Eric G. Harrison's blog
Thursday, August 25, 2005
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Jeff Key just pointed out to me that a bunch of people are still subscribing to this site (info provided through Bloglines). Please change your RSS feeds to pull from http://spaces.msn.com/members/notclever/feed.rss rather than here.
Thanks! - Eric.
Monday, July 04, 2005
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Tuesday, June 28, 2005
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It has happened to others, and now to me. Spammers overran my blog with Trackback postings. This morning, between two blogs on our server, I deleted over 500 fake entries.
At this point, when I resume blogging, I'm very inclined to move it to another service so I can stop fighting these fights myself. Who needs it?
Thursday, June 09, 2005
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If you use a KVM switch, you may find that it is not always immediately obvious what the specs are of the machine you're working on.
Sysinternals has a great tool called BGInfo, which will “stamp” various pieces of information about the system you're running it on onto the background image.
This is very handy, and free.
Wow, people are weird. My 'summer' car is a new Corvette. It's a great car, although it can really kinda suck in Chicago traffic sometimes.
Anyway, on the drive home yesterday, I was toodling along in the right lane in traffic, when an Audi TT comes screaming up behind me and just before hitting me, swings into the left lane. “What an idiot” methinks. I assume the driver wasn't paying attention, and that's why he nearly hit me.
Well, no such luck. A few blocks down, we come to a red light, and he's in the left lane, and I'm in the right lane and we end up stopped next to each other. I'm ignoring him, fiddling with the radio when I hear “... smoking Corvettes!”...
Me: “Huh?”
Him: “I love smoking those new Corvettes!”
Me: “Smoking them?”
Him: “Yeah, beating them in races”
Me: (thinking - has he stuffed a big motor in that thing) “Really?”
Him: “Yup! Got a 3.2 liter Quattro. Nothing can beat me!”
Me: “Uh, you think you can beat a new Corvette?”
Him: “Got 390 horsepower in this thing!”
Me: (thinking - huh, I wonder if Audi has done some magic here)
Him: “Let's do it”
Me: “Do what?”
Him: (racing his engine - sounds like gerbils pedalling furiously) “Race, right now!”
Me: (looking at the bumper of the car in front of me) “Here? What, you want me to ram the car in front of me? (laughing)”
Him: laughs
Light changes, we drive away in traffic, he turns left a block later down some street. Now, there are some weird / bad things here:
First, he wasn't a young kid. He was probably my age (late 30s). WTF is he thinking wanting to race on the street?
Second, I'm not sure he was all there - even if I would race him, it sure as heck wouldn't happen when we're behind 7 cars at a light.
Third, I don't race people (he of course has no way of knowing that). I find that when I'm driving the 'vette, I feel that generally I have very little to prove. Technically, the car is one of the fastest on the street, and even if you put two roughly equal sports cars against each other, it comes down to whoever gets the better start. If my car can do 0-60 in 4.1 seconds, and yours can do it in 4.5 (or whatever), either one of us could win - not that I'd race you, y'all remember back to the future, right? :)
Fourth, I should point out it was a beautiful day, sunny and 80 degrees. Perfect weather for a high power car like the 'vette to actually get the power onto the ground. If it's wet out, or the temp is below about 50, traction is a real problem. If it were a bad weather day, he'd have a chance - Quattro is wonderful for putting the power down (of course, it actually hurts performance as you have a lot more mass in the drive train getting powered by the engine compared to a 2 wheel drive car).
Finally, the fastest Audi TT I could find in my online research is the 3.2 liter TT. 0-60 times of roughly 6 seconds. Not even in the same league. I wonder if it has something to do with TT drivers? I had a friend at an old company I used to work for. I had a 2000 Corvette, he had a TT (don't remember what engine it had). He was constantly bragging about how fast his car was, and how it would beat the 'vette. One day, he and I were out to lunch and he drove my car. About 5 minutes into it he said something like “I will never even joke about my car being able to beat this monster.“ That was in the C5 Corvette. 50 fewer horsepower.
Anyway, I have to get back to doing what I do, but I just thought I'd let everyone in the Chicagoland know that they should watch out for the Corvette beating Audi TT. <booming voice>YOU COULD BE NEXT!</booming voice>.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
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Sunday, May 15, 2005
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I received an announcement that I am a member of a class in a class action lawsuit against AT&T Wireless. I've taken to reading the details of these mailers (it seems I get one every couple of months) just to see how the lawyers and the 'victims' are making out.
In this case, it seems that under certain circumstances, if you cancelled your AT&T Wireless service, they charged you through the whole month, rather than stopping on the day you cancelled the service. So, for someone who had a plan like mine, that could be a $70 or so overcharge. I'm sure that on average, the charge is much less, but you understand my point.
