Posts: 8

1. Tideland Delivers!

   01.Feb.08, 17:44 EST
   
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   When I heard there was a new Terry Gilliam movie that I had not seen I had to find it. Finally, last night, I saw it. I saw clips and stills, I had read some blerbs and outlines, but nothing could have prepared me for the trip. I knew to hold on when I saw Terry appear right at the start of the film and anounce that "most of you will not like this film." He made a few other statements that were relevent, but I guess the key one is refer to "the resilience of a child." "When you drop a child, they tend to bounce" says Terry. And bounce a child he does. It is more like she is a foot ball and she is being spiked in the endzone, over and over again.
   
   Halfway thru the film I began to feel like little Bart Simpson after his dad did him the favor of making his bed look like a giant horrable clown who was very hungry for children. "I can't sleep, the clowns will eat me" I began to say to myself, as I rocked back and forth in my seat.  I kept bracing myself for where the film may take me next. But then, it would, of course, take me somewhere completely different, but nearly as shocking. Yet, the child in the film bounced. ...would I?
   
   I keep coming back to the same concept: Now I have to rewatch Brazil, simply so I can confirm how it pales in comparison to Tideland when considering the wierd out factor. I wouldn't bother attempting to discribe this film. Just know this: If you want a film that's odd and at times disterbing, and a movie that you will end up thinking about when it is over, then Tideland is a must see.
   

2. Bean Counter Invents Railroad Ties and Retires

   19.Nov.07, 17:49 EST
   
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   Last Sunday, I attended a back yard BBQ. I started chatting with someone that had just arrived.  We are mutual friends of the afternoon’s hosts, but I had never met him before.  He looked to me like a reasonably healthy man in his mid sixties with a sort of care free attitude.  He introduced himself simply as Joe.  We started chatting, and at one point he caught my ear by stating “I wanted to retire at fifty-five.”
   
   

   Explaining his comment Joe began. “I started working at Pratt-Whitney about thirty years ago, and I was with them for almost twenty years.  Everyone balked when I announced I was leaving.  “No one leaves this company before retiring” they bellowed.  But I did.” Joe had a plan.
   
   Continuing, he told me “Each month, I had a meeting in the Tampa area to attend.  I would drive across the state through the sugarcane fields. The sugarcane made up most of the scenery along the way.  At one location I noticed a large pile of stuff.  It seemed to be growing ever larger.  Each month I would drive past the pile, and each month there seemed to be lots more of it.  Driving past on one trip, the pile was higher than ever.  A large truck adorned the highest point of the pile of stuff. The truck looked to me like a Tonka toy dwarfed by the huge pile.” 
   
   “That was it!”  Joe exclaimed.  “My curiosity could be shunted no longer.  I pulled over to find out what this ‘stuff’ was. I Found worker near the base of the pile, and asked him ‘what is this stuff?’  The worker informed me that ‘this is sugarcane waste after the sweet juice has been extracted.’  What do you do with it? I asked the worker.  ‘Nothing’ was his reply.  So, I asked Can I have a sample? The worker gave me bags of the stuff; as much as I wanted.”
   
   This is where Joe told me that “yes; I majored in finance and counted beans for Pratt-Whitney.”  He began to smirk; “However, I minored in Biochemistry.  With some research and experiment, I found a way to combine the sugarcane waste with chemicals to create an extremely tuff wood-like material that could be used in construction and as railroad ties.  We used to create ¼ inch thick boards of the stuff and challenged people to attempt to break the board with a sledgehammer. None could” he exclaimed with pride. 
   
   Being a bean counter, and having his goal of retiring at fifty-five, he had been aggressively saving as he worked, leveraging the company’s dollar matching and investment plan.  So, armed with this and some outside investment, he was able to raise the $1.5M needed to start his new company. 
   
   Joe told me of the blood sweat and tears he put in to make his company succeed.  “I couldn’t trust anyone, so, having two shifts I was there from 8 am till 12 am every day.”  “How long did you do this?” I inquired.  “Four years” he replied.  Continuing, he grinned “a German company bought me out then, for ten million dollars!”  This is more than six times the initial investment!  I was very impressed.
   So, is there a moral here?  Well, I don’t think it needs to be spelled out for you.  If you work for MOLI, you are living it.  You saw the pile, you stopped to ask the question, you used your talents; you put in the hard work, and made the commitment.  See what happens next!
   
   If there is any downside to Joe’s tale of railroad ties and retirement it is this:  Retiring at fifty-five as planned, he has become bored with world travel.  I hope to have his problem some day.  On this, Joe said “I have been to all those places over and over.  I would wake up on the cruise ship and look out thinking ‘this island again? I am staying on the boat.’”

3. Bush Countdown

   11.Sep.07, 22:00 EDT
   
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   It seems like such a long time!

