Past Diatribes

The unseasonable blizzard was, I admit, not the Bostonians' fault. I can't hold it against them. There are thousands of Irish in Boston, and they probably partied on regardless. This is just me doing the "sour grapes" thing, as the most exciting thing I was able to do that day, stuck down in Mansfield, was buy a new toaster oven. Those nights we did get into the city were a right scream. I would have liked to have seen the festivities (rather than the snowstorm) cranked to full blast, on the seventeenth.

There were four of us over from my company that week, receiving training at Motorola's facility south of Boston. We stayed at a hotel and ate all our meals on the company expense account. The car we rented was this three-litre Pontiac Grand Am, fire-engine red with tires about two feet wide. From 8:30 until 5 each day all of our attention was focused on the configuration and administration of cable modem networks. Each night, there were sites to see, landmarks to visit, and Americans to teach how to drink. We didn't make right fools of ourselves, but we made a fair showing. The best places were an Irish pub called Foley's, a pool/beer/grub joint called The Backroom, and another Irish pub called The Littlest (because it is very, very small). A really nice fellow from our class gave us a tour of the city (enormous buildings!) and this one guy in our group knew Boston from before, when he was living in the States. We met some really interesting people, including this really skank ugly sex-phone operator chick who was probably actually a guy. At this one hip-hop nightclub we got patted down, coming in, to make sure we weren't packin' any heat. Everywhere in the city there were bartenders and bouncers demanding ID, which is a hassle that just does not happen in Dublin. This one place wasn't even going to let Peter have any beer (Peter looks kind of like Harrison Ford).

It was great. My folks made a trip up to Boston, too, and I arranged to fly in a day early. It was good to get some time together- we hadn't been expecting any until the wedding, this summer. The three of us checked out the John F. Kennedy museum, then saw The Old North Church, and took a stroll down the Freedom Trail to Paul Revere's house and on to the U.S.S. Constitution, "Old Ironsides," which is anchored there just north of the Charles River. Tons of sites, grub, chat, and rain.

The five-day training course itself was another great opportunity. Cable and DSL are arriving in a big way in the US. After seeing all the ads and hype everywhere, and the opinions of others on the DOCSIS Cable Router Operations and Administration course, I was surprised to hear that only 12% of Internet users are forecast to have high-speed access by 2002. The actual figure is going to be much higher than that. Perhaps in Europe, which is always one crest of the wave behind the US, only 12% will have themselves hooked up to broadband. I am certainly going to be among the first, with any luck. While my Gateway's 56Kbps download speed is still a relief from the dinky 14.4 of my old computer, the size of the files being passed over the Internet is growing. These bigger files are neater- music, graphics, interactivity, and so on- but take an ice age to download without the right equipment.

An example of the neat stuff that's out there nowadays: check out Napster. You know how you can borrow a tape or CD off of one of your friends and make yourself a copy? "Hey Jim, you have the new Stranglebobs CD? Lemme have a loan of it tonight, would you?" Well, with the Internet, you suddenly have a whole world full of friends. Napster shares out any music you have put on your computer, and in return you can make a copy of anyone else's. In the past week or so since I've been copped onto Napster, I've proved to Carmel that these songs I keep singing (badly) are actually real tunes by Live, the Dead Milkmen and the Indigo Girls, it's just that they're unknown and unavailable in Ireland. It's good to have copies of them again.

Other news? Halpster continues to battle with computer hardware. Having promised my mate Colm many many moons ago to get a CD-ROM into his decrepit 486, come hell or high water, the end is at last within site. This machine was absolutely manky- layers of dust and used Band-Aids inside, one bit held together by a bit of wood crammed in there--- it was amazing that the thing was still working. It was a one-time high spec office machine that was first offloaded onto some employee, who then passed it off onto Colm. The original spec was 25MHz, 100MB hard disk, 4 MB of RAM --- there was also a giant hole in the front where some old SCSI tape back up device once upon a time was. To save the non-techie a long splash into acronym soup, suffice it to say that I changed the motherboard, upgraded the processor, replaced a dodgy controller card, installed new memory, and bought a new CMOS battery (these need to be changed every four years or so). Then there was a long fight to get the machine to balance all these new parts! It's all back together now and my old DOS and Windows 3.1 books are more dog-eared than ever. As soon as I fix the Windows files that were corrupted, I believe that Colm and his kids will be happy for at least a few years to come.

And in case you have any questions about fixing or repairing computers, feel free to run them by me. There've been a good number of machines that I have taken a whack at, and I may be able to point you in the right direction if nothing else. I very much appreciate the voluntary assistance that has been given at ZDnet and other forums while working on this beast, and am more than willing to do the same for anyone who needs.

One final note, discovered in the guts of this old 486: that whole "Year 2000 Bug" was the biggest frickin' hoax that there ever was! The Cheetah486 motherboard I put into Colm's box of junk, assembled in 1994, recognizes and holds the 4-digit dates without a hiccup. Anyone who was scared into running out any buying any "Y2K upgrade packages" has been ripped off.

Well, that's it from Dublin---- do be sure to check out that Stranglebobs download. It's the lads from high school jammin' out in the Mullen brother's living room many many moons ago. J Found it on an old tape, and charitably cut it onto an MP3 for your listening pleasure.

Peace.