“How does one fold a bra?”
“Fold!?! Â A bra is like a beer can! Â The only correct thing a man can do with ’em is empty ’em, & toss the empty asside………….8^)”
Category Archives: Blather
Ramblings of a man who sees the world just a little bit differently.
Outstanding BBQ in An Unlikely Place
I’d been riding by this place for long time and always meant to stop in, and I finally did. You see, Route 18 in East Brunswick is one of those roads that you use because you have to, not because you want to. A divided highway, malls of every size on each side, traffic lights at close intervals, choked with slow-moving stop-and-go most all the time… well, you get the idea.
But if you’re stopped at the Arthur Street intersection most any weekend you can’t help but notice the American Harvest Gourmet Market. Their staff is out there making BBQ beef and pork for the shop, as well as selling sandwiches and sides (and bulk, too). I finally took the time to stop in and sample.
I was not disappointed! My test was the beef brisket while my Pam had a pulled pork sandwich. Both delicious! The sauce was their own, too – a little less hot ‘n spicy than I prefer, which means that most will find it just right. We chose to sit outside to eat (but there are tables inside, too). The ambience out there wasn’t the best in the world: the Route 18 traffic, the stack of cars on the jughandle waiting for the light, the parking lot, and the building’s air conditioner were each annoying. But the BBQ was simply outstanding.
If you’re in the neighborhood – or just stuck in traffic and need a break – stop and check this place out. You won’t regret it.
American Harvest Gourmet Market
629 State Route 18Â
East Brunswick, NJ 08816
Google Maps
[2 November 2009: edited the Google Maps link, which seemed to have gone a little sour]
Old Documents: Historical or Junk?
I was clearing out some space downstairs. I’ve mentioned before that I’m a bit of a pack rat. I was in the ‘machine room’ – the space that’s set aside for servers, media, office supplies and so on. Officially I was there to do some work on a server, work that couldn’t be done remotely, involving periods of busy interrupted by periods of not busy. There was nothing better than fill those not busy periods with some cleanup.
I couldn’t believe some of the stuff that I was finding. Some materials were from machines that haven’t been around in any form for decades! That’s about twenty minutes less than forever, in terms of technology. Much went into the shredder, and much more went into the recycling!
But there were some things that might make you smile if you’re a dinosaur like me. Or maybe they’re interesting to a historian. I haven’t got the foggiest, but they seemed too good to throw away. And honestly, these are just the tip of the iceberg; sometimes I feel like I live in a museum.
First up is a third edition copy of Getting the Most Out of the Internet, which was what Earthlink handed out to new subscribers. The think that caught my eye when I saw it was that it was authored by Sky Dayton himself.
Fascinating. But the next one is even better. There was a printed newsletter called Inside the Internet. I’m not sure when they started and stopped publishing the self-proclaimed ‘rocket science for the rest of us’. Nobody does things like this anymore, it’s far easier to simply publish on the Web. But this is January 1995 we’re talking about, and things were way different back then.
Notice the holes for storing issues in your binder – they’re stock, I didn’t put them there! There are articles about Gopher and Veronica. And a bit about TIA – remember that beast? With it you could run SLIP over your shell account, enabling you to run things like a graphical browser. I think I used it back around 1993 or so to run the some of the first non-console Internet apps seen within sacred walls of D&B, where I worked at the time. It goes without saying that this long predated D&B’s online presence, which was initally created by my friend Tom Thornbury. In fact, there wasn’t much commercial presence on the Internet back in those days at all, believe it or not! Finally, did you notice the price? $5.95 for a few pages? Hardly buys much more than a gallon of gas these days.
I hoped you liked that little trip down memory lane. Did you smile?
Wildwood Rules
We spent some time in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey this summer. It was soon apparent that the sheer number of rules and signs and warnings would make for some fun images.
The effort began in our suite and widened from there. The final image presents an opportunity to learn something about conservation, erosion, and the New Jersey shoreline.
Images are here. Have fun!
