Help Me Buy A Laptop

It’s time to buy a new laptop. I don’t want to spend a lot. I want everything. Are they necessarily mutually exclusive?

Let me throw this out now – your advice is solicited and will be appreciated. Where to buy? What to buy? Any tidbit!

I might not do what you suggest, but I can assure you, right now I don’t know what to do!

Helaine and Stef both have Dell laptops, which they’re happy with. I am using a very old (PII 300 128 mb RAM) Dell laptop which is built like a tank! I had a Sony and it always seemed fragile.

With all that experience, Dell seems logical. I’m willing to consider anything.

I want a small laptop with a high resolution screen. I’ve looked at the Dell Inspiron E1405 with a 14.1″ screen and the WXGA+ upgrade (1440×900 pixels). Maybe a 12″ screen would be OK too, though I’m not sure I want to give up the pixels (though I’d gladly give up the pounds).

Dell offers loads of choices for the CPU (the ‘brains’ in the package), but there’s very little documentation to actually explain the difference between any two. What’s the difference between a Core Duo, Core 2 Duo and Pentium dual core?

The same goes with the new four flavored Windows Vista. How ‘deep’ into their marketing must I plunge to know which is which? I think Vista Home Premium will be fine – though I’d just as soon use Windows XP (or Linux, if I could get away with it… which I can’t).

Since I do a lot of photo editing, I suppose more memory is better – maybe 2Gb? I really don’t know. I’ve heard varying things on how memory intensive and efficient Vista is.

I am extremely disappointed with Dell’s website. No matter what I enter, I am unsure if I’m getting the best deal! There are always coupon codes listed on websites like FatWallet and Techbargains, but I’ve never seen them really bring the price down. If you add those online discounts, you lose Dell’s seemingly automatic discounts. And, it would seem, no one really pays the posted price.

Also, Dell’s site does a terrible job in explaining the differences in the CPUs that are available. The site has links that promise this info, but fall terribly short.

As a Dell stockholder (minor position in my retirement account) I am disappointed that their website makes the buying process more, not less, confusing! If it’s baffling to me, a knowledgeable power user, how do neophytes know what they’re looking at?

Anyway, advice is being sought. Let the games begin. Aloha.

Tech Support Times Three

I have three tech support stories to tell. Two are brief, the third is not. They all have relatively happy endings.

The first concerns a phone call I received yesterday from the company that provides much of the on-air weather equipment we use at work. We’d had a terrible problem, which they fixed. Now they wanted some log files.

The logs were needed because they fixed the problem, but weren’t sure how!

That sounds terrible, though it’s not as unusual as it seems. Points to them for asking me to send the files. These log will help them understand what they did for us, so they can do it for everyone.

The second story concerns my laptop. It is, in computer time, ancient. There’s a sticker on the front attesting to the fact that it was designed for Windows 98!

If you’re technically inclined, it’s a PII-300 with 128 mb of RAM for memory and 2 mb more for video.

If that was a meaningless blur, it’s got about the same horsepower as a tricycle.

A while ago, I upgraded it to a heavily customized version Windows XP. I carefully turned off as much as I could to preserve as much of this machine’s minimal power as was possible. It’s still a hog.

This has been a hacker machine for me. I’ve experimented with it by swapping hard drives in and out. Until today it had a tiny 8 gb drive.

With a weekend trip coming up, I wanted more storage, so I swapped in a 20 gb drive last night. Windows XP was on the drive, so I freshened some programs with newer versions and then went to reboot.

Before the power went off, Windows told me it had to install some updates… 57 updates!

Are they serious? Sure, this drive had been out of service for a while, but were there really that many updates (mostly security related) to XP? And this version had already been inoculated with SP2 and other fixes.

I took a shower while the laptop did its thing.

Tech support story three is a little more troubling. It started with phone calls from Matt Scott, one of our meteorologists at the TV station.

When he went to fire up his Dell desktop machine, it quickly crashed into a Blue Screen of Death or BSOD! The BSOD screen is cryptic, but it hinted at problems with the boot sector. That’s serious.

Before Matt got to me, he had spoken with Dell tech support. Their solution, after a few tests, was to send the drive to a forensic computer lab where, for $1,800, it could be resurrected!

He brought the PC in to work and Jeff Bailey, our webuy, began to work on it. I did some scouting around Google and found what typically causes this particular BSOD.

HINT: If you ever have a computer problem, write down exactly what’s on the screen and search for it on Google. You are not the first person with this problem. You can often find solutions just by looking. It’s very important to search for the exact words you see.

“Matt, do you have any disks that came with the PC,” I asked. My suspicion was, Dells don’t come with disks… and it hadn’t.

I went through the station looking for a Windows XP CD. Yes, what I was doing probably violates some stipulation in the end user licensing agreement – sue me.

