Author: matthew

For the technically illiterate, here’s a brief overview of what’s inside of a computer. My goal here is to give you just enough information to be dangerous, akin to a mechanic telling you what the parts of your car are, and to give you some useful jargon to throw at your computer tech and make the poor pimple-faced teenager even more confused than he already is. First off, a computer is designed to [b]store[/b], [/b]process[/b], and [b]display[/b] stuff. In order to do that, it has to be [b]kept cool[/b] and [b]provided with power[/b]. If you divide the computer into those parts, suddenly the computer starts making a lot more sense. But don’t let that deter you from jargoning up that PC tech!

KEEPING IT COOL Those fans you hear whirring? Those are to keep the system cool. Some of those fans are to keep the parts that provide power cool, too. These are called the “fans”.

JARGON ALERT: Often, if you hear a very loud grinding or whining noise from your computer, you can say it sounds like “a fan threw a bearing”, or perhaps “the bushings are worn out”, or even “the fan might be rubbing on the shroud”. These useful terms may get your PC tech to happily respond with his own anecdotes regarding the time his high-end gaming PC “blew a fan on the water-cooling rig and I couldn’t play games for DAYS”. Just nod, pretend you empathize, and let him keep working.

PROVIDE IT WITH POWER You’ve got an external power brick for your notebook that tends to get really warm, or maybe you have a desktop computer with some funky fan-grille thing in the back with a power plug in it. There’s a big power plug that connects to the wall somewhere on that thing, and this part of your computer gets REALLY WARM. This is the most likely place for SPARKS and SMOKE, and if your computer simply won’t turn on at all, make noises, beep, boop, light up, or hum, this is probably the part that is broken.

JARGON ALERT: “Looks like the PSU let the magic smoke out” or “my power brick is no longer providing regulated voltage” will get that tech on your side and keep him honest, thinking you actually know something about your PC.

STORE STUFF Inside your computer, you probably have a DVD drive and a hard drive. These two parts allow you to store information. The DVD drive is that cup-holder on the desktop box, or perhaps the little slot you slide discs into on your macbook. The hard drive, on the other hand, is where you store your stuff forever.

Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever, and since both of these parts have a substantial amount of parts whizzing past each other several thousand times a minute, they tend to get out of alignment and die horrible, crunchy, gravelly deaths. If you hear a grinding noise, or see a light flashing all the time while your computer spins an icon on the screen forever, your hard drive might be dead.

JARGON ALERT: “The drive has bad sectors” or “Could it be a head crash?” are great terms for keeping that keyboard monkey in check while he’s working on your machine. Calling your DVD or CD drive a “cup holder” is a great in-joke, and will convince that PC repairman that you are part of that tiny in-crowd who really know what is going on. Or, at least, that you finally got your hands on a chain email from 1998.

PROCESS STUFF Now, this is where it gets confusing. Most of us are used to referring to the big beige box as the “CPU”. Well, it turns out the CPU (“Central Processing Unit”) is really only one tiny part of that beige box, but it’s where most of the heavy lifting happens. This part gets REALLY HOT, and is the primary reason you have to cool your laptop down.

The “CPU” plugs into a “motherboard”, that basically is a glorified housekeeper. The motherboard has lots of little ancillary processing units that take care of all the crap your CPU is too busy to do.

JARGON ALERT: If you get a particularly old PC tech working on your system, try throwing out “Heh, heh, I wonder if the Pentium floating-point bug maybe came back” or perhaps “Maybe we could just solder a pin on this to turn it into a 486 DX2?” to get a laugh and convince him you’re one of the gang.

DISPLAY STUFF Your computer has some sort of screen that keeps you glued, watching, and probably is supposed to make sounds. If either of these stop working, you can blame your “monitor”, your “GPU” (only if you play games and the games stop working), or your “sound card”.

