Before this starts to sound like I'm an alcoholic, keep in mind that this list is compiled over a period of many months, a beer or two at a time.  It's not as though I went to the store and bought a few cases, downed them all in a weekend, and wrote this...

Coors Light
Blue Moon (Draft only, the bottled tastes different to me)
Samuel Smith's Tadcaster Oatmeal Stout
Stone Brewing Company's Arrogant Bastard Ale
Stone Brewing Company's Oaked Arrogant Bastard Ale
Stone Brewing Company's Double Bastard Ale
Leinenkugel's Sunset Wheat
Wittkerke Belgian Wheat Beer
Asahi

I'll add more as I find more beers I like.
 

I first discovered The Proclaimers when they released a 1990 single entitled "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" to some critical acclaim and Top 40 success (it was the #3 single in 1993).  Since then, I've tried to keep up with them and check out their albums as they're released.  While surfing Spiralfrog.com's library, I ran into the 2007 album "Life With You" and decided to give it a listen.

If you're not familiar with The Proclaimers, they're a Scottish rock band composed of two identical twin brothers, Charlie and Craig Reid.  Unlike some bands, their Scottish accents come through loud and clear in their music, as do their political views.  They support Scottish independence from Britain and are politically active in that regard.

One of the things I really like about The Proclaimers is their ability to turn a phrase.  Where some bands would take the cliched route in a love song and describe a woman in a red dress by comparing her to a rose or some other red object, The Proclaimers describe a pale woman in a red dress as looking like "blood lying on snow" (in the track of the same name).  While I celebrate this as an interesting turn of phrase, I have to wonder how a woman would react to being described as looking like blood on snow.  But this isn't the only unusual choice of words in the song.  Later, they say "It's taken generations of lucky breeding to make you" to the woman they're interested in. I'm not sure how many women would be swept off their feet by such phrases, but they are fun to listen to.

I found "Harness Pain" to be a very strong track.  The listener is told they must harness pain if they want to hold "the flame" and "tell the truth about love".  They're told that "when you try to succeed you mostly fail" but you harness the pain and become stronger.

"The Long Haul", "S-O-R-R-Y", and perhaps certain other tracks seem to take on the Iraq war and its supporters, saying "I miss the days when the threat to our position didn't come from some religion but from godless communism."  We're told "we're not barbarians like we were way back when, we've learned from history, so we get to go around again" and "tell your sons not to bother with football, get a backpack on and crawl, we're in this for the long haul".

In terms of music and performance, this is as good an album as any other from The Proclaimers.  However, in terms of its content, it's a far more politically charged piece than earlier albums like Sunshine on Leith.  

If you like The Proclaimers' unique sound and can stomach their political views (whether you agree with those views or not), you'll find this an enjoyable album and fair amount different from mainstream pop music.

 An Ohio historian removed an 8-ton rock from the Ohio River.  The rock is covered with a variety of carvings, dating to Portsmouth's early days, and perhaps even earlier than that.  That, in and of itself, hardly qualifies as news.

One of my machines at home runs Windows Vista Ultimate.  Until last night, it had an Asus Striker Extreme motherboard in it, a Core 2 Duo 6400 CPU, 2 GB of RAM, an Nvidia 8800 GTS video card, a PCI IDE card with four hard drives attached, a DVD/CD burner, USB mouse, PS/2 keyboard, dual 19” monitors, and 3 SATA hard drives.  In total it has over a terabyte of disk space.

I chose Vista both for the experience it would provide for work as well as the fact that when you have over about 700 GB of IDE/SATA disk space, Windows XP SP2 starts to exhibit data corruption problems due to some kind of static internal area where disk cache data is stored (I lost a ton of files before digging up an obscure KB article on that).  I spent hours trying to fix that issue and couldn’t.  The only solution was a hotfix from Microsoft, which they would not give me because I was using an OEM copy of Windows XP Pro.  They wanted me to go back to where I bought the OEM license, which was Newegg.com, which doesn’t offer tech support like that.  So I was stuck.  When I went to Vista, I went with a retail license in case it had the same problem.

Fortunately, it didn’t.

Unfortunately for me, over a year later, that Asus motherboard decided to give up the ghost.  It apparently killed a DIMM, which I replaced.  Then it pretty much just died entirely, randomly rebooting and crashing even when just sitting at a BIOS screen.  I decided it was time for a (less-expensive) replacement.  I bought an MSI P35 Platinum and 2GB of matching RAM.  Everything else from the old setup would work with this.

