THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 16 August 28 - September 3, 2000

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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Highlights this week:

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Monday
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A ton of work to do, including getting ready for the Techweb broadcast and getting things in order for Column Time in a couple of days.

The ADHD discussion is getting interesting and will have things copied to a separate page, but we will also continue it in mail.

There's a picture of Marilyn Niven's birthday party in last week's VIEW.

Here's another. Sarge Workman can still get into his 1979 Regency outfit. Alas, I can't...

Everyone else is getting ready for WorldCon in Chicago next weekend, but I am not going. Just too much work to do here. I don't go to science fiction conventions much anymore anyway.

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The PayPALS thing is working fairly well. I have used it to buy some stuff, and some of you have used it to pay me for this place, which is neat. I also get a small signup bonus ($5.00) for anyone who uses me as the reference for signing up (that's also explained on the payments page.)

They did for a while send messages saying I was "unverified" and it wasn't all that easy to figure out what that meant, but I managed it. They send some trivial amounts to my bank account, and I have to look (well, listen) to my account deposits and verify the exact amounts. I thought that meant going to the bank -- shows how out of touch I am -- but in fact it only took a phone call and punching some buttons. I can also think up about a dozen scams I could pull using something like this on naive people.  Get hold of their account numbers, and deposit some weird amount in the account, the call and pose as a bank examiner: you now know things about that account that the account holder doesn't know, and you can use that to convince the mark that you're legit. I suspect this has actually been done: I no longer keep up with all the con games the way I did when I wrote mystery stories lo these many years ago.

But in any event I have that taken care of and I am "verified". Hurrah.

I have to dismantle some machines and add SCSI to a Windows ME system. 

Interim report, the Intel 933 chip systems (both of which have Intel motherboards) are working just fine. At the moment they both have Windows ME, but I am about to use System Commander to set one of them up for multiple choice of operating systems. 

And I find that putting the OUTLOOK.PST file out on a server is the wrong thing to do. It really slows things down. See the column...

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Techweb broadcast later this morning. Niven and everyone else in science fiction are on the way to Chicago Worldcon, except me, of course. I've got too much work to do.

Moved all the FrontPage files to Regina from Princess. Amazing how much faster saves are: the 100 Megabit Ethernet is pretty slow compared to local disk access, and when the files get large the delays are appreciable. Of course last time I published it took HOURS to get it all piped up through a 56k connection. FrontPage considers files new if anything including their location has changed.

That is, I was working with FrontPage on Regina but the files on Princess. I then published the entire site to Regina from Princess. Then I opened the new web now resident on Regina (still using Regina as the computer where Front Page sat) and published to the site host at Pair. FrontPage insisted on sending up EVERY file, including all the archived files. This took hours. No harm done, but annoying. I now think I ought to have "published" to Regina to get things set up right, then COPIED all the files from Princess to Regina overwriting the published files. Of course all those files would be identical anyway, but perhaps that would make the dates the same, and thus make FrontPage not realize it had been tricked?  I'll have to try it. Atter Tag, Atter Tag.

Maxtor 40 gig disk drives with 2MB bufer now $150 at Fry's this morning. Sheesh!

Installing new HP color scanner for USB. 

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Everyone but me is of to SF Worldcon in Chicago. 

It's busy here...

PayPal works fine but alas only for US; apparently no other nation including Canada but they say "real soon now..."

I guess I have had it with Fry's. They have become so venial that I would rather pay more and not deal with them. I bought a game there the other day. Got home to discover there was no CD in the box; someone had opened it from the bottom and extracted the CD. No big deal, I thought. Took it back. Wasted half an hour before Fry's said they would not replace it. 

Ok, so Fry's has stolen $40 from me. They have also lost my business, and this will be in the column.  If you deal with Fry's go there only for their loss leaders, buy nothing else, and be sure to keep all the paperwork forever. Buying a normal product from them subjects you to theft. You have been warned. In future I'll see their advertisements, I'll buy loss leader particularly if they are the sort of thing not likely to need a warranty, and otherwise I'll go to a reputable chain. When I find one I like I'll let you know.

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This week:

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Column preparation

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Column, games, and hiking

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Everyone I know is in Chicago for WorldCon, so here I am. Got some of the column done. Found some very odd oddities in video from the game Everquest, and I'm still mulling over just how this can be. Different machines have different views of the same things, and my fastest machine has the worst lag (delays between doing things here and getting signals from the Everquest remote server that they were in fact done).  All very odd.

I have cooled off enough to have a somewhat modified view of Fry's which will be in the column.  It has its place.  But the management really ought to wake up.

And Roland sends this truly disturbing link to GWS, which I think now is several problems: one having to do with squalene in vaccines, since people got GWS who never went to the Gulf but did get their shots. But then there is this:

http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/09/03/stifgnnws02001.html  

Comments appreciated. And see MAIL There are many problems with this story; I fear the Sunday Times is not what it used to be.

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