JARGON ALERT: “Could my GPU be sharing an interrupt with another card?” will get that PC tech haring off down red-herring road faster than you can say “Nip!”, “Pang!”, or “Nu-Wom!”.

I hope this primer has been helpful. Enjoy your new computer.

–Matt B.

So it’s time, once again, to upgrade barnson.org to a new version of Drupal. I’ll be taking things down for a few hours.

Not like I have more than a half-dozen regular readers anyway. So for you six guys out there, sorry we’re going to be down for a bit!

–Matt B.

So I had an interesting week. We’re nearing a “freeze” period at work — a period in which we’re allowed to make no major changes to the infrastructure — and that means an incredibly intense workload as everyone tries to get their changes in before the freeze arrives. Add to that, the hard drive on my web server just up and died.

Now, I wasn’t too worried about my data. I’ve made good backups and taken care of it. But I have a number of webhosting customers on my server, too — all good friends, it’s a small, low-cost, low-revenue business — who didn’t take my “keep your own backups” advice to heart. So I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off attempting to restore data from a patched-together amalgam of current database backups, legacy data, and online sync when available from the failing server.

At this point, it looks like all the domains but one are fully moved. That last one, alas, is not one for which I had a good backup, but at least I know the web developer who does.

I’ve learned some important lessons from this disaster, and hope to apply them to better serve my small customer base in the future.

Lesson 1: Never trust your customers.

They may be geniuses in their field, but they are hiring you for a reason: they don’t know how to do this stuff themselves. If they knew what was good for them, they’d be doing it. And the truth is, in any moderately technical arena, your customers don’t actually know what you’re talking about. They just know what they want, and they want you to give that to them.

Lesson 2: Be the hero.

When the shit hits the fan, customers don’t want to be told what to do. Customers want you to do it. They just want things back the way they were — or, more importantly, doing what they pay you for it to do — in as short a period as possible. They want you to step in, pick up the ball, and get things running again. Don’t waste time trying to work with them or negotiate. Just get the service back up and running as fast as you can, then tell them how it is. THEN you can negotiate the particulars. A customer is more comfortable being told “Hey, we moved, here’s your new info” than you asking them what they want in this case.

Lesson 3: Cover your ass.

Sure, you made it plain to your customer what they had to do when they signed up for the service. You were explicit in your user agreements; it really is their fault if they don’t live up to their end of the agreement. Well, cover your ass in case they screw up anyway. See rule #1: no matter what you trust your customers to do, they probably won’t do it. Or they will do it, but in the worst possible way. Or they just won’t understand what you’re asking, and will ignore the requirement until the day things fail. Just figure out every conceivable way to cover your ass, then do every one of those things that you can within your financial and time constraints. At least then you can show due diligence at doing what you didn’t need to do in the first place if by some reason you can’t hold up your end of the bargain. But you’ll still probably lose that customer. Which is what you want to avoid in the first place.

Lesson 4: Relationships won’t keep your customers.

At the end of this, I’ve simply decided to replace my vendor for web hosting service that I re-sell. The moves were painful but quick, taking place over two days. Forty-eight hours of my life later, and I have no further ties to those guys. They are getting a call on Monday to stop my service, and they can find another customer.

And that last bit is the most important. Offer a valuable service, and do it better and at lower cost than your competitors. I have most of my customers because of pre-existing relationships with them, and they trust my advice and expertise. But I won’t keep them because of that relationship; I have to keep delivering value, particularly in times of crisis like a dead hard drive.

–Matt B.

Due to repeated and increasing problems with our old web hosting provider, we’ve moved the server to a new host. Let me know if you encounter any issues as a result of the move.

–Matt B.

I ran across the following blog entry today at http://kristofcreative.posterous.com/how-would-you-fix-the-economy . Once again, utter ignorance once numbers get large enough results in a popular-sounding plan that makes absolutely no sense once you break it down.

This is from an article in the St. Petersburg Times Newspaper on Sunday.The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?” I think this guy nailed it!