By the time I returned with the disk, Bailey had the machine on its side. A panel had been removed from the case, exposing the innards to the world. As it turns out, that wasn’t necessary, though it makes Jeff and me look like &#252ber Geeks (as if knowing how to make a “&#252” on the screen isn’t enough).

Computer repair is modern day sorcery. You must follow a number of steps, none actually documented, before you begin to fix the trouble. We started by reconfiguring the BIOS to boot from a CD instead of the hard drive and loading XP’s recovery console.

Matt looked sheepish – fearful his pictures, video and documents were about to get trashed.

We lucked out. Matt’s problem was the same as most of the others I’d read about. It took a few hours, but slowly but surely, his computer fixed itself, rebuilding files and reconstructing the recalcitrant boot sector.

Why couldn’t the Dell tech fix this? No clue. They should be ashamed of themselves for the solution they recommended. That’s totally unacceptable.

Why doesn’t Windows XP do this on its own without demanding a disk most users don’t have? Again, no clue. Microsoft should be ashamed of that and for its often meaningless BSODs.

Bottom line – always have a geek at the ready… preferably two!

Viruses – Never Say Never

Viruses are the scourge of the Internet.

Earlier this week, I told my friend Farrell (always searching for better, more vigorous virus protection) how I use none and had never been hit by a virus!

Oops. Somehow I got two at once!

I turned on my old laptop&#185 when I came home last night and there they were. I’d probably picked them up the night before, but they needed a reboot to activate. They didn’t come via email, because I don’t get mail on that machine. They must have come through Firefox or (more likely) Windows Media Player.

They were both sitting in the system toolbar at the lower right of my screen and one was popping up dialog boxes ever few seconds. The sentence structure hinted of slightly broken English. That was my cue it wasn’t what it claimed to be – a warning from Microsoft that I’d been infected and needed to download protection.

The first of the virii cleaned up with no trouble. In fact, it had an entry in the add/remove programs dialog, as if it were legit. The second wasn’t quite as easy.

I can’t tell you its name except to say its toolbar signature is a red circle with an “X” in the middle.

A little sleuthing turned up some older entries, but none seemed to exactly match my poison. What I caught was probably an adaptation of an earlier virus.

We’re talking about crooks and thieves here. They’re not buying their software at CompUSA.

On the inside, my virus was programmed to hide in plain site, creating a new, randomly named, program each time it ran. Find the virus, stop the program – it creates another.

I found what I think is the ‘seed,’ a program called winstall.exe, as a new entry in my registry. It was scheduled to run each time the computer rebooted.

I did some manual pruning, removing a line from the registry, then allowed AOL’s new virus scanner&#178 (actually the very highly rated Kaspersky anti-virus) do its thing. As is my custom in these cases, I ran it in ‘safe mode,’ then ran it again.

I’ll keep an eye on the little laptop to make sure it hasn’t been permanently compromised. I’ve heard of cases where the virus goes dormant for a while only to return when your defenses are down.

I’d hate to have my computer responsible for sending out thousands of spam emails (as compromised computers often do) or interrupting my surfing with pop-up messages.

I’m upset I allowed this to happen to me! I’m supposed to be the guy who fixes other people’s computers and then, disapprovingly, shakes my head.

It wasn’t a virus as much as it was an injection of humility.

&#185 – This is a really old machine – a Dell PII 300 laptop with 256 mb RAM. It is ploddingly slow for many things, but easily handles web surfing and poker while I’m in the family room.

&#178 – AOL’s virus scanner is free, and you don’t have to join AOL to get it. I suppose its in their best interest to clean up the Internet as best they can.

How Do You Deal With It?

I like Noah Finz, our sports guy at the TV station. I like his wife, Kendra, too. I’ve known her a lot longer than I’ve known Noah. They are both technophobes.

Actually, being a little skittish in the face of technology puts them in step with most everyone, which leads me to what happened today.

Noah’s laptop was old. He wanted to upgrade to faster hardware, especially with a two year old, infant and very nice camera for picture taking.

Most people would have unplugged the old machine, plugged in the new and then forgotten what was left on the laptop. Sure, they’re networked together, but how many people know how that works? Few!

I popped in the car and headed to Fairfield County.

His Dell desktop machine was the most quiet PC I’ve ever heard – startling, since the trend has been in the opposite direction. It needed a Firewire and wireless network card. No sweat, except it only had two slots, one of which was already filled by a dial-up modem.

“Put this away,” I told Noah as I handed it to him in an anti-static bag. Truthfully, it will never be used.

The Firewire card was effortlessly installed suing native Windows drivers. The wireless card was more trouble. It didn’t conform to Belkin’s instructions!

It finally installed because I ad libbed. How do they sell and support these things when the installation process isn’t remotely connected to what’s in the instructions?

