XMAS Newsletter

I count myself lucky to not have "friends" who send me bragging newsletters at Christmastime. My mom used to get them from some old neighbors. Moving didn't stop them — I guess my mom was too polite to refuse the request for their new address.

If you have never seen one then you have something else to be thankful for this year. These snoozeletters (I think they're boring) are a way to show how much better your family is than the poor schmucks who receive it.

"Bobby made the honor role ... Betty is the captain of her cheerleading squad ... John got promoted to Senior Executive Vice President ..."

If they're so smart, how come you can always find some gaff like the honor "role"?

Here's what I've been tempted to send out, but have never had the guts to:

We think Tommy is going to pass third grade this year — on only his 2nd try! ... Jennie is recovering nicely from the head lice. She's might even continue shaving her head; she thinks it looks good with her new piercings. ... Barb should get her license back next month, just in time for her release from prison (can you believe the judge gave her 6 months? It was only her third DUI!) ... The federal court ruled that those billboards with the pictures of people who hired hookers are unconstitutional and they've been taken down. It's about time, too; I was getting tired of people pointing and whispering as I walk by. On an unrelated note, I've been lesion free for 9 months now! ...

Hope you have a Merry Christmas, even if you don't celebrate Christmas.

(Yes, this is your card. Feel free to print it and put it on your mantle.)

'Tis the Season

I just can't seem to help it. I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to Christmas.

It's not that I'm cheap. In fact, my tendency is to be anything but cheap. But I still find myself very short of patience and Christmas cheer and it only gets worse the closer we get to Christmas.

So what is it that makes me grumpy? I'm not sure. Part of it is probably that I'm an introvert and this is the time of year when there are a lot of demands to spend time socializing. Putting on a happy face and socializing is very tiring for me. My brother, 3 of 3 among my generation (I'm 2 of 3), seems to be the opposite from me in this regard. I think he gets energy from gatherings and he just doesn't understand me. But I digress.

Another thing that drives me nuts is the need to keep things equal. If you have kids you probably know of this requirement. It means that you have to give each child the same number of gifts. The price of those gifts also has to be equal, as does the WOW! factor.

Aside # $52.37:Did you ever notice that "WOW" upside down is "MOM"?

Also, if you do the purchasing for grandparents you have to make sure that the WOW and fun factors are balanced well between your and your SO's parents.

Of course, I understand all of these requirements very well and am not prepared to simply toss them out and let the (cow) chips fall where they may. Nevertheless, trying to get everything to balance is hard. It leaves me weary and short tempered.

Another thing that bugs me is decorating. My wife and I have — er — different ideas about how to decorate. But I guess I must consider myself lucky overall if, for no other reason than that she doesn't with to go whole hog with the outdoor decorations. I'll admit it, I'm a lazy bastard. Especially where it involves working in the yard. Those outdoor decorations are expensive to buy, expensive to run, hard to store, and a pain in the bum to put up and take down. What's not to love? If any of my neighbors says anything about my lack of outdoor decorations I may just have to buy a menorah and put it in the window.

I could go on, but what's the point? So I'll just close with Bah! Humbug!

Bye-Bye, Earthlink. It's been great.

I have used Earthlink DSL for nearly four years, but today I cancelled the service. As mentioned in a previous post, Verizon has a sexy new service called FiOS. It was finally enough to tempt me to switch.

I got the cheapest and slowest FiOS internet service. Assuming that taxes and fees will be a wash, FiOS will cost me $10 less each month than I was paying with Earthlink. And now that I've done a few largish downloads I can report that FiOS is about 7 times faster than what Earthlink was able to deliver. Those are numbers I can't ignore.

But as I leave Earthlink I have to commend them for a solid service. In the four years I was with them I had very few outages. Like maybe one per year, with nothing lasting longer than a couple of hours. And the performance was consistent. There were no daily slowdowns when the kids got home from school. There were no seasonal slowdowns. Even the Victoria's Secret online fashion show didn't slow down my other internet use.

And, it must be noted, I came to Earthlink from ISDN, where I was paying about $1500 per month for 128 kilobits per second (both ways). So $50 per month for 768 kilobits down and 256 kilobits up was a real deal! FiOS is the next step. I wonder what the future will bring.

