, either. I'm about 30' from the street and about 80' from the alley and I hear rap from both sides of the house on some days. Why do I have to listen to other people's music? If I wanted to hear it, it would be playing on the earphones I have sitting over my ears right now. But, I digress...

The trip out of downtown was painfully slow, but again, this is not the fault of the bus. It easily took 10 more minutes to get back to the car shop as it did getting into downtown. Amazing.

Well, I've run out of steam and I still have to upload this steaming, smelling offering.

12/7/00

Today's Daily is dedicated to the memory of Leslie A. Holtan. Dad died a little over a year ago and I still miss him terribly. I'm having trouble deciding just what to say on this sad day that just a couple of years ago would have been celebrated with a steak and a beer.

Dad was a stand-up guy. He did what he had to do, even though it might not have been the easiest or most comfortable thing. He was smart about his duty, but not full of it. He had a low number in the draft, so he searched around southern Minnesota for a National Guard unit that had some openings. Instead of being drafted, through his own hard work, he found a spot for himself and a buddy in a Guard unit that only went to Vietnam after he had switched units. He was lucky here.

Just after I was born, he met my mom. He didn't have to get involved with a single mother in the late 1960s, but he did. After a short courtship, they were married and he adopted me. Even though I wasn't his flesh and blood, he and his family treated and still treats me as if I were. He and they are all good people. The marriage didn't work out and some years after my sister was born, they divorced. It was a bad time for us all, and I feel bad that I didn't have much contact with him during this time. My mom and I were too busy fighting each other, and I was just too focused on how miserable I was in Junior High to have had time for a person who might have given me a hand.

Even though he had his failings, I love him.

He had a wicked sense of humor. He participated in lutefisk eating contests, played the snoot-flute, played practical jokes and was generally a fairly jovial fellow. I think he was pretty messed up inside, but he wasn't the type of person who would talk about it. Think Iron John. That was dad. He did the stuff he had to do--the stuff that wasn't necessarily fun or even enjoyable--and this was primarily the way he showed us he loved us.

I will never forget the day I figured he was over being mad about me dropping the drive shaft out of his car. I was screwing around with my pals and bumped the shifter while turning the radio knob. THUMP--clankity clankity clankity... The sounds of impending doom. I ended up fixing it--it didn't cost much. He was pissed about it, though. Less than 2 months later, it's about -20F outside and I've borrowed one of my parents' other cars to get to work. While I'm out, Dad goes to the parts store, buys a starter for my car (the reason I'm not driving my car) and puts it in. He doesn't complain about it, he doesn't ask for money for the starter, he just goes and does it. I was floored. It wouldn't have been such a big deal if it hadn't been 20 below zero that day. I asked him how it went and he said, "Cold."

I sure do miss you, Dad.

I may be doing this daily thing more or less daily again pretty soon. The server is just about ready for a static IP so I can start serving this page from the house. When I get that all done and do some other stuff to be sure no spamazoids get a hold of my box, I'll get to return to the daily rants you've all been missing. Until then, cheers!

11/25/00

Well, we're past Thanksgiving and still no Presidential decision. Here's something to consider: The election in Florida was so close that the difference in tallies between winner and loser is inside the statistical margin of error. Translation: There's no way, with that many votes to count that anyone, using any means, will get a true and accurate count of how many votes were actually cast for the candidates running for President. A hand-count will be influenced by human factors such as boredom, not paying the sharpest attention, opinion as to whether a ballot was punched or not, a mistake like putting one ballot into the wrong pile, and bias towards one candidate or another. A computer count will miss partially counted ballots, mis-printed ballots and will very likely mis-read a few ballots due to dirt or dust in the optics used to scan the ballots. Now, with this in mind, I repeat my request that the true "Statesman" in this election campaign--the one who loves his country the most and the one who will do what's right for it even though it may not be the best thing for himself or his political career, to abdicate this contest immediately.

Please.

In other fronts, we've had a patch of good fortune lately and because of this we are now getting some old business taken care of. The ongoing dejunking program has had a banner month. Both the monster workstation and the server are nearly completed and I can see both of them up and running before the end of the month. I'm in a NT training class next week on the company's dime ('bout time, dammit), and my wife's parents are coming to our house for Christmas. There's much good news.

The monster workstation is a PIII 800EB. It's going to have 128 meg of RAM to start with, but that total could go up as RAM is dirt cheap presently. I've secured AGP video and everything else on the cheap, including a 20G 7200RPM ATA66 HDD. That'll be nice for access times, to be sure.

The server project is very close to completion as well. It really is a dual Pentium Pro 200/256k cache and it's going to start with 64 Meg of RAM. Since the Intel Providence PR440FX motherboard has built-in 68-pin wide SCSI, I've been bidding on some of these items on Ebay and have a couple in a couple of days. I can't wait to be up and running.

11/9/00

Gosh have I been busy.

Whoever has their finger on my fast-forward button can lift it anytime, thanks.

