Category: Doug

Posted on

All I Want Is a Half-Decent Sombrero!

Sadly, last summer, my $12 sombrero ranchero purchased in Mexico in 2003, was accidentally squashed during our return from vacation in Moultonborough, New Hampshire. (If one is a cowboy, rather than a farmer, that same hat might be called a somebrero vaquero.)

Six months later even I, with my less-than-excellent fashion sense, had to admit that it was time to retire the hat, so I’ve switched to a Kronos-issued, “100 Quarters of Revenue Growth,” baseball cap.

Although a cowboy hat is certainly unusual in New England, there is nothing better for keeping the rain, snow, and sun off of one’s head. I find I can weather the most severe rainstorm without a jacket with the proper headwear, and a ball cap just doesn’t cut it. I’m also a bit picky about what type of hat I get. I don’t want one that is so fancy or obviously expensive that it will label me as an outsider during my trips to Mexico.

I’ve toyed around with purchasing a new hat online. Long-distance co-worker Ricardo Castillo, who works for Kronos in Cleburne, Texas, referred me to Cavenders, which seems to have a reasonable selection. I spent an hour searching for similar sites online, and found only one or two sites that fit into the “reasonable” category. Most had a truly horrible selection. Only one had affordable prices. My biggest letdown is that none of them seemed to include the traditional Mexican four feathers in the brim. Still, I should be able to remedy this by sending my wife to a craft store. (The feathers consist of one each of green, yellow, and red, plus one smaller, spotted one. I assume the colors are linked to the Mexican flag, although its major colors are green, white, and red, in that order. It may be the yellow feather is used to better contrast against the typically off-white color of the hat, or that it is easier to dye a feather yellow than bleach one to white. Maybe yellow has better color retention. Life is full of small mysteries. I did find this link about cross-cultural palettes.)

Part of the problem might be the same reason most people would be hesitant to buy shoes online. The buyer wants a hat that he knows will fit well and look good, and there is no substitute for being able to try the item on and handle the materials. So, clothing—especially certain items—purchased online would probably have a very high returned item ratio, and could, I surmise, dramatically harm the profit margin.

So, imagine my delight when, while we were up in Manchester, New Hampshire, I spotted a store, El Cowboy Pasedo, with two huge Mexican flags in the windows. After our bus visitation work, Nichelle and I eagerly entered the store.

Inside was a variety of Mexican clothing, including some very attractive sombreros.

I found an excellent hat nearly right away, confirming at least the size I need, and asked what it cost. (Hover over the text for translations.)

“Dos ciento.”

“¿Docientos dolares?” I asked, incredulously.

The sales clerk went on to explain that some of the hats were only $150.

I explained that the hats were indeed very beautiful, but that I was accustomed to spending only about $12 in Mexico, but that these were of finer quality. I would easily spend $25 or $50 on one like this, but that $150 to $200 was simply unaffordable.

The search continues….

Posted on

IBM DeathStar / Down in the Dumps

I don’t usually write about my mood, but today I woke up feeling really down. Thankfully, I haven’t been sent into massive panic attacks over the issues described below. (One of the ironic points of living with an anxiety disorder and being a computer Geek is that a trigger point for my anxiety is problems with my own personal computer.) I am grateful that God convinced me to make a critical backup at just the right time, so everything important is intact and backed up.

It looks like I’m going to have to replace the old IBM drive on my primary computer. I noticed last night that it was an IBM DeskStar drive, which my friend Charlie Dunn said was so prone to failure they nicknamed them “DeathStars” when he was working in IT.

At first it looked like I had a problem with overheating—and that still may be the problem—although it seems to be getting worse. Last weekend Nichelle compalined that her e-mail was missing for a period of several months, but after rebooting the computer, everything was fine. I took the precaution of backing up our photos (most of which are already on CD as yet another backup), financials, and documents folders to a nonused partition on a drive I’d added in December.

A couple of days ago, I logged in to the computer and was notified that numerous updates were ready to be installed to Java and Windows XP. These updates had already been installed, and it was rather obvious what had happened—the primary drive, from which we have been booting for nearly all of the lifetime of the computer had disappeared, and the machine rebooted to an imperfect Windows setup on the second drive. (That setup was toasted, apparently, by a bad power supply, now replaced, that caused some data loss.)

Part of the time the IBM drive isn’t being recognized at all. After a certain amount of time—perhaps due to overheating, perhaps due to another type of drive failure, it won’t be recognized at all. Rebooting the system sometimes catches it and boots to the original drive, especially if the whole system has been off for a while. On a really hot day, or after a period of high disk activity, the drive will fail again and the system will reboot to the bad partition.