4. The View from Vista

   31.Oct.06, 12:27 EST
   
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   Everyone’s pipes work, except the plumbers. Such is the state of my home PC. It has drips, leaks, and clogs. I have put off upgrades, even though there are minor hardware failures. Motherboard RAM slots: one of four has failed. So, a quarter Gig of RAM sits on my desk instead in the machine. Worst of all, as of late my video card seems to have become a little decrepit. Frame rate is way down regardless of settings. Fix it, You say! Hey, I do this all day long. I tell you this, so you know my PC is ready for the wrecking ball, anyway. This leads us to the point of this tale: Who would put some buggy release of Microsoft’s yet-to-be-released OS on a perfectly good PC? No sane person for sure. However, I don’t have a perfectly good PC, and then there is the issue of my sanity (mu ha ha ha ha). So, with the expectation of total meltdown, I started to think about installing Vista Release Candidate 1. I read a few reviews, the most in depth one explained how RC1 is miles ahead of beta1 and beta2, which were horror shows. It made me think of how much better MOLI is now, than when I first sat at this desk. Anyway, in this review I read, the fellow upgraded his EX Prof. to Vista RC1. He was amazed at how smooth it went. Of course there were issues, but in the end he had a fairly usable PC running Vista. Well, I started to hatch a plan. Frustrated with my video card woes (frame rate is life), I uninstalled, reinstalled, installed old drivers, and alternate (Omega) drivers. Nothing made any difference. Installing Vista should ensure a clean set of drivers. Nvidia did have a beta version of their Vista drivers available, so it was possible… Was it advisable? I decided to install Vista on my 2nd hard drive. Long story short, it all went well, with a major side note: It didn’t just install on the 2nd hard drive, it moved files and folders around on both drives, moving some program files to a folder called \windows.old and adding things to the C drive as well. Oddly enough, I can still boot into XP and as of yet have no Vista related problems. Maybe it also rewrites XP’s registry to reflect the changes it makes as it installs. Further investigation will tell. So, what is Vista? Vista is what Microsoft has been developing since just before the release of XP some years ago. Vista is the first windows OS to require a 3D graphics accelerator to function. At first glance, Vista seems to be a significant departure from XP. I found myself floundering for short periods when trying to do simple things like find TCP/IP setting for the NIC card or navigating the file system. Surprising. These changes are supposed to be improvements. The jury is still out. Vista is very pretty! What does the 3D card do for you? It makes it Mac caliber pretty; maybe even more so. Windows shrink and fade instead of just clicking off. I am sure as the OS matures, there will be tons of MS and home-spun plug-ins to change the 3-D effects. Everything has a shallow shadow on the desk top, and the window frames are transparent. There are lots of shiny animations for file-download and progress bars. One fairly cool feature related to 3-D enables the user to see all running applications three dimensionally cascaded on an angle, so the user can choose the app. He/she wants to switch to and click it into focus. Another Mac-like addition is windows sidebar. You can populate it with shiny gadgets like a clock or CPU/memory use meters, weather, and lots more; all very shiny and pretty. But, what about my video card test? Well, just as I feared, even with a new OS and a clean set of drivers, it behaved just as poorly in Vista as in XP. Hoorah! It’s trashed. Now, with that confirmation I can start researching the parts that will make-up my next PC. The balance of price vs. power begins. …but that’s for another blog. So, Windows Vista works. You can get it free at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx, but it will stop working in May of `07, unless you buy it then. It may be prettier than Mac, but I got the impression that MS was looking to Apple when it created many of the desktop graphics enhancements. That should give you Mac heads something to boast about.

5. Me and My Spell Checker.

   25.Oct.06, 16:01 EDT
   
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   Gmeh and mi cpel chekerer. I am happy that Jenn saw enough merit in my musings to point you this way. So, now that you have been here, you know my secret: I can’t spell. As a child, my reading comprehension was very high, but my spelling was never very guud. The trend continues. This is why I can’t wait till spell checker comes to live in Moli. Currently, I type this in MS Word because I NEED SPELL CHECKER! It is not a nice feature or a handy tool for me. The first person here to receive a message from me completed without spell check would have social services here in minutes to pick up “the poor handicapped fellow” that mistakenly found himself typing messages at the PC. I learned long ago, regarding my own brain, like any of you, it has its own strengths and weaknesses. Mine, he loves to find and identify patterns. I see and understand the words; not the letters. One L, two L’s, EL or LE, IE or EI? I don’t know. Let spell checker figure it out. This is what we paid Bill Gates for! Don’t think less of me because of my poor spelling. And no, I don’t need a cork on the end of my fork to preserve my eyesight. Thank you very much for asking.

6. I want to get fired for using Moli too much!

   12.Oct.06, 16:55 EDT
   
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   Historically one can get fired from Guns and Roses for doing too many drugs and alcohol, so there must be a finite level of tolerance for everything. However, when we look at things on the irony scales, it is tuff to think of something more ironic than getting fired for using Moli too much. Challenge: What would be more ironic then getting fire from working here for being on Moli too much? Start Posting!

