April 16, 2005 Saturday
I took the old Aptiva (a 1994 computer) in to class. There are a few snickers but the fact is more computer repair has been learned in that class by the “junk” I bring in than all the newer models put together. It is also becoming obvious that talk is not a good substitute for hands on, and Mike is having to continually say how we covered this or that. The standing joke in the room when he says anything like that is, “Yes, we talked about it.” I am not criticizing Mike, I am pointing out a defect in the change of teaching methods over the past decade. Big picture.
I’ve learned that subdirectories can be used to install main directories. A 66 MHz computer with 32K of RAM can require three hours to load WIN98SE. Don’t get impatient after a half hour of apparent inactivity as long as the HDD makes an occasional noise and the read light flickers. WIN98SE requires 127 MB of disk space to cabinet (copy in an uninstalled form) and 27 MB once installed. An old 512 MB HDD will just barely hold the 1995 version of Microsoft Works at 7 MB with 85 MB of space left for storage. The point here, hello, is that none of this practical material was taught in class. It was learned there, but not taught there. Everything we ever installed in class was in a computer pre-selected to have all the necessary capacities and parameters.
Furthermore, I still cannot tackle most computer repair problems that require experience. In the carefully rehearsed classroom activities, nothing really serious goes wrong, and it is easy to tell most of what does is fairly predictable. I had to take the Aptiva in to class to get it working, although I had followed to the letter the exact procedures talked about in class. There were two or three error conditions that kept popping up that I could not get around. Yet, that is exactly what I set out to learn. Now I know to keep going past error conditions and hope the software will install anyway (an activity that has never been up to my personal standards).
This class has glossed over many things I know to be important and stressed things that are mysterious and vague. Why are we memorizing charts of cable sizes when we haven’t even been properly taught to network within our own classroom? We stepped through it once, that is one lousy time, and nobody learned it that way. (Don, the advanced guy, and Alfredo spent an hour trying to get it to work y’day and they couldn’t.) I am holding an Intel Pentium II with MMX in my hand. It has single edge contacts and four banks of aluminum cooling fins. It weighs about a half a pound. I learned that a DIMM chip is 4.25 inches long, but slightly narrower than described in the text. It also has a little notch on one end in addition to the plug, in case some dummy like me tries to put it in backwards. It has really sharp metal clips to hold it in place, sharp enough to cut your fingers. I didn’t learn any of this in class.
Nor did we learn that a socket 3 can be inserted wrongly. Fortunately I spotted one of the corners had a tiny copper lead. The Aptiva will not recognize another hard drive, and there was nothing covered in this class as to why not. The bay is vacant, but installing the second hard drive inactivates the first and it will not boot. I’ll try a few more combinations on the strict understanding that the reason I took an expensive course is so that I do not have to resort to trial and error. I also cleaned the shell and the Multimedia sticker came off, so while I’m at it, let me tell you about that.
One of the dumbest things the computer industry ever did is come up with that word, ‘Multimedia’. It means nothing to most people, because computers are supposed to be smart. All it means is that the computer will play music and show a picture on screen at the same time. The rub is that most of us are aware that Hollywood had accomplished this back in the 1930s. What’s more is they didn’t need no computer to do it. So what is the big deal and why should Joe Average pay extra money for it? Good idea, but bad marketing, IBM.
That was John on the phone, he is heading over after stopping at his dad’s place first. That can take an hour, so I’m going to try a quick and dirty upgrade on the Aptiva. I also need a keyboard and mouse. Plus disks. That is another annoying thing about Mike in class, he assumes you don’t know what you are doing if you don’t do it his way. I wanted to make a WIN98 startup disk for the Aptiva, but he said since we’d already made one, it was a waste of time. The computer is for sale and I am not giving away my copy of the disk. Now I ‘waste’ even more time making the disk after the install.
Study is a full time thing and I fell asleep in the easy chair reading troubleshooting guides. John called from McKinley, roughly four blocks north of here. It was already 4:30 PM so I waited outside for half an hour. He did not show. I had to get in my car and drive to Boca Raton so as not to be late. I wonder what happened to him. After circling the block once, I had to drive north and I got to the concert site just in time. It was chilly and windy. I felt freezing and did not stay for the whole concert.