Big Ideas

First off, yes, I'll admit that I'm a bit odd. Now, with that out of the way, let's get down to the topic of infinity, shall we?

Aside #sqrt(2)/2: I promised Gene-Bob that I would discuss the cardinality of the continuum the next day, but failed to follow up, citing a discontinuity in the continuum. Interestingly enough, it was a discontinuity in Fourier series that led Georg Cantor to the discovery that all infinities were not the same.

Aside #aleph_0 + 1: My family's fascination with infinity, or at least my and 2 of 2's fascination with infinity, probably began with Buzz Lightyear, who always departed with the phrase, "To infinity, and beyond!"

So, what is infinity? You might be tempted to say that it is the largest number. But couldn't I define a number as infinity plus 1, and wouldn't that be bigger than infinity? Well, yes and no. Mathematicians avoid these kinds of problems by dodging the issue and saying that infinity is more of a concept than a quantity. It's similar to how physicists say that light is sort of a particle and sort of a wave.

Aside #many: A very strange, but very beloved friend of mine at the Looniversity of Tex-Mex at Autism, is fond, after a few beers and a couple of slices of Milto's pizza, of saying that there are really only a few numbers that really matter. For example, 1 and 2. Anything more than a very small number can be represented as "many". I think he used to cite some ancient culture that had such a limited number system. "Many" was their infinity.

Aside #0: I can't recall if my friend had a concept of zero in his numbering system. Oh, by the way, he was the accountant for one of the departments at the University.

So back in the 70's (the 1870's), a curious fellow named Georg started looking into the concept of the continuum. An example of a continuum would be the points on a line. How many are there? Is it the same number as the number of cardinal numbers?

Curious Georg decided that there were more points in the continuum than there were counting numbers (i.e. cardinal numbers). In this off-Cantor world, there are orders, or levels, of infinity. The lowest order of infinity is called aleph null.

Aside #128: As they say at the First Brobdignagian Babatist Church of Suburbia when discussing the King James Version of the Bible, "if it was good enough for JEE-sus then it's good enough for me." I think a similar statement can be made for the ASCII character set and we should be immediately suspicious of someone who proposes the use of characters that aren't in ASCII.

Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And not only is it not found in ASCII, it isn't in the ISO 8859-1 character set either. So since I doubt that ℵ happens to produce a funny looking X on your screen, I'll just have to write aleph_0 and you should think "aleph null". Similarly, aleph_1 is "aleph one".

Now that we have notation nailed down, let's get back to infinity. Aleph_0 is defined as the number of counting numbers, or the number of elements in any countably infinite set. Counting numbers are a good example since it is fairly easy to construct the next in the sequence no matter where you are. So we can accept that, given infinite time we could count (list) all of the counting numbers. Don't you just love circular definitions? Okay, let's just say that you can list all of the counting numbers from zero on up, without missing any, for as long as you have the time. For example, you could list every last counting number from 1 to 1,000,000. With any luck, you now understand the concept of a set being countably infinite. The size of that set (its cardinality) is aleph_0.

The next issue is to figure out if a given infinite set is countable or not. We do this by trying to do a one-to-one mapping between the set of interest and the set of cardinals. For example, is the set of even numbers countably infinite? Well, yes it is because we can map the cardinal 1 to the even number 2, the cardinal 2 to the even number 4, and so on, for all possible even numbers. We'll never finish the job, but since we can define a one-to-one mapping that clearly won't miss any of the even numbers, and since we've already accepted that the cardinals are countably infinite, we have proven that the set of even numbers is also countably infinite. So both sets are the same size, and the size is aleph_0.

Stop! Back up. Did I just say that there are as many (positive) even numbers as there are cardinals? Yep. I did. Maybe now you're starting to understand why Curious Georg lost his mind and wound up in the looney bin.

Let's try another set: the real numbers between zero and one. Is it countably infinite? Let's make a list. Each number will be represented by an infinite set of digits, so 0.2 is written in our list as 0.20000000... (with an infinite number of 0's off to the right, so that we can distinguish it from 0.200000000...1). Here's a bit of my list (not in order):

1)  0.1000000000...
2)  0.1844765194...
3)  0.1368698456...
4)  0.1684413685...
5)  0.1277569545...
6)  0.9423655486...
7)  0.7526952756...
8)  0.3149712951...
9)  0.8211036501...
10) 0.3741098120...