Laptops and Hard Drives
My wife’s laptop was getting full. NTFS, as you probably already know, begins to suffer performance-wise when it crosses the half-full line. And the default MFT size is kind of small to begin with. Presently that all-important area was about 98% consumed and the drive itself had only 20% or so free space. Her last install of a Sims2 expansion pack brought another round of complaints.
Easy enough to remedy. Head out to Best Buy for a replacement drive. But how to get the new drive installed and set up as pain-free as possible? Usually it’s a fresh IPL, but I was looking for the easy way out.
I have this neat device from CoolMax. The CD-350-COMBO is a multi-headed cable that plugs into a raw IDE or SATA drive and presents to your system as a USB device. When your laptop is your workbench this device is worth its weight in gold. Soon the new drive was partitioned, formatted, and tested. (For good measure, I allocated a much larger MFT as well.)
With that problem solved I turned to the task of cloning the existing drive. I recently read of something called XXCLONE, which promised a file-by-file copy (including all the locked stuff) from a running Windows system, with the ability to make the destination bootable. This would be a good time to try that out.
The install to the wife’s laptop was easy enough: unzip and copy a file. I used the CoolMax adapter to cable up the new drive, the destination for the copy. I set XXCLONE to task and went away. The copy would take a while. When I returned it was finished. I made the new drive bootable with a couple of clicks, uncabled and shut everything down. It took a few more minutes to physically swap the old drive for the new one.
The first boot took a little longer than usual. Windows was a little confused, I guess, because the drive change triggered the New Hardware Wizard. But soon things settled down. Between these two tools, a usually-tedious job was turned simple!
There’s one other thing I should mention. The XXCLONE documentation claim that because it makes a file-by-file copy, it defragments the destination drive automatically. I run Diskeeper on all of our machines, and it reported the drive as heavily fragmented. I needed to run the boot-time defragmentation job before the new drive delivered its expected performance.
Additional stuff, 17 December 2008: There were a couple of nagging issues following the drive cloning. I’m not sure if it’s XXCLONE or if it’s integral to the cloning process itself, but some applications installed with the MS Installer were no longer accessible through Add/Remove Programs. Instead there would appear a dialogue:
“The patch package could not be opened. Verify that the patch package exists and that you can access it, or contact application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer patch package.”
The solution, while a bit of a pain, is to obtain and install the Windows Install Clean Up utility from Microsoft. Run the utility and select the errant application from the list, then clean it up – which amounts to removing it from the installer’s database. Finally, re-install the application.
In my case it was Office 2003, which called for finding the license number and install media as well as a few rounds of patches and service packs. There were a few other applications as well, but that was the most substantial.
Chrome
The Internet is absolutely all over itself lately about Google’s new browser, Chrome. It’s only a beta, but when you think about it, what product of Google’s is not beta? When I heard the news my first reaction was one of distrust. After all, nobody really knows what data Google is collecting about their users. But I decided to give the browser a try anyway after reading their comic book, which describes the technical attributes of their new-from-the-ground-up browser design.
Wow is Chrome fast! Page rendering is absolutely blazing! Compared to any other browser I’ve ever used, Chrome is the absolute fastest by far. That alone should compel you to give it a try.
Because of the way Chrome spawns individual processes it clearly uses more system resources than other browsers. On today’s modern systems that shouldn’t be a problem and the benefits of enhanced resource management are clear. [Added later on the same day: It still crashes, though, despite process isolation. See the EvilFingers site for an explanation and demo of the flaw in v0.2.149.27. https://www.evilfingers.com/advisory/Google_Chrome_Browser_0.2.149.27_in_chrome_dll.php
As usual, the masses are very quick to point out flaws. The first thing that I heard of was Chrome’s vulnerability to drive-by security problems. Downloads occur in the background, and it could be easy to accidentally launch an executable. It shouldn’t be a problem if you’re careful.