I'm not even sure where to start, but I guess the election is as good as anyplace. I'm not going to divulge who I voted for because that's just not anyone's business but mine. However, those of you who know me know that I'm a knee-jerk bleeding-heart Liberal and damn proud of it. I'm not buying the whole "you think the government can spend your money better than you can, huh?" argument. Nope. I think that the people of this country should use the government to their best advantage: To represent their interests, to enforce the laws of the land and as the biggest economy of scale buyer in the world. Do you think you can swing a better deal for health care? At who's expense? The government not only is the enforcer of the rules that the health-care industry has to follow, but they can also demand the lowest prices because they are the biggest consumer. Simple economics.

I'll also go on record saying that smugness really pisses me off.

I thank the voting public of Minnesota for electing Mark Dayton. Good luck in Washington, Mark. I also hope that Paul Wellstone will consider a second term as our other Senator. He truly is one of the guiding lights of the U.S. Senate. Godspeed to you both, and God Bless The United States of America.

As I'm writing this, the election is still not been decided. It sounds as if it may be quite some while before we know who really won Florida, Wisconsin and Iowa. Whatever the fact, I hope the determination is made soon and I really hope that it doesn't end up in the courts. What would the Statesman do? If this should become a major issue, the country may end up suffering. I would call on the Statesman in either of our candidates to abdicate the instant it looks as if this might do harm to the country. It would be the right thing to do.

In other news, the new machine is coming along nicely. I've just become very familiar with Intel's Pentium III processor running at 800Mhz (EB). I wouldn't have guessed it, but all things being equal (and in my lab the conditions were the same) it was noticeably faster than the PIII 733 Coppermine chip. I wouldn't have believed that this small bump in frequency would have made much of a difference, but it was noticeable in the equipment I was working with. I'm going to try to find the 800EB chip in early December and I hope it's within my budget at that time. The new machine now just needs a HDD, processor AGP video card and some RAM and I'm in business. I'm not going to go crazy on the video card. I figure that high-end graphics engines will always be out there, and all I really want is true color at 85Hz.

The server project is coming along nicely. It will be a modest Linux box: 128M of RAM, dual Pentium Pro 200's with 256k cache, SCSI wide with a fairly fast spinning drive. I need to find an enclosure and some ancillaries, but then I should be on the way to static IPville.

Which brings me to the apology I owe to all of you. I deeply regret that my website host has decided to put up pop-ups. It sucks. All I can say is that once the server is up and running and stable, I should not have to deal with that kind of stuff ever again.

10/23/00

Wow, it's been a while since I've written something. I've been busy (yeah, yeah, I know, EVERYBODY'S busy...), and it's been very difficult even to find the time to noodle a little bit on the old confuser. Work's been an incredible drain what with having to unbox, rebox and unbox again various components that we've had trouble with. Word to the wise: Do NOT use Intel's CA810 all in one motherboard with KDS VS-7i monitors. They're incompatible. "What?!?" you say... "Incompatible?" "I thought that kind of shit went out with Plug-N-Pray." You'd be right, for the most part. However, Intel and KDS thought they'd bring us a taste of the bad old days by making otherwise excellent parts not work very well at all with each other. Sure, they give an image, but when you start up the PC, the BIOS splash page is not viewable (no loss there), but neither is the BIOS programmer menu. That's something of a problem if you ever want to configure your PC correctly. The other problem was on about 3/4 of these setups, the monitor would flash--the screen goes black for a heartbeat and then comes back on--making it pretty much the most annoying PC I've ever come in contact with. Sucko on a sticko. Needless to say, this whole problem required a bit of information gathering, a bit of web surfing, a bit of complaining to our supplier, and a whole lot of repacking and unpacking of monitors. Wow, that sucked.

In other news, the new machine is still coming along nicely, and I'm waiting for my next infusion of cash to get some RAM or perhaps the processor itself. I must be patient, but what I really want to do is just go nuts and buy everything I need and slap it all together and be done with it.

I'm also going to build a real server. Dual Pentium Pro (200Mhz), and perhaps even some RAID action. It should be neat.

I've also got the home Linux box up and running. Wow, what a hassle. It's not because there's a lack of information, it's just that the settings for DSL boxes can be very hard to come by. Our provider has been less than helpful coming up with the information. What a pain.

The dejunking project is going along nicely as well. We're striving towards having a house where the vacuuming can be done without picking up the junk off the floor first. We're making excellent progress and we may even have the first two floors of our house totally dejunked by Christmas. This will be lovely.

10/16/00

Wow, has this month ever just ripped by. It seems that it's been 10 years since I've updated this page. It's been 11 days and a lot has happened.

I've been building a new computer and, at the same time, building a computer for my step mom. She got the old P166 processor and 64M of RAM. The new computer has that all-new ATX form factored motherboard (new stuff as of 2 years ago...), along with a new case to fit it in. I've also acquired a floppy drive--that vestigial remnant of storage media passed. I also now have a new network card that the kind folks at Qwest supplied to me when I signed up for DSL. How nice. It's a 10/100 speed card that will certainly be used on it's slower speed on my humble little network. Of course there's always upgrading to a 10/100 switch....

The new PC in progress will probably get a Coppermine cored PIII. I'm thinking I'll have the money to buy something tasty around Christmas. Life will be good when that happens. Yum, yum...