As with Helaine’s computer, this Dell came loaded with ‘nagware.’ I don’t want programs bugging me. Some are difficult to remove. Others are confusingly described. Most have limited lifespans, meaning you’re later expected to shell out more money for the software that came on your PC!

Hats off to Cablevision, Noah’s ISP. Their Optonline cable modem service has an automated configuration tool which set up Outlook Express correctly on the first try.

We installed Picasa, MS Office, the new free AOL anti-virus suite and a few others. Then it was time to move photos and documents. I couldn’t get his computers to speak to each other. I have no idea why, nor do I know how I finally encouraged them to have limited access to each other.

It just happened.

You never accomplish 100% on a mission of mercy like this, but we came close. Again, I have no idea how Noah or Kendra could have done this themselves, and they can’t be alone.

What do most people do? Or do people like me just drive around on weekends helping out and playing with little kids – they couldn’t have been cuter.

How I Got MythTV

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I accumulate computer stuff. And, as more equipment comes in, more parts move to the attic where they await… let’s call it reassignment.

I’ve just rebuilt my ‘main’ machine, replacing some of its innards. A month or so ago, a friend’s sister gave me her discarded PC. And, with Steffie at college and the proud owner of a very pretty Dell laptop, I have her old AMD500.

My junk pile is large and old. Most of what I’ve got is way behind the curve. From time-to-time I’ve forced myself to throw stuff away. It’s a painful experience.

Still, I recently found myself with an old video tuner/capture card, an older Nvidia video card, Steffie’s 500 mHz machine and a posting on digg.com (actually, here are all the Digg postings about MythTV).

The world’s best HTPC&#185 distribution now includes MythTV 0.19.fixes and lots of under-the-hood improvements since R5A30.2. Everyone should upgrade from previous versions. So stop reading and go download it via bittorrent at http://mythic.tv !

Perfectly clear now? It wasn’t to me, but a little light went on over my head.

They are referring to KnoppMyth. KnoppMyth is based on MythTV, a free set of programs to turn a computer into a DVR. KnoppMyth is referred to as “The world’s best HTPC distribution” because it allows you to put a disk in a computer and come back with the job totally done – as long as you want a computer that’s nothing but a DVR.

OK not quite that easy, but close enough.

Yesterday I downloaded files, burned a CD and began to install… and install… and install. I had no idea what I was doing and refused to read any documentation. Not only that, one critical part of the puzzle (a router) was unplugged and I didn’t realize it.

Sometime late last night, my job was sort of done. I still had to configure the system to recognize my particular hardware. And, I did.

Holy cow – I have a mainly free Tivo! That’s the point of this entry.

This old machine is somewhat limited. I can’t watch and record at the same time and the quality is good, not great. Still, I took an old computer and turned into something (oh – I hate to say this) useful.

If they’re listening at my cable company, this thing is better than the DVR I pay you for! That’s not because of the quality, but because of the amazing program guide and the ability to program it online!

All the programming info is parsed into a MySQL (if those initials mean nothing, don’t worry) database. That means it’s quickly and easily searched and manipulated.

I think I can stream what I record to any computer here on my home network or on the Internet. How cool is that? I began to follow the instructions for that conversion, but decided there wasn’t enough time tonight and temporarily ditched that idea.

This will keep me busy for a while.

&#185 – HTPC means Home Theater PC… I think.

I Am Currently Twiddling

Steffie’s laptop computer had a run-in with some juice earlier this afternoon. It works fine, with the exception of the Enter, space bar, and some other keys.

OK – under those circumstances it might as well be dead.

I need to contact Dell for service, since we have the ‘all hazards’ protection. I thought, with a college student, this was a good idea. Two points for Geoff.

I went to the Dell site looking for support. Buying it was much easier than finding it!

I waited on the phone, but it’s tough to stay on the phone when you’re at work. Instead, I’m trying their on-line chat function.

There’s obviously a lot of estimating going on. At one point it told me I had 5:12 to wait. A few minutes later it was up to 5:44, even though there was one less person in the queue.

On-line chats have many advantages. For instance, I’ll never know if “Chad” or whomever I get to talk to is really in India or closer to home (don’t bet on closer to home).

02/13/2006 08:26:32PM Agent (Gaurav_01113232): “Thank you for contacting Dell Consumer Hardware Warranty Support Chat. My name is Gaurav. Please give me a minute to review your question.”

He’s here. It’s Gaurav. Where’s Chad?

Chatting for tech support is like living life in slow motion. It’s excruciatingly slow. On the other hand, with my typos from time-to-time, he’s not the only one who is speaking like a foreigner&#185.

02/13/2006 08:38:56PM Agent (Gaurav_01113232): “I request for a minute more please.”

I’ve just paused while finishing my chat. I am pleasantly surprised. Again, we bought the full, no holds barred coverage.