7. Mac vs. PC; From a Die Hard PC User.

   11.Oct.06, 11:13 EDT
   
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   Circa 1990: I was a late comer to personal computing. I was about 30 when I finally purchased my 1st PC. It was a 486/33MHz with 8 megs of RAM and 1 meg video card. It had a 9600 baud modem that was internal but actually was so huge it had a daughter board. Since the modem alone cost $200., size mattered, I guess. With no CD player, an 8 bit sound blaster, 200 meg HD and a “fish bowl” 14” color SVGA monitor, I got our of the store for $3000. I don’t have to tell you that for less than half the price today, you can get much more. But, this was my diving board. I learned DOS 5.0 and hacked my way through Windows 3.1. Driving force? Cracked PC games! This would be one strike against Mac, there were very little titles for Mac available, legally purchased or not. Leaning to use this PC was also my launch into the industry. I soon took a job teaching, repairing, and selling PCs. No Macs in site. Sure, I heard that people loved Macs. Of course I heard that if you did art/graphics or audio/video Mac was the way and the light. I saw no Macs, but I was still very interested in digital media. So, I “found” software for both, art/graphics and audio/video, for the PC. All I ever heard from the masses and Mac Nuts was “you can’t do those things on a PC. The PC is for word processing and games.” Funny, I was doing just fine. Sure, one song took up 25% of the hard drive, but remember, there was no MP3 format, and hard drives were smaller than most memory sticks today. But I was making music and graphics with my PC clone, and I knew not the “pleasures of Mac.” Fast forward16 years. Hello Moli! Hello Macs! I have not taken a head count, but there are a lot of Macs about. Having near 0 time spent using a Mac, I struggled briefly to do even the simplest things, and then I tried thinking like a Mac user: “what if I knew nothing of C:\?” I just thought “I want my picture to go from this CD to my photo library.” ZING! It was done. 4 weeks later and I am feeling fairly comfortable with Mac. They have their good points. Most everything you can think of is part of the OS by now. There are seemingly no utilities to buy. Buy Ghost to clone PC’s? No need with a Mac. Clone `em with Disk utilities. Search your entire PC at once for anything containing the works “Hobie Cat”? Install and download Google Desktop. No need for Mac. Spotlight is there for you; upper right corner of the screen. And oh boy, is it pretty. If Mac OS X had a daisy vase it would be a VW Bug. But it isn’t all flowers. I took one home to use my first week at Moli. I was supposed to do some beta testing. It was a frustrating start. The laptop’s electrical cord, which is imbued with the magic of magnets, is only about 3 feet long. I had to search the house for an extension cord. Now, plugged in, off to work I go. I hit the website, and tried to log in. FROZEN. My Mac had crashed. Was it doing it’s best PC impression? Reboot. How very PC. Install new updates? Reboot. Very pc. Updates to the updates are ready to install. Is this a PC? One of my users complains his Mac Book turns off at random and he can not work like this. I search the forums. It is a known problem. I eventually find a site that shows Apple acknowledging the problem. It is official: Macs Crash! In those commercials where the PC and Mac are personified as men, the PC always falls down. I see a truer version, when they both fall and knock their heads together. Now, having been to the other camp, I say 6 of one and a ½ dozen of the other. In any case, I get paid to support both, so I had better know how to fix `em, `cause they do both break!

8. I should be working, but...

   06.Oct.06, 15:42 EDT
   
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   Oh geese, I wish I had office walls. I feel like that guy on WKRP in Cincinnati. [I hope they incorporate a spell checking into this blog too. I think I will switch to word then paste it back in after spell checking.] As I was saying without walls everyone can see me clearly lingering on this Moli web site. I can’t get enough. The people on here are so cool. So, this is blogging? I have avoided it all these years. Oh well 1st time for everything. It’s not like anyone would bother reading this. Who has the time or the interest to muddle thru the musings of some computer guy? I’m not JUST a computer guy. I have to go outside sometime. These are the times you can find me in my car. Off here and there. The first sentence I spoke as a child was “Bye bye, car, car.” No great poem there, but grand dad was a race car driver and cars are in my DNA. Sure, I wouldn’t mind a Bentley Continental GTC. The newest, coolest W12 cylinder convertible there is. But, I don’t know about you, but the $200,000 sticker puts me off a bit. Currently, I have a lovingly preserved `88 Nissan 300ZX 5 speed manual. It is fun stuff. She is a bit too old (19 years) to beat up at the track, but I still have fun throwing her around the corners on the street. I have had this car for 10 years and one similar to it for 2 years before that. Z car people are really loyal to their cars. I have been a member of Z car clubs and the folks are diverse and interesting. Old, young, wild, calm… You name it, they love their Z cars. Tomorrow, I drive to Orlando, for the Florida Z Fest 2006. There will be many Z car nuts there. I am hoping to talk up Moli, and maybe get at least the South Florida Z Car Club interested in our site. In any case there will be photos. I smell a Z car “view” in my Moli future. Well, that’s all for my 1st blog. Remember, back up your data regularly, stay away from gambling and porn sites when on your work PC (or Mac) and always reboot when your PC bursts into flames. GO MOLI Jeff B Desktop Support Technician jbaker@moli.com