Okay, I've listed every cotton-picken real number between 0 and 1! It took a while, but I did it! Now lets check to make sure that I didn't miss any. To do this I'm gonna make a new number and see if it's in my list. Like all of my numbers, my new number has an infinite number of digits in it. The first digit (to the right of the decimal) will be different from the first digit in the first entry on my list. The second digit will be different from the second digit of the second entry in the list. You following me? Let's look at my list and highlight the digits I'm looking at:

1)  0.1000000000...
2)  0.1844765194...
3)  0.1368698456...
4)  0.1684413685...
5)  0.1277569545...
6)  0.9423655486...
7)  0.7526952756...
8)  0.3149712951...
9)  0.8211036501...
10) 0.3741098120...

The red digits in my list are going to be used to create my new number using this formula: new digit = (old digit + 1) modulo 10. That's a fancy way of saying that I'll change a 0 into a 1, a 1 into a 2, a 2 into a 3, and so on, with a 9 becoming a 0. Here's the transform:

0.1864552900... becomes 0.2975663011...

Guess what? It isn't in my list. How do I know? Well, because it is different from the first number in my list in at least the first decimal place. And it is different from the second number in my list in at least the second decimal place. And it is different from the third number in my list in at least the third decimal place. And so on into infinity. So my list wasn't complete after all. I failed in producing that one-to-one mapping from the cardinals to the reals without missing any! And it can't be done!

Therefore, the set of reals (between 0 and 1, and by extension the set of all reals) is uncountably infinite. We define the number of elements in this uncountable set as aleph_1.

Later on, in a proof I haven't seen, Cantor proposes that aleph_1 = 2^aleph_0. I'll have to take his word for it.

FTP

There are so many acronyms today that it's hard to keep up with them. But it gets even harder when new acronyms are also old ones. Case in point: FTP, which has stood for File Transfer Protocol (and File Transfer Program) for more than 20 years. I use ftp every week and in a previous life I was even part of a team that wrote an ftp program (in assembly language) for a CDC supercomputer.

A couple of years ago FTP gained another definition: Fiber To (the) Premises. It means that a fiber optic cable is connected to your house. Well, yesterday, fiber came to my premises in the form of a service called FiOS, from Verizon.

I had ordered the lowest priced FiOS internet service: $39.95 for 5 Megabits per second download and 2 Megabits per second upload. This is $10 cheaper than my current ISP and at least 3 times the marketing speed. When you order FiOS internet service they also move your (main) telephone line to the fiber. In January they will start offering TV over FiOS.

The install went pretty well, though it takes a long time. Since fiber optic cable cannot transmit electricity, and since ethernet and telephones both require electricity, there has to be a big box that converts the light signals from the fiber into electrical signals on the copper that runs through the house. And that box needs a battery backup if you want your phone to continue working during a power outage. Of course, who has a non-powered (i.e. not a cordless) phone anymore? Well, besides me.

Then, too, there was the small fact that easternet cable isn't quite the same thing as telephone wahr. I had DSL, which came over the telephone wire. I didn't have ethernet cable from the exterior telephone CPE to my router. So they had to install that as well by drilling yet another hole through the exterior of my house.

When it was all done I got to setup a new username and password for my internet stuff and we verified that it really did work. Now I just have to recable the office (the router is in a different place) and make it all look nice.

Then my wife asked, "Why doesn't the phone work?"

Sigh. I forgot to test that before the installer left. I did some tests and called Verizon. They had me do the same tests, then said they'd get the installer back out. Well, he had been gone over an hour and it was well past normal quittin' time, so I had to wait until the morning to get my telephone working. Turns out that the computer which was responsible for switching my phone from the copper lines to the fiber had gotten stuck mid-way and there was a "hold" on my line. They cleared that and now everything is working as it should.