Dear Mr. President: Please find below my suggestion for fixing America ‘s economy. Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan. You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan: There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations: 1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed. 2) They MUST buy a new American car.. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed. 3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage – Housing Crisis fixed. It can’t get any easier than that! If more money is needed, have all members of Congress and their constituents pay their taxes…

If you think this would work, please tell to everyone you know. If not, please disregard.

Hell, no, I’m not going to disregard such a preposterous suggestion. It’s mathematical SUICIDE for our nation! Here’s the math using the writer’s figures: 40,000,000 population $1,000,000 per person == $4e+13 ($40,000,000,000,000)

That’s FORTY TRILLION DOLLARS, people. Do you have any idea how much money that actually is? The entire US national debt is around one-quarter of that figure. It’s like suggesting that a person earning $40,000 per year should upgrade from their $110,000 home with payments they can afford into a half-million dollar home knowing that they cannot make enough money to pay for it.

If we tried to make an apples-to-apples comparison to make the math work with a ballpark figure of $1.5Tn like we’re currently spending on the economic recovery, you do it this way.

$1,500,000,000 / 40,000,000 = $37,500 per person.

Good luck handing every American over 50 $37,500 and telling them to go retire on it. Hell, double it and try telling the average American to live on $75,000 TOTAL for the next twenty to forty years.

For perspective, the entire US national debt is around $11Tn today (actually around $6Tn once you figure in money held in trust, which is how we do it for our personal bank balances), and our entire going-into-severe-deficit-spending yearly budget is just shy of $3Tn. The interest alone at going treasury rates on such a stimulus plan would be nearly $500Bn per year. Assuming only the 40M retirees paid for this plan, and that they can earn a fabulous 10% APR by investing (HAR, HAR!) the $500K or so they have left after their spending spree, they’d be living right around the poverty line at $28,000 per year or so. If they made a more reasonable 5% per year, they are living on pretty close to zero dollars per year.

Guess we should all convert to Breatharianism then.

Stupid, stupid, stupid plan compounded by a poor understanding of large numbers. God help us if anybody tries to really push for such an idiotic, mathematically-implausible move.

Regards, Matt B.

Got this pointed out to me this morning: The Gladiator Diet.

Compared to the average inhabitant of Ephesus, gladiators ate more plants and very little animal protein. The vegetarian diet had nothing to do with poverty or animal rights. Gladiators, it seems, were fat. Consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates, such as barley, and legumes, like beans, was designed for survival in the arena. Packing in the carbs also packed on the pounds. “Gladiators needed subcutaneous fat,” Grossschmidt explains. “A fat cushion protects you from cut wounds and shields nerves and blood vessels in a fight.” Not only would a lean gladiator have been dead meat, he would have made for a bad show. Surface wounds “look more spectacular,” says Grossschmidt. “If I get wounded but just in the fatty layer, I can fight on,” he adds. “It doesn’t hurt much, and it looks great for the spectators.”

There are some things you engage in for a minute. Some for a few minutes. Some for hours. Some for days. Some for months. Some for years. Some for decades.

I am learning that bodybuilding is in that last category. It’s a sport of patience, persistence, and intense, regular dedication.

There are many who have done miraculous “body transformations”: three or four months, and holy crap, look at those before-and-after photos. For most of us, though, who aren’t unemployed or who weren’t in great shape before and set back due to some accident or injury, losing the slow-creep-of-fat is a much slower process.

As most of you know, I’ve lost a lot of fat over the past year. I started September 1 at 251 lbs, added in some weight lifting in October, monitored my stats while putting on around fifteen pounds of muscle through December, then finally decided to take some photos. Here’s December 2008 to April 2009. Avert your eyes if you are offended by the site of pasty white overweight men.

“Before” pic: 233 lbs, around 30+% body fat. “After” pic: 216 lbs, around 23% body fat. “After” ain’t “After” yet, though, I have a long way to go. It’s sort of “in-the-middle-of”.