There is a phrase that’s been going around lately to describe privacy enhanced browsing, the so-called ‘porn mode’. I object! There are many, many reasons why one might wish to take advantage of enhanced privacy while they browse. Why not use a less antagonistic label, like ‘privacy-enhanced’ or ‘privacy-mode’? (You’re welcome. I’m omitting a rant about how language kills.)
Cookies and pop-ups seem to be handled more intelligently as well, although those that pay for pop-up ads may not agree. Pop-ups are minimally displayed in and the user needs to choose to see it. This can trigger a billable event without the (benefit?) of the user ever seeing the pop-up. As a user I’m pleased with this behavior. As a business owner with Web properties I’m also pleased, because I’ve long believed that using things like pop-ups and cookies to track my customers is poor behavior on my part.
There’s been quite a bit of speculation about which direction Google may take Chrome. Some are even saying that this could be the beginning of the end for desktop operating systems altogether. Can you imagine this thing sitting on a bare metal hypervisor, without the overhead of an operating system? Exciting times are ahead.
Piss Hat
I was in Atlantic City, NJ with my family recently. Beautiful city, full of contrast. As we stood on the boardwalk across from the world-famous Steel Pier taking in the sights, Damian looked over the rail into the garbage-strewn alley below and mused, “so what’s that, a piss hat?”
Tagging
I was talking with some folks the other day about, um, blogs. A meta-discussion, if you will. The upshot of the thing is they convinced me to give tagging a try. It would work especially well for me, they reasoned, because I use so few categories.
So this morning I spent some time going back through the posts and applying tags. My eyes hurt. Did I really write that drivel? [shrug] I grew a ‘tag cloud’ – not the most attractive thing in the world – and lost the original edit dates on the affected posts. So, on the off chance that you’re wondering what changed, the reality is that no text of any substance has changed. Just the tags.
—Added 5-Nov-2008: Okay, so I got tired of seeing the ‘tag cloud’ in the sidebar. It was just too big and intrusive! (I thought so, and others have said as much in email.) Besides, it showed up in a summary of this URL and I’m not so sure that’s good food for the search engines – it looks like spam. So, bye-bye tag cloud – for now at least – although I’ll keep adding tags to the new entries as I write.
Smart Scanner
I had a great percent-off coupon from Best Buy that was about to expire, so I used it to buy a new scanner, a Canon 8800F. Once I had it set up I decided to have a little fun. Onto the bed went a $1 bill. No problem. A $5? Again, no problem. $10? Nope. It and a $20 – the largest bill on hand – get part way through before giving up with this informative message.
So much for my career as a counterfeiter, I suppose. Do you suppose the guys with the earpieces and dark suits will be at my doorstep come morning?
Â
Violating the First Rule
The first rule of working on color TVs is simple. You remove your rings, your watch, and so on. Some take the rule a step further and keep one hand in their pocket, unless it’s needed for the task at hand.
The reason for the rule is simple. That stuff is metal, and there be large electrical potentials lurking within – even when the TV’s been turned off for long periods of time.
Variants of the rule apply in lots of situations that have nothing to do with television repair. One popular variant is removing your tie before working with machinery. You get the idea.
Well, I neglected the rule. The other day I set out to introduce some refrigerant into the air conditioning system of a Buick. I was prowling around under the hood – the engine off and keys in my pocket – seeking the location of the low-side port. It wasn’t jumping out at me. So I’m feeling my way around the lines, my arm snaked into the engine compartment to the shoulder when the FZZZT hit and my left wrist exploded in pain. I hastily yanked out the limb, gouging chunks of flesh from my bicep and elbow. But the real problem was my watch - the one that I had no business wearing, had I followed the rule. The stainless steel band had apparently shorted a starter terminal to ground. The heat had spot-welded the clasp shut and I found myself in panic mode trying to get the blasted thing off. And finally I did, but not before it had burned a rather impressive looking depression into my wrist. No blood from the wrist; it was cauterized but the red stuff had begun to leak from the other holes…
That was a couple of days ago. It’s all on the mend now and most of the pain has subsided. It still looks plenty ugly under the bandage, but it’s improving every time I look.