Of course, the big question is whether it is faster or not. The answer is that it depends. There are a lot of things you do on the internet which are limited by things other than your network speed. For example, when you point your browser to some site you've never visited before (or more than an hour ago) then your computer uses DNS to look up the internet address for that web site. The DNS protocol has built in delays (of up to a minute) to give the servers time to answer before throwing up an error screen. Then the HTTP protocol does a lot of chatting back and forth with lots of little delays. Finally you get your content, and unless that is big you probably won't notice any significant speed difference. Then again, there are plenty of servers on the net which are incapable of giving you what you asked for at your internet connection's speed. They were slow with DSL and are no faster with FiOS.

When all is said and done, I do expect to see some important speed increases for the stuff I do over the internet. I just have to figure out what I'm going to do with that extra $10 each month!

I See Dead People

Yesterday, my wife and I took our children to their first funeral, for Great Grand Aunt Margaret. The kids had met Aunt Margaret about two years ago when we all went down to celebrate her 90th birthday, and we thought that her funeral was a good opportunity to introduce and discuss a wide variety of topics, both practical and religious. Because they had met Margaret and had heard about her from time to time there was a connection. But they weren't so close to her as to be overcome with grief, and therefore be unable to absorb any of the other lessons.

Aside #10: It appears that death takes 10 years off your life! Margaret, who was born in 1913, was listed as 82 years old in the obituary which was published in the local paper.

The first new experience of the day was the viewing. Neither boy had ever seen a dead person up close before. Of course, an embalmed body in a funeral home viewing is quite a bit different from some of the other options. I prepared them by saying that it would look like she was sleeping — except that she wouldn't be drooling. :-)

The second lesson, which really wasn't expected, was to see how people used to deal with funeral processions (and apparently still do in small towns). As we followed the hearse to the cemetery we were preceded by a police car and ignored stop signs and traffic lights (we passed through two of the town's three lights). Other traffic on the street (i.e. going the opposite direction) even stopped and waited until we were all past! In Dallas people get upset when the traffic lights switch to allow a fire truck to zoom by on the way to an emergency! (Heck, any red light makes the majority of big city drivers furious.)

Then, of course there were lots of little things to observe, and I won't bore you further with their details. It was a good experience and there were many good little discussions. I'm glad that my children were able to experience death in such a low stress way and to see how a family handles it.

Now if I can only get them stop running with scissors ...

Global Warming?!? Balderdash!

Harrumph! Global warming my a**! Woke up this morning to find the temperature below freezing. In Texas! And yet, my kids still had to go to school!

Aside #9/5+32: Here in Texas we put on Parkas when the temperature goes below 32 degrees Celcius!

I, for one, am not going to sit still for this! I'm gonna write to my erected representatives and demand that they do something about it!

And it's not just in Texas. Oh, no, there's an ice-age coming to Europe on account of a failure of the Gulf Stream. I read it on the internet, so it must be true. How can you have an ICE AGE if there's GLOBAL WARMING? Why would the polar ice caps melt if it's so cold that France will have permafrost?

I think this cold weather is just another plot by libberralls to turn Texas into a BLUE state! They must think that if our lips and fingers are blue then we'll vote for Hillary.

Well, it ain't gonna work! We're gonna vote for George Bush in 2008! P, that is. Next in line for the throne. Just you wait.

Done! (Well, almost)

My wife and I went shopping this past weekend, hoping to make a serious dent in our lists, thereby reducing our stress in the weeks leading up to Festivus. Judging by the traffic, we weren't the only ones.

The most amazing thing is that we are 1 gift away from being done! And we should be able to bag that today!

Slightly less amazing, but amazing nonetheless, is that only one of our purchases was on the internet. We made a determined effort to buy locally, and especially in our city. We weren't, however, willing to pay significantly higher prices just to support our local merchants and fill the city coffers. And we didn't have to! Prices locally were very close to internet prices, often identical and sometimes even less (and, yes, sometimes slightly more). Additionally, I think sales tax and shipping would have been about the same, overall.

Aside #8.25%: I continue to be amazed that small merchants haven't setup kiosks in their stores to allow them to special order from a wider stock, taking advantage of the same middlemen that allow internet sites to carry a wide selection with no actual warehouse. Instead they carry a small selection and sigh at lost sales when people ask for an item they don't stock, even though they carry other items by the same manufacturer! And then they blame Wal-Mart for driving them out of business!