Terrible, crappy camera phone, I know. But this is a minimally-dedicated, 1-to-5-times-per-week gym physique I’ve built so far. I know that to take it to the next level, I need to ramp up my cardio, tighten down my diet, and increase my intensity and commitment to make it to the gym 6 times a week.

But I’m realizing physiques aren’t shaped in just a few weeks or months. Losing the fat slowly while building muscle preserves muscle, and allows a superb physique lying underneath all that flab to emerge, in time.

So many times, I think I’m losing the game. Sometimes I can’t lift as much as I did last week. I get tired too quickly on a given exercise. I miss hitting the gym one night due to a lack of motivation. But when I look at before-and-after photos of myself, it helps me to remember that I’m winning even when I feel like I’m losing. Just because I fell short of my goal doesn’t mean that I’m falling short in my progress. The scale is moving the right way. The body fat calipers are moving the right way. The photo log is showing progress.

I’ve been a big fat loser for too long. It’s nice to start winning for once.

This is a political post, but it’s going to take me a while to wind around to the final point. Bear with me; I hope it’s worth the ride.

When I was a kid, we went on a lot of road trips. I mean, long, tedious, hours-spent-winding-through-wilderness road trips. We drove from Maryland to Jersey, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Alabama, Georgia, Florida… basically, if it was near the East Coast and somewhere south of New York State, my family would occasionally get a wild hare to pack all the boys in the car, load the trunk with luggage, and set off to visit family.

On this trip, there were milestones, turnpikes, landmarks, and a whole host of things we passed. There were hills, valleys, mountains, obstacles we had to cross, obstacles we had to dodge, dirt roads, and even an occasional wrong turn with a subsequent U-turn, a little back-tracking, and final arrival at the destination.

You might think this would be kind of a fun trip, right? I mean, you pass all these historical places, sometimes eat out at unique cafes, and you can have fun on a road trip. But that, unfortunately, was not the way our family managed it. My dad was a bit of a cheapskate, and didn’t pay for air conditioning on most of these rides. In fact, in the few vehicles we eventually owned that had air conditioning, he thought that leaving the windows down for a little “4 and 60” natural air conditioning was the way to go to save gas money.

This wasn’t a totally horrible idea, really. I could stick my hand out of the window, catch a few breezes, feel how the air shifted when a big semi rode past, celebrate when that one semi eventually responded to our “honk, honk” hand-signs with a loud air-horn blast, etc. Except the biggest problem was that we usually ended up driving in the muggy, oppressive summer heat, and our cars inevitably had vinyl seats.

The vinyl seats were sticky and uncomfortable, and, being a kid, I of course was in shorts for summer. Which means that my skin stuck to the vinyl. I’d get a rash, or just get really uncomfortable. Some of these ramifications were my own fault for not preparing adequately. I mean, looking back, I think “why didn’t my dad tell me not to wear shorts?” Well, sometimes he did. But more likely, he just assumed I would remember from the mistakes of my past that shorts + vinyl seats + summer heat == bad. I eventually started remembering, and the voyages got a little better.

The last thing, of course, that everybody remembers kids saying, is “Dad, are we there yet?” Now, we kids knew at least on an instinctive level that, until the car was stopped and we saw relatives running out toward the car, that we weren’t there yet. In fact, in most cases, we knew we weren’t anywhere close. Faceless miles of interstate still faced us. Discomfort plagued the trip, and that brother sitting next to me would just not stop touching me and getting his shorts-clothed leg sweat on my legs. The potty and food breaks were way too short, and way too infrequent.

“Are we there yet?” is, in truth, not a legitimate question at all. We weren’t really wondering whether we had arrived at the destination or not; we were actually expressing a general complaint that we were uncomfortable and unhappy that we weren’t already having fun at our final destination.