Last night, I received the new parts.  I removed the old motherboard and RAM, installed the new ones, connected everything back up, and fired up the system.  It came to life, then immediately choked with a “BOOTLDR is missing” error.  A bit of troubleshooting revealed what I was afraid of… In the install, Vista decided to put the bootloader on one disk, and the rest of Vista on another.  If you reassemble things such that the bootloader disk is in a different location, the machine won’t boot.  I booted from the Vista disc and did a repair.  I rebooted again and got the same error.  Another repair later, the system came up and landed at the login screen.  I logged in and found I had no mouse.

Apparently, the new motherboard uses a slightly newer variety of USB2 ports than the old one did, so there were no drivers on the machine or in Vista itself.  I popped in the manufacturer’s CD to load the drivers.  Guess what?  The installer was designed to be clicked on, and there were no keyboard shortcuts available!  With no USB ports, I had no mouse… and I had no PS/2 mice in the house to substitute.

Function OpenTheDoll()
Remove the lid from the doll
Remove the smaller doll from inside the larger doll
Put the lid back on the larger doll.
If the smaller doll can be opened, OpenTheDoll(smaller doll)
Otherwise, stop.

A function like the one above could open a nested doll whether it had only one smaller doll inside it or a million, since it will keep calling itself as many times as it has to in order to get to the point where the doll can no longer be opened.

Now that you hopefully understand the concept, let's apply that idea to dreaming, with a real-world example. Last night I had a dream that my wife woke me up to tell me it was time to get ready for work. In that dream, I fell asleep and had a dream. Thus, this last dream was "recursive" in that I was "dreaming that I was dreaming"... I can't begin to tell you how confused my brain was when I woke up from two levels of dreams. It took several seconds for "reality" (whatever that is) to sink in.

If, like me, you're a gadget fanatic and you would like to help someone out while scoring an interesting toy in the process, I may have just the answer for you.

The "One Laptop Per Child" project was started around 2002 by an MIT professor who saw in his travels how much a simple laptop computer could help the education of children in developing countries.  He founded the OLPC project as a way to develop and build a very low-cost laptop PC that could be used to educate children in developinig nations.

The resulting laptop computer is called the "XO" and is priiced at approximately $199.  Right now, if you buy a laptop for a child in a developing nation, the OLPC project will let you buy one for yourself.  The total amount out of your pocket will be around $425, of which you may be able to claim $199 as a charitable deduction on your U.S. Income Tax.  (See your tax advisor or lawyer, naturally.)

The option to give a laptop is of course going on for the forseeable future, but the option to get one for yourself or someone you care about is only open until November 26, 2007.

Because I run a game news site, I use Google Alerts to scan the Internet for gaming news and deliver me a list of potential articles by email each day.  Today's list of potential material included the following listing (modified slightly to fit this site's format) about a new Nintendo Wii (pronounced "wee") game that cracked me up.  When I read Google's excerpt from the article, it just got funnier:

Just what do you do in this Nintendo game?

If you don't get the joke, read this site's entry for the word "wee" (which sounds like Wii).

Then consider the site's definition for "whack off".

Then put the two things together...

Then read the article excerpt for an added laugh, talking about allowing the player to have an artificial sensation based on arm and hand movement...

The laptop experiment continues.

I realize that earlier I didn't explain why this laptop is going to be running Linux. I looked for a system capable of running Mac OS X 10.3 and there weren't any on eBay, even some that needed work, in the under-$100 range I was aiming for. Otherwise, I would have considered picking up a Mac so that I could continue to find Mac-related topics to write about here, since I'm doing less Mac work at the office now. (However, if you have such a laptop lying around that you'd like to give me, by all means feel free to so. My email address appears in the "Contact" section on this site. Let me know you want to send me a Mac laptop and I'll give you the address to send it to. If it's one of the Intel models, I'll even refund your shipping via PayPal.)

I could have considered running the "Hackintosh" (i.e., hacked OS X) environment on a non-Apple laptop, but that would have meant not only breaking the law (which I wasn't about to do) but also acquiring a system with at least a Pentium 4 CPU (to have SSE2 and/or SSE3 instruction sets needed by OS X). The only laptops in that performance range on eBay when I looked were well outside my $100 budget constraint.