Oh, and I'm proud to say that none of my purchases came from Wal-Mart. The pink-slip that comes a week later as a result of my choice of merchants may be my own.

Great American Smoke-Out

Today is the Great American Smoke-Out. I'm not sure why it's so late in the year. The weather-guesser on the local news said that the average date of the first freeze of the fall/winter is November 17 (in Dallas). Sure enough, we had our first freeze of the season this morning.

But the GASO is a national event and other areas probably get their first cooler weather before this. So why do they hold the annual turn-on-the-furnace-to-burn-off-the-dust-and-set-off-the-smoke-alarm (sending everyone in the house scurrying outside) event so late? I ran my furnace a couple of weeks ago when the weather was nice and we could have the windows open (and the kids were playing outside already).

But I'm a good, patriotic Merkin, so I turned on the gas fireplace as a substitute. Didn't do much. Probably because the glass doors keep out most of the dust. The smoke alarms didn't even go off. And judging from the lack of people fleeing their houses to get away from shrieking smoke alarms, no one else waited this long either.

Sync Schmink

In a previous life I was a FORTRAN jock. Yes, it's supposed to be spelled in all capital letters.

Round about the mid '80's the big deal in the number crunching world was the so-called device independent graphics library. This meant that you could display your graph on a graphics terminal, work out all the kinks, and then re-run your program to print on a pen plotter, all without having to re-write, let alone re-compile, your program.

My boss at the time (who was Bard from everywhere he'd ever been) never passed up the opportunity to ask about the blackboard driver, pointing out that until these libraries could display on a blackboard they weren't truly device independent.

The blackboard driver popped onto my stack — er — popped into my brain — this morning as I entered an appointment on the calendar hanging in the kitchen. It was my third entry of this appointment in as many devices.

I am stuck in this duplicate entry purgatory because of the twin sins of being in a mixed marriage (my wife is not a geek) and of not running a Microsoft™ operating system on my computer. Well, and my employer doesn't use Exchange™.

So I write things down on the wall calendar, and in my PDA, and finally in my corporate calendar. Scheduling the dentist is almost as unpleasant as going to the dentist. By the way, it's on Monday, the 21st.

Cargo Cults

Some South Pacific Islanders (e.g. in Papua New Guinea) believe that western goods (called "cargo") are produced by ancestral gods. They build airstrips in the jungles to entice the gods to send them airplanes full of cargo. These religious groups are known as "cargo cults". Several members were arrested recently, which is how I heard about them.

This makes me wonder. Do the cargo cults consider the cargo planes to be religious artifacts? Are the pilot and crew considered gods, or angels, or priests, or ... ?

And what about the cargo itself? Is it considered sacred or special in some way because it came from the gods, or is it just stuff that the gods give to the people in fulfillment of some sort of provider role?

Further, is it possible to infer anything about the gods' state of mind from the contents of the cargo? For example, if the cargo is food does that mean the gods are happy with the people, but a shipment of schoolbooks means they're angry? (Schoolbooks could be like extra homework assigned by an angry teacher.) Or is any cargo a sign of the gods' pleasure and its absence an indicator of displeasure?

Similarly, does the contents of the cargo signal the desires of the gods? Or an omen? How do you tell the difference? I mean, what does a shipment of guns mean? Is it a gift to help the people hunt for food? Weapons to help defend themselves from an imminent attack? Weapons to help them get revenge on a neighboring village? Or a suggestion to kill themselves? Or would that be a shipment of Cool-Aid™? :-)

Gotta go, I think I hear a plane coming.

I'm Gonna Miss Her

If you are a registered voter and have a telephone (POTS) in Texas then you've probably gotten a call from one or more parties interested in your vote on Proposition 2 on November 8.

Article I, Texas Constitution, (The Bill of Rights) is amended by adding Section 32 to read as follows:

(a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.

(b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

Proponents of this amendment say that it defends marriage by preventing homosexuals from getting married. Putting aside the fact that Texas law already prohibits marriage between members of the same sex, I'm not sure how, exactly, my marriage is threatened by a couple getting married, no matter what their gender, race, religion, national origin, etc.