I’d like to try copying the image over to a new drive, using Ghost or whatever comes with the new drive (I’m leaning toward Seagate), as it would get me instantly up-and-running without having to reinstall. Of course, I do not have that much hope that the old drive will “hang in there” long enough for such a data-reading-intense operation to happen.

If that doesn’t work, I’m willing to bite the bullet and do a reinstall of XP Pro. However, there is a drive size limitation (I think it’s 120 GB) in the initial release of XP Pro (pre SP-1), which is what I have. Installing from an SP2 CD would be even sweeter, and less prone to failure than upgrading to SP2 from a previous version.

:: sigh ::

Editor’s note added June 13, 2005:

It looks like the drive is only flaking out when it overheats. I think it may fail soon, but letting it cool down with the machine off so far makes it recover. In the mean time, I’m keeping my data backed up daily, and when the drive does fail, I can boot to my “February” installation, and still run all my apps, so replacing the drive is now less urgent, and I can plan for this at my convenience.

Editor’s note added June 21, 2005:

No, it’s not necessarily related to overheating. Or, if it is, the drive is “overheating” at a temperature far below what its temperature sensor would indicate shoud be a problem.

Last night I was running at a reasonably cool 35 degrees C, when the whole things went kablooie. At first I had the usual trouble recognizing the drive. Then, when I finally got it to recognize, it was dog slow, and told me that Windows couldn’t boot because windows/system32/system was missing or corrupt. I had just finished backing up everyone’s e-mail, pictures, etc., except mine.

This morning, after leaving the system off overnight, I got the drive to be recognized by leaving it running for a few minutes, and everything seemed to be fine.

So heat may be playing a factor, but I think it’s time to just retire the drive.

I’m also looking at putting together a new system that would kick butt for as little as $500, but I also need to get this one back to a reliable state.

Editor’s note added June 27, 2005:

Wednesday night after church, I went out and grabbed a 120 GB Seagate Barricuda drive to replace the boot drive. On Wednesday, the IBM DeathStar drive seemed to fail completely, and I was looking at rebuilding my system.

On Thursday evening, I decided to give the IBM drive a few more tries, and got it to recognize at startup!

Hurriedly, I rebooted with the Seagate drive, hoping to be able to copy my IBM drive over to the Seagate drive, which would become the new boot drive, and save me from having to reinstall everything.

Seagate’s drive setup software is supposed to be easier to use than Western Digital’s. I actually didn”t find that to be the case. They both are about the same, but there were some nonintuitive points that I had to keep hitting the help file and documentation for. Once nice thing (which I did not need) is that Seagate lets you print installation instructions that are customized for what you’re actually doing.

It took hours for the drive to copy, mostly due to the read errors (all were being corrected, but it was having to perform each read multiple times) that SMART was reporting. Copying also appeared to be slow because of Seagate’s verification process, but getting an exact drive copy is far more important than getting a fast copy.

I only found three problems:

  1. Trying to access the System Restore tab crashed. It turned that is always caused by a drive copy process, and all I had to do to fix it was disable the System Restore service, then re-enable it.
  2. The next problem was a missing FrontPage icon (the link would work, but the icon itself was the default rectangle). It was looking for something under installs that clearly wasn’t around any more. I simply replaced the shortcuts with new ones.
  3. Lastly, the icons on my own logon are weird. Unless I run in 32-bit color mode, I get ugly 2d, 8-bit icons. It seems to happen only on my account. I find it disturbing, but it can’t be described as much more than a cosmetic issue. Some of the menu colors are off as well. Again, it’s no big deal, but it does bother me.

Other than that, the machine is working perfectly. My friend Phil Luchon came over and brough his machine. We played WarCraft and StarCraft. The Lego Star Wars game, which the kids play every moment we will allow (one hour on weekedays, 2 on weekends), which had been very prone to crashing and lockups, has not had a single failure in 3 days.

Everything involving disk access is much faster on the new drive: booting, loading big programs, virtual memory swapping, etc.

Posted on

The Force at Midnight (The Star Wars Episode III Experience)—No Spoilers

Being at the first showing of Star Wars Episdode III was really exciting in many ways.

Nichelle and I weaseled our way into attending the midnight opening at the Apple Tree Cinemas, along with our friends Mark and Shelby Sohmer, and six of their friends: Matt and Wendy Camillieri, Phil and Jennifer Wilson, Matt and Heather Graves. Their plan was to go out to eat ealier at the nearby 99 restaurant, and then head over between 9:30 and 10:00 to get into line.