Other big newses include FINALLY getting my Linux box configured correctly. Yes, it runs Linux and drives on the internet now. Qwest was about as forthcoming with the correct configuration information as Abe Lincoln will be this coming new year. I asked the tech person how to do it, but she was pretty mute. She told me things I already knew. "You're running blah, right?" Yes. "You have this DNS punched in, right?" Yes. Eventually I started questioning her and she kept giving me answers to questions she'd already answered. I figured that she, like me, had never done a Linux box before. Qwest doesn't really support it, and I'm sure she hadn't been trained in its configuration. Such as it is. I finally found the path to righteousness on the Cisco website. There they had specific configuration information as to what numbers had to be plugged in where. I didn't have one of the numbers, but that's OK because they also told me how to find it. That's one attawaytago! for you guys over there at Cisco. I configured it and I'm now rolling.

I've also successfully configured the Linux box's FTP client, and the Apache server. The next project will be to get Samba to talk to my Windows 2000 box and establish a cache of my MP3 files. Life is looking pretty good.

The only casualties in this enhanced drive towards technical literacy is just about all of my free time and quite a bit of money for the various things that have come up. Money. It really is at the root of most problems around here.

This is saying that I need more. So, if anyone out there wants a generalist who loves to dabble and fight with new technologies and just absolutely digs getting his hands into hardware, let me know.

10/5/00

We must be doing better. I can tell because our stuff is getting "newer." When I say "newer," I mean our old, broken stuff is hitting the curb and our shiny, new stuff is taking its place. This isn't saying that we've been on a buying jag, no. We've just been pruning the stuff, getting better replacement stuff, and things are getting nicer, faster and much less aggravating.

I've also had some success setting up Linux. This has happened on the test bed, so I really don't have a lot of real progress to report. The home computer is doing just swell. The various tweaks and updates that would thrill a techie and bore the snot out of the rest of the whole world have all been hugely successful. The PC I'm building for my Stepmom is for the most part done. The box for the brand new Ubercomputerantant has arrived and I'm expecting to purchase a motherboard sometime this week. It may take a good long while to get it all together, but I need to keep the larger picture in mind: It WILL be worth the wait.

DAMMIT!!

10/2/00

HoooooNellie, a new month. Big deal...

Well, happy October to you all. My wife and I are entering this lovely month with a new set of tires on the Calais, a new bike in the garage and the promise of a bunch of new furniture. Now all we have to do is figure out where to put it.

I smelled alcohol on Saturday and it was bad. The kind folks at our local Team Tires place took an awful long time to do our tires, so I was rather stuck in Columbia Heights, Minnesota with not a lot to do.

After turning over the keys to the team member in charge (would he be the coach, or just the team captain?) I walked across busy Central Avenue to the bank. I realized just then that the burbs are definitely NOT made for pedestrians. Yes, there were sidewalks on both sides of the street/highway thing, but the roadway was about 75 yards wide. It was about 1/4 of a mile to the next crosswalk in either direction. This is a MAJOR arterial through these parts, and it was damn difficult to get across at Noon on Saturday.

I managed to get across the great divide and went to the bank to deposit the money that would be buying the earlier-mentioned tires. It was a quick and painless transaction. Then I went next door to a used/new CD place and bought an AstronautWife CD. I'd been grooving to their MP3 for weeks, so I thought I'd do them a favor and buy their disk. Drag about one of the three female singers leaving the band.

After blowing the dough on the tunes, I ambled the 1/3 of a mile (at least) to one of my all-time favorite greasy spoons: The Flameburger. This is the closest thing Minneapolis gets to a Waffle House restaurant. I had a cheeseburger and fries and it was really damn good.

I let lunch settle somewhat doing something I hate to do: Waiting. I really hate to wait, and being without a car really pisses me off. Of course, what I was waiting for was the bus. I can safely say that I've probably taken public transportation in this city less than almost anyone. I've probably taken it 20 times in 10 years. That estimate may be a little generous. That also includes the week I got on my high horse during college (no!) and vowed to ride the bus to save energy and gas. Well, I found out damn quick that it was much more in my best interest to save MY energy and not do something daily that I absolutely hated. That something was riding the bus.

Yes, it's true that I drove the bus. I drove school buses off and on for 10 odd years. I also drove the Minneapolis River City Trolley for a couple of years. That still doesn't change the fact that I hate being a passenger on the bus. I even trained bus drivers and gave them exams for about 5 years. I didn't even mind that. No, there's something about public bus transportation that never fails to make me want to kill.

The guy who smelled of alcohol at Noon on Saturday brought this all back in crystal sparkling clear focus for me.

So there I was, gabbing on the cell phone (if only to make the people who were pissing me off pissed off) and heading to downtown to the public library. Once I got there, I went up to the Special Collections room to get more ideas for the Minneapolis wing of the site. After a couple of hours there, I hopped another bus back up to the burbs. They hadn't quite finished the car so I finished a magazine waiting. Once I was handed the keys from the Team Commandant, I was off like a shot in a much smoother riding car. Yep, those old tires sure did suck. The new ones are pretty darn nice, I do say.

Scratch one Saturday.