In fact, the only laptops within my budget constraint were Pentium III and below. In the Pentium III category I found several in my price range, including the one I eventually purchased. It had 128MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive, no battery, no CD-ROM or DVD drive, no AC adapter, no carrying case, and no operating system or operating system sticker on the bottom. Fortunately, I had a couple of used batteries that were compatible in my basement from when I used to repair Dell laptops on the side. I also had a "universal" laptop power adapter that could power the unit. I even found a 64MB SODIMM to boost it to 192MB of RAM. I also had a PCMCIA wireless card I picked up a couple of years ago, made by Hawking. Amazingly, it all worked smoothly together and I was able to cobble together a dual-battery wireless system with only $46 out of pocket.

The only thing missing at this point was an OS. I think I still had a Windows 98 license around somewhere, but I didn't have a legal license to Windows 2000 or Windows XP, so I couldn't load those on the machine. Windows 98 is no longer supported by Microsoft and isn't such a great OS for random wireless browsing anyway. That left options like ReactOS (which is a Windows clone that isn't quite yet ready for primetime, but getting there), BeOS, Linux, and the like. Linux has the best hardware and software support of all those, so I opted for Linux. The next question was which Linux "distro" (distribution) to get. I already had CDs/DVDs for Red Hat Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Linspire, Debian, Gentoo, and 1-2 others I'd made for past experiments around the house. I ended up trying several of them. Ubuntu would boot into Live CD mode file, but the CD-ROM drive just ground and ground on the copies I had. Eventually I gave up because I would click an install option and have to wait an hour to see the result. For whatever reason (and I admit that it makes little or no sense to me), Kubuntu 6 worked and Ubuntu 7.04 didn't. So I chose Kubuntu because my copy of that distro's disk happened to be the one that worked.

Now that my eBay Special was up and running with the latest Kubuntu release, I was ready to start actually trying to use it. I was able to connect it to a nearby WiFi network successfully after loading it with Kubuntu, a Ubuntu Linux variant. While connected to the WiFi network, I upgraded it to the latest Kubuntu release (7.04 - though a newer one is about to come out) using instructions I found online. At that point, I was ready to begin loading it with applications, and I have to tell you it was easier than than either OS X or Windows would have been... by far!

To get the apps I knew I wanted loaded on the machine, I launched the Adept Installer, selected those applications from a list, and clicked "Apply Updates". Kubuntu obediently downloaded the applications and their dependencies, and installed them for me, all from that single click. Within minutes, I had FireFox, Scribus, Inkscape, and all the other applications I planned to use on the machine running for me. It was very slick and very impressive. And the apps all seem to work.

I loaded FireFox with some of my favorite extensions, including NoScript, AdBlock, Extended Copy Menu, DownThemAll and a few others. I populated it with bookmarks to all my sites (like this one) and some of my personal favorites like woot.com.

To make it completely usable for all my web work, however, I would need to find a Linux replacement for a tool I use to monitor game manufacturers' web sites for my game news site, gamerhotsheet.com. The tool I had been using up to this point was written for Windows using one of the Microsoft visual development tools, so it would not run as such on Linux (at least without WINE, which I would consider if I couldn't find a good alternative).

I've also decided that the 128MB of memory (plus another 64MB SODIMM I had lying around) wasn't going to be enough to keep this system running at peak efficiency. In fact, it seemed to be a bit sluggish already. I found some 256MB SODIMMs on eBay going at below $20 each and bid on those. If I get them, I'll be able to max the system at 512MB. That should help performance.

I've also decided that since this machine might be banging around in the car a lot, it might be good to ruggedize the data storage. Toward that end, I found a CompactFlash to 2.5" IDE adapter online and bought one. I'm hoping later to pick up a good-sized, fast CF card to place in it, then replace the old internal IDE drive with the adapter and CF card. That should minimize the potential for shock damage, at least to the data. To protect the screen, I ought to be able to find a decent-sized sleeve to put it in when I'm not using it, maybe something made out of thick neoprene.

To this point, I've spent $46 for the laptop, including shipping. If I can get the SODIMMs cheaply, I should be able to go to 512MB for $40-50, keeping inside my $100 budget. However, to implement the CF-to-IDE idea, I'm going to have to go over budget. The adapter was only $16. The CF card, though, could be a lot more - especially if I choose something like a 16GB Ultra III, which is perhaps the right thing to do. First, I want to test the adapter with one of my existing CF cards to see what the speed is like. If the adapter with an Ultra II flash card performs reasonably well, then it's worth investing in the bigger card. If it is too slow to be usable, then I can abandon the adapter and look at other options (like a decent backup or a spare drive).