02/13/2006 08:30:55PM Agent (Gaurav_01113232): “Well as per you warranty there are two option first to send the system to depot for complete check, it will take 6-8 days.”

02/13/2006 08:31:20PM Agent (Gaurav_01113232): “Or I will send technician or the key board with proper tolls and lay out to get it replaced.”

02/13/2006 08:32:00PM Agent (Gaurav_01113232): “Technician will not examine the system completely as it can only be done in depot , he will only replace the keyboard of the system.”

02/13/2006 08:32:14PM Agent (Gaurav_01113232): “Please let me know what service call should I create .”

I chose Stef’s dorm. Trust me, this is much better than it could have been and certainly easier than taking it or sending it to a depot.

I think Steffie is impressed. I am certainly impressed. I’ll report back when the laptop is fixed.

Oh – if you’re hanging around and run into Gaurav, let him know he made a friend in Connecticut. I just wish he worked here too.

&#185 – Gaurav, as it turns out, is in New Delhi.

SonyBMG’s Rootkit – Real World Story

I have written a few times about SonyBMG’s rootkit, originally intended to protect songs on their CDs. All my writing has been in the abstract, looking at the whole situation from afar.

Tonight I got this email, and the problem has come closer to home.

Geoff,

I have been reading your blog since you started it. Therefore I thought of you recently when my computer was harmed. I have been online for about 7 years and have had my current computer for 3 years. NO problems with virus’ etc. I have been very careful with my online activity.

Now comes the problem. I am a Neil Diamond fan (no laughing) for at least 30 years. Therefore my husband bought his latest CD “12 Songs” the minute it was released. Not his best but still a good thing after 4 years with no released CD’s. Unbeknown to us this CD was infected with XCP software. I played it in my computer and it disabled my CD and CDRW drives.

I contacted Dell techs (no help). I never mentioned the CD. Next step….I called our computer repair man. He spent two visits eliminating possible reasons for the unresponsive drives. I did tell him that the last CD in the drive was the ND/CD. No problems with my BIOS, drives, motherboard etc. So he determined it was my Windows OS that was corrupted.

Upon starting the repair disk it seemed to be working. NOT– it kept looping. At this point we wanted to return to the computer as it was. Again it wouldn’t allow this.

So Windows had to have a clean install. You know what that means!!!!

Lost all hard drive and software and everything that has been done on this computer for 3 years. Frustration. You bet. I am trying to restore my poor computer one step, one day at a time. What a lot of unnecessary work. I would have expected this from my online time NOT a CD. If I had ANY idea that this was possible I could have prevented this.

We still had no proof that the ND/CD was to blame. Then by chance my husband came across an announcement on the SONY/BMG site that explains the infected CD problem.

All the info is a day late and a dollar short for me and my computer.

All SONY wants to do is replace the CD.

Why has this problem not been more widely shared with the public? It is a huge problem. 52 artists have been affected. AMAZON.com has pulled many many CD’s. This IS big news affecting a large part of the music listening population. However I found all of this out too late.

Do you think this is right? And where do you suggest I go from here?

Hope this isn’t too long and will be of some interest to you.

Thank you for any consideration.

Barbara (last name removed)

Seymour, CT

I told Barbara to write our state’s Attorney General. This is the kind of case he often takes.

Truthfully, I don’t know what Sony’s responsibility is, or if there is a responsibility. Obviously, there is real damage and real costs incurred by Barbara.

I don’t know how Sony will deal with it. So far, their position has slowly evolved as if it was being formulated based on response to their last action. I’m not sure there are provisions for the Barbaras of the world… or if there ever will be.

I wonder how Neil Diamond feels about all this?

JetBlue Emergency Update

When JetBlue’s Airbus A320 landed with its nose gear perpendicular to its motion, I wondered if anyone would try and connect this incident with JetBlue’s maintanence, performed in El Salvador and primarily by mechanics not certified by the FAA.

JetBlue doesn’t even fly out of the US, except to get its planes repaired or maintained.

Today the story hit the Washington Post. I’ve attached their story to the link below.

Continue reading “JetBlue Emergency Update”

Another Computer Repair

I went to dinner by myself last night. Helaine and Steffie are away. At work all the usual suspects were otherwise engaged. I headed to the Greek Olive.

After my omelet, I schmoozed a little with Tony, the owner. Somehow we got to talking about computers and he showed me an old laptop he had which he had been told was incapable of going on the Internet.

Sheesh! This is such a big crock. The amount of money spent on new hardware for little purpose amazes me. Usually it’s a machine that has slowed down. The owner figures it’s worn out. It doesn’t work that way.

There’s no doubt, in today’s environment this machine is slow. But, for Internet surfing and reading email, it’s fine. Well, it’s nearly fine. It needs about $20 in additional memory. I’ll get to that in a minute.