Since these lawyers have gone to bat for me, you'd think I'm looking forward to my huge reimbursement check, maybe I could buy some friends some beers with it or something. Alas, no. My reimbursement is either a 50 or 100 minute long distance calling card (non transferrable) - retail value, maybe $10 - actual cost to AT&T Wireless - zilch + $.01.
Um, yeah. When was the last time someone with a cell phone with a billion 'free' minutes bothered to use a calling card anyway?
Well, surely the lawyers will enjoy their 100 minute callings cards, right? Alas, again, no. The are not receiving the very valuable calling cards that are just compensation to those of us victimized by the ruthless AT&T Wireless company. Rather they are nobly receiving $2.1 million dollars for a few months worth of work, and even that wasn't full time, I'm sure. Even if it was 5 lawyers full time for 2 months, that's about 3200 hours of time, that's about $650 per hour. Not bad work if you can get it. And realistically, it was probably a lawyer and an assistant, with about 100 hours of work total (it's not that hard to make a boilerplate lawsuit), equalling $21,000 per hour.
I think the first step in lawsuit reform would be to pass a law that says that a lawyer cannot receive more than (say) 100 times the amount that an individual victim will receive from a settlement. Of course, given that most lawmakers are in the pockets of lawyers (or former lawyers themselves), we know that will never happen. In this case, they could use their 10,000 free long distance minutes to shop around for other victims. How about those people sick of ads everywhere - there's got to be some money in solving a real problem like that!
Thank goodness those lawyers are out there protecting us from being ripped off.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
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Recently I had to move my 'drawer of junk' from a file cabinet to a small box in the closet. While transferring the goodies, I found a 250 gig hard drive that I had purchased a month or two ago with the intention of putting into my HP Media Center PC for more capacity. Unfortunately, when I went to install it, I found that there were no spare drive bays in the machine (cheap HP!).
In any case, while at Best Buy a few days ago, I saw the Adaptec USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure Kit, which takes a standard 3.5” hard drive and make it an external USB 2.0 drive. The price of the kit was about $50, but with the reward zone 'rebates' that I had, it cost me about $20.
When unpacking the kit, I found a CD enclosed, which struck me as strange, and had me a bit worried. After all, this thing shouldn't require drivers, right? Well, much to my relief, the CD apparently contains installation instructions, since none are in the box. I have no desire to actually put the CD in a drive since I'm sure that 90% of the contents are advertising, otherwise it would have been cheaper to slip in a single sheet of installation instructions instead of a CD!
Being the geek that I am, I naturally decided to forgo the instructions and figure out how to get the drive installed.
Turns out it was even easier than I thought. Just unscrew two screws on the back of the case, and the whole internal mechanism slides right out the front. Attach the IDE and power supply cable to the drive, gently lower it into place, making sure to 'fold' the IDE cable in a hump behind the drive, and screw the drive into place. Close it back up and you're all done. The whole process takes about 2 minutes, and that's allowing time to find a small phillips head screwdriver.
I attached the drive to my Windows XP system, and it recognized the drive right away, and then I had to go into Computer Management to format the drive, which is still happening as I write this. Cake.
There are two things that I want to comment on about this product:
1) Unlike my ultra portable and tiny SmartDisk FireLite 40 gig drive, this unit requires an external power supply. Not a surprise, but not ideal either if you're moving the drive between machines.
2) No rubber feet are included with the kit! So if I were to put this thing on top of my Antec Sonata case, it would scratch the heck out of it. Either I need to put some rubber footies on the thing, or keep it in the stand that it includes, which at least is plastic and shouldn't scratch things with quite as much enthusiasm as the aluminum chassis of the kit.
Friday, May 06, 2005
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When the NeXT system came out, I had moved to Chicago and absolutely fell in love with the system. The only problem was that I couldn't afford one. So, I came up with an idea to try to become a certified developer (or whatever they called it back then) and applied. Fortunately, I was rejected. I'm quite happy with the path my life has taken, so I'm happy with just about all the things that have happened (I wouldn't be who I am if those things hadn't happened, right?).
What reminded me of the NeXT was coming across this site, through comments an article on Ars Technica on the history of the graphical user interface. The article itself is pretty okay. Took me back to when I first saw the Macintosh (lived near Ocala, Florida back then) and when I was messing with OS/2 - I had a machine that I had upgraded to 2 whole megabytes of RAM. Yes, two whole *megabytes*. I was quite the computer stud.
Anyway, time to change up my desktop on my home system again. It's been looking that same for a while now. Can't have that!
Thursday, May 05, 2005
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In a word: “Meh”.
This probably describes it best.
Best part: The planet factory floor.
Second best part: The Guide itself.
The worst part: Lots of missing explanations - nothing to tie it all together.
Summary: Wait and get it through NetFlix.