I should point out that I am still waiting for word back from Dell on the master BIOS password to the unit so that I can fix some of the errant settings in the machine, such as date/time information and boot order.

Earlier this year, in my work as a system administrator, I was assigned to investigate why approximately 40 co-workers (out of 1700 using a PC or Mac) were having USB optical mouse issues. The symptoms were generally the same. While using the computer, the user's USB optical mouse would simply stop working. If they flipped the mouse over, it was as though the mouse was powered off. The laser would appear to have shut off. If they unplugged and re-plugged the mouse, it would nearly always come back to life. Only once in a while was it necessary to reboot the machine. Once in a great while, the USB keyboard would stop working as well. Again, unplugging and re-plugging seemed to fix it.

When I went through my first round of problems early in the year, a lengthy investigation proved that all of my 40 cases could be solved by performing the following steps:

1. Update the system BIOS from the manufacturer's web site. Sometimes this corrected the issue and no more work was needed.
2. Update the motherboard chipset drivers from the manufacturer's web site. Sometimes this corrected the issue and no more work was needed.
3. Update the mouse drivers from the mouse manufacturer's web site. Again, sometimes this corrected the issue and no more work was needed.
4. Replace the mouse with another mouse from stock.
5. Replace the keyboard with another keyboard from stock.
6. Install a self-powered USB hub between the computer and the mouse/keyboard.

The above 6 remedies seemed to take care of all 40 users.

Then, about 3 weeks ago, the problem reared its ugly head again. This time, the above 6 steps didn't work. People who were run through all 6 of them still had the problem. Our help desk bumped the problem back to me to resolve, since I'd handled the one earlier in the year.

This time I went through a pretty thorough search on the web, Microsoft's knowledgebase, Dell's knowledgebase, etc. What I learned was interesting. When I searched for mouse failures as a whole, probably 99% of the time it was an optical mouse that failed. Moreover, it was almost always a USB optical mouse that failed. This was true on Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and one or two other lesser-known operating systems. The brand of mouse didn't seem to matter, either. I read about the problem existing with every major brand and even some generic types. It made me wonder about the reliability of USB optical mice.

As a troubleshooting step, I suggested that we identify 1-2 of our users who were having the most "mouse failures". We swapped them with some new mechanical (i.e., old "ball style") mice from stock. The problems vanished for those users. As a follow-up step, I attacked the users' former optical mice to my system. Sure enough, I began seeing the problem myself.

An interesting observation occurred when we had one user who wanted to attach both an older mechanical mouse and an optical mouse to his Windows XP Pro system at the same time. He found that his optical mouse would fail, while the mechanical one kept working normally. (And again, when I swapped his optical mouse for mine, I began to see the problem myself.)

Another interesting observation was made after we installed Microsoft Windows XP Hotfix 914015 and 918365 on the affected systems. Occasionally the mouse would stop working as before, but within a couple of seconds it tended to come back to life on its own without any effort. (Please do not ask me for these hotfixes. If Microsoft won't provide them to you, I can't help as it would be illegal to do so.)

So it appears to me at the moment that we may have two separate issues here. The first issue is that there is a bug in the Windows XP Pro USB stack that causes a mouse to go offline if it asks to have the USB controller reset due to an error. The Microsoft hotfix takes care of that. The other issue is that we seem to have quite a few defective USB mice on-hand. In fact, I pulled one randomly out of stock and tested it, and it turned out to be defective. I confirmed this by attaching it to a Mac OS X system (in addition to a Windows XP system) and finding the same result, the mouse quit working.

I have a suspicion that the reliability of USB optical mice is not as high as we all might think. Just gauging from the numbers I'm seeing at our site, as many as 3% of the optical mice in use are in fact defective. Whether this is just the failure rate we should expect or whether it's symptomatic of a widespread defect in USB optical mice, I don't know.

In any case, it's caused me to add a few items to the above list of 6 steps:

7. Apply Microsoft Hotfix 914015 (if it's a Windows XP system).
8. Apply Microsoft Hotfix 918365 (if it's a Windows XP system).
9. Test the user's mouse on a system that isn't currently experiencing the mouse issue and give the user a mouse that hasn't been shown so far to have the problem.
10. Swap the optical mouse with a mechanical (roller ball type) mouse.
11. If the system and mouse support it, try installing the mouse on a PS/2 port instead of USB. We didn't see these issues with PS/2 mice on any platform.