Despite the outbursts, Dad would keep on driving. Yeah, it was a long freakin’ way. It seemed like an eternity. But even though we could all look on the map and figure out when we were getting close, it still felt like it took forever. I’d second-guess my dad in the driver’s seat, then spend time counting mile markers to see how close we were. I’d question every detour, repeatedly ask “Are we there yet?”, and generally make a nuisance of myself because I didn’t like where we were, was bored, and just wanted the trip to end so that I could have some fun.

Back in November, I voted for Barack Obama. He’s since had to make some really tough decisions. Controversial decisions. Painful decisions. In some cases, wildly unpopular decisions. But these problems were inherited from the previous administrations, and complete recovery is just a long freakin’ way away. The trip back to fun-land is going to take a while. We put who we thought was the best man in charge of directing this huge Winnebago down the road to recovery, and it’s possible he’s going to make mistakes. Sure, we’re welcome to criticize, but for the next few months if I hear more whining and complaining about how long it’s taking, or whether we should have changed lanes back there or not, I’ve got one thing to say to these “Are We There Yet, Dad?” complaints:

Sit down. Buckle up. Stick your hand out of the window and try your best to enjoy the ride. We aren’t there yet.

Mark McManus, the owner of the popular low-carb bodybuilding site, Musclehack.com, released today a new edition of his “Total Six-Pack Abs” book. This e-book, priced at around $30 depending on exchange rates, details a step-by-step nutrition and exercise program for achieving six-pack abs.

It’s what I followed on my last twelve-week challenge to lose weight and gain muscle mass

There are some pretty major changes between Marks’ former edition of Total Six-Pack Abs and today’s edition. Some of them are:

• A substantially changed diet program. TSPA now includes one carb-up day per week, and substantially modified dietary guidelines to accommodate this carb-up without any slow-down in fat loss. The former version was low-carb only, and I look forward to seeing how this targeted, brief carb-up works out for my body.
• In the previous edition, Mark suggested that the program could be completed with just nutrition, cardio, and ab work. The new edition has an increased focus on resistance training in either a five or three-day split, with detailed workout plans to get even the most detail-obsessed reader moving on a specific, targeted workout plan.
• Mark includes improved supplementation suggestions, including recent research into Medium-Chain triglycerides (helpful to keep you burning fat when you’re at very low body fat levels), multivitamins, and protein.
• There are now links to current downloadable workout podcasts to help you through the intense cardio and ab routines of the program.
• More photos.
• An enhanced recipe section with some of Mark’s latest low-carb creations. Pizza, pancakes, stew, fries, and porridge are all within your reach with Mark’s new kitchen creations… along with the bodybuilding standby of various meats, eggs, and salads.
• Mark spends even more time discussing the evils of sugar alcohols, and strongly discourages their use… even in the chewing gum to which I am addicted!
• As in previous editions, this version of TSPA includes the complete program, from shopping lists to workout splits, diagrams and logs for your progress, updated links to the latest research on strength training and nutrition, equipment recommendations, and a new Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section to address the most common concerns of a prospective low-carber.

Now, I admit, my overview above may sound a bit fan-boy-ish, and it is. His previous edition of this book helped me get started on my own body transformation and lose twenty-one pounds of fat while gaining six pounds of muscle, and although I’m not yet where I want to be, the new edition targets even better how I want to eat, work out, and reach my fitness goals.

I look forward to continuing my challenge following the new and improved TSPA workout and nutrition strategies. For me, it was totally worth the price for a step-by-step, detail-focused, low-carb guide to achieving the body I want.