Opposing Proposition 2 we have many groups, including one called, interestingly enough, Save Texas Marriage, which makes an interesting observation: clause (a) of the proposition defines marriage, and clause (b) outlaws it.

In other words, Proposition 2 completely abolishes the institution of marriage! It is expected to pass by wide margins.

I'm gonna miss her.

Still Here

Haven't posted in a while. Nothin' to say, really. Not that what I normally write about is significant.

Family was sick last week. Mom and 2 of 2 had strep throat and are on antibiotics. 1 of 2 and I are feeling kind of down, but not quite sick.

We made it through Halloween. Rain stopped in time to go out and shake down the neighbors for candy. Didn't seem like as many folks decorated this year. Back at home I used the 5-foot tall inflatable T-Rex to answer the door (ROAR!) — didn't scare anyone. :-( And hardly anyone came by to get candy.

Unrelated, Texas continues to surprise me by remaining undefeated. Will be rooting for Miami this weekend.

I Smell A Wumpus!

My new computer is getting close to fully configured now. So I'm starting to see the effect of the extra 1000 marketing megahertz. What, you're not familiar with marketing megahertz? Well, they're closely related to MIPS, which used to be a common way to measure the speed of a processor. MIPS used to stand for Millions of Instructions Per Second, but then got redefined as Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed. After MIPS died people seemed to become enamored of megahertz and then gigahertz, largely thanks to the efforts of Intel.

Unfortunately for consumers, megahertz (MHz) and gigahertz (GHz) are no more useful than MIPS for figuring out how fast a processor, or a system, will be. AMD decided to get off the treadmill by naming their processors with an equivalency number. So an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ was supposedly equivalent to an Intel Pentium 4 running at 2 GHz (2000 MHz). The AMD Athlon XP 2000+ itself ran at something like 1600 MHz.

Unfortunately for AMD, the game has changed again. It turns out that processor makers are now up against the wall on MHz/GHz and are having to do other things to make their processors and systems better. Since MHz and GHz are no longer the dominant differentiators, Intel has dropped them from processor names and AMD has been left with a marketing megahertz number on their processor that doesn't really help much in figuring out which Intel processor to compare it to.

But I digress (though, to be fair, isn't that the point of a blog?). Anyway, my old system had an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ running at 1600 MHz or so while my new system has an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ running at 1800 MHz or so. It's only about 200 MHz faster in some oscillator, but it's a whole thousand more in marketing MHz!

Of course, the interesting question is, is it any faster? Well, I dunno. Downloads of stuff are still limited by my 1.5 Mbps DSL line. Uploads are even more limited by the 384 Kbps limit of my ADSL connection (why does no one call it ADSL anymore?).

OOH, ooh! I could try some games! Okay, I fired up adventure. I'm still clueless. How about wumpus? Wumpus still gets me every time except for the times I fall into a bottomless pit. Screw the games. Business apps? Darn, doesn't seem to echo my keystrokes any faster in OpenOffice.org than it did before. I know, personal communications! Crap! AIM (actually, gaim) doesn't seem any faster. Still limited by my typing, network, AOL's servers, and the attentiveness and typing skills of the people I converse with.

So what was the point of this upgrade? Well, for one thing, the old system was breaking somewhere in the memory interface and was locking up far too frequently. Running Linux, I'd gotten used to not dealing with the BSODs and lockups that still plague my wife's computer. And second, I couldn't stand the thought of spending a couple hundred dollars and not getting something that was, at least theoretically, faster. And this one is, theoretically, faster. By 1000 marketing megahertz.

I was right! Phew!

I'd been having problems with (computer) system stability and finally decided that it was something besides memory, even though memtest86+ showed lots of errors. My suspicions were raised when I put the memory in my wife's computer and memtest86+ thought it was fine there. Unfortunately, my wife's computer also ran the memory with very conservative timings which, in addition to reducing memory performance by at least 1/3rd, may have also allowed the memory to work without error. I'm not willing to run my system crippled in that fashion, so I gambled that the memory actually was okay and ordered a new processor and motherboard.