Lesson learned: pay attention to those rules, they’re there for a reason.
Oh, and the air conditioner? I found the low-side port against the firewall and added the needed refrigerant. It’s working fine again. Anybody want to buy a Buick wagon?
Mobile Phone Adventure
Verizon Wireless, my mobile carrier, has been pestering me lately. An equipment upgrade offer was pending. My pair of old Motorola RAZR V3c handsets serve me quite well so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to add a third number and a new handset for my son, something we’ve been talking about for a while. Yesterday we stopped at one of their local brick-and-mortar facilities to get that done. I don’t know about you, but every time I have to physically show up to do something with my mobile phones there is trouble of one sort or another…
I’m an unusual wireless customer. I use my phone to make and receive voice calls. For email, Web, music, pictures, videos, ad nauseum, I’ll reach for a more appropriate piece of equipment. I’m not thrilled with Verizon Wireless’ closed network, either, or the way they nickel-and-dime you for every little thing. But their performance – at least where I use it – is second to none. I cannot recall the last time I had a call drop or not go through. Each ‘line’ (an archaic term in the wireless world) draws from a single pool of enough minutes that we use it without thinking and never need to buy extra, thanks to a reasonably priced grandfathered contract, sans enhanced services, that they haven’t offered in years. I’ve been a steady customer for better than a decade and a half. I’m an unusual customer.
We found a handset my son liked and made our way to the counter only to learn that the upgrade offer applied only to my V3c. But nothing’s carved in stone and after some discussion we found a way: a temporary upgrade. I buy a new handset (an LG VX9100, free after the promotion) and move my number to it. I buy an additional ‘line’ for my son, and assign the new number to my old V3c. Finally, the next day, we would swap the numbers between the two handsets, under the auspices that I’m unhappy with the new handset. Normally that swap would be $20 a pop, but there would be no charge. And everybody would be happy.
A while later we discovered that my V3c didn’t respond on the new number. Things went downhill fast from there. Tech Support reported that the new number belonged to a Blackberry belonging to Merrill Lynch, that my contract shows only two numbers, and that my V3c ESN no longer exists. Oops.
Back at the store they tried to get me to just replace the handset, “Just take the best we’ve got, no charge!” No thanks, I want the one I’ve got, please fix it. They finally managed to install a dummy ESN onto it and assign the new number, and get my contract to recognize them both. But because of the dummy ESN the handset doesn’t do anything, it’s a brick. Tomorrow, they say, they will be able to finish straightening it out.
I need to digress with some history… Verizon Wireless was probably the last carrier on Earth to add the incredibly popular – and profitable – Motorola RAZR handsets. The reasons were two-fold. First, the CDMA chipset was physically larger, and Motorola had some difficulty making it fit into the small package. Second, all Verizon Wireless phones (at the time) sported an external antenna, which helped them to provide their outstanding network performance. The RAZR’s antenna is internal. As for me, I wanted the small size but I was unwilling to switch carriers. So I waited it out. Eventually Motorola got the hardware into the handset and got the antenna performance good enough to pass Verizon Wireless’ performance testing (it took several rounds of testing which led to yet more delays). Finally they were set to roll ’em out. Just in time for Christmas! Well, sort of.
In the mobile phone industry, a hardware manufacturer will develop a new handset and the base software to make it the features work, as well as an SDK. A carrier will take that and develop their own software layer, which in turn becomes the set of services and capabilities that differentiate one carrier from another. In the case of Verizon Wireless, with their closed network, part of their software development is to lock down the handset. The customized RAZR software, due to the Christmas sale deadline, was a rush job.
Watching all that unfold, I bought my handsets a day or two before they became available at the stores. My handsets are not locked down. The best thing about this is my Bluetooth profiles include OBEX. And that means I can add custom rings I make myself, get images and voice recordings on and off, use the crappy little camera (when needed and nothing better is available), use it as a wireless (or wired, via USB) modem with the laptop, and so on, all without incurring Verizon Wireless charges.
