Dave's Workshop - Workbench July 1st

Workbench

Week of July 1^st - 7^th 2001

Sunday

It's a new week. Maybe this time I can post at least half the days (three and a half?). Oh well... I finally put down my thoughts on the DOJ vs. Microsoft case. It's in the computer area. I am going to get the hobby area going. Books and games (maybe even astronomy) will be coming soon! Speaking of games, I just got killed in a two-person game of Eurorails. If you don't know the game you will soon. Briefly, it's a train game in which you build your rail lines across Europe and deliver good to cities. It's based on the Empire Builder game, sometimes called "crayon train games" because you draw your rain lines with crayons on the game board. Anyway, I lost. Kara won with 250 million while I only had around 70 mill. I'll get her next time...

Monday

This morning I got a call from a user who said the colors on her monitor were messed up. Figuring they had played with some display settings I headed over to their cube. Sure enough, the colors were kind of weird. It looked like the color was changing shades from one part of the desktop to another in a psychedelic way. I've seen title bars set to do thing like that, but all the settings seemed correct. And when I set the scheme back to Windows default it acted the same way. Just to make sure, I rebooted into a different user profit. Same thing. Figuring the monitor went a little loopy, I told her I'd swap it out later in the day. A little later in the morning I got an email from another user who said their monitor was messed up. I go over and lo and behold, same thing. Two monitors in different sections, on opposite sides of the building suddenly have their video messed up in the same way? That's a pretty good coincidence. Wondering if it could be some trojan or virus infecting them, I decide to run a virus scan (it's supposed to be always scanning, but why not). Noticing the virus updates on this machine had not been automatically updated as they should have, I rebooted so I could reinstall the anti-virus software correctly to download update when I decided to go into bios. The bios screen also displayed the colors funny. Feeling it must be hardware, I send an email to my assistant to swap out the monitors and take a look at them. Checking with him later, he says it's taken care of. All that needed to be done was to degauss them. Degauss them! Now I've heard of degaussing monitors. Most have a button or menu control to degauss right in front, but in all the years I've worked with computers I've never heard of anyone actually needing to do that, much less run into it myself. In fact, the only thing I've ever heard about degaussing before was not to do it, unless necessary. Unfortunately, that meant I also never knew when to do it. Oh well, like they say, you learn something new every day.

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Yesterday was the 4th of July. For many, it was business as usual. For others it was a day off and a chance to get together with friends over a barbecue and then watch fireworks. I got out on the water and went canoeing for a few hours. What does the 4th of July mean though? In the US, the 4th of July is the day we commemorate the thirteen colonies declaring their independence from England. It's common to hear people complaining about the government these days. Practically every day I hear something about either local, state or federal government I don't particularly like. What gets lost sometimes is how well the US has held up over these 200+ years. Sure it's not a perfect system. And there are lots of things we've done and continue to do I'm not very proud of. But given the task, I fell we don't appreciate it enough. Growing up, the founding Fathers are often presented to us as virtues figures that sacrificed all for the good of their fellow men. Later in life we here storied about how so and so was really dishonest, corrupt, hypocritical or whatever. It's easy to become disillusioned and apathetic about our government; easy to constantly tear down and complain. But one might want to pause every now and again and remember that the people who declared independence those years ago and the people who server us now in government were and are human beings, just like you and me. So next time you here about how awful our government is or that all politicians are corrupt, stop and instead consider how hard those imperfect souls work to serve us; what they have to go through in an imperfect system, which has so far, stood the test of time.

Friday

Saturday

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Week of July 1^st - 7^th 2001

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Week of July 1st - 7th 2001

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Saturday

Week of July 1^st - 7^th 2001