They arrived on Tuesday and I finally had the time to install them on Friday. The first stick of memory, the newest, showed one error at a single address, but only about once every three passes or so. Running at full speed. This same stick had shown hundreds of errors every pass at a wide range of addresses, when run in my old system.

The second stick tested perfect at full speed over 14 hours (many passes through memtest86+'s test suite). Likewise the third, and oldest, stick.

So my gamble was right! There was something wrong with my old cpu or motherboard. I just wish I knew which it was. If I could find an AMD Athlon XP processor slow enough, and cheap enough, I'd like to give it a try. Unfortunately, cheap enough would have to be pretty dog-gone cheap to justify the effort because the problem could be the northbridge chip on the motherboard, and that requires a new motherboard.

Anyway, the new processor and motherboard are doing fine. I'm compiling Linux right now (writing this on the kids' computer) and am looking forward to a newly stable system.

Oh, and I have to get that memory stick replaced. It has a lifetime warranty and the manufacturer has a reputation for honoring it.

Why not $10?

Or at least $7.60?

I'm talking minimum wage. The Senate just rejected a proposal by Ted "Another Round" Kennedy to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $6.25. Kennedy said that it was unacceptable that a single mother with two children working full time for the minimum wage was still $4,500 below the poverty line. Well, $6.25 would leave her $2,700 below — is that acceptable? Why didn't Kennedy propose raising the minimum wage to $7.60 per hour? At least that would put the hypothetical worker at the poverty level.

But the bigger question is, why should someone working full time have an income at the poverty level? Shouldn't someone with a full time job earn enough money to not be living in poverty?

I know we can get into all kinds of stereotypes about what poor people have, or expect to have. Like big screen home theater setups, new cars with $4000 custom wheels, pack-a-day cigarette and 6-pack-a-day beer habits. But if you think about the cost of a decent apartment (where gun shots aren't routinely heard at night), utilities, food from a grocery store, a car bought used (2 years old) and kept for 8 years, clothes, etc.; could you live on $15,200 per year? Even without a cell phone, cable TV, etc.? I don't think I could.

I think the minimum wage should be $10. At least.

But I'd have to be willing to give up the $1 menu at Wendy's. And prices might have to go up at a few other places. Maybe I'd eat at home a bit more, and I'd probably be healthier for it.

I recall that Henry Ford paid his workers the unheard of wage of $5 per day, thinking that he needed workers who could afford to buy his own product. Those wages surely increased the costs of his cars (compared to what they would cost if he paid less). And it is credited with increasing wages of other factory workers. I'm sure some prices went up as a result. But it didn't cause a massive layoff of workers and didn't throw the economy into a tailspin.

I say it's time to do it again.

Jesus and Java, Part II

Almost a year ago I wrote about Jesus and Java, admitting my confusion between coffee and a computer programming language and wondering how either related to Jesus.

But I just saw an article in USA Today about Starbucks' plan to put a religious quote on their coffee cups.

The quote, from the author of The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren, is part of a larger campaign, called The Way I See It, that includes quotes from writers, scientists, musicians, athletes, politicians, and cultural critics. So no, Starbucks isn't coming out of the closet, so to speak, and joining companies like Chick-fil-A as openly religious.

But it will be interesting to watch the commentary from those who are offended by the quote and from those who defend it.

One Man's Trash

"One man's trash is another man's treasure." That is the fervent hope of everyone who hosts a garage sale, and probably also of those who frequent them.

I should disclose up front that I am not a garage sale person. I have only been to a couple of garage sales, and have not been tempted to buy anything in them. Every person I've spoken to who has hosted a garage sale talks of the thefts that occur, and of the people who will haggle over a 10 cent item.

I am not a haggler, and I am not so proud of my trash as to think that other people should be delighted to have it.

Nevertheless, I succumbed to my wife, as all happily married men learn to do, and agreed to let her have a garage sale. But she had to do all the work. I moved a few heavy pieces and stood around during the sale pointing out who they had to haggle with.

My in-laws brought some stuff over, as did a neighbor. Some of it sold, some didn't. We made a little money, but I won't be quitting my day job.