Regards, Matthew P. Barnson

As you may know, I’ve gone through a few internet service providers over the past few years. A brief review:

• Trilobyte Internet Services. They are a local ISP I used for dial-up when I lived in Tooele. Eventually, they deployed high-speed broadband via 802.11b, and when too many subscribers hopped on-board they discovered just how poorly that technology scales to a metropolitan-area network. DSL came to town, and I signed up with…
• Sisna. They didn’t suck. The only reason we abandoned their 7mbps DSL over Qwest was because DSL’s huge queues hurt the VoIP service I eventually went to. We moved to…
• Comcast. Broadband nirvana. Upload speeds were paltry, but download speeds rocked, VoIP worked well, Netflix streaming was fine, and rarely any problems except in the hottest summer months when occasionally the local switch unit went out due to overheating. We then moved to Riverton, and went to…
• Qwest. Suck piled on suck. Ugh.
• Digis. I’ve blogged about how how badly Digis sucks, both compared to other local ISPs on a cost-per-gigabyte basis, as well as their draconian throttling limits. I won’t go into the allegations of FCC violations, but suffice to say Digis is a poor neighbor. Big antenna on the roof, throttling without QOS that turns a broadband internet connection into a less-than-ISDN connection, obvious insane over-sell of bandwidth, icky.
• Xmission 1.5mbps DSL (over Qwest). Other than the big packet queues that are inherent to DSL, and that VoIP would suck big-time if we were downloading anything, this was OK.
• Rapidwave. These are the guys I’m gonna talk about.

I know what high-speed actually looks like. In my professional life, I’ve worn multiple hats: Network Administrator, Supercomputing system administrator, and UNIX administrator, among others. My work uses entirely a VoIP infrastructure for telephone service, and it works flawlessly. We have multiple redundant data connections suitable for a globe-spanning, massive network with tens of thousands of employees. I expect that the service from my local ISP should be up to the task of the following duties:

1. VPN from time to time. I’m not doing full-time telework, but I’ll work from home a day or two a week and expect full availability during the day. 2. VoIP performance should be perfect. I’m not looking for miracles, just make sure that with modest usage on the line that my VoIP service with Vonage doesn’t crackle. 3. Be up to the task of watching a Netflix streaming movie with decent quality. 4. Allow my children to play online games and Flash videos with decent speed. 5. No draconian bandwidth or speed caps. I occasionally need to back up my web server (~60GB of data) to my home connection, and I don’t want to be charged $1000 for that privilege.

Verdict: So far, Rapidwave has delivered. My speed averages between 6mbps to 9mbps downloads, and around 1.5mbps upload. Netflix will ramp down its streaming speed sometimes to middle-quality, but that mostly seems to happen only during peak usage times.

There were a couple of snags. Installation was delayed due to inclement weather. This is a problem with wireless Motorola Canopy installations that you don’t typically have with cable or DSL installs. It was only a week delay.

One day, Rapidwave went down due to a power outage. It was pretty major, and quite long (basically all day). I am glad that I was at work that day and not trying to work from home! The ISP going out really affects the household, as all the calls to the home phone line get routed to my wife’s cell phone. I’m pretty sure this is an isolated event, and it has not recurred in any form.

Our first bill was a little bit strange due to the one-week delay in installation. I’d not yet paid it, and Rapidwave has a remarkably friendly method of dealing with non-payment: any Port 80 request gets redirected to a “you owe a bill” page. That’s it. It doesn’t affect my VoIP, my VPN, or non-port-80 traffic. Pretty cool that they don’t shut down your service for non-payment, but instead just shunt your web traffic until you’ve paid.

Lastly, I’ve had issues with slowdowns occurring that require a reset of our router. Now, my guess is that this isn’t the ISPs fault, since rebooting my router fixes the issue, but with the same router on my old service it didn’t happen. I suspect the router is having troubles coping with the dramatic increase in data volume and speed, so I plan to try a new firmware to resolve the issue.

Overall, Rapidwave has delivered on their promise. Their service is tremendously faster than the fastest delivered to this household by Digis or Xmission DSL, VoIP service remains at high quality even during very fast downloads, Netflix streaming works fine (though it reduces quality occasionally), and my family is receiving the kind of speed and quality of service we expect for our broadband dollar.

So far, I’m pleased. Good on ya, Rapidwave.

–Matt B.