To me, seeing an unused computer is like having a puppy follow me home. I am unable to help myself.

The first thing I normally do is look for the computer online to see if anyone else has any advice which will make my job easier. A label on the cover says “Viva Book Hand Technologies.” That was worthless. Nothing showed up on Google.

Imagine how obscure a laptop must be to not even show on Google! After all, this is Google, where even typos can bring thousands of hits.

The bottom panel of the laptop had a little more info, including the FCC ID number. That wasn’t much help, but it was some. The manufacturer, long since gone, was located in Taiwan. The laptop had been sold under a few names including ILUFA and Chaplet as the M175.

It has an AMD K6 processor running at 300 mHz. There is 32 mb of RAM. That’s very little (which is why I’ll order Tony some more). The hard drive is 3 GB. That’s tiny, but only if this machine is going to be loaded with programs. As a barebones mail and web machine, 3 GB will suffice.

I copied the license information down and reloaded the operating system from scratch. Then I went to Microsoft and ran all the updates.

Though the laptop is the computing equivalent of one of my Dell laptops, it was very sluggish. I ‘borrowed’ a 64 MB memory stick and threw it in. Still sluggish.

When I scrolled the screen it was painfully slow. Text rippled from top to bottom instead of smooth motion. That is a warning sign that the video driver is no good. I went to the Device Manager in the Control Panel and, sure enough, a generic video driver was being used and a warning was posted.

I installed Belarc adviser, an excellent program that scans and reports on your hardware and software. It could identify the video system. Then I looked at what was being reported to Windows. Just some gibberish and coded data that I couldn’t uncode.

If the manufacturer were still alive… or if this had been a popular model, I’d be able to go to school based on other people’s queries. There was nothing.

I went to Drivershq, loaded up their Driver Detective and hoped for the best. Bingo! The video system was an old Chips and Technologies device. C&T doesn’t exist anymore, but their drivers live on.

Before long I had the drivers going and the screen responding pretty quickly. Make no mistake. This is not a speedy machine. It’s an ‘it will do’ machine.

Right now, I’m finishing up by installing Flash, Java, Adobe Reader and a few other things Tony will need. Then I’ll go back and ‘strip’ the operating system, turning off programs and services he doesn’t really need which only serve to make a system like this more slovenly than it needs to be.

This will never be a P4 3.8 gHz machine – but it doesn’t need to be. On the Information Superhighway it’s a 1996 Chevy Cavalier – and most of the time that’s plenty.

What Have I Forgotten?

We’re about 12 hours from airplane departure for Las Vegas. What have I forgotten?

Most of my packing is done by Helaine. It’s much better that way since I have the same sense of fashion I had in 1967 – and that’s not a good thing. I do have some responsibilities, like my toiletries and electronics.

The toiletries are easy, because I’m taking what I use on a daily basis and just throwing it in a little bag. Everything is congregated around the sink. If anything looks like there’s not enough for a week, I just take a new one and leave the old one for my return. Brainless. I’m perfect for this.

Electronics is different, because I’m taking things I might not use everyday – things which are spread out across my home office. Do I have the right cables for the camera? The right peripherals for the computer? Forget the 10/100 PCMCIA card and forget about the Internet. Or, is it 802.11b? I took one of those adapters too… and a dial-up modem. Who can tell? The Dell laptop has a charger with the longest power cable I’ve ever seen on an electronic device. You can plug it in in a different time zone if you want.

I have 12 AA NiMH batteries and three chargers. The digital camera sucks juice like crazy. There’s also a small can of compressed air. Lately, I have noticed some dust inside the camera lens. The air gets rid of it. Is compressed air restricted by TSA in this post-9/11 era?

I’ve finished up the last of my school work, taking three weeks of classes in two courses over the last few days. As the week goes by I’ll be able to check the online bulletin board and watch my grades pop up. It is very unlike me to be early for anything – certainly not school!

My last assignment comes at 12:01 AM. I will be on Southwest’s site getting our boarding passes. With no assigned seats, getting a Southwest “A” pass is crucial.

Then it’s to bed, never letting one thought out of my mind. What have I forgotten?

Laptop – Visiting It In The Hospital

Last week Helaine turned the laptop on. The screen flickered and then – poof – gone. I took it to a local repair shop where they said they could fix it, quickly. Now, a week later, it’s not fixed and I haven’t heard from them!

Today, I took a trip to PCW, the laptop’s sick bay. When I got there, the tech was actually working on it. The keyboard was askew, other pieces had been removed and there was a perplexed look on Omar’s (the technician) face.

I don’t want to go into the sordid details, but the laptop with no video is now a laptop that boots sometimes – and still has no video. It’s very troubling.

Helaine needed some files, so I offloaded 3 Cd’s worth of data. But, the laptop is still on the bench.