One thing that was really annoying was the sign ordinance here in Plano. Basically, you can't have them. At least not in the public right of way, which extends at least 10 feet from the curb and includes everything up to and including any privacy wall or neighborhood entrance stuff. So we had one puny sign in a neighbor's yard near a minorly major road. The setback requirements made it hidden from view until you were too close to read the address before you were past it. And we didn't dare to violate the ordinance because the city has been cracking down on it in recent months (minimum fine: $500).

So we had virtually no drive-by traffic. If you didn't see our puny ad in the newspaper ($150 for three words) then you didn't show up. And you didn't. Maybe our next garage sale, in 2012, will be more successful.

This is Progress

I placed my order today. New CPU and motherboard. I reported earlier that I thought my CPU was going bad. I had several memory modules which were showing errors under memtest86+ when placed in my system but not when placed in my wife's system. According to the memtest86+ docs such problems could be caused by problems with the L1/L2 cache (on the CPU) or the memory controller (on the CPU for some CPUs, separate for others).

One way to do further diagnosis would be to try another CPU in the same motherboard. If the problems exist with the new CPU then try another motherboard but with the original CPU. The power supply (P/S or PSU depending on your religion) could also be a culprit. Of course, I don't have spare components hanging around and don't know anyone who does. So trying components means buying components. That can cost money, if they can even be found.

I went looking for a new CPU and discovered that they are not generally available. I'm talking AMD Athlon XP in the low 2000+ range (Socket A). Oh, I found a few — for shockingly high prices (supply & demand, I suppose). I wasn't willing to spend that kind of moola for a relatively old, slow chip. I even checked to see if my mobo maker (Soyo) offered a newer BIOS that would support faster chips in the Athlon XP line. They didn't. :-(

So I felt compelled to go for a new CPU/motherboard combo. For religious reasons I want an AMD Athlon 64 CPU. Don't ask why — it's a matter of faith which simply cannot be challenged or discussed rationally. ;-)

The problem I faced next is that the DIY computer biz caters to a community of geeks who have to have the latest, greatest, sexiest thing out there. The result is that anything older (i.e. over 1 year old) becomes very hard to find. And in the past year or so we have a new graphics bus (PCI Express x16, replacing AGP), new chipsets (e.g. nForce4 replacing nForce3, K8T890 replacing K8T800), new memory (DDR2 replacing DDR), new disk drive interface (SATA replacing PATA), and a new power supply connector (24-pin replacing 20-pin).

Yep, I have an AGP graphics card, DDR memory, ATA disks, and a 20-pin connector on my ATX PSU. And I want to reuse them all to save money. So I go looking for motherboards using chipsets which support my stuff, and motherboards using them.

Yeah, you're right again. Both nForce4 and K8T890 chipsets (the newer ones), don't support AGP graphics. And motherboards using them don't support 20-pin ATX power connectors. On the bright side, AMD still uses DDR memory and all motherboards still have a couple of PATA (IDE) connectors. Causing consternation, however, is that while they loudly brag about booting off SATA disks, they fail to mention booting from PATA disks (surely they wouldn't drop that capability — they still boot from floppy, after all).

I found several interesting motherboards that fit my needs, but when I went to find e-tailers who carried them I kept coming up empty-handed. Case in point, the DFI LanParty UT nF3 Ultra-D. The manufacturer's website labels it as NEW, but no one sells it anymore (it's actually old).

I finally ended up choosing an MSI K8N Neo2-F motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor. Should arrive next week. Then I'll put it together and test my memory (again).

Wilma!

As of today, we have only one name left for naming Atlantic storms: Wilma. What happens if we have Wilma and then more storms? According to an article that Gebo will probably link to in a comment, Once we've run out of the 21 names on the list (hurricane names don't start with Q, U, X, Y, or Z) we start using the names of the letters of the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta, etc.).

Since the himmicane season lasts until the end of November there is a very real risk that we'll have a hurricane named Beta (the wonder dog?).

But I have a better idea, inspired by the last name on this year's list: name them after Flintstones characters! Oh, and weather reporters on the news should be required to yell the names in Flintstone style. (Unless anyone can remember a Flintstones Character starting with 'A', we'll just go straight to Bam-Bam!)