I still had my Jedi costume from Episode I, and Nichelle surprised me by announcing that she would also create a costume. She found one of David’s action figures that would be possible to re-create, and hit the costume shops for makeup, thrift shops for the clothing, and a fabric store for a few dollars’ worth of material.

Nichelle and I had our Wednesday night Bible study at church, and then needed to install the baby sitter(s) at our house and change into our costumes, so dinner with the group was out for us. We got to the theater just before 11, and found the rest of our group waiting out back for the opening at 12:01 a.m.

Below are the costumes my wife Nichelle and I wore (and our son, Isaac, hamming it up). Nichelle is dressed as Jedi Master Luminara Unduli. (Disclaimer: This is a very unflattering picture of Nichelle, and not a very good idea of what my Jedi costume looked like, either.) Nichelle and I were asked to pose for pictures on our way in, and complimented on our costumes on our way out.

Star Wars fans are an interesting bunch, and the fandom was truly in Force (I couldn’t resist—sorry) that evening. The lines went out around the building in every direction. While waiting for the film, we saw dozens of costumes: Lea Organa, Darth Vader (thanks primarily to the Darth Vader Voice Changer helmet now available in toy stores everywhere), Boba Fett, an attempt at General Grievous (which I didn’t figure out until the next day), several jedi. Light sabers were in abundance, including a few very nice plasma-tube models with realistic sound effects and a very convincing (if permanently attached) blade, the plasma in which extended and retracted when it was powered up. (Of course, there is such as thing as going overboard with this.)

Most of our group was at the far back of the line, and when we got in, Nichelle and I discovered that only 8 seats had been saved instead of 10. We settled for what appeared to be the only two adjoining seats left, in the far left of the third row of the “orchestra pit” section of the theater—not really ideal viewing.

We ran into several people from our church, most of whom were guys who had left their wives at home with the children. (Personally, I hate attending anything without Nichelle, although a break from the kids is sometimes welcome.)

There was quite a bit of time to wait between opening the auditorium and starting the movie. Some fans brought laptops or portable DVD players and were watching the other Star Wars films. People were chatting, laughing, trying to make pithy (perhaps Sithy) remarks. The atmosphere was festive, yet full of anticipation.

The management held a costume contest, which we had not known about. (As a prize, in our auditorium they gave away the full-size Chewbacca cardboard stand-up which had been used for promotion before then.) About a dozen of us lined up in front of everyone, and a cheer-based voice vote was conducted. It became clear that the winner would not be the one with the best costume, but the favorite character. Nichelle and I did fairly well; ultimately, though, Boba Fett won out over Darth Vader. Vader then attacked Boba with a light saber, which generated laughter and applause.

Our friend Phil Luchon reported via cell phone that in his theater in Randolph, Massachusetts, people set off the fire alarm twice, and they had to evacuate the auditorium. A guy dressed as a stormtrooper yelled, “The first transport is away!” and everyone cheered.

Finally, although a few minutes late, the lights went down, and the trailers started. Of particular interest to our group was the Chronicles of Narnia (see also this site).

Then the magic began! (Except that the left half of our screen was badly out of focus, and I found that very distracting, especially being so close to the front. The manager of Apple Tree Cinemas is sending us VIP passes—there was, indeed, a problem with the lens.)

Without revealing much in this non-spoiler article, we really loved the film. Anakin’s complete turn to the Dark Side is indeed very disturbing. Yoda is amazing in both action and dramatic expression. The integration of the prequel and sequel story lines, and some nagging questions left over from Episode I are handled wonderfully. Lucas has finally succeeded in making a prequel that works.

When we got home, we discovered Isaac had written this note, and put it in front of our bedroom door:

We took the kids to see the film on Saturday afternoon. 🙂

Posted on

Who Is Geekier? Mark Sohmer or Doug Wilcox

This started when Matt Camillieri described my friend Mark Sohmer as a “wicked smaaart super geek.” Frankly, I do not think Sohmer is quite deserving of that title. The debate rages on, and I am taking this public.

I started by pointing out a little secret to Matt:

Did you ever notice that just before Mark comes up with a brilliant answer to a Geekworthy problem he sneaks off somewhere to use his cell phone? Do you believe this is merely coincidental?

See this post

–Doug

Mark responded with some foolishness about owning a BlackBerry, which he first capialitzed wrong, and then insisted was two words (which it isn’t).