We’ve got vacation coming up, and I’d rather bring that laptop than the older, slower Dell. This story is not finished.

Sony Laptop to the Hospital

We have two laptops at home. One is an older Dell which has become mine… and a Sony Vaio PCG-FXA59 which Helaine adopted and used to be mine. When I woke up this morning Helaine gave me the bad news, the Vaio had gone bye-o (I’m sorry – unavoidable).

Actually, what she saw was the screen blink a few times and then nothing but black. For the past few months the laptop had exhibited a reddish tint on its screen when starting up – that now seems to have been a symptom of the impending doom.

I brought the machine upstairs and plugged a monitor into its external VGA port. It worked. So, the laptop is alive, the screen just won’t fire.

I could have sent the laptop to Sony, which meant shipping it to San Diego. Their repairs are flatrate, with LCD repairs costing $600. That seemed too pricey. Instead I went to a place I’d seen advertised on TV, PCW Computers in Orange. They charge $30 to do a diagnosis and then separately for the repair.

The funny thing is, in their ad they reference their location by saying, “across the street from CompUSA.”

I walked in and it was unlike anything I had ever seen. People were carrying in towers mostly. And there were plenty of them. Behind the counter were a number of workstations, with monitors. There is no shortage of computers to be fixed, I suppose.

My hope is the problem will be the inverter (which creates the voltage to light the bulbs that illuminate the LCD) or the Cold Cathode lights themselves. Neither are incredibly expensive (though I’ll assume the total cost of repair will be at least $200). If the actual LCD went, this laptop is toast – and not worth fixing.

In the meantime, Helaine has adopted the Dell.

Flag Day in Hudson, NY

All the photos on this page, and lots of parade pictures, can be seen in my photo gallery.

Back in 1969, when I got my first paid on-air radio job in Fall River, Massachusetts at WSAR (Ahoy there matey, it’s 14-80) I met Skippy Ross – a fellow disk jockey. He was older, wiser, married, and the station’s music director. We became friends.

Later, in 1971, I went to WBT in Charlotte, NC. Skippy was already there… he just wasn’t Skippy anymore. In Worcester, MA he had become Skip Tyler and now he was Bob Lacey.

For nearly 35 years he has been Bob Lacey, working at the radio and television stations at 1 Julian Price Place, and becoming a Charlotte institution. He and his partner, Sheri Lynch run a woman friendly&#185 morning drive radio show, syndicated across the country.

Bob and I have remained friends through all this time. When my life was falling apart in the mid-70s, Bob took time off and drove with me through the Western United States. We have shared good times and bad longer than most married couples – and with a better relationship.

On-the-air Bob refers to me as his ‘gold best friend.’ It’s an honor I treasure.

We are two very different people. I think the difference can be best explained in a little story. The year was 1973 and I was leaving Charlotte, moving to Cleveland (based, as it turns out, on bad information from someone who wanted me to leave). It was my last day there and I was getting a new tire put on my car. Bob joined me at the tire store on Independence Boulevard, a busy Charlotte business district back then.

We went to the Coke machine. Bob went first. His soda plopped from the slot, he put the bottle into the opened, pushed down and was ready to drink. I got my bottle, went to the opener, pushed down and… soda all over me. It was as if a midget was in the machine, waiting for me to shake the bottle.

To me, Bob has always seems suave and in control. I have always seemed like an unmade bed – scattered and kinetic.

We are both lucky, because in spite of setbacks in our lives, we’ve done well – both with our careers and families. And, for two old guys (and he is much older and very, very short… make that very, very, very short) we’ve aged well.

I was on the phone with Bob late last week. It was the usual chit chat. I asked him what he was doing over the weekend and he told me he and Sheri (his radio partner) were flying to Hudson, NY for Flag Day. There’s a parade, which they ride in, the emcee from the reviewing stand.

Hudson is a few hours from here – a nice drive if it’s a nice day. There’s some highway to take you away from the urban areas and then it’s small, sparsely traveled 2-lane roads through rolling hills. The trip goes up through Northwest Connecticut, cuts through the Southwest corner of Massachusetts and then west into New York and the Hudson River.

I decided to go.

Since I knew neither Helaine nor Stefanie would want to take this road trip, I prepared a geek’s journey. My camera was ready with two sets of batteries and two flash memory cards (I could have taken 350 high resolution photos, but only took 273). I put my old Dell laptop on the passenger’s seat, plugged an inverter into the cigarette lighter and threw a GPS antenna onto the armrest between the seats. This trip would be well documented.

The trip up was uneventful. The weather superb – truly perfect. Though I had printed directions before leaving the house, the GPS receiver was really helpful, showing me my turns before I got to them.

With the top down, on a sunny day, there are lots of sensations. The warmth of the sun (I was worried about the warmth of the sun on my laptop, which I removed from the seat and put on the floor while still in Connecticut), the breeze, the aroma.