Those steps, so far, seem to eliminate the problem in all cases. Perhaps they'll help you if you're experiencing a problem with your USB mouse.

Consider this a "cautionary tale" about rental cars... Names are being altered to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent...

Earlier this year, my wife and I rented a mini-van from an outfit we'll call "Nifty Rent-A-Car" (though that's not their name). We picked up the vehicle at a nearby Nifty rental office and headed off for a vacation. The next day, at our destination, we were rear-ended by a young driver. He was going so fast in the 35 mph zone that he knocked our stopped mini-van into the vehicle in front of us, knocking that vehicle into the car in front of it, and spinning his own vehicle two lanes over and in front of the three others. In other words, it's unlikely he was going anywhere near 35 when he hit us.

The damage to the back of our rental van and his vehicle was extensive. The rental van and the two other cards were drivable. His car had to be towed. We were all shaken, but fortunately there appear to have been no serious injuries... at least nothing that has shown up yet.

After getting the police report, having breakfast, and going back to our rented condo, we called the rental car company to tell them about the accident, provide police report information, etc. We also contacted my insurance company to have their involvement. The insurance company, which I'll call "Commonwealth Ranch" (though that's not their name), treated me extremely well. They spoke with me at length about the accident, explained what I needed to do at each step of the process, etc. I have always been pleased with that insurance company and this didn't change that.

Nifty Rent-A-Car wasn't quite so easy to deal with. We left messages, called various numbers, and asked to have the car swapped with another since the tailgate in this one was no longer usable. After several very frustrating calls, we were given two options. One was to continue driving the van, but if Nifty's people spotted it and decided that it was in their opinion "disabled" they would tow it away and we wouldn't have one. The other was to drive 3-4 hours away to their nearest location and exchange it. Since I was on vacation, the last thing I wanted was 6-8 hours in the damaged van doing nothing else, after having had an 10 hour drive to get to the vacation destination. So I opted for option one and made the mental note never to rent from Nifty ever again.

The next day, someone else at Nifty got one of the messages we left on their voicemail. This person must have been having a better day. He not only volunteered to replace the car, but offered to send someone to us to pick up the damaged one. It was a total 180-degree turnaround from the earlier frustrating calls. (Can you say bi-polar company?) The driver showed up when he promised he would, with a van that was comparable to the one we had originally, though not in quite as good a shape. But hey, it was an improvement and it wasn't wrecked, so that was fine with me. We swapped vehicles, I filled out some paperwork, and we finished our vacation.

When we returned home, we received a call from Countrywide Insurance (not their name) saying that they were accepting fault for the accident and would cover the costs of the claim. "Good," I thought, "that will be the end of that."

It wasn't. Last week I received a letter from Nifty, telling me that the insurance companies had paid all they were planning to pay and that I still owed them $5200+ for repairs to their vehicle. If I "agreed" all I needed to do was give them a credit card number or check. That didn't sit well with me. It didn't sound right.

I called Commonwealth Ranch (my insurance company) and checked in with my claim adjuster there. She looked up the records and said that the insurance companies were disputing Nifty's claim that $4800 worth of damage was done to the van. She told me that they're aware that car rental companies negotiate repair parts and labor discounts with body shops, and that while it might have cost you or me $4800 to repair the damage done to the van, Nifty probably paid a bit less. She said they'd asked Nifty to provide an invoice showing the "actual" amount of damages to the vehicle, but Nifty had not provided one, so they naturally had no paid.

She also told me that some car rental companies, and apparently Nifty was one of them, would try to get the customer to pay money if they didn't like how fast the insurance companies were or weren't moving. Essentially, if I had paid the $5200 Nifty was asking for, I was paying for the repair, their "loss of use" of the rental car, and various other fees, which were the responsibility of Countrywide Insurance. Countrywide had by no means told Nifty they wouldn't pay what they owed them, they just wanted proof that Nifty had paid that much to fix the car. As soon as they provided that proof, they'd get their money. So the request they sent to me was essentially an attempt to scare me into paying for the damage in lieu of the person who caused the accident and their insurance company.

Uh, no, Nifty... I wasn't at fault for the accident, my insurance isn't finished with you, and the driver who was at fault has insurance which hasn't paid you yet. When you've gotten what you can from the insurance companies and the other driver, we'll talk about what I might owe you - but I think that will be a big fat zero.