I listed a few points in my favor:

I think, despite what Mark will try to claim, that the evidence speaks for
itself:

  1. I operate a Star Wars Web site that has received over 1/2-million hits.
  2. I have the highest score on the Geek Test of anyone I have ever met.
  3. I know the name of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe
    (Milliways), and the name of the leader of the “Disaster Area” band (Hotblack Desiato).
  4. My cube is furnished with a Lego Star Destroyer (as well as an X-Wing and Y-Wing). See http://stardestroyer.wilcoxfamily.net/.
  5. I own two binary timekeeping devices: A BCD (binary coded decimal) LED clock and a straight-binary digital watch.
  6. I hated Titanic (except for the few minutes where the ship sinks—that part was cool).
  7. I have built my own light saber.
  8. When house-shopping, a primary concern was having a good space to put my 1100+ volume library, about 1/3 of which is science fiction.
  9. When I heard on the news that Tom Clancy had bought the Vikings, I thought the reference was to the 1970s Martian spacecraft.
  10. I can only watch The Net as part of giving it the MST3K treatment.

I could go on …

—Doug Wilcox

Let the flames begin …

Posted on

I am an Idiot

[doug]Nichelle is making me post this, because I used it as leverage to get her to finally post an update on all the cute things Naomi is doing.

As you know, we had some computer problems, which seem to have all been solved. However, after upgrading to Trillian 3.0, Nichelle complained that she was not hearing any sound from Trillian.

We tested sound from other sources, Media Player, Flash animations, etc., and everything was fine, so I logged on to her screen and checked the Trillian preferences. Sound was enabled, and I looked everywhere trying to see what was wrong.

A few minutes later, she looked through the sound preferences for Trillian, and discovered that, despite the fact I had looked at the setting three or four times, I completely overlooked the checkbox marked, “Do not play sounds when I’m away.” Nichelle was, of course, as usual, in “away” mode all the time, because she tends to just be at the computer for a few minutes.

So, I get an “F” in troubleshooting for that day. ::: sigh :::

Posted on

Fighting the Sick Computer

[doug]Before you ask, I will point out that I run a hardware firewall (provided via my SMC Barricade router, and have Norton Antivirus 2005 doing e-mail scanning, realtime protection, and nightly full system scans, including, of course, using the latest virus definitions. This cannot be a virus problem!)

It all started just before Christmas. I really needed more hard drive space, so I decided to stop by Best Buy and grab a decent-sized (160 GB) Western Digital 7800 RPM drive. You’re probably thinking, “No problem, just throw the new drive in, and you’re all set.”

(I am going to outline this from here on, and will update the entry when I have a chance to provide more detailed information.)

  • Used the Western Digital utilities to copy the system and secondary partiition to new partitions on the new drive.
  • I begin booting from teh new drive, with the old drive attached as a secondary drive.
  • I am amazed at the new drive’s performance increase.
  • After 3 days, the new drive slows to a crawl, and shows massive time-to-read errors in its SMART monitoring system, but no data loss or bad sectors.
  • I exchange the new drive, and repeat the process.
  • Network games that are heavy on processing power start locking up the system. I suspect a power supply overload, so I disconnect the old drive. The problems go away.
  • At the beginning of February, a bunch of System level-files go missing (application data like the install file for Microsoft FrontPage). A bunch of DLLs stop loading. The only real symptoms are missing icons, the inability to update old installs, a 5-minute launch time on our ZoomBrowser, and System Restore won't come up.
  • I spend days using the Event Viewer. There are no hardware failures or disc errors reported, and no explanation for this.
  • In mid February, the unthinkable happens. David puts in Knights of the Old Republic, and the CD icon comes up, but the launcher never appears.
  • I kill the process and log his account off. When I jump to my account, I get a notice that an error occurred with one of the registry files, and that Windows had restored the registry from a backup.
  • I reboot, and discover that I can’t get into my account. Several of the other accounts have reverted to their “new user” states—the default desktop, no e-mail configuration, etc.

    • I fear that more folders have disappeared, and that our e-mail is among them. I start a search for inbox.dbx, under my Documents and Settings folder, and it finds nothing.

  • My fifth search produces results. Our e-mail is safe.
  • I reinstall the drive old drive from December, and synchronize our files.
  • Earlier this week, the same registry problem occurs. this time I run system restore from the previous night’s automatic recovery point, and everything returns to normal

I still have not found the source of the problem, and am very anxious while wondering if it will occur again. Maybe the registry fault is an errant piece of Knights of the Old Republic, or even caused by a dirty CD. The game itself was copied from the “old” D-partition to the new bigger one, so something could have gone wrong in a strange way. I’ll have to give reinstalling it a try.