Brian Howe of Bad Company. He is from Portsmouth and is an established entertainer. His perspective is not totally music and he has the confidence to joke about money and his career. It was my kind of band, three musicians and a vocalist. No horn sections and keyboardists on the road, no way. Bands that have extra musicians tend to use them in every tune they play, which gets repetitious. Rock is evolved enough that lead, bass and drums can provide a better variety than larger groups. The lead player was from Prague and he was half the age of Brian, indicating that Czechoslovakia is just now entering the 70s. The music was an anthology of Bad Company songs with the word ‘love’ in the title. I Feel Like Making Love and Can’t Get Enough of Your Love. At least I think that’s all Bad Company because I never had one of their albums until the mid-80s.
It was a great show, if very short at just shy of an hour and a half. It was supercharged versions of the covers, because the intervening 25 years let them add in all the little nuances and techniques that accompanied rock evolution, while retaining the full flavor of the original hits. He has this incredibly life-like hair transplant. The groupies have not changed, except their ages. There were five or six I would have died for. I wish John was there because I lost my nerve. I could not think of a single thing to say to these forty-year old groupies. John has far more in common with drunk women than I ever will. He’s back at home with the phone off the hook. Hey, I tried and I waited so long I was almost late. He missed the $4 hot dogs and $1 bags of dry, unbuttered popcorn at the concert. My guess is two hundred people where they were expecting two thousand.
It is so cold I left the concert almost twenty minutes early, and I never did hear the Texas blues warm-up group. The heater in the Taurus works well and I believe that is the first time I’ve ever had to use it. That car is a really neat unit once you get to know it. Six way power seats, and sliding cargo hooks. It has a fold down third seat, power everything, a great stereo and all kinds of automatic features. The only thing I don’t like is the power door locks for they are really the only persistent problem with that car that cannot be fixed. Getting anything out of the back seat is a process of opening and closing the doors in sequence. I’ve locked myself out of that car at least five times. Otherwise it is a very fully-developed utility vehicle with all the major conveniences, and I keep discovering more as time goes by. What is that lever hidden under the floor panels in the back? Does anybody know?
I got home late because I had to drive north from the concert, the police blocked all left turns out of the parking lot. The attendance was minimal due to the cold weather, and I stopped at Checkers for a chicken burger, right across the street from McDonald’s. I don’t know exactly why, but I hope they steal the lead in fast food. It could be that McDonald’s is just a little too relentless with their advertising. Hardly anyone alive today has not heard of them, so why all the lame promotions, contests and themes only a blockhead could identify with? Like their food, McDonald’s advertising has a slightly monotonous flavor out of the last century, and the quality goes down with every cent spent on billboards instead of better ingredients.
The Hippie called really late, it seems he still has the puzzling situation with his virtual memory. I think it may be a low-level virus infecting his Dr. Watson. We talked for close to an hour, he made a joke that almost an entire day had gone by without him calling me for computer advice. He is making a genuine effort to learn the workings of the machine and I give him plenty of recognition for that, the more so because he is not a logical thinker but a musical thinker. By that I mean right-brain, kind of like the great actor who has trouble memorizing lines. I advised him to run a virus check on his system files, and sure enough, he found an EIDE virus, a type of infection of the hard disk driver (HDD) controller. All computer applications run in memory, not in storage, and virtual memory is a temporary area created on your hard drive to place items that would otherwise take up space in your RAM. That is why virtual memory is also called a RAM drive. It is on the drive, but sure as tootin’ it will disappear like RAM the minute you turn off the power. So how does it fill up so quickly when The Hippie boots up? Virus.
Favorite Brian Howe joke. “If you are ever in Ft. Meyer’s Beach, make sure you go across the big bridge. Go right to the end of the road. You’ll see a huge white house. Three stories tall. Overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. With windows as large as this stage. My ex-wife lives there.