And that’s why I don’t want to give up these handsets or upgrade their firmware. Whenever I need to explain this, the representative smiles and understands. [Ed. 6 July 2008: My wife, OTOH, never really understood why I held those capabilities so dear. That is, until the latest bill arrived. My son had bought a ringtone. $2.95, no big deal, but the browsing charges, the megabyte charges, and the fact that he tried the Web browsers on all of our handsets by the time he was through, had brought the cost of that stupid ringtone to near $20. When I explained how billing works, and had real examples to use, the lightbulb went on.]
So today I will see whether they can get this mess straightened out. I’m nervously optimistic.
Contrasts in Sensitivity
Today the (snail) mail brought a couple of items that warrant some comment.
For my Dad, who passed on not two weeks prior, came a survey solicitation from Saint Peter’s University Hospital (now Saint Peter’s Healthcare System, link updated). He spent just shy of twelve days in their ICU. During his stay, the decline in his health was dramatic and rapid, ending with his discharge to hospice. That decision involved several different departments and quite a few physicians, specialists and staff. The survey request ended with this closure, “Thank you, and please accept our best wishes for your good health.”
For me and my family, from JFK Medical Center which runs the Haven Hospice Program, came a hand-written envelope. It contained a letter extending their sympathy, which went on to describe the comprehensive set of services available to us to help cope with our loss.
I can’t say enough about the staff at Haven Hospice. Although we spent less than 24 hours there, the degree to which the staff has extended an amazing amount of goodness and support is nothing short of amazing. They’re truly great and caring people.
Sad News – My Dad’s Passing
The past few weeks have been exceptionally grueling.
My Dad, whose health hasn’t been the best over the past few years, passed on last Tuesday in hospice. I had the honor of writing his obituary. I expect that over the weeks to come I’ll be writing more about Richard’s life.
Wacky Incoming Call
I received a wacky call on my home telephone. When I answered, I heard:
This is 777-3633. Please leave a message.
Then nothing. I dropped the call. The Caller ID, that unreliable, easily-spoofed feature of my POTS line, reported the call as Out Of Area with a number of 999-999-9999. According to the ‘net I’m not alone in receiving this call.
This morning I got a call from Nuance, the software vendor. I use a few of their products, and they were pitching upgrades. Anyway, their Caller ID came up the same way. Unrelated, I’m sure.
Florida Beating
The story about the Florida girl beaten by her peers has brought the so-called experts out of the woodwork again. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s girls, heck, cheerleaders involved that makes this incident particularly newsworthy.
The Orlando Sentinel reported it this way. (Oops  – the link died.)
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying for a moment that the behavior is correct. It’s not. You shouldn’t post defamatory material. You shouldn’t gang-beat others. But sometimes stuff just happens.
Making it a little bit more personal… over my lifetime I’ve done some ass-kicking. And I’ve had my ass kicked a few times, too. Each role – kicker or kickee – teaches you something, and you come away from each lesson a little stronger for the experience. You can wring your hands all you want; sometimes it just happens.
But it’s the stuff that followed the Florida incident that riles me, beginning with the requisite blaming of others. What’s become of taking responsibility for your actions, or taking responsibility for those in your charge? Of teaching? Of setting a better example? No, it’s easier to blame someone else. I wonder, who will be the first one to bring suit this time? Or write a book?
And then there are the experts who have all the answers. Well, actually, it always boils down to the same answer, doesn’t it?
Here’s an article: Videotaped Florida Teen Beating Prompts Calls To Block Violent Content. [Oops- the link died.]
So let’s block it. Yeah, that’s it. Regulate! Censor! Protect! Then it’ll go away, and we can get back to the really important stuff, like who’s winning on American Idol or something.
Y’know, when the stuff that passes for entertainment today is evidently (according to media coverage, ratings, paychecks, and so on) more important than anything else, is it any wonder that some of today’s kids are all-consumed with obtaining a piece of that attention?