Springtime has good aromas. There weren’t many restaurants to pass at this time of day on this route. I did smell freshly cut grass (a watermelon-like smell), freshly cut lumber (as I passed a mill) and a dairy farm. They were all distinct, but the dairy farm was certainly the most pungent.

I have a radar detector mounted in the convertible. When I first bought the car, I had electricity brought from an interior light directly to the unit. It only went off once on the trip, and then because a police car was going the opposite direction and must have had his transmitter on.

By the time I got to Hudson, the streets downtown were closed off for the parade. This was a bigger deal than I thought – and as I’d later find out the longest parade I’d ever seen.

The main street of Hudson, Warren Street, was lined with happy people. For some reason I expected this to be a lily white town. That was not the case. There was just about every shade of person imaginable, and they were all out on the street together ready for the parade.

It seems like Hudson is a town that was, and possibly still is, down on its luck. I walked on cracked sidewalks with tall weeds growing through them. There were small houses with chipped paint. On Warren Street itself the homes were old but freshly painted. It had the aura of gentrification – a two edged sword which rebuilds and displaces.

I moved toward the river, where the reviewing stand had been erected, and waited for Bob and Sheri. They arrived, first in the parade, sitting in a convertible. It is only now, looking at the photo, that I realize it is a used car, for sale, with the price tag nicely affixed to the windshield. Still, it looked great rolling down Warren Street, and Bob and Sheri were enjoying every second of it.

We chatted for a few seconds and then they made their way to the microphone and the parade began. It was a bad day to have a fire in the Hudson Valley, because I believe every piece of fire equipment for a hundred miles was rolling down Warren Street – even a blue fire truck from Philmont, NY! Along with the fire equipment there were policemen and soldiers and and organizations, plus kid from schools and sports leagues.

This was the longest parade I had ever seen. As we approached the 3 hour mark, I turned to a policeman standing near me and asked, “Are they going around for a second time?”

There was a sad moment. A float in memory of a local soldier who had been killed in Iraq. The base of the float was full of American flags – one for each death in this war. In a glass case, the soldier’s uniform was displayed. Very, very sad.

The parade ended and Bob, Sheri and I hopped onto a golf cart to head down to the riverside where the festivities would continue. The scene was very much like those beeping carts that careen through the terminals at airports, taking people with more pull than us to the next gate.

It was getting late. I had a drive ahead of me. They had autographs and then a plane ride back to Charlotte. We’d all get home around the same time.

I wish I could have spent more time with Bob, and with Sheri who I like a lot. Bob and I are already trying to figure out a time for next summer. But maybe there will be time sooner.

The good thing about gold friends is, their friendship will wait.

&#185 – When I say woman friendly, I mean a show which is not based on sex, bodily functions and stretching the vocabulary envelope. Stern, Imus and Bubba the Love Sponge don’t qualify for this genre.

All the photos on this page, and lots of parade pictures, can be seen in my photo gallery.

New Monitor – Again

This past summer, after staring at a CRT monitor ratcheted up to its maximum resolution, I bought a brand new Pixo AT700S monitor. My thought was, an LCD monitor would have a sharper look, use less power, and make me much cooler. Plus, the 17″ CRT at 1280×1024 was blinding me.

You may be wondering, why a Pixo? After all, Pixo isn’t the first (or fourteenth) name that comes off your tongue when thinking of monitors. My thought was, since I was going ‘digital’, a pixel is a pixel, so all monitors should be equal.

What a dumb thing to think. It’s absolutely wrong, of course.

First, an LCD monitor, though producing a specific number of discrete pixels, starts its life by translating your computer’s analog video output to digital. Anything lost in that translation is gone – never to be found again.

Also, even in the 21st Century, monitors are loaded with components. Each of these components has to stay within its design specifications if the monitor is to perform properly.

Right away, I could see that wouldn’t be the case with the Pixo. I’d use a test generator and align the monitor only to come back the next day and find the alignment point had moved.

Then, one day, after a few months of use, the monitor sent a large puff of white smoke skyward. It was as if it had elected a pope. In the room, and later the entire house, I could smell the telltale odor of a capacitor that had fried.

I brought the monitor back to Staples, where they gladly gave me another Pixo.

No problem. Back on my desk, looking good, until a few nights ago.

I was working on the laptop at the time, so the LCD monitor for the main computer only caught the corner of my eye. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but I turned to see it brighten… and then dim… and the brighten again.

There are many things electronic components do very well. Healing isn’t one of them. I unplugged the monitor from my KVM (Keyboard, video, monitor) switch to see if it was the culprit. No change.

The problem came and went over the next few days. This morning, I had had enough. I was on my way to Cheshire to drop off Christmas gifts and figured I’d stop in at the Staples in Wallingford.