Posted on

Doug, the Haiku Master

Stream unvisited—
An update is required.
I wait forever.

Okay, the above title is an exagerration, but let me explain. We are using a new version of the source control system in place at Kronos. (We switched to this new system—which is not a Kronos product—about six months ago, from VSS, which sometimes produced catastrophic problems, and was not living up to our needs). The latest release of this new product promised some highly beneficial new features, but, primarily because Kronos is pushing the product well beyond its typical implementation, there have been some “performance issues.”

After receiving a notice last week that performance was really slow, but the system was not locked up, instead of a whine, I posted back a quick Haiku. Haiku, at least as we learned it in high school, is Japanese poetry consisting of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. There are variations on the definition, especially when working in English, but the format tends to produce poetry that appears to be deeply insightful at best, and pithy at worst.

I received quite a few compliments on the e-mail, but didn’t realize how notorious I’d become until a co-worker who I do not believe I’ve ever even seen stopped me in the stairwell and asked, “You’re the guy who wrote that Haiku, aren’t you?”

Here are a few of the other comments:

  • This is most masterful.
  • Thanks Doug. This helps make the pain of [the source control product] more bearable.
  • Very nice!
  • {:-)
  • This is great. (-:
    I’m sure you've seen all those “error message haiku” that have been circulating for years. Some of them are very funny as well. My favorite was:

    With searching comes loss
    And the presence of absence:
    “My Novel” not found.

  • Congratulations tovarisch Doug Wilcox: you are now awarded the “Udarnik of the Month” title. Now write more haikus “sverx plana” before the end of October. (“sverx plana” means something like “above the required quota”).
  • bravo!
  • Excellent haiku of the day. Thank you!
  • Excellent!
  • LOL!!!

    How about:

    Jboss starting up,
    Machine useless for all tasks.
    Gaze at screen saver.

    To which I responded:

    JBoss now better;
    Standards can be pleasant:
    One Gig of RAM.

    OK, that one made my cat wake up when I laughed!

So am I popular, or notorious?

Posted on

Skunks Do Not Always Spray When Surprised

[doug]Skunks don’t bother me. Really. I actually find the complex smell of the skunk scent to be pleasant, except when it is exceptionally strong. The other night (or morning, I have no idea of the actual time), Nichelle was conducting a late-night grocery procurement operation, and had the nerve to wake me up to help bring the groceries in.

As I walked down our back steps, I surprised a skunk, who made a fast retreat in the other direction; I was so sleepy I was already three steps away from the skunk before I processed exactly what had happened.

Now, I know it's possible to “tail” a skunk—pick one up by the tail—which will prevent it from spraying. It’s a risky business, especially as I have no idea how to put one down again. Maybe I can get my kids to try it.

Posted on

Online [PC/Video] Gaming: An Industry Name Finally “Gets” It

From this article at Reuters:

The new platforms are expected to offset what Florin [Gerhard Florin, Electronic Arts’ head of European publishing] sees as a disappointing early start for online gaming. The prospect of amassing a core of gamers who pay a monthly subscription to battle other global combatants on the Internet has yet to take off.

Florin attributed the slow take-up to a nagging fear that a gamer could be humiliated in challenging an unknown foe.

“We expected millions of people wanting to play the online games and we have found that, no, they don’t. There is a pretty easy reason. If you play tennis and you don’t know your opponent you are careful whether you should play against him. The same is true with online. If you go online you could be slaughtered or cheated,” he said.

Overcoming the social aspect of online gaming, he added, will hold back the market in the short term.

I think this is probably the most frustrating thing in online gaming. It is almost impossible to win (other than when I am playing with a known group of friends), because those who do game online tend to be those who spend far too much time gaming online. So it isn’t that one might be humiliated, it’s that one will be humiliated. Of course, years ago I was beaten at Command and Conquer by an eight-year-old. When one throws in “unsportsmanlike behavior”—everything from player-killers to abusive language—as well as lag time and trouble keeping a connection to many servers, the appeal of single-player games is obvious.

I do like to play against human opponents. My son John is very challenging, especially at WarCraft III, but our skills are near enough that I can beat him when I really work at it. When I play with Isaac and David we either team up against computer-AI-driven opponents or give them one or more computer partners to help balance things out (except in the Jedi Knight series, where David needs no help). Overall, though, it is rare that online gaming is very fulfilling to the average gamer.