Howard Young

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living reached out to me yesterday.

We had to get a smog check for our ’97 Toyota Avalon and purposely scheduled a late lunch so my wife and I could get her car tested around 2:00PM to avoid the “lunch crunch.” The Smog Check Center runs as a FIFO, a queue, that is, first come first serve.

Apparently, the center was very busy, so even at two, there was a 45 minute wait. Perhaps, like me, all their customers wait until the very last day to get their car tested.

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Congratulations to Barry Bonds! It’s an accomplishment that will without a doubt be hard for anyone else to exceed. But that’s what they said about the Babe and Hank Aaron.

Twelve more and he’ll hit the magic number of 0×300. (Is anyone out there old enough to know what is so special about that address on the Apple II?)

I never met a software developer that didn’t drink coffee (or tea). Lots of coffee. This is due to the demanding hours we keep. Eighteen hour days is not unusual especially during crunch-time.

I love running out to Starbucks, Coffee Bean or now my favorite Bad Ass Coffee around 3 or 4 in afternoon to keep me going until later that night.

But every morning, I drink Equal Exchange Coffee. According to their site:

Equal Exchange’s mission is to build long-term trade partnerships that are economically just and environmentally sound, to foster mutually beneficial relationships between farmers and consumers….

What this means, as a consumer, you get a great price for coffee, and as a farmer, they get substantial higher profits for their product. Since the middle man is removed, more profit goes to the farmers and workers whom live in poverty stricken countries.

Buy and drink lots of coffee. It will make you a better programmer!

– Howard Young

I’m not really into Social Network Websites. I don’t have a MySpace or Facebook account, but I really like LinkedIn.

LinkedIn helps you keep in touch with old and friends and colleagues that you lost track of over the past few years.

Once you create your profile, add a few companies or schools that you’ve attended, LinkedIn creates a list of people that you may have a relationship with.

Add a few friends and colleagues and you’re “networking!” I highly recommend LinkedIn. Start using it, and better yet, add me to your network!

– Howard Young

I managed to kill my Windows 2003 server the other day. It happened when I was upgrading it to Service Pack #2 and it ran out of disk space and couldn’t revert back to the previous version.

You would think that 1.7G is plenty of space to upgrade, but no….

The server was an old Dell 6300 with 4 Pentium II running at a lighting speed of 450 MHz. When it was purchased about five or six years ago, it was an extremely powerful server. And it still is powerful for driving I/O to the Firmware I’m testing.

Since it’s used for testing, it was no big loss. Just the time to reinstall 2003. I plopped in the Enterprise edition and it wouldn’t boot off the CD. I checked the BIOS and alas no “Boot From CD First” configuration. It can boot off a 3 1/2″ floppy.

So I go about trying to create a bootable floppy with 2003 on it. Usually, the Windows OS CD has a utility to create 2003 boot disks so you can install it initially from a floppy. But not on 2003.

There is a way to create a 2003 boot floppy, install a loader and SCSI driver so that you can read the CD after you boot from floppy. So I went through all the trouble to create the disk, plopped in the CD again and reboot.

This time the Dell sees the CD and starts booting off it. The only different I did this time was put the latches down over the CD ROM. Duh. The CD ROM is mounted vertical in the server instead of horizontal as in the majority of all computers. Doh! What a time killer.

Any way I got the OS reinstalled and I’m back in business.

At the time of my last post, The Natural is not so Natural, I was having some difficultly getting use to the Microsoft Natural Mouse. But after a few days, I’m finding out that the pain in my wrist is going away!

I’m also holding unnatural mice at the same angle as the Natural Mouse. I just need to get a new mouse for every computer I’m using…

– Howard