Long story short, the electronics guy at Staples didn’t seem surprised by the fate of my Pixo. He didn’t have any more, but he personally used an Envision (a name I’d actually heard before) and offered one to me at $60 more than I had originally paid.

I really didn’t want to buy a more expensive monitor, but I knew the Pixo was wrong for me. So, now on my desk is a lovely Envision EN-7100si.

The video is very sharp, though I’m not very impressed with the contrast. That, however, could be a driver or software problem, so I’ll hold judgment.

I see people using LCD screens all the time. They are quite cool and should look better than a CRT but only if they operate at their native resolution. 15″ monitors want to be at 1024×768. 17″ monitors need to have 1280×1024 resolution. If you’re not doing that (and most people seem not to) then the monitor is going to be smudgy, with dark grays where there should be black.

Oh – the Dell keyboard in the photo. I never thought a keyboard made much difference either. How many times can I be wrong in one entry?

The Geek In Me Speaks

Here’s a major surprise – I love computers. I find them fascinating and am always tempted to learn what I can and expand the envelope, if possible.

It’s possible this goes back to my first experience with computers, in high school in 1967. Somehow, we had two computers at school. Actually, we had one – an IBM 360 (I think) which was booted by flipping switches in the proper order and ‘fed’ with punch cards or paper tape.

What seemed like our second computer was a Model 34 Teletype, somehow connected by phone line to a computer at a local college. I played Wumpus, Golf and Horse Racing. Everything came out as printed text on that very slow teletypewriter.

In 1978 I got a Radio Shack TRS-80. Later, I got a Commodore 64 and then a series of PCs, culminating in the homebuilt Athlon XP 1600+ machine I’m composing this on.

I like being on the ‘bleeding’ edge, so I’ve kept an old computer handy and loaded Linux as the operating system. Depending on whom you believe, Linux will soon roust Windows as the operating system of choice, sending Bill Gates and the Evil Empire to the poorhouse… or it is an ill conceived idea promulgated by geeks who can’t really see who the final user will be (I saw Walter Mossberg say this yesterday on CNBC) and don’t care to design in ease of use.

I want the first choice to be true but I’m scared it’s the second. That’s not a totally fatal situation, but it certainly means Linux isn’t quite ready for prime time.

My latest install attempts (and they’re ongoing as I type this) will bear this out.

With a new, five year old, laptop (Dell D300XT), an extra hard drive for it and a great deal of curiosity, I set out to make the laptop run Linux. Since this is an extra hard drive, I should be able to swap drives and go back and forth from Windows to Linux without one affecting the other.

Since Red Hat has decided to get out of the consumer desktop end of Linux, I decided to try a new distribution. As I understand it, all Linux versions share certain core components but differ in the other programs that come in the distribution. Suse seemed like a good idea. I had read about it. It has its fans… why not?

The recommended way to install Suse seems to be by installing a small subset of Linux (in my case burning a CD-R) and then using FTP (file transfer protocol) to pluck everything else directly off a server and right onto my hard drive.

If there are detailed… or even sparse… instructions for doing this, I couldn’t find them! The Suse installer started asking questions I had no answer for within the first few seconds of the install. There was no help button to press; nowhere to go. Using Google I was able to get some answers, but every time I’d solve one problem, another would spring up in its place.

Next I went to Debian; another respected distribution. They had a few network install suggestions, but all led to boot disks that were wrong or unavailable.

Finally, I went to Red Hat’s ‘cousin’ Fedora. There’s some sort of incestuous relationship here. I’m not sure what it is, but I think in some way Fedora is part of Red Hat.

I began the installation from 3 CD’s I had downloaded overnight a few days ago. A Linux distribution, even from a cable modem, requires hours and hours of downloading and then burning of bootable ISO CD’s.

Fedora seemed to understand what my system was all about (though it looked like the installation was taking place at 800×600 resolution on my 1024×768 laptop screen). It asked what kind of system I wanted loaded and when I chose ‘desktop’, the loading began.

I’m not sure how long it was… probably around an hour… when Fedora just stopped. A screen, telling me there were four minutes left, stared at me. No motion from the hard drive. No motion from the CD. Nada.

After a while I got tired of waiting and rebooted the system. What I had was nothing. The system wouldn’t boot. Linux wasn’t installed. I have just started the process again.

Maybe I didn’t have enough patience. Maybe the computer was doing some sort of Klingon Mind Meld and didn’t want to be disturbed? How should I know?

Even if this installation is fully successful, my job won’t be done. I’ll need to figure out how to enable my wireless network card, a printer hooked to my router and configure all sorts of computing minutiae, like email parameters.

Right now, it looks like the install will continue long after I’ve gone to bed. Maybe this will give the machine a chance to decide it wants to work this time.